Taking Nothing for Granted

Hello, all!

Yesterday, I created and co-led a twenty-minute PD session for my school on (drum roll, please) the care of laptop carts, because we had just purchased a brand new one for our school (yay, tech budget!). I stole...er...adapted a PowerPoint presentation to fit the needs of our staff.

I started the session by having teachers "examine" the cart for any safety issues or concerns (I left the doors open, pulled out trays, and had hidden a few computers). They caught on quickly, which led us into a discussion about the importance of setting routines and procedures surrounding the use of technology.

As I explained the need of keeping the cart plugged in and charging, I bent down and grabbed the retractable power cord and spoke briefly about how the cord stopper worked to adjust cord length so that it wouldn't whip back under the cart. I was trying to emphasize a point and began to apologize for the basic information, when I noticed that some people were looking at me in outright amazement. Many had never known how the retractable cord had worked.

While this scenario might seem outrageous, there is no fault or blame here. These teachers had simply never been trained to deal with the basics of a laptop cart. For me, this was great validation as to why we, as teachers, should take nothing for granted. Be explicit, model desired outcomes, and, for the love of all that is holy, teach people how to deal with a retractable power cord. Just because you know it, doesn't mean everyone does, and while it might seem basic to some, it could be awesome to others (a great reminder for the classroom, too!). We need to support and lift each other up, not condemn for what we believe to be weakness or inability.

Needless to say, I didn't get to the PowerPoint presentation.

Things are Getting Easier

Drew, Dorothy, and I are working on turning StoryTown into a Smartboard project! We have been using screen hunter to capture the lessons from to create interactive and engaging lessons for our students. We are also working on getting our lessons uploaded on the High Quality Teacher Resource Center. While we know not everyone in the district has a SmartBoard in their room, we believe we have created the lesson so that they can be projected onto a whiteboard and controlled by the teacher, via the computer. We find the lessons we do to be highly engaging to our students. I have the high readers in my room, Dorothy has the low readers in her room, and Drew has a mixture of abilities in his classroom; we find that each of the lesson we create work for all levels of students, with very little modification. The student know they have to be engaged if they want to come up and create something on the Smartboard.

This project extremely time consuming, but next year we can add to it! AND it's worth it! I highly recommend you all consider creating Smartboard Storytown lessons for your grade level! Let me know if you want to see a lesson, or if you teach kindergarten, I'd be happy to email them to you!

Have a great day!

Frustration

Hi everyone, I am having some frustration with technology right now. My new laptop crashed twice and had to be rebuilt and last week my new laptop had hardware malfunctions. :-(
I am excited about our Kindergarten blog, my students are excited as well.
Please feel free to take a look at our blog:
www.mslopezroom114.blogspot.com

Hi from Haskin Elem 4th Grade

I have been working very hard at getting my students to type in their blog entries on my Math Blog. We would appreciate anyone who has the time to go to my blog and post an answer to my students math problems You can click on this link to get there.  http://www.classblogmeister.com/  Type in Mr. Hood in the read Blogmeister's box and click on GO.  Thanks in advance for your time.  Good Luck!

Good Day

Hello all,

After having successfully created a blog, my students are unable to access. I have decided to use a different site and recreate. I am beginning to feel very inadequate in technology. (ha, ha).
I have students with siblings in other classrooms where blogs are working efficiently and they are excited about being able to use ours. I have heard only good comments about the blogs and am hoping to have mine accessible by the end of the week.

Cheryl

Hi from Center 5th grade

Hi doing well. Use board for over 3/4th of my day. Have my class blog up and started. Will share the url shortly when my students have shared more. Interesting note. My class has pen-pals in Anaheim, CA - They have very limited computer usage..... They have a hard time believing we have so much tech and they are so much bigger. Interesting to me. I love the collaboration with my peers at school. Things are going good here. We are doing all subjects on the board. So way cool! My kids love it.

Jeri

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.

I post more frequently on my professional blog, check it out at www.howatscience.net