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December 21, 2007 10:50 AM
Smart Boards Prevent Bored Students
Six of our teachers at Juniper Elementary School will be receiving and creating lessons using Smart Board technology in their classrooms for the first time. Our goal is to provide teachers the equipment and training in order to use the Smart boards effectively in the classroom. Or focus will be to create lessons that are student interactive, were students use the technology to teach and learn while the teacher is free to move about and work with children on their level.
At this time, our teachers have completed a selection process. We hoped to focus on teachers who felt that they would or could use the technology daily in their classroom. Our school is a technology Magnet for our district and this has been of great benefit as much of the needed infrastructure was already available in many of the classrooms. By luck or interested teachers represent nearly all grade levels in the building. There classrooms are also in places throughout the campus that evenly distribute the equipment for long term use.
This entry will be updated upon arrival of the equipment and then again during training in the case that anyone would like to be involved in the training opportunity.
Thanks to everyone who is making this possible!
The grant application is available upon request.
Posted by scottmcdonald on December 21, 2007 at 10:50 AM in Ed Tech Grants | Comments (0)
December 14, 2007 08:37 PM
Write (Around / Across) the World
The project began by learning to connect with other classroom teachers via E-Pals. Thus far, I have made connections with teachers in Germany and England. One wants to become pen pals as we conduct similar units and share information about each classes learning.
We are working to get all of our waivers (parent consent required under thirteen) so that we can obtain e-mail addresses for each student. Our district has asked all parties involved to be certified with I-safe in order to use E-Pals. I must note that only e-pals can send messages to other e-pal addresses. Our IT specialist will teach a safety class and proper etiquette when sending e-mails or searching the web.
Today, students received a demonstration with a piece of assistive handwriting technology called the Fly Fusion Pen. It is a pen which has a micro-camera and special paper used to import handwriting into a word document and either leave as is or convert to text. Both E-pals and Fly Fusion Pens have technology to translate language; however there is a small up charge of $810.00 for 30 pens to be upgraded with software capable of translating languages beyond very basic words like car, cat, dog...
Next, we will engage in writing interactively with classmates to test their e-mail accounts and editing procedures when importing handwriting into text.
We have created our bulletin board and added a few countries and soon the cities we plan to make contact with. Once we start getting letters we will post them on the bulletin board with a string connecting each city with the letter sent from that city to ours and out to a boarder made up of the letters they send us.
This project will allow students to teach our own community through publishing work shared with citizens throughout the world. Students will present information about their own learning by sharing letters and reports they create. They will be sharing and learning content by communicating with a captive audience. Students will also be using the data they collect to educate others about newly aquired knowledge that happens in a small corner of the world like Madras, Oregon. After all, how exciting can it be to present information to an old teacher or parent sitting in the same room when you can send messages around the world to a person your own age studying the same things?
Posted by twheeler on December 14, 2007 at 08:37 PM in Ed Tech Grants | Comments (0)
December 9, 2007 03:28 PM
Leadership Team Work
Take a look at our comments from the end of the last meeting. Also preview the survey data.
Slides from our work today....
Posted by jena on December 9, 2007 at 03:28 PM in General | Comments (0)
