I have found education related Twitter chats to be personally and professionally uplifting and encouraging. I look forward to connecting with other educators from around the globe to discuss current best practices and knowing that in the midst of government put downs of teachers there is a place where we can "meet" to help each other. Here is a calendar of the education chats I found to be very helpful. A big shout out to my favorites...#Nt2t, #teacherfriends, #satchat, #mnlead, and #christianeducators! In one of the #teacherfriends chats, we were discussing science based inquiry lessons and I ended up learning of a free professional development opportunity through Shedd Aquarium. It's helping to refresh best practices in science inquiry and showing me how learners (old and young) can use a self-paced module for earning badges upon completion of a lesson. I would love to learn how to develop a student-centered primary lesson module like the one I'm completing for my students!
Skype in the Classroom helped connect my students to learning I never imagined. I started exploring the possibilities during one of my snow days and you could say the rest is history. A big promotion for World Read Aloud Day through Skype allowed me to set up connections with 3 authors and 1 illustrator during March and April. Through the authors' and illustrator's personal websites my students explored their books, blogs, and everything in between. They formulated questions to ask during the actual Skype and the sharing of ideas was A-MAZ-ING! My students now ask me everyday if we are going to Skype and consider themselves local celebrities due to the media coverage of one of the sessions in our local newspaper. Reflecting on these activities through the SAMR model, poses some questions as to the where to put this...substitution, augmentation, modification, and/or redefinition??? At the very least it's substitution because students can listen to a live guest speaker during a school convocation, it just happens that Skype allows this virtually from anywhere in the world. Since the students were applying what they learned from the websites and analyzing it to formulate questions to ask during the Skype and then the discussion that happened during it moves it into augmentation and modification. Some of the guests asked for suggestions for ideas for their next books so that qualifies as modification due to the collaborative nature of the discussion. Each of the guests said to keep in contact with them and if the students had anymore questions or ideas for us to e-mail. There is usually not a day goes by without some connection to the Skypes. so to say that the students were thoroughly engaged is an understatement.
Now on to the next adventure....sharing these tools (and others) with elementary teachers in my district at our 1st ever EdCamp...Spice It Up Diner here I come!
No comments:
Post a Comment