One of the projects we were recently asked to help with was a campus scavenger hunt for Niko Plakakis' class. Teaching students who have severe disabilities can be a very challenging -- and very rewarding -- profession, and Mr. Plakakis is taking Colony High School by storm with his genuine love and care for his students. Objective: Students will learn to locate different locations on campus using an interactive campus map. His goal is for all students to use a map and identify the essential components. What better way than to use your own campus?! Please take the time to watch this powerful display of learning: To create the tool, we worked with Niko to add the Colony High School map to Prezi, an online presentation tool. From there, we zoomed waaayyyyyyyy in and inserted an image of his class into each location where they had taken a picture. The reason for zooming in was to hide the picture, making the discovery even more special for the students. We even added a couple YouTube videos of his students swimming in the pool. This lesson had very little to do with the technology; this was a successful lesson because Mr. Plakakis cares for his students and they know that, so they'll take any risk he asks of them. In fact, it was an honor to get up in front of the class and guess where each place on the map was located. From Niko: I love using technology in my class. I use Doceri regularly. The students love showing off their skills using my iPad. Doceri has also allowed better access for those students in my class with vision problems. I absolutely treasure our interactive campus map we created using Prezi. The students are so excited to see pictures and video of themselves posing for shots around our campus. My students would never get the same thrill out of using a regular campus map. Our students struggle understanding a traditional map. This project has helped them greatly. This is a great example of how using technology can increase learning. My favorite technology quote is by John Dewey, "If we teach today's students, as we taught yesterday's, we rob them of tomorrow." If you are at Colony High School, swing by and give Mr. Plakakis a high five. If you are a teacher around the district who is teaching students with severe disabilities, we would love to come by and create a similar project of your campus map and images of students from around the campus.
As technology coaches, we get asked to help with a lot of fun and crazy projects: Google Forms to email student feedback, test-prep website training, probeware demonstrations, and so much more. It's all fulfilling, and all very rewarding to see the work the teachers of CJUHSD are doing to improve instruction, achievement, and help students become college and career ready. Please schedule a time and date that works for you and we look forward to supporting you!
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With finals week upon us, there is an increased emphasis on test preparation and the desire to have students retain as much information as possible. In Mrs. Herold's SDC Biology class at Etiwanda High School, students took a different approach. Their task was to prepare a presentation about a genetic disorder that was assigned to them; this is nothing new in a biology class. What is new, however, is how the students would embrace the content. For the first day of the project, Mrs. Herold and her students learned about a website called Flippity.net that takes content from a spreadsheet and turns it into dynamic flash cards. The cards can be different colors, have customized text, include images, and even include YouTube videos! As a study resource, this is a phenomenal way to get students more interested in compiling information. Mrs. Herold's students had bigger goals - take the information you have gleaned about your project, put it into the flash cards, then create a Google Slide presentation about the disorder. BOOM! On the second day, students continued to work with their flash cards with the goal of building something they could use on their projects. As they grew more comfortable with the platform, the questions became more complex and the interactions with the spreadsheet became more involved. We saw the designs begin as a basic creation and transform into something quite impressive! For the third day of the activity, Mrs. Nemecek, Etiwanda's teacher-librarian, came in to speak with the students about GALE. GALE is a robust database that provides quality sources of information for their research as a part of their research for the genetic disorders that were assigned to them. Another quality feature is the ability to highlight text and annotate text digitally, have it read back to the user, and also save the text to Google Drive. Mrs. Nemecek did a great job of walking students through the process and set them up with a helpful tool. We have no doubt that these students are benefitting from the use of technology, but it's more than that. Mrs. Herold, Mrs. Nemecek, and the entire team at Etiwanda High School are building a culture of risk-taking that directly benefits the students. We are honored to have been a part of this.
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AuthorsDemi, John Stevens, John Corrow, and Paula are excited to visit classrooms and meet with teachers to see some of the awesome things that are going on within CJUHSD. Archives
February 2016
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