Archive for the ‘YuperStars’ Category
Filed Under German, Chinese, French, Spanish, YuperStars
Frau Zemil has been in the lab at least three times so far this year to learn and implement a great piece of software called Apple Remote Desktop (ARD). ARD allows teachers to see the screens of all of the students in the Instructional Area. This is especially useful when you are giving instructions to students, because you can actually see if everyone is following along okay with your directives.
Frau Zemil has used the tool to open up web pages on the students’ desktops, send Word documents with instructions for the day, and most importantly, to log third and fourth graders into DiLL (since they don’t have their own LabNet IDs). We are finding this tool to be a great time saver, since we can have the lab set up and ready to go *before* fourth graders enter the lab. All they have to do is sit down and everything that they need for the day’s lesson is opened up and ready to go.
Kudos to Frau Zemil, Mme Collet, Mme Romanelli, Mme Jackson, and others in the department for learning this great tool.
Here is the Remote Desktop Cheat Sheet I’ve been using to train.
Filed Under Spanish, YuperStars
Maestra Guerrero learned iFlash this past week and planned a project for her 4th graders to create decks of their own. 4th graders will add audio, images, and text for basic vocabulary around the house. Click here to see a movie of how students can study with a deck of iFlash cards.
Filed Under French, YuperStars
Mme Collet did a fun activity last week with DiLL. She gave her students a visual prompt:
and then recorded questions for the students to respond to (i.e. Audio prompt: No. 1. Is her hair brown? Response: No, her hair is not brown. It’s blond). Yet another fun application of DiLL that her students really enjoyed (especially the pictures of Madonna’s changing hair color!)
Filed Under French, YuperStars
We welcome Mme Romanelli to the World Language Department this year, who is filling in for Mme Schneider while she takes a year off. [Mme Schneider, by the way, is posting her reflections and some of her writing on a WordPress blog that she set up this past summer. Take a look!]
Mme Romanelli showed no hesitation in signing up for the lab the second week of school and bringing her 8th grade class to do three activities in DiLL. This is really wonderful and shows a lot of courage on her part, since she just barely learned about DiLL three weeks ago!
First, she had the class do a “pre-assigned task” that she had recorded in Garage Band and uploaded to the DiLL catalog. Students responded to her audio questions and their responses were recorded to the server for later review.
Then she enabled the new Self-Grouping feature in DiLL, so that when students were finished with their assignment, they could make themselves “Available” (just like we do with Instant Messaging) and be automatically paired to other students who were also “Available”. This way the students who had completed the task on their own could practice it in pairs.
Finally, she posted scenarios on the projected screen and asked students to create their own dialogs in pairs. She randomly paired the class four or five different times so that they could work with different partners for each scenario.
Bravo, Mme Romanelli, for plunging right in this year!
Filed Under French, YuperStars
Ms. Beck reports that she has made her first two homework assignments on her Blog for two of her French classes. This may seem like a little thing to some of us veterans, but it’s *huge* step for someone who didn’t really know what a blog was or how to use it until a few weeks ago. Congrats Ms. Beck!
Filed Under Chinese, YuperStars
Ms. Liang brought her 5th and 4th graders into the lab this week to learn the words to the Beijing Olympic theme song. See a short video of the kids’ singing/plaintive howling here. Both classes had a lot of fun with the activity and I understand that they will memorize the words and perform this song during Language Day next spring. Kudos to Ms. Liang for using the iWeb activity page she created during TechWeek and being the first teacher to bring her class to the lab this year!
Ms. Liang is *also* the first teacher to learn how to use Apple Remote Desktop (ARD) to log fourth graders on to their computers, log them in to DiLL, and copy a webpage to all of the workstations in the Instructional Area. Remote Desktop, which was installed on the Teacher’s Station over the summer, allows a teacher to observe each of the student’s desktops from their station at the head of the room.
Filed Under German, World Languages, Latin, Chinese, Spanish, French, YuperStars
SO. A short time to reflect as we begin a new school year.
This department, the World Language Department at the Laboratory Schools, is really a special group of people. It was incredible to see everybody working together, helping each other, and really staying on task during our Professional Development week. I am blessed to work with generous, creative, upbeat, and dedicated teachers. I enjoyed their companionship and sharing the same space with them as much as I did watching them improve their tech integration skills.
I set a goal last January for the lab to reach 30 reservations per week. We exceeded that goal. For this coming school year, I think we’ll see a natural increase to at least 35 reservations per week. But what I’m hoping for more is to see teachers trying out new things in the classroom, learning from their experiences, and sharing them on a monthly basis at our eight departmental meetings. That will be my new measure of success, now that we are all starting to use the lab on a regular basis.
This year, I’d like to see 40 Yuperstar posts on this blog. That’s a fairly ambitious goal, since there are only 37 weeks in the year. But I think we can do it. 40 documented occasions where teachers have tried something new in the classroom involving technology in one way or another. We’ll still track tech learning activities here and
here, but I think that the most important indicator of our success will be the number of times students leave the lab or their classrooms saying to their teacher, “that was a really interesting class period”, “that was something different”, and “I really learned something today.”
Filed Under German, World Languages, Chinese, French, Spanish, YuperStars
Today was slated as an open workday for teachers to finish up the Lesson Plans they had started during the week. We continued to set people up with blogs, work out the kinks in iWeb, and filled out a Summary&Feedback form (in Pages ‘08) to help us improve future technology training.
At 1pm we had an optional training session in the afternoon for teachers interested in getting a WordPress blog set up. To my delight, we had 10 teachers listen in on the training (done via DiLL so that other teachers could continue working at their workstations), and by the end of the day, almost all of them had configured the basic settings on their blog and written a few sample posts. For some teachers, iWeb was intuitive and easy; for others, the blog solution seemed much simpler.
Pretty much everybody in the department is now signed up with their own personalized blog for posting homework. It will be interesting to see how this pans out during the school year and what the students think about the new trend.
Teachers spent the day completing lesson plans they had started during Days 1-4. (See the Summer2008 page on our wiki for sample work.)
All-in-all, this week was a great success. Teachers in the department got to know each other better as they worked toward a common goal. There were a lot of “firsts” this week: “my first Keynote presentation”, “my first website”, “my first blog”, “my first iMovie”. That was very gratifying to hear! I commend the teachers for being willing to pay the price and devote the time necessary to really dig into these technologies. We are poised for a great year as we continue to innovate with new applications of technology in the classroom and report on our findings at our monthly Faculty Development meetings.
Thanks to the Laboratory Schools’ Professional Development committee for providing this much-needed opportunity for our department. We all hope to see more of this kind of training for teachers across the Schools in coming years.
Filed Under German, World Languages, Chinese, French, Spanish, YuperStars
Today, we began with an intense introduction to the features in iWeb. This software was by far the most difficult to learn for many of the teachers. We drilled down into more of the features available in the Inspector, which will help everyone as they continue to work with iLife and iWork applications throughout the year. But it was a tough day. My lesson plan (an online treasure hunt) was too complicated, but teachers overlooked that and went on to design some simple and effective iWeb activity pages of their own. (See the Summer2008 page on our wiki for sample work.)
The A/C came back on yesterday, so today was a little easier on our bodies. Good thing, because everyone’s brains were on overdrive!
