Generating Group Stories through TodaysMeet

TodaysMeet was utilized in my Spanish 3 classes to generate a group story for practicing the proper use of both the Imperfect and Preterite Past tenses.  To do this, I created a TodaysMeet room for each of my 3 sections of Spanish 3 and then linked the URL of each room to today's post on our class blog.  The whole activity worked seamlessly and students really seemed to understand better how to properly use the 2 tenses.  Definitely a successful activity, which I plan to use again in the future!

InfoCor Tour

Wow!  I learned a lot and have a bunch more ideas after our tour today of InfoCor in Germantown, WI.  They were extremely knowledgeable about the products they had to offer and I learned about some great tools that I didn't realize I already had access too.

One of these tools is the Google 3D Warehouse!  What a collection of 3D images readily available for use!

Here are some pics of the products we viewed during our tour!

¡Presentaciones! - Which digital tool is best?

As a culminating assessment for our Spain Unit, the Spanish 4 students worked collaboratively in small groups to create a presentation on an autonomous community of Spain.  Their task was to convince their classmates to travel to their autonomous community by educating them on what their community had to offer.  During their presentations, they had to utilize 3 different visual components of their choice. (This was a project originally created by my colleague, Tracie VanGheem-Rottier.)   I was amazed at all the different web-based tools that students chose to best fit their needs and the various ways they utilized them within their presentations.  Some tools included Prezis, Tumblr blogs, Google Presentations, and Slide Rocket Presentations. Take a look here at a few clips of their presentations!

   

Professional Learning Academy 2011

The Professional Learning Academy this week was AWESOME!  I am so glad I had the opportunity to collaborate and brainstorm with some really amazing and innovative teachers in my district!  I am super excited about some of the ideas we came up with and learned about (which I shall share in more detail very soon).   Now, all I have to do is get to work on implementing them for this upcoming school year!  Some of the topics and tools we discussed included...

• Problem Based Learning
• 21 Century Classroom Design
• Google Apps for Education: IGoogle, Google Reader, Google Docs, Google Earth and more!
• Blogger - to be used as a class managment tool and as a living document of student work, projects, etc. throughout the school year
• Moodle
• Discovery Education
• Video Tools - Screenr, Splicd, Youtube, and Jaycut
• Introduction Videos for 1st day of school
• Digital Citizenship and Proper care of 1:1 Devices
• Parent Letter for students that will be enrolled in the 21st Century Model Classrooms

Creating a Model 21st Century Classroom..

I am thrilled to be creating a "Model 21st Century Classroom" in the upcoming 2011-2012 school year! My school district has chosen 5 classrooms (2 elementary, 2 middle school, and 1 high school) that will basically be given a "technology makeover". The technology tools in each room will be a little bit different, but in all the classrooms the implementation of technology rich lessons and problem based learning will take place.

What will this entail for my high school Spanish classroom?

• A Smartboard - A large sized Smartboard was purchased at the end of last school year and installed in my classroom in May 2011. So, I have already had some time to work with it and start creating lessons using the Smart software. However, I still have much more to learn and will work to optimize the capabilities of the Smartboard in the upcoming year to improve teaching and learning.

• 30 Motorola Xoom Tablets - The Motorola Xoom is the first tablet device that runs on the Android 3.1 Honeycomb System. It also contains a dual core processor, HD Video Camera, front and rear facing cameras, and is Adobe Flash Player 10 ready. The video below demonstrates in more detail the capabilities of this device. With the 30 Xoom tablets, there will be a 1:1 student to tablet ratio in my room. As you can imagine, this opens up so many opportunities for learning and my brain has been working overtime lately with new ideas that I want to try out. I have to shut it down sometimes so I can fall asleep at night!

As the year unfolds, I will be continuing to post updates on the creation of the "Model 21st Century Classroom" as well as reflecting on the various new tools, apps, strategies, and technology rich lessons that are implemented. I love getting and sharing ideas with others! So, if you have anything you think would be useful for me and others looking to improve 21st century learning, don't hesitate to leave a comment!