Holiday Greetings from your Instructional Tech Teacher

As you are winding down and getting ready for your holiday vacation check out how some of your colleagues have been integrating technology into their curriculum.

This is a picture of Cathy Carmignani connecting with her students from home using face time.  There was a sub in the room and I stopped by to help them get set up, but then the kids took it from there.  They were able to complete a unit circle project and meet Cathy's family!!  I can help you make this happen with anybody who you may want to connect with your students, for example an author, or a guest speaker, or a class from another country.  The possibilities are endless with technology!

So excited to create and share a lesson on the Eno board with some of the students in the Castle Program.  Seen above is student Marie Gadbois and physical therapist Nancy Ahrabi-Nejad doing some yoga poses and interacting with the Eno board.  Marie was so excited and had a great time

Shout outs to Gina Johnston, Brittany Burns, Paula Bombrun and Katie Salt for trying out Explain Everything on the Ipads.  Gina's students created presentations on some New Deal Programs, Brittany's students were creating exhibits to be used for an online Holocaust museum, Katie's students were creating projects about the history of women in advertising and Paula's students were examining and reflecting on french literature.  Explain Everything can be used in any subject by both teachers and students to demonstrate understanding and creativity.  As stated by Kristine Deisman in her online overview of Explain Everything, "The integration of technology in classroom instruction should not be for technology sake. Its use should improve student engagement and achievement. It should inspire and embrace creativity."

For any of you who follow me on twitter you may recognize this picture of Kim Honey and I on the Armenian Museum field trip.  Kim's students and I were taking pictures and tweeting them out with explanations for the kids who could not participate in the field trip.  They also used the tweets during a follow up discussion about the filed trip.  On our bus ride to the museum Kim and I had fun using the Google Field trip app which informed us about notable architecture, art and historic locations that we passed on our ride to Watertown.  Let me know if you want to try some technology on your next field trip.

Special thanks to Brian Calnan, Steve Godbout and Felicia Rutigliano for piloting the new Ipad cart proposal program.  With a written request you too could have a cart of 15 Ipads for an extended period of time.  More details on that opportunity coming soon.  If you are interested in learning more about their experience and the awesome things they are doing with the Ipads I am sure they would be happy to talk to you.

And last but not least Kevin Hausmann is using Diigo to help his students share online resources for their upcoming Chromatography project.  I have found this social bookmarking website to be extremely useful to me and I would encourage you to try it and share with students.  "While many social bookmarking sites offer some collaboration opportunities, I have found that Diigo (Digest of Internet Information, Groups and Other stuff) combines a user-friendly social platform with bookmarking features, making it an effective research, integration, and collaboration tool for use in the classroom." (quote taken from http://www.educause.edu/ero/article/classroom-collaboration-using-social-bookmarking-service-diigo)

Feel free to comment on anything mentioned in this blog post AND I hope that you all.....