Projector, yay!

Yay! We finally got a projector in my room! What's nice about it is that it is hooked up to a separate computer that sits in the back of the room and also serves as a student computer. So if/when students want to do presentations or show something on the projector I don't have to worry about them being on my computer (which is against school policy).

So far I have found the projector useful for several purposes. First, I have used it as an overhead quite a bit, so I am glad to be saving the environment in the reduction of transparencies I waste. Of course, that is surface level use. Second, I was able to use the projector to share with my students high and low quality project examples and we scored them together using a rubric. Specifically, I opened up the rubric on the computer and used the highlighter feature in Microsoft Word. As the students told me what to quality indicators were satisfied on the rubric, I would highlight that section. I found this to be particularly helpful with some of my low level learners who are still struggling with figuring out how to use a rubric. Having the highlighting up on the screen showed them how to highlight the rubric and breaking that down verbally in class helped them to understand what that means.

Other than that, not much technology use right now. We've been spending a lot of class time reading the play. I had wanted to use some media clips in a Jack Daw we did to start the unit off, but for some reason I could not find the small film clips and was running short on time. So the students did the Jack Daw using other forms of media I had gathered already (such as images and articles, etc.).

I did just get my eThemes request back. I asked them to find resources that I could use when teaching the novel Night. I haven't had a chance to look at those items yet, but a skim at the resources looked really good. I'll probably end up using a lot of the resources for pre-novel introduction activities to help students become familiar with topics and interested in reading the novel.