We were joined this week by Stephen Lewis, principal of Oak Ridge Elementary. Stephen shared his experiences as principal of a Title One school and how technology is present in the school. Alice Mercer is the tech integrator at the school. Stephen and Alice discussed the issues, joys and challenges of their work. We continued to stream for part of our post show.

Next show - October 6, 2008 where we will talk about the K12Online Conference with the conference conveners.
Chat Log

Come have a listen as we discuss Gaming in education with our guest, Tom Turner, we talked about why and how you can use online and computer games in education. The discussion points were:

1. Defining different types of computer games
2. Educational opportunities and learning objectives in these games
3. Barriers to using them in the classroom
4. Games that will likely never be in a classroom (first-person shooter games, e.g. Halo, GTA)

Our next show will be on September 8th, 2008 at our usual time 4pm Pacific / 7pm Eastern at Edtechtalk

This show featured Clif Mims, a professor at Memphis State University, and Bethany Smith, an Instructional Technologist at North Carolina State University. Both of them work with pre-service teachers to help them learn about how to effectively use technology in the classroom.

We started off with our backgrounds, and what we were required to do vis-a-vis technology in our pre-service. Then we looked at these essential questions:

• Are pre-service teachers being well prepared for entering k12 classrooms today.?
• Are pre-service teachers bored in college lectures? Does this affect entry into the field?
• What are your recommendations for best preparing pre-service teachers?

Bethany felt that teachers needed to have a PLN through Ning, or another service, to go to. Clif thought they needed to see examples of teacher who are using technology successfully. Alice felt that with the advent of more scripted/prescribed curriculum, teachers needed to see what project-based learning looked like. It was a great discussion, and the text chat log below includes comments from teachers who are taking a class on education technology.

The It's Elementary team shares the successes and challenges of their year.

Points of interest:

• Technology is not a something separate, but an integral part of our teaching
• We use it to help kids make connections to the rest of the world
• Some issues were how to get kids used to writing, and not just playing on computers, how to plan and allocate time on the computers, and how much choice to give kids.
• How annoying, and brain-dead e-rate filtering programs are to deal with.

Leave us you comments and visit our blog http://itslementary.edublogs.com Our next show will be a live report from NECC 2008. Stay tuned for date and time.

Happy 3rd Birthday EdTechTalk.com

 

 

The "Happy Birthday" edition of the EdTechBrainstorm.