Exemplary, Creative Uses of Technology in Teaching

Winners of the 2009 Edublogger Awards for Blogs/Wikis in Education

Check out the list here. 

Teaching Content

Comma Usage

A middle-school teacher creates mini-movies with PowerPoint (did you know that you can export PP presentations as movies?)  with animations that teach the rules of comma usage.  He then posts those movies to his homework blog so that kids can review. Read all about it in his professional blog, Bionic Teacher.

 History

This teacher uses the "street view" feature on Google maps (where you see actual buildings and streets as if you were a pedestrian there) to show the kids the actual intersection where Kennedy was assassinated.  You can even zoom up to the window where Oswald was, and follow the street to see the grassy knoll. 

What else could you show kids using this tool?

 Language Arts

Mr Mayo's  8th grade language arts class is immersed in digital storytelling, blogging, skype for interviewing distant experts and connecting with other kids across the country, and Twitter (a text messaging tool that sends messages to many people at once) that is being used to compose collaborative stories with hundreds of kids around the world.  Take a look at the many examples of student work on this blog.  Does anyone want to argue that he should go back to pencil and paper?  

Hardware

Creating an interactive whiteboard using a bic pen and a $99 Wii.

This blog talks about a way to create an interactive whiteboard for the cost of a Wii and some small electronic modifications to a bic pen.  Anyone want to negotiate "clicks" for trying this out?

Including Missing Classmates

Click here to view a video about using Skype to Include a young girl with leukemia who can't attend school in the daily lessons of her classroom.    And then, having the students make a video about it all.

Making Digital Video to Teach

While the  content is more appropriate for high school students, this video demonstrates how relatively simply production in digital video can create powerful teaching tools.