As part of 5th grade’s unit ‘Why Should I Care about the Environment?‘, students were asked to take action in some personal way. To model this behavior (as good teachers do), Jen has made a personal pledge to stop using paper coffee cups, and has started a blog chronicling this process: Cutting Coffee Cups Out of My Life.
She approached the Allegro staff with a suggestion to give a price incentive to encourage everyone to bring their own mugs rather than buying paper cups, and regular coffee buyers may have already noticed that the staff are currently doing data gathering, writing down every time someone brings their own mug.
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Back in September, I wrote a bit about podcasting at ISM. In the months since, podcasting has really started to take off in the middle and high schools. During the last couple of months, a number of HS English classes, all the 8th graders and a number of 6th graders have started podcasting projects using www.podbean.com.
For an example, listen to this episode (from Dave Feren’s IB class podcast) featuring a fictional radio program called “Good Morning, Afghanistan”. The purpose of this podcast was to creatively show an awareness of some significant aspect of the historical context for the novel The Kite Runner.
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“We are failing our students when it comes to teaching them about the Internet. We either block things they will eventually get access to, at home or at an internet café, or we let them loose in the World Wide Wilderness without so much as a Swiss army knife. Wikipedia, Youtube and facebook are not the biggest problems.”
That was the blurb for my session discussing the dangers of setting students free on the Net without a little guidance. Here are some of the sites and resources that I used:
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Over the last week, a number of teachers around the schools have been visited by an IT teacher offering to explain RSS in twenty words or less and to hook them up with a personalized iGoogle page. Read the rest of this entry »
Welcome!
This baby is primarily intended for teachers at International School Manila, as a means of sharing our thoughts and ideas on the role we think ICT should play in education at our school. Not because we think there should necessarily be MORE technology in classrooms, but because we think the technology we do use could DO a whole lot MORE for the educational outcomes we hope to achieve in our classrooms…
The blog you’re reading is a point in case: while up until now, there has been a monthly IT newsletter going out to all faculty and staff in the school, it was in a traditional, static HTML format, which did not allow for any form of interaction, such as comments with user feedback or further discussion of a topic. The IT @ ISM newsletter is therefore being superseded by this blog, as we felt a blog could do more to promote a conversation about the role of ICT in our classrooms.
Through our posts and discussions, we hope to make the case that the vast plethora of new web 2.0 tools cropping up on a daily basis not only can, but probably will (whether we like it or not) fundamentally change the educational landscape in which we work. By embracing it early on, we probably stand a better chance of getting it right and benefiting our students and ourselves as educational professionals.
