WELCOME to my first blog!

Welcome! I am glad to say that this is my first blog. You are welcome to comment on the various educational technologies that I will post information on in the next few weeks. There are links to the various technologies so that you can view samples of how each of the technologies work. Enjoy!

I hope that this will help me and you increase the use of technology in the classroom to enhance our students learning.


Sunday, January 29, 2012

PD on using Discovery Education for D.I. Purposes

The professional development session that I conducted with the staff on our school wide work day was very successful. I made a Google Doc survey to gather data about how successful the session was. There were 36 in attendance because many teachers either called out or had other mandatory meetings to attend. I spoke to one teacher that has never stayed for my DI work time and she said that my session was the 1 out of the three sessions that she was able to create a DI activity for her classes.

With the Discovery Education account that our county has, teachers have the ability to gather several types of resources (videos, pictures, images, writing prompts, songs, etc.) to create an assignment, quiz, or writing prompt. After making the assignment, teachers have the ability to assess the students by providing them with a URL and code, the students are able to submit their answer and use whatever multiple sources of information that require to complete the assignment. It really helps apply to the purposes of UDL and the 3 main principles entailed in it.

In order to address the needs of all of my staff members, I used the SMART response remotes to gather formative data on how many have used Discovery Education before and in what form. From that point, teachers began to access what level they needed and every teacher walked away from the session a login, resources for their students, directions on how to create assignments for DI purposes on Discovery Education, and many teachers created assignments to use in their classroom.

I am hoping that by the end of February, I will be able to conduct a follow-up session on Discovery Education and utilizing it to fit the needs of the staff and their students. Unfortunately, since we did not make AYP last school year, our focus is doing anything and everything possible to make AYP this year and with MSA in March, we are in crunch time.

Based upon the overall data, the majority of the staff would like a follow up session so I plan to share the data with my principal to encourage him to plan a follow-up session.

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