Classroom 2.0 PD Online Session & Podcast

I listened to an online professional development session that was given on February 21 on Classroom 2.0 Live.  The featured speaker was Mary Beth Hertz.  She is a technology teacher that has experience teaching elementary and high school students.  She seems to be a great educator with lots of great ideas.  Here are the notes I took from the session.

Her curriculum had these four pillars:  communicate, evaluate, collaborate and create.

Made a scope and sequence for each grade with these pillars in mind which include:

Online safety digital citizenship, programming , digital storytelling, office tools, research,  basic technology concepts and operations.

For digital citizenship she used Infinite Learning Lab.

Then she got net books after the mac lab and it was wonderful, it was easy to get around to all of the students, instead of them being in rows.

Teaching High School:  everything is based off of essential questions and learning goals and everyone one of her students have a notebook computer.

Students are responsible for going to the right sites and not going to the wrong sites.  Students are given a lot of freedom but expectations and responsibilities are communicated a lot.  The freedom can be a blessing and a curse with some that have very little access to tech and some have a ton so you have all different levels.

Compare/Contrast Elem & HS

Elem: more guided, less time, most tools required a teacher account, hard to integrate homeroom content into lab lessons

HS: “figure it out”, more time, students use their GAFE accounts, lessons more easily applied to other classes.

Reflection:  learned a lot from elementary in how to teach HS, especially in regard to classroom management.

Participants then asked questions to Mary Beth.

Overall, I feel like I learned a lot from being a part of this online professional development session.
KSU­‐EDL7510 / KSU‐ITEC