Teachers!
I need your help. Open houses are coming and we want to show you off. You all use and depend on your laptops daily. Would you be willing to share some of your key tech moments with me? You are using it daily with your website, other websites, student website, avatars, alphasmarts, picasa photo sharing, Chinese wordprocessing, Flip cameras, laptop carts, student writing, peer editing, web design, photoshop, finalcut, youtube, document cameras, hyperstudio, keynotes, podcasts, lab probes, catlab, smartboards, excel, screencasts, jing, snapz pro, stop-gap animation, digital art, student videos, teacher videos, google earth, blogs, forums, word editing, phonics, language, vocal recording, instrumental, art, drama, athletics, PE, Yoshis, debate, expos, graphics, artStor, tablet pc, geo sketchpad, inspiration ... How could we survive without these tools? Help me consolidate this and add it to our blog (photos and video welcome):
Andrew von Mayrhauser
ReplyDeleteI use the laptop every day to project key ideas on the whiteboard instead of scribbling in marker. I maintain an increasingly active portal with resources students can access through the portal at home. I have launched a project called "Photographer of the Day", where one student per day is the class photographer, charged with capturing the "essence" of that period on the digital camera (tech grant). After choosing the photo submission for the day, the student photographer will then use dropbox to share the photo choice with me for eventual posting on the website. The overall goal is to provide a 6th grade window of sorts for parents, who otherwise can't really see what their kids are up to.
I am taking pictures with my phone of labs and activities that the Biology and AP Environmental Science students are doing, and using an iPicasso app to load them onto my Picasa album, which is part of my HRS Gmail account. What I like about this is that it is relatively seamless, and the technology does most of the file moving for me. My goal with this was similar to Andrew vonM's (sharing with the parents at home what the students are doing in class, in the hopes of triggering more discussion). However, one downside is that it can only be viewed if the people I share it with have a gmail account. Still, I think it is a worthwhile thing to maintain, so I plan on keeping it up.
ReplyDeleteI recently learned about screencasting using Jing from Karen at the workshop this past week and it was timely. My seniors in Biology were away visiting colleges, and I was able to screen cast a lecture on energy flow from the sun to our cells into three five-minute segments. One of my seniors responded very positively to it. One downside (sorry, another yes-but comment) is that not all of the students were able to view it on their computers at home (perhaps because the computer was not fast enough). Still, I love the application and look forward to playing with it some more.
ReplyDeleteI am loving my women's lit blog: landwomenslit@blogspot.com. It's a great way not only to extend my class discussion, but also to allow students to take off in new directions with articles, images, videos they want to share with the class. I've asked five students to be the bloggers each week--and others then respond to those five. This seems to work well to give the blogging some structure and not have every student feel that they must post all the time. We use the long block to read a few post and discuss--it's fun and enhances our discussion of gender in the world.
ReplyDeleteWarren F said...
ReplyDeletesooo, every member of the math dept is using smartboards. i'm teaching geometry honors for the first time. not only am i learning the material, we also make extensive use of geometer's sketchpad (chris d is the lead). this software allows kids to not only learn geometric concepts, but visualize it. to enhance vertical learning, chris kinney and i also use it in algebra 2 honors. talk about 21st century learning.
peace,
me
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ReplyDeleteI use my laptop for almost everything I do during the Head-Royce workday. My lessons are written in Smartboard software and projected to the students. They incorporate graphing calculator software, geometry software, textbook PDFs, websites, and math type software. I write on the Smartboard with virtual ink and save lessons to the website after class. I write answer keys with a stylus on my tablet PC and post them online. When I'm not interacting with students in the classroom, I am posting bulletins or e-mailing them directly. Each of my three courses has an entire curriculum archived in electronic form on various servers. While I was at a total loss the day the power went out last year, I am pleased to say that I haven't used a dry erase marker in five years. More importantly, I can confidently state that student learning has improved over time as I have incorporated more and more educational technology. Most importantly, my laptop allows me to play video games during faculty meetings! (OMG JK LOL)
ReplyDeleteOther than the obvious uses of the laptop (Word, iCal, mail, etc.)....
ReplyDeletemy most tech-forward usage of the computer is in Excel.
It's great for performing brute-force calculations.
The project I am proudest of is my Maxwell-Bolzmann generating program,
which allows one to predict how changes in Temperature affect reactions of all sorts. I've never seen anything online that does what this does, and it's a great illustration of a complicated set of ideas. I'd be glad to show it off.... it's a bit hard to describe in words.
Michele M. said...
ReplyDeleteI use ARTstor everyday for teaching art history. ARTstor is a digital image collection that includes the tools to create power point type presentations. In addition, ARTstor has a support staff who answer questions helpfully.
Chris Kinney said...
ReplyDeleteI do love my laptop. I use it daily for website updating (portal), Smartboard (all lessons are done via Smartboard), and lesson plans, among general internet use, etc. I also use dropbox daily. I suppose I don't really think of much of my laptop use as tech, much like people don't think of expanding / contracting their diaphragm to breathe, if you get my drift. I use it weekly for Car club (looking up videos of races, applets of how engines / gears work, etc) along with all my other teacher duties. Here's a video that was made of me, exploring various concepts in geometry and physics (off campus, that is)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1TZ8Qfg6cBw
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ReplyDeleteKathleen R said...
ReplyDeleteWays we use technology in Fine Arts classes
All music for the Musical Theatre Class and any musical we do is posted on the portal so the students can download it and rehearse at home.
Flip Videos of the Drama 1 monologues were posted on the portal for the class so the students could watch themselves and comment on their performances.
Love the Portals for class communication-also use it to update the rehearsal schedules for the after school productions. Very helpful.
Carmen Reid said...
ReplyDeleteWe recently made a music video to Waka Waka in Spanish class. I'm also going to start the students on a digital storytelling project for
the second quarter.
Hilary Bond said...
ReplyDelete8th grade history (Lauren and Eric) is embarking on an Islam project which the kids will film with the flips and edit in either the flip program or imovie. Fun! It should be like a newscast.
Scott Clark said...
ReplyDeleteAndrew VonM is having class historians photograph the 6th grade class, and he'll be posting a media gallery of key moments each week, possibly with captions. He's still deciding whether to do it in blog form, or using the Finalsite media gallery.
Holly Below said...
ReplyDeleteLower School Lab:
5th grade - Media Lit, "All media are constructed," just about done with commercials they planned, acted and filmed (selling shoes) -- each group using two of the methods of propaganda
4th grade - beta testing the new pre-test/post-test version of TimezAtttack
also 4th grade - researching in the data bases and making posters on a famous Californian
3rd grade - just finished making trading cards with research and pictures of local marine creatures for their trip to Aquarium of the Bay in SF last week. Just embarking on Clue Finders problem solving software for grade 3.
2nd grade - finished their "Spiderpedia" entries using KidPix and moving into Read,Write,& Type (software by our alumna, Jeannine Herron) and Reading Mansion, the grade 2 legendary phonics software.
1st grade - just finished their first little animated pieces set to music that we string together into a cute Quicktime movie. They are currently working on place value to parallel their classroom math topic from "Making Math Real" using Kidspiration software in activities written by me.
Holly Below said...
ReplyDeleteIn other LS classrooms:
5th and 4th grade classrooms are about to pilot laptop carts - one cart(20) per grade level, and enroll their kids in (filtered & limited) Gaggle email and Gaggle Docs
5th graders have been using wordle.net in writing projects
Anson Kendall has started a blog
4th graders using lots of color and fancy formatting as they type up the poems they wrote.
New-to-3rd-grade teacher Priscilla Hine is jumping into tech - learning the projector and Lumens and requesting help for a third grade combined website.
2nd grades have just subscribed to EveryDay Math Games Online for use in the classroom and in the lab. These are top quality curriculum based games.
2nd grade teacher Zach Bernard is thrilled with his SmartBoard on loan this year - and I think we'll be seeing some tech grant applications for SmartBoards this year.
1st grade teacher Debra Carr is loving her projector/Lumens set-up and April Avila Forde is hoping for her own, soon.
Debra Carr has started a blog.
Kindergarten teacher Kath Weekes and intern Melissa Gale are working on a research project to find top quality iPad apps for our primary kids - very exciting!
Nicole Bowler and Rick Redfield are working on their Lower School PE blog