SMARTboard

Katie Crowley and I have been using the SMARTboard in our classes on a routine basis. It may appear to be intimidating at first, but it is unbelievably user friendly! The SMARTboard is a combination of your computer’s desktop and a white board – anything that you open on the computer is projected onto the board. You can write on images, movies, websites, word documents, powerpoint presentations… and then save and print everything! Useful when a student has missed an important lecture or even when you run out of time at the end of class… just open up the document and everything is there.

It is particularly useful to discuss documents and images. We have used the board with our students to analyze paintings, political cartoons, and other primary sources. The students have a real sense of ownership as they are the ones taking apart the documents and teaching their classmates the material. Students that do not usually take notes on activities like these take notes with the SMARTboard. Standard level students love this technology.

One of our favorite things: when studying the age of Absolutism, visiting interactive websites like this one. When Katie showed this to her students, one of her standard level students who is not normally enthusiastic about history got very excited. He is interested in woodworking and told his classmates about how much time and money the inlaid floors would have cost.

stjlabs.com blog

I have been using the blog (www.dscavitto.stjlabs.com!) to post assignments. I will be sending the address to parents as well so they have a chance to check on assignments and what we are doing in class. This has been great for some of my absentminded kids who tend to lose their syllabi…

gmail.stjlabs email and Google Docs

I am in love with Google Docs and knowing that my students can communicate with me over email. I have cleared up many questions about assignments – especially our research project! Having email lists has been handy as I find websites that will be helpful for their project. I’ve also chatted with a few of my students using the chat feature in Gmail when we are both online and the kids love it.

I’m also collecting papers over Google Docs and grading them and sending them back to my students that way. We’ll be using it more as we start writing our musicals in small groups (Oh yes! Musicals on the Roman Republic, the Roman Empire, and the French Revolution!!) and the students can collaborate that way.

We’ll post more later as we try new things!  Thanks Josh for all of your help with everything!

Over the years I kept up with the new technology introduced in the world of computers both at work and at home, including websites.

I have been teaching Spanish (a rather accidental transition) since the turn of the millennium and I am especially interested in using technology to help students with learning disabilities learn Spanish. I find that children, who have trouble paying attention to a lady speaking in a foreign language, love to sit for hours in front of a computer listening to the same language and playing language games. For those kids, developing reinforcement tools might be invaluable.

My immediate problem is that I have been laid low by a horrible cold for the last two weeks and I’m trying to conserve what little energy I have to teach class, etc. I haven’t been able to get to work with all these wonderful toys.

The one thing I did do was introduce Google Documents to the students and, having ironed out some initial problems; things are going swimmingly for us all.

For those who might be thinking of using Google Documents let me tell you that story. Since I had difficulty talking (and I talk a lot in language class since, at the moment, I am the only one in the room who knows the target language) I decided to move our Hispanic Country Project forward and started working on that.

The project consists of a Power Point presentation on a Hispanic country. The presentation is in English for SP 1 and in Spanish for SP 3. The first day we went to the language lab was almost a disaster. All of them knew enough about Power Point to start the presentation but some don’t have it at home, some don’t have a thumb drive, and thus couldn’t save what they had done. We scrambled and all was well in the end but I knew we had to find alternatives.

Enter Google Docs. They still need a thumb drive but only for a few minutes at a time (while they save pictures from the internet and then upload them to the presentation). This makes it easier to share a thumb drive. They can also work from home and from the library and don’t need to have Power Point at home.

Google is ten times better than I could possibly be in explaining how to set up a gmail account and the Google Documents account. I had to point them in the right direction when it came to uploading their presentations and making me a collaborator. My guess is that 75% of the kids have set everything up correctly and I told them they should all be set up by tomorrow (Monday). I will be able to help anyone who still has difficulty in the lab tomorrow.

As their collaborator I have been able to check their progress, their revisions, make suggestions and corrections. Up to now I am very impressed. It is easy to use and allows me to keep track of their work, which, I hope, will cut down on extensions and will improve the quality of the work. I want this to be quality work not just for the author’s sake but also because I hope the other children will learn something useful from each one of the presentations.

My history of tech – well, let me put it this way – I remember using Yahoo when it was a Stanford University project, using a Windows 3.1 program called “Pine” to check email, and my first PC was a Packard Bell. Fortunatley, it’s all been uphill from there. My A/V stuff has been learned by hook and by crook through my years at the Academy as well as spending half my life in the theatre.

I’m here primarily on the media side of things – looking at piggybacking on existing infrastructure to better integrate media and media creation as part of curriculum. The day of the TV cart and the tape you have to check out are over – as are the days of plopping a class in front of a movie for a block and a half and giving them a writing prompt afterwards.

Hmm, a dream project . . . a current project I’m working on is the creation of a school-wide Video Lab – something separate from my Videography equipment that would allow any student to come in, check out equipment, and make movies for any class for a project. Another would be the Safari Montage project, which takes all our video and turns it into a locally-hosted server. I’m also interested in a school-wide videocast system, with “announcement TV’s” at key traffic points in the school. If you’ve been to LSC recently, you know what I’m talking about.

Current tech use – I split my time pretty evenly between Macs (for video, graphics and audio) and my PC (word crunching, email, etc). Tech is, of course, fundamental to my Video classes – digital shooting, editing and publication.

That’s about it for me. See you around!

I’m really excited to play around with Academics Manager and online document services. The biggest motivation these have for me is that I am a forgetful person: I constantly have trouble determining what I should do for homework and how far out project due date are, as well as often loosing floppy disks, USB drives, and physical copies of work. These two utilities hold the possibility of helping me make forgetfulness irrelevant. With sufficient teacher involvement, Academics Manager or other online class utilities can provide syllabuses, assignment details, or even handouts. Online document tools, like Google Docs make it impossible to misplace work and easy to track drafts. Plus, Google Docs gives group projects the possibility to become organized and easy to manage. In the past, group projects have been nothing but headaches and wasted time. The project’s I’ve done with Google Docs, however, have been streamlined and interesting. I look forward to helping incorporate it more officially into the school.

Dream projects of mine involve easily accessible data between all sorts of applications. I hope to someday work on designing a system, for a school or otherwise, where it doesn’t matter what kind of computer a person has, what software they run, what web sites they use. All the programs, sites, and machines would instead follow well defined standards that would allow everyone to interact with each other without knowing, or caring, what the other people are using. I envision all email clients having the same access to your official email, calendars that you can view in anything from Google Calendar to Microsoft Outlook to a Palm Pilot to printed paper without any difficulties. I want to have networks that can be secure and well managed without the need for your computer to be managed by your organization. All of this is possible now, but difficult to set up and enforce. I hope that in the future, the companies that make the kind of technology that we use will work together more to make such integration the rule rather than the exception.

In my school-day, the technology I use is varied. At home, I use my desktop computer (which I assembled myself) and my laptop, a very small IBM model. My internet connection at home is Satellite, which hinders anything that requires instant reaction, like Skype, but makes web browsing much more bearable. At school, I have no classes where we normally use computers, but I use the Writing Lab and Library machines often.

I’m glad to be involved in this project. I look forward to see what we can do.