Sunday, November 1, 2009

Using technology in my classroom every day - Hoping to do more

I've sort of gotten into a routine with my classes for using technology. We're primarily using clickers in addition to the normal SmartBoard, Powerpoint, etc. Each student is assigned a clicker number and I can then use their responses for attendance, anticipatory sets, and even quizzes.

The cool thing is that the students really like using them. We took a paper-and-pencil assessment and used the clickers to submit answers at their own pace - now every time a test is coming up I am inundated with questions about if we will use clickers. Unfortunately our district common assessments have to be done with pencil and scantron (or online, but realistically we don't have near enough computers for that). Obviously short-answer responses are important as well and clickers are limited to multiple-choice style tests.

I'm hoping to find a way to incorporate some collaboration with other classes, even if they are just other biology classes. We don't have a lot of room to deviate from our pacing, so it makes cross-content or cross-school/grade collaboration difficult.

I would like to do a little more with technology now, hopefully with the same student response as the clickers. Thinking about doing an electronic project or webquest for our current unit, but again - it would have to fit in with our common pacing.

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1 comment:

Dave Tarwater said...

James,

I am intrigued with the Whole Brain Teaching. I will delve into this more. Good stuff with the clickers.