In reading the Online Experience Guideline I learned a little more about two technologies I have really wanted our school to embrace; Electronic Portfolios and Interactive Discussions with Experts. Our school has a lot of technology (over 120 computers for K-5) and we tend to do many lessons/activities on these computers. The progress of the students from the beginning of the year to the end is amazing. I would love for us to track this progress better and give the students more ownership to the progress. As well our school uses Skype in the classroom, but we have yet to use it to bring experts. It's been a communication tool that teachers have played with and I would love to use it to bring content experts into the classroom.
Content:
Both these tools could help teach any curriculum content. The electronic portfolios would be a great tool for showing students their writing progression over a period of time. The interactive discussions could be on any topic that the teacher can find an expert on.
Pedagogical Strategies:
With the electronic portfolios students can be required to help define context and goals, collect/design the portfolios, reflect, make connections and evaluate the content, and in the end they can even be required to present their work. For the expert discussions this would be a great opportunity to have students involved in group discussion and inquiry based learning from the expert.
Ease of Use:
The only technology that I might find a little more difficult to use with my k-5 students would be the Online Research Validation. The 4th and 5th grade students could pick this up, but I think the younger students would have a harder time understanding the concept without more online experiences.
So what tool would you use for your portfolios? Would you use something like Moodle or Blackboard?
ReplyDeleteSkype is a very easy to way to bring in experts. Check out epals to bring in other classrooms!