Top 5 Lab Celebrations!

Scott’s Top Technology for Learning Lab Celebrations for October 2006:

•  Keyboarding: Kids are “getting it” better than ever, more quickly, more consistently. I’m working the 3^rd grade all the way thru Type to Learn 3 (or as far as I can get them by winter holidays, and the 4^th graders are doing 6 solid weeks of that program before moving them over to begin Keyboarding Online (Keyboarding for Kids), which they’ll be able to do every day. The TTL3 will then be an activity for choice time.
•  Graphing: “Create a Graph” website at the National Center for Educational Statistics website is a remarkable new (revitalized) website that we’re using in the lab to create graphs. It’s truly flexible and offers the option of emailing completed graphs without printing them. I’ve long been looking for an appropriate way to handle graphing at the applicable grade levels and I think this is the bomb. After having used this site extensively for 1^st and 2^nd grades the 3^rd 4^th graders will take to Excel graphing work much more readily in coming years.
•  K1 Go Here!: Having worked K students well into lesson 6 and 1^st graders through lesson 9 of the 50 available ones at Boowa and Kwala’s UpToTen.com website, we’re moving on to other “centers” at the “K1 Go Here!” website that’s stood us in such good stead since 2001. Students began exploring the “Little Animals Activity Center” at the BBC website this week, and we’ll get to all four of the centers before the holidays.
•  The new laptop carts: 4^th grade teachers are using these carts extensively. Karen Marler proudly dragged me into her room to show off her writing class setup with overhead projector displaying her hand-drawn story map and the laptop connected to the network to bring up her error-ridden Word document story for use whole class. With this capability she can bring up student stories to share whole class without printing and copying them all, visit websites, view online tutorials in the classroom, and prep her students for labwork without using lab time to do so, so that they are ready to work when they come into the lab. I expect other grade levels to begin using these more and will be making a concerted effort to educate teachers on options for their use.
•  Publisher Newsletters: Notice a new look to the grade level weekly newsletters? Babs Freeman-Loftis, our Lower School Assistant Head, has empowered our teaching teams with Microsoft Publisher to create extraordinary-looking publications with pictures and important information for you every week. An efficient system has been put in place for teachers to upload their finished and approved newsletters to a network file folder and then I reformat them as .pdf files and upload them to our web server on Friday of every week. I think this system will help keep our webpages in place, and those newsletters that do go home in backpacks will certainly be more widely read by parents! Now, to teach the teachers how to save as .pdf!
• Webliographer!: Our USN Lower School Webliographer was recently featured in Home Education Magazine magazine as a resource for homeschooling parents and children. We created it and maintain it for our own students of course, but one of the wonders of technology is the ability to share work with the world. I'm very proud to bring some of what we do here at USN to children who are unable to be here every day: It's a broader, more global community we live in today, and the more we can share our hard work with the world, the better a world it will be.
• Videoconferencing: 4th grader Kiana Jansen's family took advantage of the chance to work in Holland this fall and since her mom uses Skype, the free voice-over-IP computer program that I use every day, we are arranging for meet-ups with her classmates, Kiana in her home in Holland and Allison Dent's class in the lab and even in the classroom. High School Technology Coordinator Penny Phillips has graciously donated a webcam for the laptop cart in Ms. Dent's classroom (a cam she won in an online geek poetry contest last year!) and we're going to make it work for virtual visits from now until Kiana returns to school in January!