While I have a few minutes here at school I thought I'd share an experience yesterday in my classroom. In one of my earlier posts I mentioned a web site called www.twitter4teachers.com. Dennis also has it in his list of sites to visit.
Through that I made contact with a fellow grade 8 science teacher at the Parker Middle School in Reading, MA. He is a very enthusiastic young teacher with an awesome command of technology in the classroom. Yesterday my classes watched a live-streaming video from his classroom where his kids were doing presentations on the Seasons and the Earth/Sun relationship – topics in the Earth Science curriculum we both follow. As we watched his students present their work via the video link (www.ustream.com ), we also had the chance to ask questions via text messages from 1-2 cell phones in my classroom. The messages were sent to another site (www.wiffiti.com) where my kids could see their questions appear on the screen, and then the Reading students would answer our questions real-time. It was quite the experience for both me and my kids as I began to see the possibilities of sharing educational experiences with others, anywhere, in the world!
I had also begun to develop a working blog and website for my own use in my classroom. I am using edublogs.org as the blog development tool as it is available in most schools and gets through the firewalls. Feel free to take a look at the link….and I welcome any and all suggestions! Mr. Ruggiero's Science 8-2
Students are coming back in…time to go!
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Wow! I am very impressed! You are doing a great job! I am sure your students are involved, excited and enjoying your class! I am still navigating my way through everything and I get very discouraged because I am lost. I am a Title I tutor and the second grade class was using an "ancient" textbook to look at a flat picture of the earth. I thought it would be great if they could have seen the "Flat world" clip. Google Earth, and I am sure a gazillion other great sites and oppourtunities are out there to make learning so much more meaningful and exciting! I am looking forward to doing the same for my class!:) LauraP
ReplyDeleteThanks Laura...it was a fun experience and not that difficult to do as I received the instructions from the Reading teacher. I found that setting a goal for myself - identifying what it is I wanted to take away from this class,and working toward that - helps me to navigate through all the tools. There are so many out there, so I decided to choose a focus, and that has helped me to focus!
ReplyDeleteI checked out your link and it is immediately appealing to the viewer. You have obviously spend quite a lot of time creating it and I'm sure you and the students and parents enjoy using it. I will share this with the new science teacher on my team. This is his first year of teaching and I know he would like to see what you've done and perhaps tweet with you. Thanks for your link!
ReplyDeleteThis was a great story Bob. Thank you for sharing it with the class.
ReplyDeleteBTW, if there are any Milky Way bars left after school, you could always bring them to our class... lol
You class blog is really beginning to take shape.
Dennis