STARs become a Mouse Squad

We're winding down the days of summer now and beginning to look forward to what exciting endeavors we can work towards in the upcoming year. One of our exciting new projects is developing our STARs crew. They are a group of middle school student technology advisors that work on supporting the smooth and relevant integration of technology into the classroom. We've been kind of wondering aimlessly over the last year not sure how to structure this particular program but now through purchasing the rights and information to develop a MOUSE squad, I'm very excited by the prospects! I hope with this program we will better be able to meet our goals, assist teachers, motivate and challenge students and facilitate the integration of technology into our classrooms.

Besides working through the Mouse squad modules, I also hope to: make use of their tech ticket system (maybe), work at manning a HELPdesk, and maybe - maybe - have a TechTips blog of quick little tips for teachers. That would be kind of cool - I think.

In any case, I'm excited.

Portals

We are looking at a school wide or classroom focussed portal right now. iGoogle is the perfect choice with individual tabs and a wealth of great widgets but sadly the possible exposure to inappropriate content makes it impossible to adopt in the classroom.

We're looking at Netvibes as an alternative ...being able to host and control content makes it a more viable alternative... so it's the next thing we need to investigate now...

getting ready for next year

Today, the grade 6 team sat together to iron out the orientation schedule for next year. Having been through the orientation and laptop roll out once already, we feel much more prepared for next year then we did this time last year. After a lengthy discussion and looking back at some old notes from the first week of this school year, this is what we decided on was essential for those first two introductory days back at school:
1. Laptop nuts & bolts session (including what's included in the laptop bag, logging in, changing passwords, navigating the mainshare and D drive, logging into school email and changing that password as well)
2. TUP (going over some of the main expectations with our school's Technology User Plan - but we also thought this was too much information for those first days. We decided a brief introduction followed by a more in depth lesson on the TUP in the second week of school)
3. Personalizing the desktop (fun activity where students personalize desktop with four things that speak to who they are)
4. Tour (hallway patterns and expectations for carrying laptops, storing laptops, and laptop free zones)
5. Online classroom (logging into, changing password, and an introduction to navigating the LMS)

We are pretty satisfied with those topic areas for the first two days. 7th and 8th grade will also be implementing their laptop program too in those first two orientation days. It will be interesting to see how whether their priorities differ or are imilar to the 6th grade...

Online labs

The last couple of weeks, we've been engaged in earthquakes in the classroom and the students tried out several online lab sites to map earthquakes, plot epicenters , determine magnitudes and build structures to withstand earthquakes. The students loved them saying in some cases they were the coolest labs they did or that it was like a game, wasn't it? If one of the 5E's of technology is to engage - I think these labs certainly did that! In terms of educate, I have no doubt of this either. How wonderful that what used to be a multi-day tedious activity (plotting earthquakes) - now can be done quickly and effectively, leaving much more time for the discussion, application and evaluation part of learning.

Pretty cool....

DyKnow success

Our school has invested in DyKnow - a cool teaching and monitoring tool. I've enjoyed the monitoring aspects of the tool - getting to transfer files, share control, display student work, applying attention and keeping my students on task. The vision side of it is taking a little longer to embrace. I did have a great wing-it lesson last week when the DVD player wasn't working and I needed something quick. I had my students each create a multiple choice question and submit the panel to me. I then appended all of these panels into one file and displayed each question one at a time. Using DyKnow, I then polled the students on each question and got a little nifty graph that showed how many students responded correctly. The students loved the interactivity of the game and I loved being able to guage how well my students knew the concepts. Woohoo! Gotta love those days when It just works.... :-)

The school goes Diigo

Today our principal, IT director, and IT coordinator had a meeting. One of the agenda items was whether or not certain tools such as social bookmarking sites should be standardized so that students, teachers and parents don't get overwhelmed or frustrated by the number of different sites they have to be familiar with. I get the point. I really do and at the same time, I feel a little sad. Until now, we've had a lot of freedom to try new programs in our classroom. Many turn out to be not that wonderful but just as many turn out to be fabulous - but without the freedom to try, how will we know? And without the innovative initiatives of teachers willing to get their feet wet, how will we grow?

Maybe the process of clearing new initiatives through IT will be required before we can try innovative projects and maybe that isn't a bad thing. Maybe it will lead to better communication between teachers and IT. Maybe it will only lead to more support and fewer redundancies. All that would be good - as long as it doesn't lead to snuffing of innovation.

In any case, I'm happy. We're going with Diigo over Del.icio.us. Woohoo!

Diigo in our science class

I've been playing around with Diigo the last month in the classroom. I love it. The students have been looking for websites about Taiwan's geology and there just isn't much out there for their reading level and that's in English. What I've been getting them to do is find a site, and read through it. Even if they don't understand most of it, there is usually something small or short that they can glean from it. Anyway, they then bookmark it to our class's group page and include both a highlight and a sticky that points out the small tidbit of information that they found on it. What we ended up with was a wealth of websites where the students could then go to and immediately find the important and helpful parts of each site. I'm astounded because now the students have a wealth of resources and they'll be able to visit numerous sites but their research time of wading through unrelated material is going to be cut in half because their peers did that for/with them! I love Diigo.

What I hope to do next is have the students create a wiki about Taiwan's geology based on their research. Then wouldn't it be great if I could get someone from the government or university to look at their wiki and give them feedback? There's nothing else like that out there about Taiwan, in English at an adolescent's reading level so it would really be contributing something new - now how cool is that? Will it really happen? I don't know but I'll try and I'm hopeful.

In any case - Diigo is cool.

(Another note) A math teacher heard what I was doing. She had wanted to create a list of math games sites for her students. She had everyone find a site and email her the URL and then she posted the word document she made. When she heard about Diigo - she was floored. That was exactly what she had wanted to do but didn't know she could. There are so many possible ways to use Diigo. How do you think you'd use it? Or have used it? I'd love to hear about it.