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Friday, 31 January 2014

Jan 15 - 31



Look at the balanced classroom !

Yes.   Here is what the inspired and excited co-teaching “couplet” needs to share: Don’t forget the notice the two situations where the use of technology and non use of technology is perfectly applied.......
In our co-teaching classroom, we try to balance our use of technology in order to maximize student inquiry.  One way we do this is through our activity design.  To accomplish this, we look at what the student needs to achieve and how can technology use, or un-use as sometimes called for.  One way we used technology was to provide necessary background information before reading The Crucible. Students participated in a webquest in which they researched prominent figures of the Salem Witch Trials and then took part in a simulation in which they themselves were accused of witchcraft and put on trial. This allowed for students to experience the historical period in a different way and engage with the material on various levels, not just academic.  When we met as a full class afterwards to debrief, students shared information they found, expressed their feelings about the trial process, and shared their ultimate fate from the Salem courtroom.  Sadly, many students were lost to the gallows. When we moved on to studying Shakespeare, we decided to forego the use of technology to focus on collaborative problem solving.  Students were given copies of Sonnet 116 cut into individual strips along with the rhyme scheme of a sonnet and challenged with the task of putting the sonnet in correct order based on their knowledge of sonnet structure and grammatical inferences based on what the individual lines revealed.  Once the sonnet was put back into the correct order, students analyzed the poem on a more critical literary level.  We are enjoying the balance of technology in our classroom and the critical thinking skills it allows our students to express!

Google Cloud Print
Did you know you can easily print by going to www.google.com/cloudprint/. Just upload the file you want to print from your computer.  I think this is easier than going through you Google drive.

Classroom Collaborative Projects in Progress:

Teacher/Department
Project
World Language Department (Thanks to Miriam for initiating this effort)
Choosing the best recording mode.  This will help the department use the audio recording facility to improve oral skills in F.L.  as well as to enable us to send a quality audio files to IB
Lisa Levi - English Department (Thanks Ms. Laura Blair for helping us with the project)
iBookAuthor - Making study guide for her classes using iBookAuthor
Manoharan Krishnan
Technology Enhanced Differentiation - A complete unit will be self taught by the students using Technology.  Each group will teach the rest of the class their part.
Math Department (Ms. Calley, Ms. Chitra, Ms. J.S. Lakshmi)
IXL accounts set up for a few students (to be used for remediation in the area of  Algebra 1, Algebra 2 and Geometry)
Trying to make T’Nspire work for the teachers
Freshman Seminar/ILearnIT (Mr. Steve, Ms. J.S. Lakshmi, Ms. Jennifer Alevy and Geetha)
Co-planning Digital Citizenship Dissemination through student projects
Science Department - Biology (Mr. Mohan, Ms. Lakshmi V and Geetha)
Co-planning an Unit on Evolution
P.E. Department:

Ms. Holly has set up a nice class blog for her class where the students keep a record of their Personal Fitness
Ms. Sally’s training program on MS Excel and Google Drive initiated already (Thanks Angel for supporting me with this project)

Enjoy your weekend!


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