Exciting Developments

Entering my third year of teaching it's pretty exciting to look back on all the progress I've made, especially in terms of using technology in my classroom.  My first year my classroom had a television (with no VCR, DVD, or remote) and an overhead projector.  However, during this year I was introduced to SmartBoards.  I applied for (and received!) funding to get a SmartBoard for my classroom.

The SmartBoard was just the beginning.  Over the summer I took a class where I learned a lot about blogs and wikis.  I decided to go the wiki route and set-up a wiki for my classes.  My honors classes created their own usernames and began to post and have discussions on the wiki.  It wasn't perfect (I think I've worked out a lot of the flaws for this year) but it was pretty encouraging.

This year my mentor teacher Dan (who has always been very technologically inclined) showed me some pretty cool stuff he was having his students do with blogging.  I was extremely impressed, and insanely jealous!  His blogs had a lot of the outcomes I was hoping to achieve from using the wiki.  I was tempted to jump on the student blogging bandwagon right away, but after some discussion and thinking it through decided to hold off until second semester. 

My students will register on the wiki and begin posting soon.  This will at least get them acclimated to using the computer, logging into a site and posting.  Then second semester we will up the ante by having each student blogging independently (very different from a communal site like the wiki).

Although I already have a personal blog of my own (where I often talk about teaching) I'm starting this one specifically to document my trials and tribulations of using technology with my freshmen honors world history classes.  I figure this one can also be used as a reference/resource/model to my students when they begin blogging.

We'll see how it goes . . . but I'm pretty psyched, I'm really looking forward to second semester now!