Chanatown

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...