Chanatown

Quick EdTech Timeout (2 full and a 30 second remaining)...It's been a few weeks since that beautiful day (really, the weather was nice), April 3, when the UPS man came and delievered my shiny new toy to my doorstep (2:30pm: finally, I could leave the house!)  I've gotten a chance to use it, play around, download apps, read articles, skim some books, and much, much more. So, here's Part 1 of why I love my iPad...

A popular topic in the edtech world is 1:1 classrooms (every student gets a computer), and netbooks seem to be the hardware of choice currently (though I could see the iPad getting into the fight very soon).  At ETHS, we have not been focusing on a school wide 1:1 initiative, but rather targeting specific areas/groups that might benefit from more exposure to computers.  Above all, what seems to get lost at times in the 1:1 discussion is how the availability of the computers will help improve instruction.  As I assist in planning and developing curriculum materials with our pilot teachers, we find ourselves tinkering with exisitng lessons, often finding new ways to elicit more engagement from students, but occasionally needing to alter the lesson entirely or even deciding not to use the netbooks at all for the lesson.  Here are some of our observations during this first week of the pilot: We seemed to have gotten over the technical hiccups within the first two days of using the net

Yesterday, I gave an afternoon training workshop on the Lesson Activity Toolkit for Smart Notebook.  Similar to what I've seen other trainers do, I view the LAT as the second phase in teacher training for SmartBoards.  The first phase involves simply using the board for everyday usage (e.g. web browsing, showing videos, presentations).  The next half step would be to start using the Notebook software to ink and possibly add images and pre-built flash animations from the Gallery. In planning for this workshop, I was hoping to find training resources that described all of the features of the Lesson Activity Toolkit.  Unfortunately, though I found a few useful blogs, ( Teq , The WhiteBoard Blog ) and some individual YouTube videos, I didn't find a nice summary of the features and possible integration strategies for the classroom.  Thus, I created a handout and my first wikispace .  The handout (found as an attachment on the wiki) contains a summary of the built-in activities for