Betty’s Instructional Technology Blog

Our Technology Action Team meeting will be discussing a variety of topics this month:

Tech Updates

• * We have begun a few blogging projects recently. We will review our current blogs hosted by Edublog Campus. There are three main blogs projects happening right now. The first is Writer’s Notebook, a blog that will contain staff and student experiences with this literacy strategy. The second is a project being done with fourth and fifth grade teachers across the district. The fifth grade teachers are responding to the novels they are reading in lit circles using blogs and Voicethread. Two fourth grade teachers will begin a project responding to the novel Sarah, Plain and Tall. The third project involves students creating podcasts and embedding them in their class blogs. Finally, we are looking to create an additional blog about mathematics which will contain sample problems and solutions to various math problems using Voicethread. This will be modeled after a project called Mathcast, by the makers of Math Playground.
• * Voicethread was recently purchased by our district. It is a wonderful collaborative tool that allows several people to comment on a document saved on the Internet. We have been embedding voicethreads in our blogs and using them as stand alone resources.
• * Galloway recently purchased licenses to upgrade toKidspiration 3. This new version has several additional features including a built in dictionary and Thesaurus, a math fiew that contains wonderful manipulatives, and a searchable graphics library.

Tech Standards Status

• * We will review our scope and sequence to see where we are in meeting the technology standards.
• * We will reinforce that all lessons need to be saved in the proper folder on our shared X drive (GT Common) and catalogued in our database.

Next Steps

• * We will continue to discuss assessment of the technology standards. We will focus on how we will implement the NJTAP-In rubric in 8th grade and how we will continue to store student work related to assessment of the tech standards.