Teaching Technology

Imagine what your life would be like if every student was interested in the content they were studying...

Wouldn't teaching be so much easier?  

My book, Teaching Technology Through Interest Projects, does just that: it will help you differentiate for each student in your classroom while teaching standards to the whole group.

• Each student, ages 8 to 18, may choose their topic of study- anything he or she likes as long as it is not violent or vulgar.  
• Each teacher instructs the whole class (2 to 32) on the common core standards of research skills, reference materials, writing styles, and the National Educational Technology Standards for Students (NETS-S).  Each student applies the whole group lessons to his or her individual interest project.

Teachers teach whole group/ Students learn individual interest

Win/Win

Check out the free resources that accompany my book: Teaching Technology Companion Website.

Teaching Technology Workshop Presentation Preview

Home School Mom's Positive Review

The Internet is an amazing place!  In the interest of keeping up with technology and education, I created a Google Alert with the words "Teaching Technology" (With an alert, Google will email you when an article on the web matches your key word alert.)  After weeks of learning new and helpful technology tidbits, imagine my surprise when an today's alert mentioned my book!

A fellow blogger and home school mom wrote a rave review of Teaching Technology Through Interest Projects!  Thank you, Lisa Keva at Home School Circus for your positive words!  Check out her review: http://www.upatdawnreadytowork.com/2012/12/teaching-technology-through-interest-projects-review.html 

Technology Support Included in My Book

Teachers have the weight of the world on them.  Increasingly, they are responsible for more material including educating students in the common core, social skills, emotional intelligence, morality and citizenship, and the ever-changing world of technology.  Additionally, teachers must maintain a website, a blog, an electronic grade book, while constantly collecting and disseminating data on each of their students in their overfilled classrooms. (Wow! Just writing all that made me tired!)

In the mind of making teachers' burdens a little lighter, I insisted my book, Teaching Technology Through Interest Projects, include access to instructional slideshows and student examples.  I am pleased to say that my publisher created an amazing webpage that includes links to the very slideshows I use to teach my Interest Project curriculum in my own classroom.

Here is instructional slideshow for Activity 3 -  Would this help you teach?  If you answered yes, please buy my book!

Great Teaching Technology Sites

Start the week off right 

by learning something new!  

Let's face it, technology will outstrip us in the great race if we don't stay in touch with new developments each week.  In my never ending search for excellent sites for students and teachers, I have found few that I would like to highlight each Monday.

I'll start with some free stuff:

Free Tech for Teachers delivers excellent news on the latest in technology and how to download some freebies.

Free Scratch Download works on practically any computer and any computer operating system.  Scratch is the best critical thinking activity for ages 7-97 that I have found on the Internet.  Created by students at MIT (that's Massachusetts Institute of Technology- one of the most prestigious universities in the world), SCRATCH makes computer programming as easy as stacking Legos.  Use your stacks to program custom animations to tell a joke or teach a class about your Interest Project.  I love this program so much that I included it in my Teaching Technology Through Interest Projects resource book.  Click to see a sample Scratch Interest Project.

Student Documentary - Interest: Guitars

Here's an excellent example of a fifth grade student using his interest to motivate learning.  

• See how he researched his topic using the Internet and books.  
• Watch as he synthesizes his newfound knowledge into a documentary movie - with planned preproduction of shots and written narration script.  
• Finally, he demonstrates his understanding of technology through the application of iMovie to produce his video.  

Excellent work, Wyatt!

Letting Students Teach Technology

When I became a teacher, I was amazed at how my understanding of subject matter increased by my sharing it with others.  Recently, I discovered an effective way to teach technology to both students and teachers: let the students teach the teachers.   New York technology teacher, Rob Zdrojewski, has empowered his students by enlisting them to teach social media skills for professional development.   The sessions, called "Tech under 90 seconds", enable a teacher to learn valuable tools, such as gmail, Google Doc and Google+,  in small pockets of time.

"We talk about not having enough time in our day to do stuff; well, now if you can find those pockets of time and you have 90 seconds or less, you can scroll through our mobile blog site, check out different videos, and learn something right on the spot," Zdrojewski says. 

This is great news for the teachers, and gratifying for the students.  "The kids are really proud of knowing they're not just teaching kids in Amherst Middle School," Zdrojewski said. "It's on the web, so anybody that searches 'how to share a Google Doc' potentially could come across their video and learn it from there--and it's all thanks to screencasting technology."

Screencasting is using screen capturing technology by videoing the screen of a person taking the viewer through the program or application step-by-step.

Way to TEACH TECHNOLOGY, Rob Zdrojewski!

View his students' videos on his blog.  Read the full article from the journal.com. 

Need more techniques for teaching technology?  Purchase my award-winning book, Teaching Technology Through Interest Projects, visit The Critical Thinking Company. 

How Do You Teach Technology?

I was an educator for 15 years in a school system that invested millions in technology.  Day after day, I witnessed exactly the same uses of technology: drill and practice for state tests.

In my grades 3-6 gifted and talented classroom, I chose to utilize the power of technology for more.  Differentiating based on student's individual interests, I allowed my students to research independently to become resident experts on any topic of their interest and develop innovative ways to share their expertise.  My job as facilitator was to teach the students how to research on the Internet (finding reliable sources and correctly cite the sources) and to introduce them to innovative presentation technology such as documentary movie making and animation programs like MIT's Scratch.

The creative and informative work they produced with topics ranging from "The History of Dragons" to "The White Rose- Opposition to Hitler within Germany" could not have been possible without the freedom of student choice.   I certainly wouldn't have assigned the latter topic to a fifth grader, but she chose to assign it to herself. (To be honest, I had never heard of The White Rose Society before my student's presentation and learned much that day- a perfect example of the power of the Internet for education.)

My book, Teaching Technology Through Interest Projects, was written to share that power with other educators- public or private school teachers and home school parents.

Great Article on Education Technology

The Global Search for Education: Education Technology

Book Finally to Printers!

We finished our final updates and the book is off to the printers.  The companion website is complete and online.  Today, the Critical Thinking Company announced the book's availability date as May 24 and they are currently accepting preorders.  Sample pages of the book may be viewed on their website.

What an incredible experience this has been!

What are Interest Projects?

What are your interests?  What inspires you?  What do you do when your work is done?  What gets you excited about learning?  Is it something old, something new, hands-on, visual, or auditory?  The answers to these questions make life worth living and can make school an exciting place to be.  Rarely do we ask these questions to students, but the answers can be used to guide our instruction and influence the learning capacity of our students. 

In my book, Teaching Technology through Interest Projects available at The Critical Thinking Company(http://www.criticalthinking.com/), students will have the freedom of choice to explore their personal interests and learn correct uses of technology for research and presentations.  Their interests may be life-long or only for a fleeting moment, but the introspective experience of making their own choices on which to base their learning will allow the students to grow not only intellectually, but also, emotionally and socially as they share their interests with others.