End of Teacher Tech Camp

This has been a great week. Our teacher students this week were so awesome. They had wonderful ideas on how to use all the new technology tools we introduced them to. One of them, Brian, was immediately embedding widgets and such on his classroom website. It was great to see everyone so excited. Ideas were popping up everywhere!

One of the reasons this week went so well was that our students (the teachers) were all eager to learn. They were excited about something new. This is how we want all of our students to be. It doesn't matter if they are teachers coming to learn new computer skills or young students coming to learn new skills. The instructors were also excited to teach and I know that made the difference in how the week went. Is it that hard for us to bring that excitement into our own classrooms? Now that August is here and we are all heading back to our schools, we need to keep that energy going. You cannot start the year with a ho-hum attitude and expect your students to be happy and ready to learn. I love summer and could live in perpetual summer but I am ready to start the school year. My brain is churning with new ideas and I am looking forward to trying some new things with my classes.

So here are some goals for my year:
1- keep an updated wiki for all the things my students do during the year
2- kind of related to #1 since I will need to keep my students active to have something to put on the wiki!
3- all grades, not just 6-7-8 will do some sort of project with technology- not sure what, yet, but they will!

My favorite tools to use for this year will be VoiceThread, Voki, Wikispaces, Edmodo

Check this out from Larry Ferlazzo: (one of my favorite blogs! This man is awesome!)
“Only Connect” Is A Great Game For The Classroom
Only Connect is a BBC game show that also has an online site.
There are sixteen squares with words on each one. The player needs to use the words to create four categories of four words each. It’s a great game that helps develop the higher-order thinking skill of categorization.
The online game is too difficult for all but advanced English Language Learners, plus you only get three minutes to complete it.
However, the idea is a wonderful one for the English Language Learner classroom (and even mainstream ones, too). Students can create their own, and then can exchange their creations with a classmate, who in turn can try to solve them. All students need is to make sixteen boxes on their paper.