I'm glad to say that I've at least accomplished something for our STI 2011 strand. I am not however 100% proud of the outcome.
The blog through my process after I found out that it would take too long to have SketchUp loaded onto the student Netbook is as followed. Morrell's Blog
Students were asked to research and create a Google Presentation of a specific plate boundary. The last post of my blog you'll be able to see a sampling of presentations.
Some problems I ran into during this project besides the SketchUp conundrum is the ability to actually flip the script and let the students learn on their own. It was both myself not wanting to see them try again and again to get something right but also their inability to actually want to work independent of the teacher. They really enjoyed taking some of the pictures and loading them to my computer (my Eye-Fi card and camera aren't seeing eye to eye right now) as well as getting their Google presentations ready for embedding into the project blog. Another problem was the infrastructure of the network in my building. Some days that I had designed as work days needed to pull a 180 turn as the network was down or connection to the internet wouldn't work.
Some things I really liked about this project was GoogleDocs and the ability to watch the kiddos work on their project in real time with another person. They were able to work together in my class as their partner was someone else in the room and then "together" during study halls or at home. I was also able to drop in every once in a while to see their progress and to make sure they were 50/50 on the project creation.
In the future I REALLY want this to become what I had envisioned with SketchUp AND the presentation piece that I was able to scavenge and retool to this project.
And yes, I was able to get some permission slips in! :-)
This is the great debate! You are not alone in the trying to get the technology to work within you classroom setting. It is not uncommon for the school officials to block, deny, delay or be ignorant on the tech use at your school. I find most teachers are surprised on how much I am using the tech by working around the blocks. For example, Google Blogger with current security will block more then 5 users at a time. So during class if you try to log in as a group (every student) it will not work. To work around this I had to create asynchronous grouping. So I love that you are working on TROUBLESHOOTING! the tech. That is one of the biggest teaching tools I hope to give all my students. Trying to eliminate the variables to identify what is going wrong.
ReplyDelete*Don't you love the kids pics? They add so much to a site. With your age group I hope they will be able to run more of the site once you get over the limitations of your tech. Keep up the good work. Please make sure you are telling the students about the issues.... this teaches them about troubleshooting as well. Some times NOT WORKING is more valuable then it coming out exactly as you planned.
The Art of Innovation is to throw yourself at failure and miss - WETA Workshop