Facilitating Technology in the Classroom

Today I met with three of the new teachers at Croatan High to show them how to create a blog in WordPress. The goal was to use a blog as a Classroom Management Tool. We created pages for each subject and a subpage within each subject for homework, policies, and pacing guide.

The benefits include the ease of use and the beautiful templates, very professional looking. Also, no need to remember where or how to save information.

The drawbacks: once you navigate to another page or subpage, the only way to get back to the posts is through “Archives”. This is not very intuitive for the user. Also, we had difficulty changing the date of the posts.

Any thoughts? Comments and solutions are welcomed!

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Photo Story 3 is a wonderful use of technology in the classroom. Students select images, write a storyboard for the images, narrate the storyboard, and add background music. It is a powerful motivator for the student to research and write while using their creativity. When a student has finished a project, they truly “own” that information.

Podcasting is another great tool in the history or social studies classroom. Students can practice their interviewing skills and record the interview in a podcast. Using Skype or Gizmo, a student can remotely interview a subject and record the interview. Imagine interviewing someone in Africa about the AIDS epidemic- now that’s authentic!

A blog can be a great classroom management tool. Daily posts can include objectives for the day, questions that will be discussed in today’s lesson, and homework assignment. Students can respond to the questions of the day as part of their homework assignments. At the end of each chapter they have a review sheet already completed! At the end of the semester, the students have a study guide for the final exam.

Geometer’s Sketchpad (GSP) is a powerful program, and it is not just for Geometry.

I do all of my Geometry lessons in Sketchpad.  If the students purchase the student edition, very inexpensive, $25, they have a copy of all of the lessons to review at home.

 I have also used GSP in Algebra II, and it would be extremely useful in Trig and Functions.  It  is easy to demonstrate a family of functions, such as exponential functions, in Sketchpad.

Lessons for sine, cosine, tangent functions have already been designed in Mathbits.com.

 SAS in School has some great interactive tools for math.  They have a wealth of websites that they continue to monitor.

A Smartboard is especially useful in math.  Because of the symbols used in math, it is tedious to type equations on a laptop or in a website.  Using a smartboard in the classroom, the teacher can copy the notes from class and export them as a PDF file so they can be posted on the teacher’s website within minutes.

 Tablets have been invaluable in math.  Students can write directly on their tablet and store their notes in an electronic notebook, OneNote.  Teachers can also print their notes as a PDF file.  TI  Smartview displays the TI 84 Graphing Calcualtor on the tablet.  One essential benefit is that the student sees the keystrokes, not just the calculator screen.

I have used a classroom wiki to review for tests.  Students are assigned to small groups (2-4 students), and their group is responsible for solving the problem and describing in detail how they solved the problem.  It is amazing to see the students describe in detail a 10 or 12 step problem in Geometry.  Talk about writing across the curriculum!  The students see the value in their writing, and they learn to use the wiki as a great reference for reviewing for tests. Students can use Skype to create a confernece call, and collaborate on the problem. IF the students have tablets, they can see each ohters desktops on skype!