Game Plan Progress
I’m excited to let you all know that I have made some awesome progress in getting my tech-free classroom moved into the 21st century. Here’s some of the great things that are happening for us.
1. We have purchased not one, but two sets of student response clickers. This has been a great asset for me, as well as other teachers. One of the big pushes we are making, like many schools, is to make formative assessment a larger, more carefully executed part of what we do. These clickers have bridged the gap for the “old school” teachers who use the method of 3 weeks of information, one day test. They are liking it because they are seeing better results for students, since they are making adjustments every so often.
2. I found out this week that I’m going to be getting the projector that I’ve been wanting as well as a document camera to use SPECIFICALLY in my classroom only. That may not seem like much, but compared to my old chalkboard, it’s going to be pretty amazing. I can’t wait to start looking around for tips and tricks I can do with it. If anybody has some awesome suggestions, I’m all ears.
So far my action plan seems to still be on track, but I am realizing that I am going to have to really push hard to get the kind of technology integration that is really beneficial. The biggest hurdle I face is that many of the teachers at my school share the feeling that “it’s been done a certain way for a long time and it has worked, it will still work” without realizing that the student of 2011 is different than the student of 1995. I will be looking for studies and documentation that show just how important and effective the technology can be in order to hopefully convince them that this is a good idea.
You will love your document camera. I teach Math and Science and it is really great when needing to show experiments or use manipulatives to model Math problems. We also have clickers at my school. I have found that they are most useful for a quick check for student understandment of material. One issue I had in the past was sending home a grade or a test grade. With the clickers, you get the score, but the student does not get the test back to look at his/her answers. As a parent, if my child is getting graded on work, I want to go over the test with her. You can print a test from the CPS unit, but this kind of defeats the purpose of using the clickers. For these reasons, I only use the clickers for review of material or to do a quick check of mastered material.
ReplyDeleteDo you find yourself using them more often with the new push for formative testing? I think they're perfectly designed for that, and I definitely see your point about the hard copy of the test. Thanks for the input.
ReplyDeleteYes, my administration actually had rather see us using them for assessments. The more technology the better! Nice post!
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