I had the wonderful experience of being the keynoter on ELA and technology at an elementary school. I did a presentation on improving ELA skills through videoconferencing where we videoconferenced with two “sites” – one on listening to an “expert” read a science poem and answering questions and one peer to peer on Readers Theatre about Three Little Pigs with human tableaus to show comprehension.
Then I did an interactive presentation on Increasing ELA learning through Technology in which I went through Vocabulary, Basic/Literal Reading, and Inference Reading. Many teacher commented that they never thought of using technology to improve these specific ELA learning. Numerous of the activities were based on Robert Marzano’s work.
Then I did a mini-workshop on creating Big Books using PowerPoints.
I was very impressed with the faculty. They were attentive and participated. They seemed eager to learn new techniques. I was amazed when I told them how to search for PowerPoints on a topic (topic +.ppt or “term” +.ppt such as “Rhyming Words” +.ppt), most admitted that no one had ever shown them that technique. Several had taken full day district workshops on PowerPoint.
What do you do to make subject area technology use easier for teachers? How do you help your fellow teachers? Do you share your Sight Words PowerPoint? Do you work together to find great images for the PowerPoint that has few words? Or do you take over their keyboard and do it for them which disempowers them?
© Harry Grover Tuttle, 2007
———————-