Sunday, April 17, 2011

Mobile Learning Lab

I visited The Innovative Educator Blogspot and chose two articles to read:  Ten No Nos of Teaching with a Projector or Interactive Whiteboard and The Worlds Simplest Online Safety Policy. I'm pleased to report that I am only guilty of one of the "No Nos," the one that says "Don't Leave Your Audience in the Dark."  I plan to follow one of the author's tips for this problem, which is to add several lamps throughout the classroom to help with this problem. The Worlds Simplest Online Safety Policy outlines the hows and whys and teacher implications of an easily adoptable school policy for online safety. The topics in this blog are very relevant to me and I added it to my RSS feeds. I also visited Handheld Devices in the Classroom and saved a section on "digital cameras in the classroom" for future reference. I also visited all the other links provided in the lab.  
I was already a member of Classroom 2.0, but added myself to the Cell Phones in Education group and added a comment in the discussion forum.
I visited Poll Everywhere and created a poll for my students asking them about their favorite movies with PG-13 or lower ratings. This information will be helpful to me because in a few weeks I'll be a bus leader (my 4th year doing this) for our annual 8th grade Washington DC trip. Having a few DVD's for once-a-day bus downtime on the 4 day trip is very helpful.  I was very surprised at how easy this site was to use and happy to see students can respond via the web (not just cell phones.) Our current school district policy is student's phones have to be off during the school day. I also liked how you can customize the design settings for your poll. I also looked at the PowerPoint graphing template they provide. Again....very easy to use.  I currently do a lesson in my class where students create a class survey, gather data, then turn their data into a spreadsheet and corresponding graph.  I can incorporate Poll Everywhere into this lesson. My students currently gather data in the face-to-face mode.
I do use digital cameras in my classroom, currently on a pretty limited basis.  I plan to start using them for podcasting. I would also like to be able to incorporate use of students cell phones in my class but think this would be a "hard sell" to get administrators on board due to school policy against this. I also saw the question come up on Classroom 2.0 of what to do about students who do not have a cell phone, and nobody offered any suggestions. I am inspired by all the suggestions I saw from other teachers about how to incorporate these technologies in the classroom!

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