Skip to main content

Where is everyone?

While I admit to being quickly on board most things (except the iPad, that is... that's a tool for my 65-year-old Mom) I'm disheartened by the slow pick up of online learning networks (via Twitter, Ning, Facebook, etc) by my colleagues. We're a 1:1 school and the faculty are pretty comfortable with technology -- but I see very few of them (well, okay, maybe 3 out of 100) that are actively engaged online. Is it really just an issue of time, given that independent school teachers have a very long academic & athletics day followed by the same prep time all teachers require? Are they unaware of the benefits of connecting and collaborating online? Or does that beg the question?

Comments

Good question Cal, but I think you have to support them on their learning journey.

I am taking PQP courses with an amazing group of educators, and am subjected to a teeth-gritting Web board online component (Hello OPC, the 90's are calling...) However, I looked forward to a new OPC piece, a Web conference hosted by Tim Hawes and Shawn Allenby, 2 stellar educators with web savvy.

In an Adobe Connect room, there was a really busy back chat, what with 42 attendees, and I listened, read, interacted, as I do at these online gatherings. But the feedback from some of my fellow classmates was revealing. Too frenetic, never been in that environment, intimidated, and the list goes on. When I speak to the fact that this is the way students live their lives everyday, it just widens the gulf.

We need to scaffold that canyon, be patient and remember, well for me, when I couldn't hook up that VCR.

Well, I still can't do that, but now I don't have to; luckily the 21st Century caught up to me;)

Barb

Popular posts from this blog

So you want to hack your OneNote Class Notebook

Taking a brief break from my "Getting Started with OneNote Class Notebook" series (you can start that one here )... This is a little advanced so if you're not comfortable setting permissions inside of Office365 you may want to avoid this.  Or set up a Class Notebook to play with so that it doesn't affect any existing Class Notebooks.  Yeah, the latter is a good option. One of the great powers of OneNote is that you can do some really neat permissioning of the Section Tabs. When the Notebook is created, of course, it gives you an "open permissions" on the Collaboration Space and student-read-only on the Content Library.  And then each student space is wide open to each individual student. But we've found that occasionally you want to mix up the permissions a little.  For example, you could create a space in a student section for your private notes that the student couldn't see, or maybe you want a tab in the Collaboration Space that students cou

Online assessment

Sorry... I forgot I was supposed to write things here :) And thanks to David Cox's recent post on ExamView to prompt me to return to writing ... not to mention that I'm at Educon this weekend and everyone there is a prodigious blogger. But back to ExamView. ExamView seems to be another online assessment tool and David writes how he is using it in his classroom and how he plans to use it. I've been using an alternate tool, MapleTA and had considerable success with it. I think the strength of MapleTA over the other assessment tools is that it is based on the computer algebra system Maple -- and therefore, when you ask a question or the student enters a solution, it can involve any manner of mathematical content. Not just numbers but also algebra and graphs. And we managed to jury-rig Geometer's Sketchpad to provide dynamic diagrams (yes, we'll be switching over to GeoGebra when I find some time). I think the most important aspect of online assessment is the us

Desmos, OneNote & Replay

So using Desmos activities are a great way to encourage exploration and discussion in math class -- if you haven't tried them, I encourage it.  They're collected at  https://teacher.desmos.com/  But ... Desmos doesn't give you quite enough.  It doesn't have a way of capturing the work that the student does within their space, and it doesn't allow for annotation of class contributions as we come together to discuss.  Well, not surprisingly, OneNote comes to the rescue.  Using the Windows shortcut Windows-Shift-S it is really quick to snag the Desmos screen and pop it into a waiting OneNote page.  From there, we can grab our pen and (using wireless projection) talk about what all the different responses mean and where to go from there. (An aside : one of the nice features of Desmos activities are the way you can hit PAUSE and it will pause all the screens of the students working.  I always give them a heads up "10 seconds to pause..." and it's refr