Where to Start - Help!

I am the Director of Technology for my school. Part of my job is teaching students as a "specialist" separate from homeroom instruction. I am doing my best to integrate into the homeroom curriculum and have really gotten the kids far with MS Office Suite. I was feeling really good about what I was teaching until I came here :) After two years on the job, I realize I need to do a better job of integrating web 2.0 tools into my lessons. I am on the awareness level of most tools mentioned here, but am overwhelmed as to where to start. I teach 1st-8th grade for two 40-minute periods a week.

Any suggestions for grade level appropriateness of each tool - wiki, podcast, skype, video production, flickr, website creation, blogs? Any great lessons/topics that you used to integrate with to provide me a source of inspiration?

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Permalink Reply by Nancy Bosch on April 17, 2009 at 5:11pm

Decide what outcomes you want--if you are looking for an option for authentic writing I would recommend a blog. Start small with a core group of kids who would be interested. To practice you could start one blog for each grade level (start with 8th and work your way down) and post Reflections Prompts. Ask thought provoking questions or links to articles of interest and 'assign' some people to repond to the prompt. You could also start with third graders the same time you do middle school and have the middle schoolers respond to the little guys. If you want them to write you have to be willing to respond---if you have hundreds of kids blogging it will take you hundreds of hours to respond!!!

Be sure you set up your blog rules and get parent written permission, and notify your admin. You can see our class blog here and the Terms are at the top. My blog is on the front page and each kid has their own blog. To see who's discussing what start with Recent Posts. Let me know if you need more ideas--I'm full of them.

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Permalink Reply by Sabine on April 17, 2009 at 6:08pm

Hi,

I use blogs also for classroom journals for reflextion or note sharing, posting their opionions about topics, sharing skits and so much more. Our District Technology Staff director shared several links to check out blogs.

Here is one that has a lot of info about it.

http://web20intheclassroom.blogspot.com/2008/01/blogging-in-classro...