SENTEO Student Response System

I have had a classroom set of the SENTEO student response system from Smart Technologies in my room since the start of the year. I have found working with these that they really hold all the students accountable. Many of the uses I have are during a discussion and I can quickly formulate a question to see who is following along. With the students signed in, I can check to see who is answering and who is answering correctly. This means that instead of getting one response from a student who raises their hand I get a response from all my students. This helps most of my students stay focussed. I have found the system to be easy to work with and they help give valuable real time feedback. I recommend them to everyone.

Google Maps

I have been working with a Smartboard for 3 years. Recently I have been listening to the Smartboard Podcast on www.pdtogo.com. Ben Hazzard and Joan Badger always have wonderful sites to use in class and new and interesting ways to integrate technology into everyday teaching. Recently I tried googlemaps in support of a unit I teach on the American Revolution. It was fun to show my students Boston Harbor and to actually show them where the Boston Tea Party took place 200 some odd years ago. Many of them had not made that connection. This past Friday I had a parent volunteer come in to teach an art lesson. In this art lesson she needed to use a pull down map. Yes I have a pull down map but pulling up a satellite image of Europe on the Smartboard was much more realistic for the students. The parent was wowed and is going to share this with her friends. Easy support for more technology in the classroom and so very real support for the lesson. I really like google and its online tools.

Mitch

Digital Presentations

Okay so I had my students create their digital presentations and we were sharing them with the rest of the class. I think they came out really good for the most part. We had a few digital hiccups along the way, a misplaced file here and there, but overall they look really good. I know now many areas that my students need assistance on when it comes to "final copies" of what ever they do but I know they can get a project done. One good story. One of my students really liked adding pictures from the internet into her project. I told her as long as she adds a caption for each picture she can keep adding. I guess that I should have been checking her progress more often because she did her presentation and really made me laugh. I don't know if you know this or not but Benjamin Franklin has real life black and white pictures just out on the web. She had found someone whose name might have been Ben Franklin posing with his family in a black and white picture, not painting. We had a bit of a discussion about this and it was a learning experience. We are now almost done with all of the presentations and the students are excited to try more. Hopefully we will get a chance soon.