If you could show off one of the ways you've used technology in your classroom, which one would it be?

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?

Tags: presentation

0 members like this

▶ Reply to This

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Josh Seamon on November 30, 2008 at 5:05pm

Awesome stuff!

Jarrod: http://vceos.wordpress.com/ isn't loading for me -- It's bringing me to the "create a new blog" page on wordpress.com?

Have you ever used http://www.polleverywhere.com/?

▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Jarrod Robinson on November 30, 2008 at 7:46pm

whops i forgot and extra 'e' http://vceoes.wordpress.com

Yeh polleverywhere is awesome, have used it to gather data during class with mobiles, however im trying to find an alternative that used bluetooth to respond, therefore no costs at all

You can read about lots of the other things ive done at my blog
http://mrrobbo.wordpress.com

▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Josh Seamon on November 30, 2008 at 7:55pm

Excellent, thanks!

▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Ben Sanoff on December 14, 2008 at 10:47pm

I just tried using http://www.polleverywhere.com/ on Friday with a group of high school students at Berkeley High. Just being able to say we were going to be using cell phones for an educational use was fairly shocking to many students.

In terms of its effectiveness I would have to caution that the interface could be improved. Responses have a character limit and unless you pay you are limited to 30 respondents in each poll. However, I saw lots of possibility and it was interesting to see how students interacted in a texting space. One class was very academic posing questions that went along with a socratic seminar we were having. In contrast my other class was very social giving each other personal feedback and support.

In terms of successful projects I had students create a multimedia wiki that was really engaging for students.

▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by GreenMen on November 30, 2008 at 8:15pm

Intresting Question. I use Google too. I have Customized portable Firefox with google Notebook & Google Bookmarks. Which is very useful to students and teacher for research work. I did have small presentation after I attend Learning 2.0 conference in Shanghai http://groups.google.com/group/aian/browse_frm/thread/d67b08d254fb38e Maybe this will give you great ideas.
Thanks,
Gaurav

▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Anne-Maree Moore on December 9, 2008 at 3:31am

Wikis for collaborative prjects between our classes in Australia and our partner classes in Wales and the US. Just one of our recent project which answers the question Do we see the same phase of the moon in both the Southern and Northern Hemispheres produced some amazing results and we have witness many unplanned outcomes from this project. Students enjoy sharing photos and audio files of themselves, their school, their lives with their partner classes. We share videos and images of our wildlife. They also enjoy using the email and discussion tabs to communicate between each other. The more we do this the more ideas we as a team come up with for further collaborative projects. We enjoy this direct collaboration with other teachers and students. Teachers are using skype to communicate to make the connection more real. (Our time differences do not allow direct communication between the classes unfortunately).
Wikis are great!

▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Erich Stephen on December 9, 2008 at 12:23pm

Wikis and Blogs are great for teachers. Here is an example of some Wikis and Blogs at my school. http://brooks.usd259.org/blogs.htm

Some teachers use the wikis for actualy collaboration (thoughs are closed), but other teachers are using them as their personal websites. Authorstream is a great tool for teachers to embed their powerpoints into their wikis or blogs. Google Docs is another fabulous tool your teachers will probably get a lot out of if they haven't already been exposed to it.

If you want to get the most bang for your buck though, I'd let teachers present their own examples. During my tech inservices, I get the most productivity when teachers learn from other teachers rather than me. Hope this helps

▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Josh Seamon on December 9, 2008 at 12:28pm

This is great stuff. Thanks for the info everyone!

▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by John Plummer on December 9, 2008 at 2:09pm

I would have to say wikis too. I have quite a few and love them. I would like to try to get my students to use them a little more and encourage them to use not just for the classwork they do with me but also for themselves for studying for exams etc.

Also www.quizlet.com This site is so simple to use put has so many things created in it by a simple list of words and definitions. All of my ESL students love this site :-)

▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Jack on December 16, 2008 at 8:18pm

When I was tutoring SATs, I started to put up lessons on YouTube in small part to give my kids a fallback in case they needed a refresher... http://youtube.com/miteach

I'm not sure about its efficacy, but I've ended up with a small group of viewers who check me out consistently

▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by David Huston on January 23, 2009 at 9:55pm

I have developed a Ning web site describing some of my experiences with using Web 2.0 tools in a history/social studies high school classroom. Here is he link: http://classroomcollaboration.ning.com/

My two primary activities are M4 Projects (multi media mind mapping) and CC2 Projects (Classroom Collaboration 2.0) that use several tools: Zoho Notebooks, Zotero, Mindmeister, Zoho Show,n Picasa Web Albums, Voicethread, Kompozer, and Moodle.

Come take a look and let me know what you think.

I will be presenting some of this material at eTech Ohio Coference on February 3, 2009. Look me up if you will be there.

▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Josh Seamon on February 4, 2009 at 6:54pm

The faculty in service has come and gone... and it went really well!

You can check out the materials I covered right here: http://stjlabs.com/january-09-in-service/