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Professional Development Day
We can’t wait to see where you go from here!
Khaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaan!
Forgive me, but I had to throw in a Star Trek II reference with the name of this app. Khan Academy is a popular free learning site dedicated to providing free course materials and videos on a variety of subjects. Khan now has an app. I encourage everyone to check it out; it would be a great resource in the classroom and for personal edification.
Check out this great OSXDaily article on the new app: http://osxdaily.com/2012/03/12/khan-academy-ipad-app/
I would like to extend congratulations to our first graduating class of the Somerville School District 21st Century
Academy. The fall cohort learned innovative ways to use the iPad in their classrooms. Through workshops, in-class support, and collegial dialogue, the fall members distinguished themselves as dedicated and innovative educators. As cohort members, these teachers have gained skills that will be valuable in their own practice and as a resource for colleagues. I would like to extend my most profound thanks to each and every one of them for their efforts this cycle.
The spring cohort begins in a few weeks; spring members look for emails in the near future. The spring cohort will go through the same curriculum as the fall cohort in order to increase the number of teachers in each building that can serve as a technology learning resource.
SOPA…What does it mean to teachers and students?
You may have heard a new techie/public policy term being tossed around lately in the news and online, SOPA. It may sound like a new high end Scandinavian body wash, however, it is actually a new piece of legislation making it’s way through the House of Representatives that will, if passed, change the face of the internet. How does this new legislation affect you as an educator? How does this new legislation affect your students? Read on.
In the age of the re-mix, the Wiki, and other communal creativity, students often skirt the edges of copyright. If enacted, SOPA would permanently shutdown sites that infringe on copyright. As CNET puts it, “Some critics have charged that such language [in the legislation] could blacklist the next [and current] YouTube, Wikipedia, or WikiLeaks. “ SOPA will also expose, infringers, read students, to civil legal action.
Teachers:
For teachers, many of the tools we rely on in a 21st Century Classroom may be banished to the Internet abyss, or at least severely curtailed. Student digital creations for your class will be exposed to copyright scrutiny and civil action. Worst of all, infringements by your students can expose you to civil legal liability.
To find out more about this proposed legislation you can check out these sites.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-31921_3-57329001-281/how-sopa-would-affect-you-faq/
OK…so it’s the day before break.
Your students have worked hard and have behaved like little angels all semester. Time for a conditional behavior modification reinforcer! Time for Turkey Fling.
It’s fun, appropriate, funny, and teaches neat Newtonian Physics concepts, like gravity, momentum, and flying turkeys.
Have fun!
http://www.ezone.com/games/turkeyfling/gamecode.htm
A happy Thanksgiving to you and yours from The Department of Technology and 21st Century Education!
Things, on the Internet, are not always as they seem.
Songs get remixed, images get edited, and ownership becomes hazy. As teachers trying to educate in this Brave New Digital World ambiguity in ownership and copyright can become problematic, both legally and ethically. How can these esoteric issues of copyright and trademark be an issue in a K-12 classroom? Let’s examine the following scenario to help clarify.
Mrs. Smith decides to teach a lesson about Honest Abe. Being an exceptional teacher, Mrs. Smith decides to use images and video along side her primary source documents in the lesson to address the greatest range of student learning styles. The Lincoln lesson is a resounding success! When presenting the lesson to the building PLC, colleagues inform Mrs. Smith that the pictures and videos that were used and disseminated were actually all under copyright. Now Mrs. Smith is unwittingly infringing copyright and setting the same example for the students.
How could Mrs. Smith have avoided these problems? If only there was a website with open source, copyright free media that teachers could use and disseminate. Introducing…Wikimedia Commons (Rest assured, different than Wikipedia)!
Available at, http://commons.wikimedia.org, Wikimedia offers a wealth of pictures, audio, and video for you to use to your hearts content! Each file on the website has detailed information on authorship and copyright to allow for proper citation. These files can be downloaded and distributed without worry of copyright infringement.
Give Wikimedia Commons a try and let us know what you think!
As always, please reach out to us with questions, comments, or column ideas at technologywednesday@somervillenjk12.org.
dvanced concepts at the secondary level when they are still struggling to grasp the basic language of the content area. Whether it is a biology class or an English class, vocabulary development is an essential step in developing an understanding of the key concepts being taught. At Somerville High School, teachers have been utilizing a tool at Quizlet.com to help students with this skill. Quizlet provides teachers an online study tool that can be adapted to include your own vocabulary terms and definitions. The students enjoy the game format of the features “Scatter” and “Space Race”. The students enjoy using the iPad touch screen for the games instead of the computer with the mouse since part of the experience is trying to beat your previous time! A new feature that has recently been added is the “Speller Tool”, which provides students with practice spelling the vocabulary terms. The program says the word out loud and prompts the students to type the word. Hearing the vocabulary words pronounced correctly helps all language learners. This tool would also be invaluable in an ELL classroom.
As a youngster, I touched everything! Things never seemed real to me unless I could touch them, feel their texture, associate form with function. Only after manual contact did a new object or idea take on a reality with me. Learning functioned much the same way, in my experience. Unless I could touch, manipulate, and put into practice a newly taught concept or strategy that concept had little chance of sticking in my ever-fuzzy gray matter. Mathematics was the ultimate example of the subject where lecture just did not cut it for me. If there was no manipulative exercise for the newly introduced concept I knew it was going to be a long unit.
Manipulatives made math an approachable discipline for me, and, research shows that I was not alone. I would have been in heaven if my math teacher could, some how, setup an exercise with hands-on components for every new concept or equation. The teachers could not, of course, accomplish this. Cost, availability, and little blue manipulative squares strewn about the classroom are but a few of the roadblocks that stood between my lesson nirvana and the realities of my teacher's daily practice.
If only I had been a math student in 2011. Thanks to the Internet, there is now a free digital resource that my teachers could use to make my math wishes come true. Enter the National Library of Virtual Manipulative at http://nlvm.usu.edu/. The NLVM has engaging, interactive, and fun ways for students to learn mathematical concepts through a hands-on approach. The library is differentiated by grade level, discipline, and concept. The lessons are free and available anywhere in the world at any time without the need to download or install anything. One more thing, the whole site can be translated to Spanish or French with a click of a link at the bottom of the page.
Ubiquitous digital manipulatives…oh, Mrs. Wilson can I please retake Algebra I using these tools? I promise I'll do much better this time, well, at least I can promise I'll be less of a discipline problem having spent time on the other side of that big desk.
Please check out the library and let me know what you think!
A Call for Lesson
We are looking for a few good men, and women, to send us lessons! Please send us information on how you and your students use technology in the classroom. Include samples of the work, pictures, or video and we will share it with our whole community!
Send work, lessons, questions, or comments to technologywednesday@somervillenjk12.org
We all know SmartBoards are great: Interactive, student centered lesson nirvana at your fingertips.
Much of the Smart goodness, however; is centered in the Smart Notebook software. The lessons built with Smart Notebook are the centerpiece to the whole Smart experience. To access pre-built, excellent, and free Smart Notebook lessons please navigate to the Smart Lesson Exchange at http://exchange.smarttech.com.
Now you may ask, “But Jason, I don’t have a SmartBoard, how do these lessons help me?” My answer, the lessons work well in a computer lab, or in a classroom with a TV or projector. To use these lessons to their fullest potential, however, you should make every effort to let the student interact with the screen. To involve the students directly, you could have a student come up to the front of the room, point to where they want to click, and you click the mouse; alternatively, the student could click the mouse directly to manipulate the lesson.
Check out the exchange and let us know what you think at technologywednesday@somervillenjk12.org!
Welcome to Technology Wednesday!
