A Good Day for Technology Integration

Last Thursday was remarkable. One of the teachers at my school planned ahead to have a sub and spent the day working with me on projects to implement within her curriculum. She did this instead of going to a conference for a day, and I think this was much more useful for her. She could easily have gone to a conference and gotten jazzed about some new tool or technique, but so often when that happens there is no follow through. Instead we worked on two projects which she will be implementing over the next few weeks. The first project uses Audacity which is a simple sound recorder on all the students' tablets. The students will record songs which they've written about the book they are studying. The second project will involve using a wiki with another of her classes. She also got comfortable using Windows Journal to project to her math classes. The school saved money by not sending her to a conference and the curricular gains are clear.

Of course, I didn't spend every minute of Thursday with her... I also stopped into a 7th grade math class whose teacher has been experimenting with DyKnow over the past few weeks. This innovative software allows the students and teachers to share an electronic notebook. The teacher's screen is projected. Problems were sent out by the teacher and each student worked a solution on their tablet. Some students demonstrated their solution (and their thinking) to the class. The teacher could see (and capture) what each student was doing for each problem. Each student leaves with a copy of the notebook and can play it back in sequence to see how problems were solved. This piece of software promotes an environement in which all of the students are very actively involved with working through content.

After lunch I met with our Teacher Institute coordinators who are planning for the first class of graduate students at Norwood this summer. We talked about the various digital skills they will need to master and realized the list is fairly large.

I also met briefly with the faculty advisor for our student newspaper. We are transitioning from paper to electronic publishing this year and we just published the first story! All in all, a very good day for technology integation.