Testimonial Time

As a former classroom teacher, I know how rewarding it is when one of your ex-students tells me how they benefited from having been in my class.  With my job as an ITRT I have somewhat the same feelings when a teacher tells me how their students have become more engaged because of the new ways in which technology is being used in their classroom.  I recently had two such experiences and I am going to use this post to pass them on to you in the hope that they will inspire you to consider taking your technology usage to a  new level and engage your students in a similar manner.

I happened to be in Mr. Hennessey's (science--NHS) class making updates on some laptops.  As I finished Mr. Hennessey related that his students used their cell phones to do lab reports and as a result of being able to use their technology gadgets, they were much more interested in writing up the reports and were handing in much better quality work.  It seems they are able to use their cell phones to take pictures of microscope slides--which they previously had to draw using paper and pencil. Now this news might have been a bit more rewarding to me personally, if I had had some degree of involvement in making this happen.  Nevertheless, it is exciting to see the students figuring out how to take these pictures, transfer them to some device, include them in a lab report, and use their GoogleDrive to hand those reports in to their teacher.

DON'T just skip over these links,  click on them and look at the quality of these reports.  I asked Mr. Hennessey if he could give me a couple of samples to pass on, and he had these to me the following day--so they are not something some student spent extra time on because it  was going to appear here--it's a genuine sample of the quality of the lab reports which his students are creating.
Sample One
Sample Two

Here is a statement from the students involved:

...Taking pictures of each step with our cell phones helped us organize our process and allowed us to remember exactly what was done weeks after. Not only is using technology beneficial to our future endeavors where everything will be processed digitally, we were excited to use our new virtual tools. Putting our new skills to work, using google docs, made the lab exciting and through searching for information on the internet we were able to learn much more about the topic. We look forward to the next lab as we are getting better and better with our understanding of technology.

The second experience I can claim to have a hand in, in that I have worked with Judy Fieth (English CHS/CMS) spending some time in her classroom and helping her walk her students as they initially logged on to their school Google accounts.  Some months have passed since that time and I really hadn't heard a lot from Ms. Fieth as to the effect this might have had on her classes.  However, she had a series of email exchanges with my colleague  Melissa Rollosson, and somehow or another the discussion got around to the impact the use of these the Google applications has had.  Below I'm going to paste two statements, by Ms. Fieth, copied from one of those emails:

Having DOCS this year is wonderful!  It makes my English teacher life much better.  Students write more and better and I'm able to give detailed feedback quickly.  It's such an improvement over notes scrawled in the margins!

I can't believe that English teachers aren't flocking to Docs. The kids take their assignments much more seriously now.  They sense that they're in a "real world" environment, which they are.  I get a lot less of - "When would we ever use this?"   Last semester I had amazing results - students actually ASKING for writing projects.  I've noticed that a few of them have kept working on their projects even though they're not in English class!   Very cool.

Now I realize that some of you have experienced a lot of frustration in the past due to such problems as limited band-width, limited computer availability,  students forgetting their passwords, etc.  If that is you, please realize that strides are being taken to overcome these difficulties--new and faster access points, more devices available (and still more coming this fall), permanent passwords for all  new student accounts, etc.  and consider how you might use technology to more fully engage your students.