The second day of presentations was again very interesting! I really enjoyed the Skype/Illuminate presentation! I used Skype one time in the classroom during the my last placement. While teaching a grade 7 science course and studying rocks and minerals, I organized to have a geologist speak to the students through skype. I got all of the students to write up one-two questions for her beforehand and then she spoke for a little while and then she answered all of the students questions. The students loved this and found it very engaging! This is definitely one good use of Sype, however the guys mentioned a lot of other really exciting uses of both skype and illuminate. Some of the applications included using skype to share files, I never knew this was possible but it is a great application, and as Nathan mentioned, could be very useful next year to share resource among each other. Nathan talked about talking to other classmates who had more experience with a course to share resource back and forth. This is a great application and something that I would have never thought of! Another application that sounds really neat is to do quizzes using illuminate. I have done quizzes with students using senteo, which students find more exciting than a normal paper and pencil quiz. Senteo software is expensive, so schools could save on this technology if they already had illuminate.
One of the other presentations was on game use in the classroom. Again these guys had some great ideas! Games are very activating and engaging for students of the 21st century. One of the ideas that I got from this presentation was to use Tetris in math classes for teaching transformations. Students could describe what they are doing with each piece they move in reference to transformations.
Darren and Rob were back on wednesday for a presentation. We seen these two in our senior years math class first semester. They had a lot of great ideas and thought provoking messages. Unfortunately I had to leave early this day, one of the biggest things I got out of the time I was there was the idea of publishing student work. This provides students with motivation and extra determination as they have a larger audience. The example of the "Landslide" video was a great example of this. Students were very into the singing of this song. Students need to be reminded of to post things responsibly and be aware of what they are putting on the internet. Another site that Darren mentioned was Wolfram Alpha this site sounds like it will be great for teaching science and math courses. You can get complete solutions to examples and other questions. This could be something to monitor for student use and also a good resrouce for teachers. One thing I unfortunately missed was the demonstration of ipadio. This sounds really neat to record conversations.
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I was amazed by all the different uses for Skype too! I thought it was just a video phone, but there are so many more things that we can use it for! It would be interesting to try and use it in my classroom. I will definitely try!! Great post, too bad you missed the rest of the presentation, it was really neat!
ReplyDeleteHey Laura,
ReplyDeleteThat is really cool that you used skype in one of your student teaching placements! The kids must have loved you! Maybe you can help me by providing me with resources via skype if i ever have to teach science! haha That is too bad that you had to leave early form Darren and Rob's presentation. One thing that they talked about after you left was a site called Ipadio, which involves using your cell phone to call in, and then it records your conversation and converts it to an mp3 file as well as text. It was really neat, we tried it during the presentation. This could be a way for students to submit assignments ... get the teacher to listen to their ipadio file rather than submitting a written copy.