With a shortened week the High school teachers were busy preparing for semester finals and prepping their classrooms for new students and new lessons using a variety of technology tools.
Multiple teachers have been creating Google blogger accounts which will include private access for just students and parents as well as linked web resources for increased student engagement. These blogs can be used to share video,documents,forms,surveys,photos of all types and access to these can be completely controlled and managed by the creator. I have also provided assistance with teachers just starting with Google Drive a better understanding of how they can use the cloud storage and use the sharing preferences of the documents to back up work and share more fluently with students and parents.
The continual updating of Ipad carts at the high school continued this week as Zach and I synced and updated the Ipads as well as the MacBook attached to the carts. This was beneficial for Ipads which need to some times be restored or apps need to be updated. This updating is going to assist the planned pilot of Net-Texts learning app which will enable teachers with Ipads to use Open Educational Resources(OER) to build and develop lessons from open source materials.
A cool infographic tool we have really employed at the help desk in the past week is Easel.ly(http://www.easel.ly/) . This is a great great tool for teachers as well for presenting ideas and concepts quickly with great colors. The tool also has easy to use templates and allows you to add text and symbols with ease. I have included a sample of how we have integrated them into the help desk below. Please email us if you feel you would like more info on using this tools.
At the Andover Innovation Lab and help desk we had Google Hangouts with the students to assess their project work for the semester. Eli Gukovsky and Viabhav Patel both presented. Eli had created a layout and template design for a Android Game App and Viabhav presented on the benefits of Minecraft for education. Both of these presentations can be viewed on posts on this blog. Students were required to direct the Hangout and present video artifacts and discuss their findings and experiences at the Andover Innovation Lab/Help Desk.
We are looking forward to an exciting beginning of the new semester at the help desk as we plan on adding 10 new students to the rotation. We expect to be working on some exciting new projects moving forward. Stay tuned for some exciting independant projects and student videos. As always we are assisting with the trouble shooting and integration of technology at Andover High School.
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