Upper School Tech Byte #4- Taking Attendance

This week history teacher Gustavo demonstrated how to take classroom attendance using an iPhone or iPad with the FileMaker Go app.

Upper School Students Starting Their Global Online Academy Courses

A dozen Upper School students are starting spring semester Global Online Academy classes this week. These students are taking seven different course offerings:

• Advocacy
• Bioethics
• Game Theory
• Japanese
• Gender Studies
• Medical Problem Solving I
• Music Theory & Digital Composition

We're lucky our students have access to GOA and can take such interesting electives!

Upper School Faculty Tech Byte #3- Embedding Google Forms in Haiku

In this morning's Upper School Faculty meeting Rosario shared how she uses google forms with her

students.  She walked her colleagues through the steps of creating and customizing a google form and demonstrated how to embed it on a Haiku site.  A few "ooh"s and "ah"s could be heard in the room,

as she displayed what the google form responses look like when viewed in summary form.  Lastly, she shared a few examples of how googles forms embedded in Haiku sites could be used my teachers.  The data collected can be anonymous, or it can record the students' names with their responses.  Data collection can be used as a way to see if students have completed their homework, such as by having them answer questions after watching a video or completing an assigned reading.  In class, teachers can give quizzes or use the questions as a form of formative assessment.

Upper School Faculty Tech Byte #2- Library Website

On Thursday Laura gave the Upper School faculty a virtual tour of the Upper School Library website, created in google sites, highlighting the embedded photo slideshow, links to local library catalogs, the webpage listing all of the hard-copy newspapers and magazines to which we subscribe, and a beautiful page highlighting the library's new titles, which links to their pages on goodreads.  Laura also shared the library blog created in blogger and the library twitter feed.

Upper School Faculty Tech Byte #1: Haiku in the Russian Classroom

In our weekly Thursday morning faculty meetings, several faculty volunteers will be sharing some of their uses of technology in the classroom with their colleagues.  They will be demonstrating their professional and classroom uses of technology, sometimes sharing tech tips and tricks and at other times showcasing best practices and classroom projects.

Our first volunteer was Russian teacher Josh who showed us student wiki project created in Haiku.  He also shared how he posts his class syllabus online and uses the calendar to post assignments for students and and the online grade book to give them feedback online.  He walked the faculty through the steps of creating an assignment in the Haiku calendar, showed them what the assignment looks like in the calendar, and demonstrated how to access the assignments in the grade book to leave grades and comments for students.