Sunday, October 2, 2011

Welcome!

Hi! Welcome to my blog. I've decided to start a blog to share with you my experiences of trying to get technology into the classroom, what has worked, and what hasn't and why.

To start of with, here's a little intro:

I teach grade 7 language, math, science (for the first time!), history, geography and drama at a 7-8 school in the TDSB. I have been teaching there for the last 6 years. I’m from Wales and I taught high school in the UK for a couple of years before that.

I have been a teacher/librarian for the last 4 years, and that has necessitated my voyage into technology.
This year I wanted a change for various reasons, frustration being a main one (I'll probably deal with that in a later blog!). But when I started I knew nothing about technology, my board e-mail being the height of my tech know-how! That changed when I went to the York University ABEL summer institute, and I was introduced to Moodle - and it was all systems go from there.

I took the Pearson Publishing grade 7 history/geography textbook and converted it into the Moodle. It took me about 6 weeks during the summer, for about 4 - 6 hours a day, but when I introduced it to the kids, they loved it! As more and more teachers started to ask questions and ask for help to set up there own Moodles, I was eventually asked to run a few workshops for the TDSB. I said sure, and then teachers started to ask if they could use my Moodle, again, I said sure. Then I realised that I was in breach of copyright laws - I hadn’t asked Pearson for permission!

I’m starting to ramble now, so I’ll cut a long story short - I asked Pearson to come in, they saw my Moodle, loved it and asked if I wanted to be a tester for their new technology innovations, which I jumped at. I still do the testing for them! And now I’m running my own workshops for Moodle at the ABEL summer institute!

Over the past 4 years I have used quite a bit of technology, such as SmartBoards, Twiducate, PollEverywhere, iGoogle, DropBox, Podcasts, Prezi, BitStrips. I have been using cell phones in my classroom for the last year, and my new favourites for this year, Edmodo, MangaHigh, SpellingCity and ClassDojo.

1 comment:

  1. I came across your blog through Elizabeth Moyer's blog.

    Well done you.

    I have written a series of posts recently about QR Codes. Your students might enjoy following up on some of them

    Using QR codes with my primary school class

    Allanah

    ReplyDelete