M4-1
One strategy I have tried to use is to share webinars with teachers. I would sign up for a webinar from SimpleK12 or edmodocon and invite them to come to my classroom and watch the webinar on the IWB or on the movie screen in the media center's presentation room. I scheduled these for lunchtime or after school on a day which we didn't already have another meeting. Well, lunchtime is difficult (even though we get an hour! unless of course we are working through lunch). A lot of the teachers, at the special education school where I work, end up eating with their class most of the time, as most of the students need a lot of support and the teacher needs to be there to help the paraprofessionals. The only times they do not is when they have an IEP or other meeting. After school is hard too. If we are not in a mandatory staff or committee meeting, the teachers need to prepare lessons for the next day, clean up their room, have phone conferences with parents and other tasks.
A strategy that did work, though, other than meeting one to one with individual teachers, was to show them what could be done by sharing a video of the tool in action. The best way I have found to do that, if not in person, is to send a video via email. Many tools have links to videos showing how they work. usually on YouTube. That has had some positive results. Case in point: I recently sent out a video about using Skype to interface with another class somewhere in the world and play a game called Mystery Skype, to guess where the other class was from. The students use their geography knowledge and the Internet to look up clues and use online maps to narrow down the location. I have a couple of teachers who were very interested in it. Now we are just looking for an appropriate class to interface with.
Photo credits:
Tomkins, C. (2012). Social Media Marketing and Gourmet Cooking With The Social Media Chef, Chris Tompkins. Social Media Marketing and Gourmet Cooking With The Social Media Chef, Chris Tompkins. April 2012. Retrieved October 16, 2013, from http://servedfreshmedia.com/2012/04/no-time-for-marketing-heres-how-to-make-time/
The Writing Center at MSU. (10/2012). The Writing Center at MSU. Retrieved October 16, 2013, from http://writing.msu.edu
Videos are a great way to learn new tools. I recently used tow videos to introduce Google Earth and Google Maps to students in my class who were not familiar with them. They could watch parts of them more than once if needed, and it freed me up to work with other students on other parts of the project. Thanks for the Mystery Skype suggestion. There are a couple of teachers at school that I would like to pass that one on to.
ReplyDeleteI like your idea to share information with colleagues via the internet because time is so precious and it can be extremely hard to schedule meetings in. The tools you sent are really neat and I think could be a great benefit for those who would actually use them and take time to incorporate them properly into the classroom. I may use this strategy with the teachers at my school because I feel like we are always in meetings and it makes us all feel stretched thin, so this would be a great alternative!
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