Starting the Year

Kate and I were excited to finally meet last week for an after-school meeting. While I already knew Kate, as my wife works at her school, we had not had the opportunity to talk technology yet. We had wanted to meet earlier, but between DNC events (Go Obama!) and moving, it just didn't happen.
We spent an hour setting up the Smartboard, Clickers, and discussing online options. Kate was particularly interested in the variety of possibilities with the Smartoard. Her second grade bilingual class needs ways to visually manipulate language and images to build their English skills. The Smartboard would allow them to organize the sounds and phonems of English, and then link them to pictures. While we thought this would be a great way to enhance the curriculum in English language learning, we were also a bit daunted when we started exploring what else her students could do. We discussed how picutes could be used in Clickers, so that the benefits of this tech could be used by those who were not fast readers. At some point we threw in some GLETs talk too, but we'll have to further discuss that sometime soon. We look forward to meeting again soon.