STaRT Tech Learning Community

I overlooked a little check box to turn on Titles for this blog. Sorry about that, I now realize that it would have been VERY helpful for us to view the titles in the Last Posts Panel instead of the first line of the post... :-)

This is an example of our java player

Karl Wodtke @ Rick Hansen Secondary

I am a Math and Science teacher at Rick Hansen. My project is looking at the effects of incorporating multimedia in the
classroom on student understanding and summative achievement.

My project is focusing on the incorporation of webbased multimedia such as flash-animations and short movie clips into my lessons. In order to do this, I have changed the format of my classes, such that they are organized around the use of Apple's Keynote presenter. This program allows for the easy amalgamation of text-based material, jpegs, charts, and movie clips to create a very diverse multmedia lesson. I have been focusing mainly on my Biology class with Keynote and lately have started to try this for my math classes. The results for my Biology class have been outstanding so far. Student achievement in exams for my Biology class has increased over 15% for the last 2 exams after utilizing multimedia to present ideas. The students have also commented that lessons make more sense and they objectives are made clear.

The other focus of my project is to make my media-based lessons easily available to parents and to also use the web as a tool to disseminate information to parents and students. The creation of a website also served as an organization tool for students who access my site's class weblog to find out we covered and what was assigned. Students and parents can also access the site to download material that was assigned outside of the text.

So far so good, and I rapidly learning a variety of software tools to try in my classroom.

Thanks!

Digital Video @ Fraser Middle - Dave Sampson

At Fraser Middle I teach an Exploratory course called Computer Arts.
All 650 students, grades 6 - 8, rotate through my class at some point during the course of the year. Each rotation is 9 weeks in length and I have the students for apx. 18 hours (2 x per week). That doesn’t give us a lot of time together and we have just recently rotated.

Students work on many projects during Computer Arts depending upon what grade they are in. So my timeline and the Learning Community timeline is a little bit different, however, I look forward to our project and sharing our progess with the community once we get started.

The project I am sharing with the STaRT Tech Learning Community is Digital Video. I am currently teach two classes of grade 8’s and it is those students that will be working on the digital video projects starting in the new year.

More details to follow...