TIES Conference Thoughts
Last week I attended and presented at the TIES Conference. I attended several sessions on digital storytelling in the classroom and was inspired. Some of the ideas I liked included creating digital lab reports, making commercials convincing people to do or not do something and creating public service announcements. I was impressed with the way teachers created projects that made students go much higher on Bloom’s Taxonomy and get to “big picture” issues and questions. I was so inspired that I downloaded Photo Story and created an Astronomy project and then used Animoto to create the same project, so I could show the final products to teachers I coach, so they could see what types of things can be done in a few class periods with these two tools.
I also attended an interactive response session that focused on ways to use clickers to assess more than low level or recall type questions. This session also discussed the use of Senteo as a formative assessment tool that can and should be used during a lesson to assess understanding and guide instruction, not just as a way to take a quiz at the end of a unit.
Another session I loved was on ThinkQuest. After attending the session I was hooked on the benefits on this FREE product. The testimonials from fifth grade students sold me. The fact that students were discussing books, writing lab reports and posing interactive questions to one another amazed me. I was also impressed with the ascetic qualities Think Quest offers. It truly looked like a fun social networking site. The fact kids could have a fun page to work on at home appealed to them and got them to look at it from home and add to their assignments too. When I was sharing what I had discovered with my colleagues, I discovered two of the middle school teachers are currently using ThinkQuest. I would love for them to share how they use it with staff at a staff meeting. I plan on talking to our principal about it.
