If you or your school has a subscription to Brain Pop Jr, you’ll want to see this site. Kim Duran has organized a page of resources for Brain Pop Jr. Of all of the resources she has here, the best are the matrixes. She has made it really easy to find the Brain Pop Jr. resources that you most need. The resources are aligned in science, math, and literacy. Check it out!

Check out this post by Ben Gondrez at Fletcher Elementary. He’s figured out a clever way to reuse packing materials from the visualizers and give students a comfortable place to read.

The Dubious Rantings of Mr. Gondrez 

As the Department of Instructional Technology works with principals on school improvement plans, we are noticing a definite trend in which direction teachers and administration want to move. Schools are putting projectors and visualizers into the hands of teachers and students. Visualizers (document imaging cameras) are a fantastic tool for teacher’s instruction. They align perfectly with strategies that work. Three instructional strategies that are demonstrated optimally using a visualizer are:

• Identifying similarities and differences
• Using nonlinguistic representations
• Using questions, cues, and advance organizers

The visualizers lend themselves to all of the strategies, especially in regards to student work. Teachers can simply lay student work on the visualizer and there it is projected on a large screen for the class to see. What a great way to illustrate to students exactly what proficient and outstanding work looks like.

Here’s an example of a School Improvement Plan for Education Technology - Information Literacy (SIP: ET-IL).

Ben Godrez (Technology EA) is pioneering the use of www.think.com to communicate and collaborate. His fourth and fifth grade students are using the site’s free email and blogging capabilities to begin communicating with each other. Soon this will be a platform for students to post projects. As they use district resources to research from a variety of resources, they will have a perfect place publish their work. We’ll keep you posted on this amazing project!

NETS: IIa. interact, collaborate, and publish with peers, experts or others employing a variety of digital
environments and media.

NETS for T: IIId. manage student learning activities in a technology-enhanced environment.

Great things are happening at Fletcher Elementary! Here are a couple of examples of what’s happening.

Jeff Wentworth is taking advantage of the power of visualizer technology to demonstrate proficient and outstanding work to students. Friday he used students’ science journals to demonstrate the various techniques that students are using to organize the scientific data that they are collecting. Jeff took two well organized journals and asked questions of the class in order to engage them in considering how the authors organized their work and how the class might replicate the same kind of organization. While the two students whose work was shared were seemed to be enormously proud, the rest of the class benefited from their expertise. All of the circling, diagramming and arrows that were annotated over the student work was virtual. Because of this, student work was respected during the process. Students were given back their work without marks and scribbles all over it. What a powerful way to share “best practices” with a classroom.

NETS for T: IIIc. Teachers apply technology to develop students’ higher-order skills and creativity.

Jori Botvinick’s second grade students are building their number sense by interacting with the Promethean ActivBoard. The board was set up with an interactive “memory” game consisting of digits 1 – 9. Students used the pen to uncover cards and find matches that equaled 10. At the end of the activity, a discussion was held detailing all of the combinations that add up to ten. Throughout the entire experience, students were engaged and excited to share which cards were hidden where and how they added up to ten. As students were working you could tell they’ve developed their own problems solving abilities related to the board. For example as one student accidentally opened a new page, she instantly new how to close it and go back to the previous page. What an incredible way to support students that are kinesthetic and visual learners! This is a great way to develop interactive learning centers.

NETS: 1c. Students use models and simulations to explore complex systems and issues.

NETS for T: IIa. Teachers design developmentally appropriate learning opportunities that apply technology-enhanced instructional strategies to support the diverse needs of learners.