blog.classroomteacher.caEducational Technology in the Classroom (K-12 Education) |
Our school is fortunate enough to have access to interactive whiteboards (SMARTboards), SMART airliner tablets, and a class set of clickers.
If we were going to invest our own personal money into our classroom technology, we would definetely get a class set of clickers over the airliner tablet or interactive whiteboard. No contest. Here’s why.
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We’ve been teaching our speech unit to Grade 7 and 8 students for several years, but this is the first year we’ve really had an opportunity to integrate different types of technologies into our English lesson.
Let’s be honest. Most students hate doing speeches. They don’t like spending the time to write the speech, revise their work, or to present in front of their classmates who might bully them if they don’t pick a topic that’s popular, original, or cool.
Having said that, overall, students (including lower-end students and disengaged boys) were more interested in our unit because the technology hooked them in a meaningful way. (As opposed to technology for technology’s sake.)
Here’s what we did:
Continue reading Integrating Technology into your Language Arts Public Speaking Lesson…
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It’s the long weekend and term 2 report cards are done (for the most part.) We’re moving our class websites to another server (yet again), but that’s for an upcoming post.
One of the coolest things we did this past term was use graphic organizer software (i.e. concept mapping software) with a SMART board.
Continue reading Interactive whiteboards and concept mapping software for the classroom…
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We just signed up with a $10 per month business plan with pSek to host our WordPress MU sites and so far, we’ve been impressed with their technical support.
Over the past two weeks, we’ve placed a few support tickets to help us get our WordPress site up and running. (We set the priorities in the support tickets below.) pSek responded quite quickly to even the low priority call tickets, and they’ve been able to help us get our sites up and running.
We spent a fair bit of time crawling the internet to find answers to our WordPress MU problems. Some things might be specific to installing WP and WPMU on pSek, so we’re posting some of these items to help other pSek users. (I suppose if pSek posted some more information in their knowledgebase, it might reduce the number of call tickets that get placed. Surely, we can’t be the first people to ask these questions.)
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There are lots of places you can set up a free classroom blog: edublogs, wordpress, and wikispaces.
Of course, “free” always comes at a price and there are always limitations with using these free services. In the end, we decided to run the (free) open-source WordPress software off of our own webhost space to unleash the full potential of WordPress in our classroom blogs.
(WordPress software is free. You can download it here, but it’s a pain to install it yourself. Check out their handy installation guide to see what we mean. You’re better off finding a webhost that offers one-click WordPress installations.)
Continue reading Classroom Blogs, Bluehost CPU Throttling and pSek Webhosting…
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Hi everyone, my name is Kisu Kuroneko and I teach Grade 7/8 literacy (English, History, Geography, Drama) in Ontario, Canada.
Over the past few years, I’ve been experimenting with integrating a variety of different tools in the classroom, including Google Docs, online literature circles, twittering in the classroom, wikis and blogging. Here are my professional blogs to give you an idea of some of the things we have done in our classroom:
I’m interested in finding other Grade 7 and 8 students for my students to collaborate with online. I think experiencing the global village by working online with students from a different school, culture, or continent is an exciting idea. Could you imagine video conferencing with a class overseas? Reading responses from students in a different time-zone? Collaborating on a common assignment / peer editing using Google Docs or a wiki?
Here are some ideas that I’m bouncing around:
If you’re interested in discussing possibilities of having our Grade 7/8 students interact with each other, please leave a comment below on this post.
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We run several classroom blogs and professional sites, including this blog on using educational technology in the classroom. Mostly we use WordPress, but lately we’ve been experimenting with bulleting boards (phpBB) for our online literature circles.
You can only go so far with free accounts, whether they’re with Blogger, WordPress.com, Edublogs, or Wikispaces. Eventually, you want to be able to do more. That’s when we looked into setting up a self-hosted Wordpress account and looked into finding a web host.
Up until now, we’ve been quite happy with BlueHost. They use Simple Scripts to let you set up a variety of websites with the click of a button, including WordPress, phpBB, etc.
So, what changed?
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We’re currently experimenting with online literature circles at our school.
Certainly literature circles, book clubs, and discussion groups aren’t new tools for many teachers. For example, the Saskatoon Public School Board has some great resources on their website about different ways to run literature circles, as well as assessment and evaluation considerations.
However, the idea of running a literature circle online may be new for some teachers. We’re setting up Educircles.com as a way to help get more teachers using bulletin board software for online literature circles.
Continue reading Online Literature Circles and Virtual Book Clubs (Educircles)…
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If you’ve spent any time on the internet, you’ve already been indoctrinated into the world of Making Money Online. Just do a search using one of the big 3 search engines (Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft), and you’ll see ads beside your results.
When we were growing up, we made money as teens by mowing the lawn, babysitting the neighbour’s kids, or having a paper route. As we got older, we started to get our first job: working at summer camp, a fast food joint or the local supermarket. Finally, we went to college or university to earn a degree and get a “real” job.
So it can be hard for us to understand that kids want to (and can) make money online.
Here are two things to think about:
1. Make money online as a teacher to help offset the costs of your technology-integrated classroom.
2. Explore the topic of Making money online with your students (either as a media literacy unit or as an extra-curricular club.)
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We’re just creating our new classroom website for the 2009-2010 year. We had it up and running in about 15 minutes by setting up WordPress 2.8.4 (3 minutes to create the site; 12 minutes to cut and paste the content from our Meet the Teacher newsletter.)
Continue reading Still using WordPress for our Classroom Website…
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