Recently, students in Mrs. Sumbry's eighth grade science classes created multimedia presentations explaining Newton's laws. What's notable about their project is the manner in which students collaborated and prepared presentations. It's not the iPads or software used to create the presentations. Nor is it the cloud storage used to share images taken with student smart phones. While working, the classroom was noisy, all students were engaged (but not uniformly so), and the teacher was in constant motion throughout the room. It's clear that Mrs. Sumbry is preparing her students to work in a collaborative environment. She is clearly an Instructional Technology Superstar!
Our newest Instructional Technology Superstars are Mrs. Halvorson, Mr. Rose, Mrs. McCollum and Ms. Tosi. Understanding the benefits of collaboration, they designed writing prompts for conversations in the digital platform, Edmodo. And things didn't go so well in the beginning! As is typical with middle schoolers (and some adults, I might add) initial posts were often silly, disrespectful and lacking in content. After a few weeks of concerted efforts on the part of these teachers - as well as some tweaking of their writing prompts, they are seeing great improvement in student interaction. Thanks to a great team for teaching much-needed communication skills and for not giving up on these students.
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Instructional Technology SuperstarsThis blog will feature students, teachers and other personnel who are doing great things with instructional technology in Phenix City Schools. Archives
November 2016
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