Well, the Stanford Summer Teacher Institute was well worth the $200 registration fee. I signed up for two sessions. One was outstanding down to the smallest detail and I will be sharing materials from the class this weekend through this blog. The course was entitled “Creating Learning Communities With Technology.” Here we studied free popular tools to develop internet skills in our classrooms.
Two items I intend to try this coming year are 1) a blog—one for my students and one for the teachers I will be supplying support for in their work with ELLs, and 2) a new presentation tool from www.prezi.com (a tool that takes the place of the more traditional Power Point which gives a teacher/presenter more control over what participants see and when). In fact, Stanford is giving everyone who attended the workshop the premium edition for a year free as a gift for attending.
We need to think 21st century because our students surely are. In fact, they live and breathe it effortlessly. Further, my high school students have very limited assets so if they don’t have access to these tools in my class, where will they be able to use them? Also, as an adjunct professor in teacher education, I need to show them what is out there, how this material can be incorporated, and why it must be used as an instructional support.
I will be spending weekend going through everything I learned at the institute and will be posting it both on this blog as well on www.classroom20.com.
Denise
www.ellteacherpros.com
I think the most exciting bit of information I walked away with from the conference was the need to introduce blogging into my classes. Writing is not something most of my students really want to do so to find a totally different venue to bring writing into the class in a way they have never seen should motivate them a bit more to write. It took me about a week to get the OK from the district. Since I will be the sole moderator and only those I invite to join the blog will be able to access it, I should be fine. I am hoping my especially weak writers will see that writing need not be a headache:)
ReplyDeleteI think I will use http://edublogs.org/. It seems to be quite a popular one for students and teachers. Of course, it is also free. Further, to try to make sure that this experiment works out well, I have made email contacts with a couple of teachers who have been doing this for a year in my district.
Wow! I am excited:)
Denise
www.ellteacherpros.com