Wednesday, February 1st, 2012, is the first ever Digital Learning Day. Celebrate by signing up on the official website, creating a lesson that involves digital media and connecting to the 21st Century Learners in your classroom. In library science, students will create a blog to post on their iGoogle page. Throughout the quarter, the blogs will be used for assigned reading journals.Students will then submit the link to their blog posts on their Moodle class assignment. What will you do? As always, I am available to help you design, access and implement technology lessons, starting with some suggestions linked and posted below. Let's engage our students digitally!
Social Studies: Use word clouds to compare political speeches. Students can create their own or you can have them already created and use the interactive white board to display and discuss (don't forget to have the kids up at the board interacting!). Tagxedo and Wordle are both user-friendly, free resources that make creating cloud pictures easy and fun. You could compare President Obama's State of the Union address to the Republican rebuttal or Governor Snyder's State of the State address.
English: Book trailers (movie trailers that advertise books) are becoming very popular, to the extent that publishing houses are creating them as part of their marketing blitz at publication. The storyboarding process (planning the movie) links directly writing and technology standards. In the process students should also learn about copyright as it applies to music and images, an area of copyright often ignored. Animoto allows teachers to create free educator accounts to share with students. Included are images, music and text boxes, making the process quick and easy. The link to the movie trailers can then be added to our web-based school library catalogue, setting a real-world purpose for student work.
Math: Have you introduced your students to the Khan Academy? Try setting up a teacher account to monitor student practice. What a great intervention to use for the mastery of concepts before unit and semester tests.
Science: Use the power of the Internet to take an online visit to a museum. Exploratorium offers explorations in every subject area and includes online activities, videos, simulations and lesson plans. For instance, in The Science of Baseball, the class could use the interactive white board to apply physics principles to test the angle and location of the bat and where to place a hit. Or watch open heart surgery online at The Human Heart.
For Michigan Educators, there is a chance to win a $50 gift certificate for participating in Digital Learning Day. Submit a lesson plan using digital resource from MORE. The first 20 lesson plans accepted before 8:00 a.m. March 1, 2012 are eligible. As always when using technology tools, please be sure to check access from the computer(s) that will be used for the project or assignment. Some of these tools require plug-ins or access that may not be standard and will require a day or two for technology to make the upgrades. At AHS, simply fill out a technology work order request.
