Chanatown

As mentioned in my first post about LiveBinders , I am working with our Literacy Coordinator on an ePortfolio solution for our Humanities classes. As we finalized our setup this past week, I was pleased to discover that LiveBinders recently introduced their collaboration feature. A quick look at this new and exciting feature after the jump.

I'm working with our Literacy Coordinator on creating some student electronic portfolios, and there exists a wide variety of options ranging from creating student websites to collecting works in a digital file cabinet. We decided to give LiveBinders a try, mostly because it scored big points in terms of ease of use, simple design, and strong core functionality. More on the initial setup after the jump.

Having run up a streak of consecutive posts (ended last week at just over 60), I wanted to take the time to reflect on some of the more memorable ones, as well as pull together a few that were especially relevant to teachers at ETHS. Thus was born the EdTech @ETHS Monthly. Crafted from a simple MS Word template, I wasn't ready to commit hours to a fancy newsletter design. Yet, keeping my activity sponsor hat on (Green Team - Environmental Club), I wanted the document to be accessible and carbon free. Yudu took care of the rest.

This link will take you to the Agenda for the Netbooks and Literacy workshop day #2.   Netbooks and Literacy is a summer project approved by Evanston Township High School (ETHS).  Its main objective is to train English/History teachers on the hardware, software, and Web 2.0 tools that will be available to them during the 2010-2011 school year.  These teachers will be piloting the second phase of a project designed to utilize netbooks in the classroom with the goal of improving literacy instruction.

This link will take you to the Agenda for the Netbooks and Literacy workshop day #1.   Netbooks and Literacy is a summer project approved by Evanston Township High School (ETHS).  Its main objective is to train English/History teachers on the hardware, software, and Web 2.0 tools that will be available to them during the 2010-2011 school year.  These teachers will be piloting the second phase of a project designed to utilize netbooks in the classroom with the goal of improving literacy instruction.

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 da...