Last Wednesday and Thursday the initiation of our Paperless Classroom occurred! It was quite exciting and as a class we had a wonderful time, problems, issues, glitches, and all.
I started with an ambitious project. It was both designed as an introduction to web based research, primary and secondary sources in a standards based sense, but more importantly as a computer literacy diagnostic. I felt that it was important to find out where our students are as a group with their computer and their Internet knowledge. What we found on the first day was to some surprise a success, the students were wonderful and were able to manage the large amount of information that was given to them. On the second day of the lesson we all got a little bit tripped up. Let's go into the details.
These two lessons were based on learning to find, identify, and evaluate reliable primary and secondary sources, then use those sources to create a WANTED poster of an outlaw of the student's choice using Glogster. This was a lot for two days of only 180 minutes total, and that was my fault, I got a little ambitious. However, this is what I wanted to know - I wanted to know where we were so that I could figure out how to guide us to where we want to go.
What is more exciting is that in a short twenty minutes or so we will be starting in a more organised less car chase crash kind of way and start with the beginning. Let's get some Google Life on!
I have posted the lesson plans for these two days at the end of this blog post. I will post a results summary document as well.
Monday, October 31, 2011
Thursday, October 13, 2011
The Start of a Great Project in "The Greatest City in America"
We have a motivation problem. We have three classes of students with the capability to be engaged, hardworking, motivated, enthusiastic learners, however, for the most part, we have been unable to reach them. We have good days, and we have bad days, and occasionally we have a great day. I believe that we can make everyday a great day. And today was the first day that we, my co-teacher and I, decided to take steps and make moves to make everyday a great day.
As we sat administering some tests, we realized that the only times our students had used the computers in our class was to take their online standardized tests. Then we realized that we had not seen the laptops being used in any other class either. This realization, combined with the fact that we had both been spending a lot of time online looking for engaging resources for teaching The Giver, made us realize that we had stumbled upon a direction to go. We decided we wanted to make a blog for our classes. We decided through much excitement that we wanted to go paperless.
I spent my first five weeks of graduate school at the Johns Hopkins University in a class called the Paperless Classroom. When it was over we were told that we would probably never be able to use any of the things we learned in this class, or at least for several years. Today, I have been happier than I have been in a while. I am thrilled that we will have the opportunity to try and make this work.
We spent the rest of the day working with Blogger and figuring out how to get the laptops to live in our room, and just figuring out how to make this work. This particular blog site will be my formal record of what we do from the teacher's perspective. My personal reflections can be found at my other blog TeachingDaisies. When our class blogs are published and things get up and running, I will share the link to those blogs as well.
Two weeks from now we will be up and running. And by the end of the year we hope to have an interactive digital classroom, where are students can interface with the real world through their own unique lenses. Good morning Baltimore...
As we sat administering some tests, we realized that the only times our students had used the computers in our class was to take their online standardized tests. Then we realized that we had not seen the laptops being used in any other class either. This realization, combined with the fact that we had both been spending a lot of time online looking for engaging resources for teaching The Giver, made us realize that we had stumbled upon a direction to go. We decided we wanted to make a blog for our classes. We decided through much excitement that we wanted to go paperless.
I spent my first five weeks of graduate school at the Johns Hopkins University in a class called the Paperless Classroom. When it was over we were told that we would probably never be able to use any of the things we learned in this class, or at least for several years. Today, I have been happier than I have been in a while. I am thrilled that we will have the opportunity to try and make this work.
We spent the rest of the day working with Blogger and figuring out how to get the laptops to live in our room, and just figuring out how to make this work. This particular blog site will be my formal record of what we do from the teacher's perspective. My personal reflections can be found at my other blog TeachingDaisies. When our class blogs are published and things get up and running, I will share the link to those blogs as well.
Two weeks from now we will be up and running. And by the end of the year we hope to have an interactive digital classroom, where are students can interface with the real world through their own unique lenses. Good morning Baltimore...
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