IA Reads

Thursday, March 13, 2008

Poll Everywhere Experiment

We tried out something new today in a 10th grade American Studies class. I had the kids take a poll where they voted by cell phone. In the 1st block, only about 12 out of 30 students had brought their phones since they are banned during the day. The students that did participate really enjoyed it! It was something new and they were pretty excited about not getting in trouble for using their phones. Is it possible that more and more applications like Poll Everywhere will lead us to rethink using cell phones in the classroom?

Here are our results:

Tuesday, March 11, 2008

MACUL Conference


I spent March 5-7 at the Michigan Association of Computer Users in Learning conference in Grand Rapids, MI. The Keynote Speaker was Mary Cullinane, from Microsoft who was part of the School of the Future project in Philidelphia. Definitely very inspiring and it was a great conference kickoff. (thanks to Michael Porter for a nice photo on his MACUL Flickr site).
Steve Dembo from Discovery Education had some of the best ideas that I came away with. Here is his wiki about a lot of the content covered in his presentation. It's definitely worth checking out.


Monday, March 3, 2008

IB Community Theme

Our staff is starting to explore the IB Community Theme online, just unveiled by the IBO. It's open to students and the rest of our IB community (parents, neighbors and those interested in the IB philosophy).

Take a look.

http://communitytheme.ibo.org/