Wednesday, August 27, 2008

Transforming Education for the 21st Century

My school is now a high tech campus! Our "Classroom of the Future", at the multi-media center, is almost finished and I saw a Promethian Board there last week during a walkthrough. Our entire school is now both wired and with wireless internet connection. Every classroom has a telephone from where we can call the parents too when a student is misbehaving. Every teacher has a working computer on his/ her desk (though some of them cannot get their computers moved from their previous schools yet). Yesterday in a 6th grade science class, I saw students using brand new Mac laptops; we have at least two carts of around 50 Mac laptops per cart. There are two classrooms in the first floor with a web conference technology which lets us:

- See every class, students, and educators anywhere in the world
- Share classroom instructions, presentations, video, and multimedia with the click of a mouse
- Demonstrate lessons and view desktops
- Invite others educators and students to collaborate spontaneously

I am so excited to collaborate with my colleagues across the nation (Technology Liaisons from the National Writing Project) and other educators across the globe. I can't wait to integrate these technology into my teaching this school year. I am very sure that I can get my students with special needs, who are visual and kinesthetic learners and are digital natives, to enthusiastically learn. I will have a lot of suggestions to the 6th grade regular education teachers during our collaborative meetings on how we can get this going for our students. I am sure they will be open to my creative ideas. I've heard from our previous principal that Cisco Systems, a multinational corporation which designed these networking and communications technology and services that we now have, will have their small office in our school. Here's a trailer for a 30-minute Cisco broadcast which can be viewed at www.cisco.com/go/education/bizwise


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1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I really enjoyed reading this entry. I worked in an elementary class and all of the technology, such as the Smartboard, truly amazed me. Technology is becoming more and more important and more used in the classrooms today.It is becoming increasingly important for teachers to gain knowledge and receive training on these tools. I remember the first time I saw the Smartboard, I was too afraid to touch it because I didn't know how to work it and was afraid I would break it. I also think it is a great idea to have phones in every classroom. Not only does it allow teachers to call parents when they are misbehaving, but it also can serve as a sort of scare tactic. If a student is threatened with getting their parents called, a lot of the time they will start behaving. I know that it would work for me if I was still in school!

7:56 PM

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