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I was very happy to be in Adriana Monti's  Brazilian History & Culture class for a video project she was doing on a press conference about the Kaiowa and Kaapor Indians. We had been talking for a while about some tech project possibilities, so this video project became her debut in many technological skills for which she is very proud now. The press conference was a very interesting format as she had different groups preparing to be the Indians and other groups preparing to be the press with specific questions. The pairing of Indians and press was decided on the spot and students had to go off and video record the Q&A press conference using the internalized knowledge from the research. Most groups worked independently on the video editing requiring very few tips from me. As I saw the project developing, my suggestion was to have the videos online so students could check anytime anywhere and could also make com...

Academic Technology Coordinator and teacher partnerships can take different forms and operate at different levels. The Cell Division project in Grade 9 Biology using stop motion video is one example. The teachers and I were able to have quick chats about a project and with an idea of what the project was about I could provide a sample suggestion for teachers to consider and explore in class. The teachers and students worked independently, and actually, when I stepped into a class I was very pleased to see how students figured it our and had many creative ways of carrying on the project. So all started last semester, when Karem Doersam approached me with the idea of doing her animated cell division using stop motion technology. In past years, she had asked the students to make drawings on a paper notebook and animate by flipping the pages. Now she wanted to do the same process with the support of technology. She had also asked Karin Gunn who shared a site that she created about stop mot...

Last week we had a workshop on what I called "Online Collaborative Resources Database".  That is a pretty big name for "social bookmarking".  But the purpose of that big name was to highlight the features of the tool instead of the tool. As it collects bookmarks, notes, images, it becomes a database of resources for a group of people connected to this database. As it is online, it can be accessed anytime anywhere (better than computer-based bookmarks or favorites).  As it allows collaboration, it fosters a great 21st century skill. On top of all that, Diigo allows for collaborative highlighting of bookmarked webpages. Last year, History Internal Assessment experimented with Diigo as a resource database for students. The idea was for each student to add to Diigo bookmarks as they found a good resource, attaching a short note on what the resource was about and tagging it to facilitate later reference. Tagging as a group required students to be ...

One of the presentations for the K-12 Online Conference was based on Amaral's flipped classroom experience in the IB Bio HL class. The presentation can be watched here (20 minutes video):  Technology as an Ally in the IB Science Class .  In this presentation, Amaral talks about  the  use of a Google Doc to prompt student learning prior to the formal introduction of a new Unit in class. Then we can see snippets of class dynamics after the use of this Google Doc and the feedback from three students on how this approach affected their learning. Sample pages from a Google Doc used for this purpose are shown on this page. You can see that each student picked a different color to respond to the questions given by the teacher. So each student had to answer at least one question by doing independent research. In  this  way, students arrived in class with some knowledge of the new topic and questions about it. This was  the  flipped class approach prior to...

The theme for teacher workshops this week was Formative Assessment with Technology  , which was based on an experience using Poll Everywhere in the IB Bio HL class. Amaral was looking for a technology tool to help with pre-assessment and I happened to be looking at Poll Everywhere for a while and also taking an ASB online course on formative assessment. We decided to go for Poll Everywhere, which has a free online version and seemed to provide the quick whole class feedback that was expected. The experience with Poll Everywhere went very well and I was happy to see that after the workshop, Caitlin decided to use it as a review tool with students on the next day. Her students really liked Poll Everywhere and asked for more.  Her feedback on its use was positive as she felt more able to target review to the class needs shown on the poll results. Just to give you a more detailed idea of how Poll Everwhere was used in Amaral's class, here is the account of the context for thi...

The goal of the PE class in the weight room is to teach students about maintaining a health-enhancing level of physical fitness.  In order to do that, Sueli Valades requires students to record their workout in terms of sets, repetitions, weight, heart beat, etc, and also write reflection journals. As we discussed ways to wave technology into the process to facilitate record keeping and engagement, the idea of using cellphones came up. The use of cellphones in schools has been debated for some time and I have been waiting for opportunities to explore those for educational purposes. The idea of record keeping in the weight room seemed perfect, as students need to constantly move around a room full of equipment and therefore require an easy way to keep records on the spot.  A Google Spreadsheet was then created to keep records online and therefore accessible anytime anywhere. The spreadsheet also provided an automatic calculation of target heart rates according to age. At the end...

We have started on a journey to transform learning at Graded and one of the stops along the way occurs in August 2012. At that time the high school will become a 1:1 laptop environment. Today we are providing an update on preparing for August. As you can see, much has been done and there is certainly work in progress on everyone's part. After today's presentation we'll split into small groups to discuss the prompts below. After the discussion we ask that you record your answers in the comments. Answers can be from the group, individuals or a combination of both. What are you doing differently this year in preparation for August 2012? What are the next steps for you professional growth? What are you nervous about (if anything)?