Helcat Rants and Ramblings

Today marked the second day of school with tablets and I might not know much, but I do know these two things:

I am tired but happy.

Things are going really well.

I think its a good sign that the faculty are excited and their only concern seems to be that the junior class is missing out.

Unlike many of my other verbose posts on this blog or on the DLE and now 21st Century Connections Blog, this post will be short. I thought it would be fun to see an overview of the last two days at MICDS.

Math teachers learned much from their summer work and came back energized and ready to take advantage of the tablets. They have started their scribe blogs, as one put it blogging a la Darren K. Students looked at their electronic texts and set up their OneNote Math Notebooks. Students were turned lose on Geometer’s Sketchpad and told to create their individual “Coat of Arms” using a pattern of matching the letters in your name to coordinates on a graph. This year, they can have Sketchpad for homework and can do explorations outside of school.

History teachers used DyKnow to deliver a powerpoint called Images and Power. Students need to find images that show opposing viewpoints for homework. Tomorrow they will use DyKnow to have kids share their images and mark key elements up for their classmates. Next week the assignment will continue and we will work in CreativeCommons and copyright. In 9th grade, students set up their accounts for their World History Ning Discussion Site and started using Quizlet. They also set up their OneNote notebooks and learned how to submit homework using our Interact system.

Science teachers used Chemthink on the smartboard to begin discovering some students misconceptions. Students took notes in OneNote and had a webassign assignment for homework.

In English Class, Dyknow was used to poll students on themes in the summer reading book and to promote discussion around a new Harkness table. They will begin blogging shortly.

The Art Teacher made a workbook in OneNote to go along with the online course he created a few years ago. Students opened the course workbook in OneNote and began working with it.

Foreign language teachers are using DyKnow to have student’s present artwork that corresponds to vacabulary terms. The images are drawn on OneNote pages or in ArtRagePerhaps cartoons in Comic Life will be the next assignment.

Grade 11 is not a tablet grade but the History classes have laptop carts to use every day so its an in class one-to-one situation. Today we covered Setting up their online journals on the course webpage. We then set up their google notebook for research purposes. The created their xtimeline account. We teach US History thematically not chronologically and students are required to create a timeline for each of 7 themes. Since students had done most of that last year in 10th grade, it went quickly and the teacher turned to me and said, “Let’s go ahead and set up igoogle pages with the course RSS feeds.” Kids created iGoogle pages, added a fun tab and a history tab and then subscribed to the RSS feeds for the course.

All cylinders were firing this week and it has been a terrific ride so far - very exciting and very fun! I’m proud of my teachers and of the kids! But for now, I think I need a little sleep!

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