Upper School Tech Byte #8- Prezi and Kickstarter in Science

Students in Leah’s Current Topics and Research in Science and Technology class completed a unit on climate change. Their assignment was to learn how climate change impacts populations around the world directly and indirectly then create a fundraising campaign to combat climate change impacts in Ethiopia. During the research process, students Skyped with representatives from NGOs.  The two-week project culminated with students' creating Prezi presentations describing the problem and emailing them to all BB&N students asking them to vote for one of three initiatives.

Upper School Tech Byte #7- Haiku and Google Drive

In this morning's Upper School faculty meeting, English teacher Sharon demonstrated two blended learning strategies she uses in her classroom to enhance her students' learning experience: peer to peer feedback and asynchronous discussion.  Teachers in the traditional brick-and-mortar classroom are typically bound by the constraints of time and space, but Sharon is using technology to break down her classroom walls, leading to more efficient and deeper classroom discussions.


Sharon showed colleagues how she has students share their written work through a google drive folder linked to from her Haiku website.  After reading one another's writing, they post initial thoughts in an online discussion.  Having this pre-work done before entering the classroom the next day leads to a more effective use of the face-to-face time in the classroom and therefore deeper conversation.

Upper School Tech Byte #6- Haiku

Woodworking teacher Paul showed his colleagues how he uses Haiku to create slideshows showcasing both his students' artwork and that of professionals.  He also demonstrated how to use the Haiku gradebook to leave students comments on projects completed offline.  For more information on the Haiku gradebook, check out this HaikuLearning site.

Upper School Tech Byte #5- Kahoot and Padlet

At this morning's Upper School faculty meeting, Spanish teacher Caroline shared the tech tool Kahoot (whose tag ling is "Make Learning Awesome!") by simulating a game being played in the Spanish classroom along with the help of 10 volunteer teachers who acted as the students in her "classroom."  Teachers go to get kahoot to create an account and set up a game, while students go to kahoot it and enter the teacher's code during class to play the game.  This tool can be used as a form of formative assessment to gauge student understanding in a creative and fun way.  The volunteer teachers certainly had a blast this morning, as did many of the audience members!  If you have a minute, take a look at Edudemic's "Ultimate Guide to Gamifying your Classroom."  Richard Byrne, author of the Free Tech 4 Teachers blog, listed kahoot last December as one of "15 Good Tools for Quickly Gathering Feedback from Students."  Also included in those 15 was Padlet...

At the end of the faculty meeting this morning, attendees were asked to fill out an "exit ticket" by sharing one piece of constructive feedback regarding Tuesday's professional development day using the website padlet.  For more information on how to use padlet, check out this blog article by Richard Byrne on Free Tech 4 Teachers.  You can also check out "5 Ways to Use Padlet in the Classroom" by Education World.  Lastly, if you decide to use it in your classroom, view this step-by step guide on "How to use Padlet: A Fantastic Tool for Teaching" by Vicki Davis of coolcatteacher.com.

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 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.