technology in the classroom

One of my educational interests is the integration of technology in the classroom.  I've become more and more interested in this topic since I work at a 1:1 laptop school that is very supportive of edtech professional development.  This year our school has started cohort with a mixture of teachers and administrators that are committed to learning more tech integration, and I feel really excited to be a part of this group!  Our first learning opportunity came this week as we got to spend an entire school day working with Kathleen Ferenz, who works with the Library of Congress and Apple Professional Development.  This lady is awesome!!! She offered a lot of great tips and tidbits, most of which we can practically implement in the classroom.  We covered a lot of stuff in one day--way too much to post here, but I hope to share some of what I learned as I use it with my classes...starting right now:

During the morning session we learned about the power of using iPhoto as an educational tool.  Kathleen taught us how to create albums of primary sources/pictures (go here to find some pictures that are free to use) in iPhoto and take those pictures to create slideshows or eBooks.  In my IB World History class we are learning about the Chinese Civil War and we are hitting a new phase of the war, which is from 1937-45 (right before and during WWII when the Chinese were fighting against the Japanese).  To introduce this new topic I found about 10-12 photos and made this slideshow:

I created the slideshow using iPhoto, which only takes minutes to create (it's not perfect but it gets the job done quickly).  So today I started class off showing the slideshow.  After which I allowed the students "time to wonder" (a Kathleen phrase) about the topic.  They did this by discussing what types of things they learned/noticed from the pictures and what they hoped to learn about this topic in the coming classes.

Next, I asked them to take the pictures they just saw, investigate what they're about, and create a "storybook" that gives the basic story of this time period in China.  If you have iPhoto then you can create eBooks easily (see this example of an eBook about an unrelated topic).  Many of my students have not converted to Macs yet, so this presented a bit of a challenge because my students in PC land do not have iPhoto.  My temporary solution was to put the pictures into a Google Presentation on Google Docs.  Click here to see what I sent my students. (side note: I went to "View"-->"show speaker notes" on my Google Presentation and then I was able to leave a few tips for my students along the way. i.e. topics to cover, more background on the picture, etc.)  Next, I shared the presentation with my students, they made personal copies of the file, and now each student is in the process of creating their own photo story about China's war with Japan.

They worked on their stories in class, which went really well, and they should be finished by Friday.  I'm still deciding on what to do with them next class.  Some options I'm tossing around: have them read and evaluate each other's stories, pick a few exemplars and have students share them with the class, and/or have a class discussion about each of the pictures and let the students tell me the story they uncovered.