Mar 10, 2016

Tech PDA Recap

What an amazing four weeks!  My heart grows abundantly each year during this PDA time as we are able to work alongside so many passionate teachers at one time on improving student learning experiences.  Here are just a few snippits from our sessions...
"Getting to experiment and create with the new technologies is helpful. Having it modeled and getting to try it out right away is helping me remember what to do after class."
"I really feel like it was well organized. i felt like you were really able to meet the needs of a very diverse group of people. thank you for always being so patient with when working with some of us "novice" learners."
"I love that forms is user friendly and it can be used in so many ways. I recently surveyed students about using technology to help me plan instruction. I can’t believe that they like to use technology rather than listen to me for a class period!"

"I used google forms for a couple different things this week in class. 1. I used it to take anecdotal information as my kids were working and give them feedback on their progress. 2. I used google forms and DocAppender to let the kids keep track of their responsibilities in class and track how they are doing using my feedback from their daily work. I also used Draftback to show some of my students how much time they were wasting. This helped them to see that they did have enough time to complete their work, they were just using their time to do other things. After I showed them everything that they were doing, they were much more focused and completed much higher quality work. "

"Loved EdPuzzle for Heat Transfer video! I definitely want to use it for some reteaching in other units next year - I’m challenged to find ways for students to revisit content when the rest of the class has mastered something.  I put links to documents into my assignment menu (
Google Doc) to centralize access for my students."

What Did We Do?

Our topics were wide ranging, and the classroom opportunities that they lead to were equally broad.  In fact, here are each of the working documents from Sean's PDA in published Google Doc form.

Fruits of Our Labor

Finally, here are some of the fruits of our collective labor of the past four weeks.  And if you want to learn more about any of the items you saw in this post, just contact your district instructional technology coach!

  • Teacher YouTube Channels and videos (feel free to subscribe!)
  
          

Sean Mullins | Secondary Instructional Tech Coach