Coming up in January I am running a section of our faculty inservice. I have a large chunk of time to use in any way I want. Part of my intro presentation will be demonstrating how teachers at my school (St. Johnsbury Academy) effectively use technology in their classrooms. In that same section I would also like to show off how teachers at other schools are using technology in their classrooms.
What should I present to my fellow faculty members? What's the coolest thing you've done?
Also -- if you had an hour to teach your faculty anything you want about instructional technology, what would you teach them?
google apps for schools has awesome potential. I am mostly using it with my grade 5 students by having them complete reading responses on google sites and our whole writing program is done through google docs. Google Apps makes use of docs, calendar, gmail, start page (like igoogle) and sites.
Unfortunately I can't open it up for others to view because of privacy, but google have a couple of sample pages.
Using Google Docs (create forms) to do student surveys, collecting data in a spreadsheet and then graphing data. Also, using the 'share' function to collect data from students all over the world doing science projects (eg. How far can a paper plane fly? How far do different types of balls rebound when dropped from 1 metre? Comparing the nutritional inofmation from breakfast cereals.).
I'm really chuffed with the results of our "On Line Science Fair" - a wikispace where middle years maths and science students share their science projects. Call me old-fashioned, but I love Voicethread too!
Contact me if you would like the links to these.
Best Regards, Britt Gow
I'm in the ESL teaching field and you might highlight this guy that I constructed to help students learn English.
If I had an hour, I'd surely get them using some kind of way to turn quizzing and assessment into a game. This is a very powerful area of teaching that is underutilized. I'd show maybe something like "Fling the Teacher" > here's an example for Christmas... Teachers use the generator available on our network to make a game with their curriculum/content. Takes just minutes... Click PLAY and then GAMES.
In a geography elective course I was teaching, we did an interactive lesson with schools in Panama, Florida and on a German army base during an eclipse. We could see how the sun looked from these different locals in the Western Hemisphere and learned a great deal of science from the kids on the army base.
Coolest thing ive done would have to be incorporating Mobile Phones into my teaching
Students used them to record audio blogs while on an outdoor ed excursion, they were then sent instantly to our class blog so people could follow our journey in real time