wiki again

I have begun a new wiki with my new year 9 class. They have embraced it more quickly than other classes and have posted their responses to the text we are reading. These reponses were quite detailed and I am pleased with their progress. I will be posting homework tasks on this site for them.

I added vokis to each page and this has been recieved well. These vokis give a brief overview of the tasks for each page.

One student has already created his own voki. I am very pleased with the way that this class have embraced the technology. They also have a Smartboard in the classroom and love using it. They often stay back to use the board after class.

New School

Well I am beginning to settle in at my new school. Moving certainly makes you reflect on who you are as a teacher and what it is that you value. You have to get used to a whole new way of doing things and some things you have to let go.

I am very pleased to note that there are Smartboards in this school, I just haven’t found them yet! The whole approach to technology is different and that requires some adjustment on my part. However, there are Mac labs, which is pretty good. I am going to begin setting up either wikis or a ning for my classes, I haven’t yet decided which. I may even just decide to use Learn Hub, a new online course management tool which I have found fairly useful.

Let’s see what the future holds.

New Smartboard Tools – lesson creator

The new Smartboard files for educators are available in beta and I uploaded them to try in my classroom. They are flash animation files that are easily customisable so that you can create quizzes, question activities and match up games in your class. We used them for revision of persuasive language techniques and they were incredibly easy to create. I plan on sharing them around the department so that I can get a feel for how easy they are for everyone to use. So far, though, I really like these as it took me much longer before to create these types of lesson activities and they did not have the polished look that these ones do.