TLT 450: Technology in school settings

Since Lifang’s and Demet’s presentation go together like PB & J, let’s comment on a single thread here. I’ll kick it off with links to that school I mentioned, Eagle Rock….

And to review the materials from the presentations, they are:

• Lifang’s visual and handout
• finally here is: Demet’s visual and handout

To be updated with Becky’s materials. In the meantime, discuss. Anyone had any experience using SurveyMonkey? The classrooms I observed in VA were wild about contentgenerator.net’s “FlingTheTeacher” game…

Actually, Stacy’s presentation was anything but standard–definitely a vivid portrait of a usually horribly boring topic. Her ppt and handout are posted in her Lehigh webspace; let’s see if we can extend the great discussion we were having in class.

Since these form a unified topic, I’m combining them into one thread. Matt’s visual and     handout are here; Bolu’s will be coming. Items for discussion:

• I’d love to hear about your experiences as either a learner or a teacher in working with scaffolds
• The when-and-why of behaviorism and constructivism–when have you found it best to go with a behaviorist teaching technique? A constructivist technique?

To be updated once I get Bolu’s materials. In the meantime, feel free to discuss. I’m particularly interested in hearing about people’s experiences working with K-12 students as they create or edit webpages. What tools and techniques have you used? What’s been successful? Spectacularly unsuccessful?

For another project, I’ve been listening to a podcast out of GMU’s “Digital Campus” series. Take listen, if you like:

• http://digitalcampus.tv/2007/03/06/episode-01-wikipedia-friend-or-foe/. (It’s 40 minutes, so perhaps listen to just part of it.)

There’s some interesting features here that may or may not help you think about composing audio: There’s an intro with music and spoken clips mixed together, there’s a host who sets up the segment, and the format is rather like a radio talk show: Host intros guests, sets up topics, chat ensues. There is also a musical bump between segments (at about the 33 min mark).

For your purposes, you might lift some of these tactics (e.g., interview format) for your own podcasts.

Comment on Doug’s presentation. Feel free to reflect on your own in-the-classroom vs. outside-of-the-classroom patterns of behavior as well as what you’ve observed in others, especially K-12 students.

Freshly updated with Trish’s materials: visual and handout. (BTW, Trish, I’d love to post your Scratch file, too…maybe put it in the comments?) If anyone wants to download and get Scratchin’, go to http://scratch.mit.edu/. In the comments thread, I’m interested in what you can do with this to learn programming, but I’m MORE interested in hearing thoughts about how to connect this to content-area instruction (science, math, lang arts, soc studies, for lang/ESL). Maybe as an after-school option or as an enrichment thing?

Feel free to review Jhumur’s powerpoint and handout. (Note: handout is Office 2007.) If you’d like to play around with the software, Lehigh has a site license for ArcGIS, and you should be able to get your hands on it if you’re using a university-owned machine. If you need help with it, let me know. But, I’d love to hear more about your experiences with GIS, particularly alternatives to Arc–MyWorld? AEJEE? I’ll get the comment thread started by linking to the online stuff that I mentioned in class.

To be updated once I get Alex’s materials. But in the meantime, feel free to comment. Again, we’re sniffing around for K-12 applications of this.