You want to bring social networking into your classroom but Twitter and Facebook are blocked at your school. What can you do to bring web 2.0 tools into your classroom? Have you heard about Edmodo? Edmodo is a safe and secure location for students and teachers to get into Social Networking. It is free to use and no one from the outside can see student names or chat with students. Teachers can create a class within Edmodo and have their students sign up and join their class group with a group id number. Teachers can reply and comment...
Wednesday, 25 August 2010
Tuesday, 24 August 2010
North Carolina is a Winner !!! According to CNN the District of Columbia, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Maryland, Massachusetts, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, and Rhode Island are all to receive a portion of the $3.4 billion remaining in the "Race to the Top" fund for education. The second round of competition began with 35 states applying and in July 19 states were listed as finalists. Each finalist sent representatives to Washington in August to present their case, according to CNN.What did each state have to do to qualify for "Race to the Top"?...
When taking a reading class a few years ago, one of the assignments was to do research and create a multi-genre project. We got to choose the topic and the ways to represent the information we found. I was teaching 4th grade, so I decided to research the Orville and Wilbur Wright, so I would create something I could use when I taught NC Social Studies.After finding lots of good information from a variety of resources, I decided to create a scrapbook...
Thursday, 12 August 2010
Student Response Systems (SRS) will be used in many classrooms this fall as a tool for assessment and to boost student participation. But what if you’re the student who knows the material and can easily answer the question? You have to wait till everyone answers the question before the teachers moves on to the next question and that’s time that could be used in a better way.Promethean has developed a solution to this problem and has unveiled a new...
Monday, 9 August 2010
Lot of wonderful ideas were presented at the 2010 Reform Symposium, but I had to be careful not to get so caught up in reading the sharing of ideas in the participant chat window that I missed the message of the main presentation. As I look through my notes from the Symposium, it is many of the comments I wrote down from the chat window that are catching my attention.One of those comments that seems to be jumping off the page at me is "Teachers want...
Friday, 6 August 2010
Lots of teachers use brainstorming as a way for students to share ideas and possible solutions to a problem. Always define the problem to make sure students clearly understand the problem. Make sure all ideas are written down.There are four basic rules to brainstorming:Focus on quantity – the greater number of ideas produced generates a greater chance of producing an effective solution.Withhold criticism – focus on extending ideas and suspending judgment.Welcome unusual ideas – help students to look at ideas from different perspectives and not...
Wednesday, 4 August 2010
For the past 2 days, we have been working with WSFCS principals on best practices with Classroom Walkthroughs, Reflective Meetings, and Data Feedback. As a district, we use Teachscape to gather data on instructional practice in our classrooms. For the past three years, we have done a great job at getting into classrooms but we have not used the walkthrough data with teachers as much as we would like in order to improve student achievement.As part...
This came from one of the wonderful presentations at the Reform Symposium this weekend (see #rscon10 on twitter). I can't wait to go back and listen to the presentation by Angela Maiers again. You can find the archive and several of her other presentations on her biography page. I have so many ideas for future blogs that I feel overloaded but in a good way. I wanted to share this because these simple words had a big impact on me. Think about the...
The administrative staff for WSFCS recently listened to Chip Madera talk about coaching employees. He shared that leaders/coaches should work to develop people up, over, or out. We should be growing leaders and helping them become highly effective.One of the best things about my job as Director of Instructional Technology is working with the fantastic people in our department and in the schools. In my first year, our team hired two great technology...
Monday, 2 August 2010
Let me start off by saying that I was fortunate enough to be able to participate in the Reform Symposium this past weekend, I have pages and pages of notes (I know .... paper). I did recognize many names from twitter. There were also many that I did not recognize or follow (and some that I do now). That got me thinking about how I created a Personal Learning Network for myself. When I first started Twitter, I looked for some people that I knew in person (like the people in the Instructional Technology Department for my school system ... which...
Sometime in June, WSFCS Online Learning had it's 600th participant receive credit for an online technology course since October of last year. If I'd planned ahead I would have had confetti and balloons falling from the ceiling and a shopping spree for the lucky teacher.Although I think 600 is a huge number, and we'll exceed 700 almost immediately in the new school year when courses again open for enrollment, I think the numbers are only important...
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