November:
I attended a RESA VII training which has allowed a small group of technology integration specialists or those with a deeper interest in technology to get together and share ideas, learn new things that are available to them and their colleagues. I really enjoyed a training session with Mark Moore from the WVDE. He went over Thinkfinity community - which I had seen before - however gained more insight to how I could be using it to benefit myself and others in my building. He also shared with us TED talks which I had heard of but never actually explored. It gave me some great ideas on how I could use it for writing prompts in my reading classroom. He also discussed the 21st century Thinkfinity technology contest -which got me thinking on how I could do some cool thinks in my classroom and maybe win some money for our school. He also showed us some various ways that we could use wvde webtop - which again gave me some more ideas on how I could incorporate it into my classroom if my students had them as well. Overall, I think it was a worthwhile learning experience and look forward to attending another training session in the spring.
December:
I began by wondering what I could do in my classroom to both create an excellent learning opportunity for my students as well as figure out a way that we could be creative enough to enter my students in the WVDE/Thinkfinity technology contest. I sat down and discussed the idea with our Language Arts teacher Mrs. Dean to see if maybe we could collaborate and come up with a fantastic project that we could submit to the state department. Well in my 8th grade Social Studies classroom we were talking about the American Revolution and I mentioned to Mrs. Dean how Mark Moore had discussed this really cool interactive game "For Crown or Colony" that we could incorporate in both our classes and then branch off in different directions from there. She liked the idea so for the next 3-4 days, depending on the group, the students played the game in our classes and then discussed the American Revolution more in depth in my Social Studies class. After we were finished the game, my students had to pick a topic or an individual to focus on and create either a news broadcast or an interview with a person that had an impact on the revolutionary war. I then grouped the students into groups of 4-5 and they created a news broadcast with a news anchor a news station name and a news segment that allowed the stories to transition smoothly from one story to the next. The students then dressed up and filmed in front of a group screen their news broadcasts. I then edited them and added pictures in the background that set the students in their particular location. They did a good job for this being our first year attempting this project, but as always there are things that I learned would make the project better in the future. (Mrs. Dean's group created a newspaper on Microsoft publisher.)
January: A new year!!! We came back to school and it has been a slow start - however - we just found out that all our hard work paid off and our students did win the Thinkfinity Technology Contest!!! We did win $2,000 for our school to use toward new technology. My next job is going to be to explore and see what the best purchase would be for Fairview Middle. I really am leaning toward ipads, however they are expensive so I have to do a little more exploration. I am very excited to have helped the students win money for our school. Check out our videos and other video winners at:
Any suggestions for how to spend the money - let me know!!!!
