When students from her 10th-grade honors class returned from summer break, Arrowhead High School teacher Kathy Nelson organized an online open-house activity to discuss three novels they had read during their time off.
After six hours, the English teacher at the Hartland school had a 178-page transcript of her students' dialogue and a new appreciation of the power the remote technology of the Internet can lend to the sometimes intensely interpersonal field of teaching.
The approach makes sense not only pedagogically - based on the idea that students learn best from each other through sharing ideas - but also as preparation for higher education, in which combining online learning with lectures is fast becoming the norm, said Myragene Pettit, a librarian and technology director for Arrowhead.
Pennsylvania is fourth in the nation, according to the Organization for International Investment, a Washington, DC-based business association for U.S. subsidiaries of companies headquartered abroad, in “insourced” jobs – employment by companies based outside the United States. About 233,000 Pennsylvanians work for subsidiaries of foreign firms -- almost 35 percent of them in manufacturing, according to the association.Read the full gantdaily.com story ...
Language arts teacher Phil Overeem and social studies teacher Jami Thornsberry, both longtime educators and club sponsors, say the site Facebook provides a faster and more effective way to communicate with students than other methods. Students don’t pay attention to morning announcements, they said, and teens rarely check their school e-mail accounts.
"What it boils down to is that students think it’s the corniest and squarest thing in the world to use their student e-mail," Overeem said. "They just won’t. They will not regularly check their student e-mail, and that causes problems, especially for extracurricular sponsors who do a ton of stuff."
An independent study of Pennsylvania’s innovative Classrooms for the Future initiative has found that the program is improving the quality of high school instruction, resulting in stronger engagement by students and teachers and an intensified focus on critical thinking and problem-solving skills.
From the Yahoo! for Teachers team:
Check out the all-new Yahoo! for Teachers Beta
We've been working hard to get Yahoo! for Teachers ready to use
in the classroom. We've made some improvements to help you easily
create and share classroom projects that meet state standards.
One thing hasn't changed -- Yahoo! for Teachers is FREE.
No annual dues. No membership fees.
Go to http://beta.teachers.yahoo.com and enter the following user
name and password to access Yahoo! for Teachers:
- User name: yhallpass
- Password: g0bbler (please note that your password uses the
numeral zero, not the letter O)
To start using Yahoo! for Teachers, enter your Yahoo! ID and fill
out a short (we promise!) registration form.
For a quick reminder of how Yahoo! for Teachers can help you in
the classroom, go to http://beta.teachers.yahoo.com/howto
We look forward to hearing what you think about the new
Yahoo! for Teachers.
This Web site provides teachers with information and activities to connect science with current or recent news topics. For example California Burnin': Are We Building in Harm's Way? and Sports 'n SteroidsFrom flights of fancy to making monsters, Leonardo simply had to know how the universe worked. His various attempts to discover the truth reveal much about this remarkable man and provide the inspiration for these fun activities.
By collaborating, students can develop their potential for learning. Specifically, students can learn to approach and solve new problems so that they develop the capability to solve problems that do not exist at the moment of learning. Rather than simply absorbing material, learning rules, and displaying the material and rules on demand, students learn to develop capabilities that they first experience in assisted or collaborative learning situations.
Source: British Educational Communications and Technology Agency
... managing a classroom of students with laptops is mostly about managing the students. This means that you use the same tools for classroom management with laptops as you use for basic classroom management.
iPods in the classroom became trendy several years ago when Duke University began giving them to incoming freshmen.
Now, they're spreading to school districts around the country. Advocates say they help engage students in learning and keep them tech savvy.
The devices have also been popular on college campuses where professors record lectures on iTunes.
"This is tech generation. So, when we think of instructing students, we have to think of different ways of teaching," said Whitt's principal, Alisha Crumley. "To get their attention in class, we have to keep up."
I have a book titled Using Technology with Classroom Instruction that Works which contains a lot of good practical ideas for integrating technology into your classroom. Feel free to borrow it any time.
HippoCampus was designed as part of Open Education Resources (OER), a worldwide effort to improve access to quality education for everyone. HippoCampus content has been developed by some of the finest colleges and universities in the world and contributed to the National Repository of Online Courses (NROC), another MITE project. NROC makes editorial and engineering investment in the content to prepare it for distribution by HippoCampus. Both HippoCampus and NROC are supported by The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.
What's a wiki?Digital Storytelling is the modern expression of the ancient art of storytelling. Digital stories derive their power by weaving images, music, narrative and voice together, thereby giving deep dimension and vivid color to characters, situations, experiences, and insights. Tell your story now digitally.Techlearning > > Tips For Digital Story Telling > November 1, 2007
- Leslie Rule, Digital Storytelling Association
Census at School offers students a golden opportunity to be involved in the collection and analysis of their own data and to experience what a census is like.
... educators across Frederick County (MD) Public Schools, have discovered the potential of podcasts. They use them to enhance classes, engage students and translate classic subjects into the digital age.‘‘You can use podcasts in any subject area,” Amy Boehman, a technology curriculum specialist for Frederick County Public Schools said. ‘‘You can do interviews, or record student research ... Any content that a child learns can be turned into a podcast.”
High-tech classes plug into iPods
At Chenango Valley (NY) High School, Michael Breed's freshman earth sciences class members receive and submit their assignments not with notebooks and day planners, but with iPod Shuffles.
The iPods are used as electronic storage devices. They hold assignments, Breed's podcasts of test preps and, yes, a few songs of the student's choosing. "They're the only kids in the entire district allowed to have an iPod in school," Breed said.
The iPods are effective because most of the nonschool day, students are listening to their iPods, instant messaging, text messaging or surfing the Internet, Breed, a 13-year science teacher, said. "And they get to school and it's cut off. It's not a surprise to me to see that kids are bored."
Breed produces his own podcast for the class, where he assigns homework, reviews for tests and offers some personal music selections. A podcast is a digital media file distributed over the Internet for playback on portable media players, like iPods, and personal computers. They are most often audio files, like a radio broadcast.
NoteStar is an Internet utility to assist in the preparation of research papers. Teachers and students can set up research projects with topics and sub-topics. Students may then take advantage of NoteStar's many features to collect and organize their notes and prepare their bibliography page.
All Day Nightmare- This book is a good fit for a reluctant reader because the story is spooky, the reading level is not overly challenging, and it is fun for students to feel like they have control over the story.
RSS, huh? There are differing opinions as to what the letters R S S stand for. And, it's not really important anyway.Imagine a room full of middle school students arguing to stand at the head of the class and answer a question. No, it’s not some alternate universe of overly zealous 13 year olds – it’s Jessica Voss’ eighth grade language arts class at Del Rio Middle School.
Voss is one of more than 250 teachers in the San Felipe Del Rio Consolidated Independent School District who gave of their own time to obtain a technological foothold in their classrooms.
“Students today are surrounded by technology … get them into a regular classroom without it and they’re bored,” said district technology director Donnie Weaver.
Getting that technology into classrooms, however, proved to be a challenge, said Weaver.
In the past, the district purchased classroom computer equipment that sat almost entirely untouched because teachers weren’t properly trained on how to use it.
This BBC web site will tell you everything you ever wanted to know about computer viruses, including ...
I've put together two edtech toolkits. One is for anyone who wants to get started in podcasting. This toolkit includes Windows software and a collection of informational and instructional videos to help you get going. The other kit includes all the tools to build and use a PowerPoint version of the popular game show Jeopardy in your classroom.
