Archive for the ‘technology’ tag
Web 2.0 Club Students as Technology Trainers
Every week is interesting when you’re launching an all-Apple Laptop high school. This week was no exception.
I run a 40-minute Web 2.0 activity club every Thursday. (That experience, by the way, makes me weep for teachers who teach classes of less than an hour’s duration. I have time for almost nothing in 40 minutes and will, I swear, have a heart attack from the adrenal rush of trying to reach my objectives in that eyeblink of instructional time. We have 77 minute class blocks at my school, which feels just right.)
Last week, our IT Manager configured a Mac Server for class drop-box folders, shared resource folders, and private student folders. We needed to get all 240 students registered on the server - and, oh yeah, their teachers too.
Then some other teachers started asking for a way to train the students in iMovie - everybody and their dog is suddenly using iMovie in the classroom, which raises its own issues. A couple asked me to pull that off.
But the question was, how? How train an entire faculty and student body in the server network, iLife software, and more?
The answer seems wonderful: My Thursday Web 2.0 Club has 23 students. We have our weekly Homeroom during each Friday’s club time - and we have 22 homerooms. You see it: one student is available to teach each homeroom in a weekly cycle. Here’s how it looks on Bubbl.us* (thanks to Patrick Higgins for the Twitter tip about this tool):
[bubbl]http://bubbl.us/view.php?sid=49550&pw=yaVWC.w6Lr12UMzJlY3ladE5ZSFBQLg;500;400;Tech Training;100[/bubbl]
Today was our first run-through, and by all accounts, the students did a great job. Next week they’ll walk through the first “Cutting the Crap from Student Movies” video.
I think we’ve found our system here. And a way to give students experience as presenters and trainers. Pretty cool.
*WordPress users: Bubbl.us requires a WordPress Plugin. I installed it here on WP 2.3, and it works fine.
For more on staff technology development, see these articles:
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