Saturday, October 3, 2009

Teacher In-Service

We had an in-service for our county last week covering a couple of topics. One speaker talked about giving our clients quality and what that meant. The other discussed the inspired teacher. Both gave their presentations with PowerPoints. One tried to show a clip from a video but had some tech trouble before it actually worked. That reminded me of a couple of times in the classroom and having to quickly improvise!

I also had the opportunity to discuss interactive whiteboards with some teachers from a district that recently received several of these for their classrooms. The teachers who had received them stayed in their home district to learn to use them. I am intrigued by their concept. Quizzes can be put on the screen and each student has a clicker. The students click the answer they choose and it is recorded automatically for the teacher. I think the program also gathers information about which questions the students had the most difficulty with so that the teacher can key in on those areas. I am anxious to learn more about these after the teachers have had more time to work with them.

Education has changed a great deal since I began teaching in the 60's! I think I have done an adequate job of keeping up, but things are progressing even faster now. This new era excites me very much. (It can also frustrate, too!) So much to learn and so little time to learn it!

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2 comments:

  1. Ruth PridgeonOctober 4, 2009 at 1:41 PM

    Judy - I have long been intrigued by the use of the clickers! Probably, theonly that has stopped me is of course the $$. It is about $1200 to get a classroom set. I would need 30, which means I would have to purchase the 36-pack. I am anxious to get the results of the survery back. I am interested to see if what I "think" is truly confirmed or not!

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  2. Gina RiosOctober 4, 2009 at 7:56 PM

    Judy- Our school purchased a set of these clickers two years ago. I am ashamed to admit have yet to use them though. We have taken surveys at staff meetings and "teacher quizzes" using them but I have not used them in my own classroom. When we got this new technology we were given no PD on how to create assessments using them and it is mostly our tech teacher who uses them on a regular basis. This is not an excuse because I know that if I asked, our tech teacher would sit down with me to teach me how to use it but one suggestion for your school might be to have someone offer some opportunities for teachers to learn the new technology and then have them fool around with it for a while. I think that people will be more likely to use it if they feel competant at doing so. Good Luck!

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