Integrate Technology Effectively
So we chatted about educational games in our latest podcast, more specifically DimensionU. I’m working on a longer post about educational games but in the meantime, I found an awesome video that exemplifies gamification.
Click on the break and watch the video. Did they accomplish their goal? What effects did the “game” have? Continue reading “Edutainment … Gamification … Recycling?”
I luuurrv technology. You know why I love technology? It brings something new to a classroom that was more or less impossible before. Sometimes this technology can make no difference, be helpful, sometimes it can be transformative and in other cases it can make you tear out your frickin’ hair. So when I heard about a student response system called Socrative.com I was pretty curious. I mean students can use any device to log onto a website and respond (in real time) to questions.
So which is it? What category does Socrative.com fall into? Only one way to find out, click on past the break to see all the cool screen shots, a how to and a verdict.
I saw this service on freetech4teachers and thought I’d try it out. This is an online meeting space where people can work collaborative together on a project, as a study session, or to compare and create a common set of notes. I think this is a good idea, I mean people always say two heads are better than one and that is what hall.com is definitely getting at here. So does it deliver? is it something that teachers/students should use? Ehhhhhh . . . . . . . maybe. There are things I like and some things I don’t. Read on past the break to see the gorgeous screen caps and my rationale.
Google Docs offers something that Microsoft PowerPoint, OpenOffice, LibreOffice, and iWorks cannot–real time collaboration. I recently just finished up a unit working with two of my grade six classes about building an effective presentation and how to present. I gave them a general topic and they were to create a presentation in Google Docs, share it with their partner, and share it with me. How did Google Docs do? Well . . . not so great. Read on past the break to find out why I used it and what went wrong.
Continue reading “Google Docs – Presentation – A real trainwreck”
Student: “Sir! My pencil broke!”
Teacher: “Oh geez! Not again! Ok, go down the hall to the Writing Utensil Specialist” and ask her to reset your pencil.”
It was in the middle of one of my digital photo classes and my students were getting a little rambunctious. Naturally I got frustrated with their behavior, minutes later it dawned on me. It wasn’t them so much as it was the tech issue they were dealing with. They were to upload photos to our class blog and reflect on them. Of course, the network was not being kind to us and the uploads of very small resized images was taking a long time and in a few instances, they weren’t uploading at all.
Same day, Patrick has my lab checked out and has a videocomponent in his middle school tech course. He was having his own set of issues with compatibility and so forth. So while the kids were working on their video project, we cracked open a cold one. What?! No, it wasn’t a beer…although we could have really used one at that point. As we sipped Continue reading “Ed Tech and Murphy’s Law”
