Discovery Ed Tech...Finally

OK, I'll be honest, I haven't been overly impressed with Discovery Ed this year.  It has a lot of good information, but the organization is lacking and you really have to sort through a lot of bad stuff or inappropriate things to find the good things.  Well this week my class did a science sleuths "lab." The way the science sleuths works is that there is a whole interactive science lab.  The students are presented with a problem.  Even with this problem it is not specifically written so the student has to determine the problem.  At this point the student can watch videos(interviews), do testing, or research with articles, dictionaries, or an encyclopedia.  Their goal is to solve the problem and one of the best things is that not all the information will lead them towards the answer.  It's the best real-world type science simulation I've seen.  The kids really have to do some critical thinking, and since I had them work in pairs, they had to do some collaboration.  I believe these are called 21st century skills!  Sure some of the students were a little frustrated at times, and they did find it challenging, but overall I would say that when I polled the kids they really liked this activity.
Now if any science folk out there are interested in using this,(Kendy), there are some problems. The one we did was the frog files, as there are many science sleuths.  The save function doesn't seem to work well so the kids sort of have to start over each day.  I'd recommend having them take notes on a google doc because of this.  I've made one for the frog files that I like and would share if you'd like to use it.  I also don't like the way they conclude the experiment with certain questions.  I included my own conclusion in my google doc.
Its always nice to find something good.  Now I need to do that searching through more of these science sleuths to find some more to use this year.

Making connections

Sometimes I start thinking of technology and all of its possibilities of making connections with students.  The idea of all of these social networks that might be used, but you have to be careful with.  I've heard of some teachers using twitter.  I'm not a personal fan of twitter at all, but I could see how it could be a pretty helpful thing if you could quickly send out something to your classes maybe explaining something or even just posting something cool that you just saw that might relate to your curriculum.  It could be a great way to get information to parents such as "please sign you child's progress report" They could maybe even tweet a response indicating that they did see the progress report.
Then there's the idea of facebook.  I know some schools have their own facebook site, mainly for parents to follow.  This seems like another great idea for a school, but could it also work with a classroom?
I had a student last week suggest that I just get a webcam and have it running during my classes so students that are absent can see the class and still do the work.  Another interesting idea.
but where does it end?  When I have homework, will I have to Post it on my website, tweet it, then post it on facebook?
Then what about texting?  The kids use it all the time.  Why not use that to our advantage?
I don't know, and I'm really not planning on trying any of these out right now.  I don't even know if this is the point of this blog, but there's so much out there but only so much time to use it.  Sometimes it's all rather overwhelming other times it's just pretty overwhelming.

A Techable moment

So, how is technology going this year?  Overall I've been very happy with the amount and types of technology usage I've used this year.  I'd say that the kids have used the computer around 70% of the time which is a big jump from last year.  I've put nearly everything we've done on google apps.  Some of the things I've used include an online test in science using Discovery Educations assessment builder.  In Social studies I just made a test using Google forms. 
I've also been trying out class dojo which has had its ups and downs.  I'm thinking I'll be using it for participation points if nothing else.  There's definitely some fore things I'd like to be using, but finding the time to set them up has been difficult.

Flipping 2.0

OK, I should have done this earlier, but I need to say how my second effort at flipping went.  Overall it was pretty good.  I made this video on Interactions in Ecology.  I did have to go get a new webcam as my laptop seems to be getting pretty old and the recordings wouldn't stay in sync with the audio.  The new camera made things much better and clearer.  Again I used prezi. 
Overall I'd say that the kids that did the assignment really liked it.  I've even received some praise from some parents that I chatted with at outdoor ed.  The main problem I'm still having is with the fact that so many kids didn't do the work.  Sure this is a problem with just about any assignment and it's always frustrating, but this is often the same kids that would most benefit by the whole idea of flipping.  I'm not saying that I'm giving up or anything, but this is definitely a problem that I'm struggling with.  I'm planning on starting to work on another video pretty soon.  Hopefully I'll figure out something to get more people to participate.  Any ideas?