Technology in Education: Notes from the Closet

In schools today budgets are tight.  Professional development dollars are shrinking.  In my case, our district just instituted four furlough days; all of them faculty professional development days. Luckily we like to plan ahead. In the beginning of the school year we voted to divide one of our "Flex" PD days into several smaller sessions. This means we took one of the 3 professional development days front-loaded in the beginning of the school year and agreed to make up the hours over the course of the school year. This works for our faculty. After all, in the beginning of the school year teachers are focused on setting up curriculum and classrooms. Dispersing one of these days allows us to target topics or issues that might arise after the school year begins. When we began talking about what type of PD we needed it was different across the board- different grade levels and departments had different needs.  Our solution was to develop our own PD Learning Series whe...

Last year I taught students how to give each other strong feedback using Today's Meet.  The full post can be found here .  This year I had the opportunity to do the same lesson but with a new school and a new set of fifth graders.  The lesson series with this class came out of a conversation with the teacher, Ms. Foreman about student projects. She was looking for ideas for book reviews.  Lucky for me she is enthusiastic and open to any suggestion involving technology. I introduced Ms. Foreman to Audioboom .  Having just provided the teachers with a professional development session on using QR codes in the classroom we decided to create audio recordings of student book reviews.  The beauty of using Audioboom is that it automatically generates a QR code linking to that specific audio file.  While the recordings were taking place the class was also working in PicCollage .  I showed them the basics of how to use the program and some were already f...

A Happy Accident So much of learning happens accidentally. As much as I schedule planning time with teachers to work on their 'Personalized Technology Plans' the best "teachable" moments happen on the fly.  Case in point.  Recently I stopped to speak to a 5th grade teacher about introducing her students to their CPS Google accounts.  As I was leaving her I poked my head into the other 5th grade classroom.  I love this teacher (both of them are stellar educators)- as I look to see what the kids are doing on their laptops she starts to wave me over excitedly saying "ooo Mrs. Zumpano, come see what we're doing!".  I love her enthusiasm, openness to all-things-tech and how she wants to share (even though I also laugh and tell her she always grabs me in the hall as I'm walking by and never formally seeks out my help).  She explained that for Black History Month the students were researching African American colleges and creating Google Presentations on ...