Tech Happenings @ LvHS

Our freshmen made interactive posters about their interpretation of LOVE as a pre-reading activity for Midsummer Night's Dream! They were amazing, and took minimal instruction from their teacher to make them. They included sound and video too. Then they each presented their poster on the projector! No technical issues to report and the site speed seemed fine too. I'll add a sample to this post soon.

Here is a letter I sent out to our parents today... Dear parents and guardians, As you are aware, many teens and adults enjoy Facebook and Twitter. But there is another service that I feel you should be aware of: Tumblr. It became evident last fall that many of our students are active readers of Tumblr postings. We decided to block access to Tumblr on Louisville’s network to avoid such intense distraction during the school day and to keep your daughters safe. It is always helpful for parents to be aware of these types of services due to the unpredictable and uncontrollable nature of their public content. An interesting article about Tumblr’s efforts to discourage potentially self-destructive content is linked here for you to read. http://digitallife.today.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/02/24/10490934-tumblr-bans-anorexia-bulimia-and-other-self-harm Parents, we do our utmost to monitor and control internet content accessed via Louisville’s network. However, if you provide your daught...

I think a constructive way for a 1-to-1 faculty to move forward in "teams" would be for each department to develop a vision or a plan that addresses positive laptop involvement for their students. This way they could learn and implement and fine-tune technology integration as a group of supportive colleagues. Here are some examples that I may encourage: English: Pre-writing on laptops using digital graphic organizers, mind-mapping software, research, notes, etc and bringing it all together with Onenote. Science: Use OneNote as a LAB NOTEBOOK that includes data and charts from excel, images, photos, etc. Digitally turn in the entire lab book digitally. Social Science: Increase the use of digital maps rather than copies printed on paper... students can insert them into OneNote with their notes. Increase use of Polling as a formative assessment tool. Math/Science: try some level of FLIPPED CLASSROOM and/or BLENDED LEARNING in a CONSISTENT way, not just sampled here and there. Mo...

New application (web site or app) to stimulate participation and engagement: GoSoapBox.com Here is a teacher review of the service, and samples of how he uses it. http://www.edutopia.org/blog/gosoapbox-classroom-participation-matt-hurst It does polling, quizzing, etc. sort of like combining Quia and PollEverywhere. I noticed the site is slow, let me know if you do too.

Here's a great Prezi I found in the Prezi U library... http://prezi.com/gmbjcmpwnyxb/dschool/ You can sketch things on a tablet, save images, load into Prezi , etc. Embedded video is key to making it come to life!

Prezi U is now live! Learn and discuss best practices using Prezi in education, read articles and case studies about how top universities are using Prezi, find downloadable content, and more, all in one place. Ohmygosh the articles are so inspiring, and content sharing among educators brings a huge level of focus to teachers who are Prezi enthusiasts. No wading through public random content. Here's a get started article for you! http://edu.prezi.com/article/23005/How-to-use-PreziU/

I received some pdfs that are great reference cards for social network users.... keeping your "footprint" to a minimum, security suggestions, etc. I'm going to post these on My Louisville and link to them here, they are worthwhile. https://my.louisvillehs.org/ftpimages/387/download/FB121211_1800[1].pdf https://my.louisvillehs.org/ftpimages/387/download/Twitter121511_16311.pdf

Here's an interactive graphic that displays lesson examples for each section of the chart. http://www.celt.iastate.edu/teaching/RevisedBlooms1.html

Success! Our chem teacher Myriam got up and running using our new student response system from Turning Technologies.... She's doing test review with multiple choice problems and students are sending their abcd answers using clickers. The graphs are clear and bright and immediate. It took 5 minutes to learn and train the teacher. Awesome!

Wow! Apple really knows how to get things moving. But today I found some articles "post announcement" that are thought-provoking. Great article, now that you’ve read the iBook announcement by Apple. Discusses all the issues regarding devices, k-12 districts, universities, etc. http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2012/01/apple-college-bookstores/ Check this out! http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jason-gilbert/ibooks-2-apple-textbooks_b_1216687.html There is apparently an app developer INKLING that feels Apple stole their ideas to market iBooks. This company does the development of interactive digital textbooks for iPad, but will look to multi-platform in the future. I downloaded their app to play with sample digital textbooks on my iPad, you can too. Go to appstore and look for inkling it’s free. Their web site is beautiful: www.inkling.com And they have a store so you can see their current available titles: https://www.inkling.com/store/

I found a neat free site with 3D anatomy for teaching freshmen and sophomore biology, as well as junior/senior anatomy. This would be awesome both on laptops and on your interactive whiteboards! Please take a look at http://anatronica.com/ but it requires a free download “viewer” that we can install for you if you want, or I can demo for you. We are running into issues installing and running on student laptops due to the way it downloads. Downloading on laptops that have restrictions is messing with the access to it once administrator signs off...More on this as we solve it! It's a nice product so we want to make it work.

There is a simple "SHOW" button that allows you to display a selected student's screen to the class for discussion and collaboration. Use this feature to present writing samples and data and charts from experiments. Allow students to display and control simulations from their seat. Let students explore using Google Earth allowing one student to "lead" the exploration from her laptop.

Junior students will have laptops next year. Our Chemistry teacher was not interested in Gizmos, but we can revisit that. It allows for teacher assignment of simulations that students have to follow steps and answer assessment questions. One important thing to remember is that every student is engaged, not sitting back watching (or not watching). That being said, I think we have a responsibility to find alternative visual and manipulative simulations for our science students, particularly at the regular level. Then we can learn about how to use them with 100% engagement, rather than only projected demonstration. Here are some link to get us thinking: http://www.freezeray.com/ has some for all sciences http://group.chem.iastate.edu/Greenbowe/html%20%20files/resrch-simanim-content.html has some great chemistry ones that develop inquiry based activities for our classes http://phet.colorado.edu/

I found this on an ISTE discussion board: "While I do not have tablets in my classroom, we are 1:1 laptops with interactive networked projectors. Thus, the projector becomes a device to share student work in process. We can jump between teacher and student screens in a click. In teacher mode, it is an IWB , in student mode it is a collaborative process." This is simple to do using our LanSchool product with the click of a button! Either teacher or student can control the display. This also helps to validate the evolution of the IWB , or interactive whiteboard. It is still an outstanding teacher tool when used well, and is a great way to display and manipulate student work.

This is being talked about a great deal, so you should all read this so you know what the idea/plan is with the announcement of iBooks from Apple. It’s about giving publishers a consistent tool/format to transform their textbooks so they are truly interactive, not just PDF versions of the paper books. But how fast publishers will get on board is always the question. The thing to focus on is not that it’s Apple, but rather the concepts such as interactive galleries, audio/video, annotating/highlighting, study cards, 3D images with rotation, and many things we currently must supplement our “old school” textbooks would already be part of the books! Now they’re talking sense. I’m projecting that the same ideas would be produced in non-apple formats as well so focus on the concepts here. http://www.apple.com/education/ibooks-textbooks/