Classroom Technology

Wow! This was a total whirl wind of a week. I had just gotten the hang of posting every day and then I had to go back to work. Monday I moved my stuff from my old office to my new classroom. Then I started setting up my classroom. Tuesday I helped the New Teacher Mentor from last year pack up her office so she could take it to her new school where she is going to be a writing teacher too. I finished the night off at a Girl Scout Team meeting. Wednesday was our first full day back at school and we got to spend it crunching data from last year's SOL test. I spent Thursday writing 3 instructional calendars for the first 9 weeks, one for each grade I teach. Then I had to make sure it matched the grade level teachers calendars as. UGH!!!! But today was the BEST!!! We had technology professional development. And that's what I want to talk about today: technology in the classroom.

We had 4 different sessions today: Smart Board, Moodle, CPS clickers, and digital media (ie. United Streaming).

We all found out on Wednesday that we will all be required to have Moodle websites this year. And I found out that I will be one of the Moodle Mentors, since I had 16 hours of professional development over the summer to go beyond the basics of using Moodle. So today's session was to show teachers how to add items to their pages and what some of the possible items they can add.

For the Smart Board session, each teacher shared a lesson or template that she used in her classroom. I had never used a Smart Board before, so they went a bit more in depth and showed me how to do some of it. For which I will be forever grateful. I can't wait to try some of the things I saw.

The digital media session was mostly to tell us the changes in the districts stance on movies and media in the classroom and what our options were.

The CPS clickers session is the one I was most excited about. Over the past two years I have seen teachers use them in their room and now I get to! We learned how to add quick questions based on Power Points we have all ready created. I also learned how to have the kids answer a paper test using the clickers instead of a scan-tron. I can't wait to set up my Focus question so that the students get to use the clickers every day. After 4 hours of professional development, I went down to the library and checked out my own set of clickers for the year.

So here is my question for you all: What kind of technology do you have in your classrooms and what kind of technology do you wish you had?

Until tomorrow!

Robyn