Technology Integration » Integration Techniques:Teachers

We’re Inspired !

Brad Edwards — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 00:56:47 +0000

This week I spent a day with the 6th graders. I’ve been working all year with this group of students but with a science teacher. Today, their Language Arts teacher wanted me to show them how to use Inspiration to help them plan their writing piece about their career study. These students were right on task. I was really pleased to see how well the listened and how well they organized their work. When they put their ideas together in Inspiration and saw that their outline was done for them, including the notes they could add, they were hooked. It was a new program for them.

This program isn’t in their docs, so I had to help two or three in each class find it. Some are still struggling to find things, and I think there will always be those. Overall, 95% of them get it.

At first, students were taken by the Inspiration icons, wanting to choose just the right one. Eventually, after the first group, I learned that this was a distraction from the lesson and that organization of ideas needed to be the focus. Between the first lesson and the second (one afternoon to the next morning), their teacher emailed me her Inspiration model. We put that up on the screen. While she talked about it, I clicked through it. Good experience team teaching, especially today. I’m reminded about the recent experience with Canvastic. As a graphic organizer, Inspiration is extremely powerful since it gives students the visual cues about their thought process prior to writing. I wish I had had this when I was in the 6th grade: outlining was never much fun for me !

I can’t wait to see how well these 6th graders will be doing with their one to one laptop program as they enter 7th grade next fall. They’re already far ahead of this year’s 7th graders and this year’s 7th graders are far ahead of this year’s 8th.

Without One To One Part 2

Brad Edwards — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 02:29:58 +0000

A group of 2nd graders came into their classroom to find me and my computer screen projected on the wall. We were looking at an interactive physics web site on projectile motion.
You wouldn’t think that second graders would be interested in this on the surface, but these students took turns figuring out how to point the cannon so that the projectile would hit the target. I grouped them into boys on one side, and girls on the other. Each group member had a turn until the group “hit the target.”
There was a lot of reasoning happening here….. there was some guessing, too, and some students had fun, but the most amazing thing was their levels of engagement. They were really competing, and, I think, learning as well.
But who would have thought that second graders could grasp projectile motion?
This was a lesson with just the instructor’s laptop, a projector, a screen, the web resource, and a great group of kids.

Integration Techniques without one to one

Brad Edwards — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 02:23:33 +0000

Most teachers aren’t nearly as fortunate as I have been. They have a few laptops available, maybe one or two desktops in their classrooms. Not many have a mobile lab of 20-30 laptops with Internet access available to them…but they really should, you know.
What to do when there isn’t one to one? Two weeks ago, I stopped into the local market on my way to school and bought two large packages of M&M’s. I grabbed a few paper plates, and headed to the 4th grade classroom for a lesson. The teacher had no idea what I was going to do, and in fact had emailed me a web site to have them “look at,” but that was something she didn’t need me for really.
I separated the class into five groups, each of three or four students. Each group had a sorter, and there were one or three laptops per group. You can guess the rest.
The M&M’s were divided up roughly among the groups. Each sorter counted out the number and the colors. Each group created a spread sheet enumerating the colors and the amount for each, using a fill across and fill down formula to create the total for all.
They then experimented with graphs. We use Numbers, a part of iWork, Apple’s ‘answer’ to Excel, and did some neat things with pie charts, pulling the segments apart, copying and pasting into Keynote and Pages for practice.
At the end of the class, I summarized the exercise by adding the group totals together into one spreadsheet. We drew some conclusions.
The purpose of the lesson was have experience with the software, understand some terms such as mode, mean, median and range which they had been working on the week before, and just to interact with the technology as a different way of learning.
The kids did great…..didn’t lose a single piece of chocolate! (who would want to pop one of those into the mouth after having been handled by so many folks?) And I think we got the idea of how to make a spreadsheet, too.

Success with Keynote

Brad Edwards — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 18:59:43 +0000

I work as the technology integrationist in a rural K-8 school in central Maine. Last summer the school purchased a new laptop cart with 26 MacBooks just for the second floor of the elementary school….that’s Grades 2-4.

I love working with all ages, but today’s 3rd grade lesson on Keynote was amazing. These 10 year olds stunned their teacher with their presentations we made in under an hour. I come to the classes once a week to help teachers learn the tools. The week before, we had saved full size images from a Google image search to our iPhoto libraries. This week, we added the photos through the media browser to a blank Keynote presentation. And some were wanting to add their narrations, too. We added transitions. The students didn’t know what transitions were, but when I showed them the difference between the presentation I had made with and without, they caught on right away. Didn’t they have fun with this. They were much better listeners today, and we accomplished so much.

What I take away from these sessions is from the energy and excitement these kids have. And that energy has prompted me to resume my blogging.

When I did this same exercise with a fourth grade teacher earlier in the week, the teacher decided to have her students use Keynote to demonstrate what they had learned about some subject or another. And with a 6th grade teacher yesterday, I’m now booked with his class to demonstrate the rudiments of presentations. We start off with a limited search, and then we go on to add the photos, full size images. Then on to making the presentation.

One comment the teacher made that has stayed with me was “I’m on overload right now, and won’t be able to remember all of this.” But to that I said, “You have 18 possible teachers in this room right now, so don’t hesitate to ask if any of them know how to do >>>>>>.” This is what I love about the technology. It has enabled students to be teachers and teachers to be students as we discover a need to share the learning and the classroom and switch the locus of control to the learner.

Powerful stuff, technology is.