Getting I.T. Right

What began as a friendly competition between some classrooms at Union Hill Elementary has resulted in unexpected global interest. Participating teachers at Union Hill created a “Sign My Guest Book” page on their classroom web pages where visitors could record name, city, and state to serve as a means of measuring extent and success. Ms. Allen, a fourth grade teacher at Union Hill, is now getting posts from all over the world. Her students are assigned to do a bit of quick research on the unfamiliar places, find an interesting fact or two to share with the class, and mark the location of the posts on a big map. Checking the blog has become a much-anticipated part of their day. Now their little project is the subject of a blogger in Amsterdam and has been Tweeted and re-Tweeted around the world.

http://schools.roundrockisd.org/XeniaVoigt/Voigt%20newspaper.htm

Through Xenia Voigt Elementary’s new online newspaper, students have an opportunity to communicate with a wider audience for information, views, and ideas.

Students in Grades 1&2 spent the afternoon in Mo Willems’ studio via a live simulcast in the library. Mo Willems has written the Pigeon books and the Elephant and Piggie series. Purple Sage was one of just 200 schools across the whole country to have this privilege. We were the only school in Austin and Round Rock, Texas to participate.

Edwin Flecha at Round Rock High School uses video from School Tube to teach factoring quadratics. You can review your own “factoring” skills by watching this video.

http://www.teacherweb.com/TX/RoundRockHighSchool/MrFlecha/apt5.stm

Charla Newlon of Teravista uses a blog to present math challenges, share resources about Martin Luther King, Jr., and to gather reader responses. Check it out at:

http://teacherweb.com/Blog/TX/TeravistaElementarySchool/CharlaNewlon/1/default.aspx

The 3rd grade team at Wells Branch Elementary uses their interactive whiteboard tools to annotate math problems from the Pearson-Envision textbook site. After a brief demonstration by the campus Instructional Technology Specialist all third grade teachers had the site pulled up with annotations all over their virtual textbooks.

Math teachers at Ridgeview Middle School are using document cameras to record how they solve problems. Natalie Ortega has gone one step further and created her own channel on Youtube to help keep her videos organized and accessible. Read more and watch the video at http://www.robinstechtips.com/?p=254 .

Tags: videos

Sixty Bluebonnet fifth graders participated in a live video conference with the Fort Worth Museum of Science and History on Friday, March 13, 2009. In the program “Icy Science” they join in hands-on explorations investigating ice that helps them understand important properties of matter concepts – changes of states, freezing point, and molecular structures.

Tags: Science, video conferencing

In a pilot program with Teachermate first grade students at Bluebonnet reinforce their language arts and math skills using the Teachermate.

Students in Mrs Fatke’s seventh grade science classes created visual presentations identifying weathering, erosion, deposition, and man’s actions on the Grisham MS neighborhood. Their presentations incorporated the MYP technology design cycle and the science TEKS.

Watch their video…….