Technology in Education: Notes from the Closet

Each year as students head back to school they set goals for themselves; ' get good grades' , ' listen to the teacher' , ' become better at sports' are some popular ones we here.  Teachers in first grade, second grade and third grade took these goals a step further; they had students record them. Teachers began by having students write three goals for the new year.  When this step was complete I came in. Using the app Audioboom I recorded each student reading their goals.  Audioboom stores the audio recording on their site, and generously creates a QR code linking to it.  I printed each and teachers found creative ways to display them (see pics below).  These goals were then placed in classrooms for Open House.  Our parents loved them, and the students got a kick out of them as well. The hope is that we will come back to this activity in June and rerecord reflection statements about meeting/not meeting our goals.  It will be fun to compare writing ...

I've used AudioBoom for years to provide audio feedback to undergraduate and graduate students.  Even at the college level students love this form of feedback.  Recently I've introduced it to many of the teachers at Coonley .  We absolutely love that AudioBoom generates a QR code for each file and provides a free account that allows unlimited 10 minute recordings!  With this we've made our kindergarten monsters come alive, provided musical recordings of our students' progress and allowed our 5th graders to become book reviewers. We find new uses for this awesome app each day.   Below is a User Guide that I created to help teachers walk through the app.  Click here to see a 1 page condensed version.  Happy recording!   AudioBoom User Guide

For the past month my STEM partner Tom and I have been assigned to work in the "SWAS" room (a 'school within a school') with a group of 7th and 8th grade students.  For science we started with a unit on the human body, exploring the various body systems.  I found some fantastic content PowerPoints (with note templates) from another teacher's science blog.  Once again, I can't say enough about the power of a Personal Learning Network - this teacher made their materials available on the Internet for others to explore and they definitely helped us (see his blog here ). As a culminating activity we had the students trace themselves and work together to label a body system.  Groups were given websites that had facts about the human body.  They used these sites to develop QR code questions.  The final products were displayed in the SWAS classroom and on our STEM bulletin board in the main hall.  See the pictures below.       ...

My blog post from Teachability.com Posted by  Nicole Zumpano  in  First Year Teaching  on Mar 17, 2014 2:53:00 PM Each semester my undergraduate and graduate students are introduced to incredible amounts of technology concepts and tools in my Technology in Education classes.  One of the assignments calls for the students to create classroom lessons that incorporate technology and to develop sample artifacts using this technology.  I’m always impressed by what these students are able to create.  After all, many are undergraduates; they have yet to step foot in a classroom and many have not yet had education foundational classes. Below are links to some of the great projects I’ve seen this winter.  With the quality and thought that went into these I’d say our future is in good hands. Alphabet QR code flash cards for little learners Counting coins with QR codes Create a mystery game of fractions using QR Codes! Use context clues...

http://goo.gl/dfzTyi Recently I presented a QR Codes professional development session for interested faculty members at Leland Elementary .  I've given this presentation before at conferences and as a webinar.  QR codes have become very popular in classrooms. This presentation contains updated ideas as well as student projects I've completed and ideas from pre-service teachers I've taught. It also contains ideas I learned about in an awesome session on QR Codes at I.E.T.C . given by Michelle Heikes and Heidi Morgan .  Below the Prezi is a participant guide that lists the ideas introduced.  I gave this to teachers so as I showed examples they could make a note of the ideas they liked in order to revisit them later.  I hope to include pictures soon of teachers that have implemented QR codes in their classrooms!   We've already begun using the codes on our interactive S.T.E.M. bulletin board!  The board contains math problems at each grade lev...

Recently I came across a resource through my PLN (Professional Learning Network) on Twitter  that gave me an idea for Black History Month.  If you are an educator and you are not on Twitter we need to talk! Using a resource shared by  James Gubbons   that was originally created by  Tony Vincent  I decided to introduce QR Codes to the  4th grade students .  We talked about what a "quote" was and referenced some  famous quotes . I brought the iPads in and displayed some of the mystery quotes from Tony's website around the room. The students worked in pairs to scan the QR codes to find missing words from famous quotes.  For today's purposes I only used quotes from African Americans.   The students then created their very own quotes, with "mystery" missing parts just like the ones we scanned.  I demonstrated how to create a QR code using QRStuff.com and created a step by step guide for the students to assist them. Q...