EDUCATION NOTES

A whole new world


Kate Williams is a language arts teacher at Brundrett Middle School in Port Aransas.

Kate Williams is a language arts teacher at Brundrett Middle School in Port Aransas.

I was overwhelmed by the program for the convention. It was that big.

With a glossy magazine cover, the Texas Computer Education Association was “Charting New Waters” at their 30th annual convention and exposition in Austin. There were over 400 workshops, concurrent sessions, and amazing keynote speakers. The convention’s aim was “to provide Texas educators with innovative ideas and support structures in the area of educational technology”. And boy, did they.

I saw teachers explain how they had used videoconferencing to enable students to rewrite fairy tales with a modern twist, and an entire school district that uses wikis, podcasting, Facebook and Twitter to allow students to share academic experiences globally. I learned about Google tools for teaching and what a wovel is. (It’s an online novel where readers decide what the author will write next). I saw what webcams and avatars can do to interest students in writing. And I came back from that conference energized, looking at Brundrett Middle School classrooms with a new eye.

In our language arts classroom, we’re on our way to seamlessly incorporating technology. We have five mini-laptops, so students have the choice of typing their writing assignments or writing them by hand. We’re working on achieving a 1:1 student to laptop ratio in the classroom. This makes it easy for kids to grab one and look up something – we’ve done research papers with their help this year.

Students are much more likely to revise with word processing tools than they are to attempt it longhand. Most writers are. Word processing revolutionized the publishing industry – why not the classroom?

Instead of a book report, students completed an “animoto” – a slide show with music, images and text – to create a book trailer. You can see them via the school’s Web site, www.paisd.net (click on schools, Brundrett, classrooms, Mrs. Williams).

We use our Elmo document camera (an overhead projector and so much more) to edit and revise (everyone can see exactly what I’m doing to the paper projected on the screen), to film a demonstration, or to take digital pictures.

We have something called a “Classpad” – basically an electronic clipboard with a digital pen – that enables me to walk around the classroom and control my computer from anywhere. I can pass the Classpad to any student and they can select their answer on a quiz while the class watches on the screen. “We should take all our quizzes this way!” one student exclaimed. “This is fun!”

And that’s the goal. It’s not about using technology for technology’s sake. It’s about figuring out how you might be able to teach something in a more interesting, more engaging, and more relevant way by incorporating the things we use in our everyday life into the classroom: The iPod, iPad, iPhone; blogging, Facebook, Twitter; Wikis, podcasts, moodles, nings, wordless, texting and tweeting.

As teachers, we learn along with our students. We guide them. We “chart new waters” together, modeling what it means to be a lifelong learner.

Or, we pretend these things don’t exist, that they can’t possibly be used in schools, and we become increasingly irrelevant. And we lose them.

It’s a whole new world, all right. And I, for one, like being a part of it.


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