Today I found myself working with my OSTA committee discussing how we wanted to redesign the website in order to attract more members as well as provide more benefits to the members. Although only four of us were present we got a lot accomplished in a short amount of time over Skype!
As always, I found myself well versed in not only using collaborative tools with my colleagues live, but also problem solving the basic technical issues and proposing a technology component to our website and future conference presentations--i.e. back channeling, google doc for notes, etc.... (A lot of this idea is modeled after what Silvia Rosenthal (Langwitches) did at ITSC!) As more and more schools continue to add technology into the classroom it is going to be important that we begin to share how these new tools can be used effectively while also enhancing the curriculum. This leads very nicely into the STEM initiative taking place in education and hopefully will lead to more grants this coming school year!
Unfortunately, I still am not seeing a lot of scientific examples as to how to use the iPad in the classroom. Of course basic formal and informal assessment, research, presentation capabilities, camera/camcorder capabilities (although not great on iPad 2) and study devices are all there...but how do we use it otherwise? Or is this enough? I am not sure I can justify that knowing that there are web based tools that do all the same things. Is the difference that these tools are 1:1 all the time? Does this make the classroom more efficient? Are students really more engaged and willing to complete some of the more traditional assignments? I think at our showcase the teachers will address this issue.
Still waiting to see the outline...hint, hint;)
No comments:
Post a Comment