A Teacher’s Thoughts

Wikis it Seems

It seems this falls’ theme was the wiki. Starting with our team’s Amistad project, students and teachers alike began to discover how to leverage the features of a wiki to enhance, inspire, and document learning. While most students and teachers had used a wiki to retrieve information, only a couple of students had contributed to a wiki previously. Four classes embarked on creating separate wikis around the Amistad incident and the Industrial Revolution in general. Students and teachers practiced key skills in online content creation and collaboration. The one thing that struck me most was when the students moved into the content management role. They assessed their wikipages for gaps, self-assigned tasks for finding information, and spent time double checking each others’ work. This was exciting to watch.

Launch of the Science Fair Wiki

Inspired by the first annual Mount Washington Valley Science Fair and the many student scientists who participated (including two from my class), all the middle school teachers in our district agreed to jump on board with a science fair this year. A wiki was a perfect solution to allow students to showcase their developing work to each other. You can view the wiki here.

Implementation of Online Grading

This move just seems to make so much sense to me. Honestly I feel that having just made the move to online grading, our school was way behind and it really felt that way. Maybe its just our close proximity to the the often progressive state of Maine that made me feel this way so I was surprised to see how infrequently schools use this type of tool. In the end the transition was smooth.

Lessons learned:

• Commit and move forward

This worked for us because of what we did next

• One step at a time

In moving online, we were able to stay with our previous gradebook software. This meant there was no real change at first. Grades were simply stored in a different place, which has no effect on teachers or students. Only after we offered training (we have a few new teachers this year and a few that still used paper gradebooks) and confirmed everyone was using the software we opened up access to students. We allowed this to run for a few weeks. We offered more training and individualized help. The final step was to send home parent accounts.

• Set clear expectations

1. Use the gradebook
2. Update your gradebook weekly

• Differentiate Instruction

How often do we see this rule violated? Our whole-group training lasted less than 10 minutes. Afterward there we a few follow up sessions for those who needed extra help or wanted to learn more. Following that individualized assistance was offered through our team structure and via our tech committee.

I see this as a structural change in our building and likely why it has been so easy to implement. While this isn’t an example of an integration of technology into classroom practice, it does create a more technological environment in the building. It also offers a confidence booster to individuals who are good teachers, who have always been good at communicating about student progress, but who may lack technology skills. In the end there is more communication with families and families have more ready access to information. This can only be good for students.

Digital Tools and Technology Leader Grant Awards

These grants are providing for increased technology access and case studies on the use of technology in science classes across four schools in our district. The opportunity for case study comparisons will provide us with needed data to inform our decisions regarding further technology implementations in our district.

All in all, a great way to end 2008!