PLE+Project+Update+-+May+2008

Penn London Elementary School Report 2007-2008 Integrating technology into the classroom __ Accomplishments: __ This year students created slideshows in Kid Pix either in their classrooms or in the PLA computer lab. Slideshows related to the curriculum in many ways- timelines, books, facts about Pennsylvania animals, homonyms, and more. Slideshows were posted on the web for view by parents and the community. VoiceThreads created to record student voices and post the work online. Comments on the work by others (from our school and outside of our school) were received. It would be nice to have a subscription to VoiceThread for next year. Work was done on the Language Arts Curriculum to integrate spelling lists and such into the Smartboard program for students/teachers to use in the classroom. Google Earth was used to create virtual tours of places around the world. Tours helped to enhance Social Studies instruction. It also enhanced Language Arts instruction, as students were able to "tour" the settings of various Harcourt stories. Pat created "tours" for several Harcourt stories. __ Concerns/Glitches: __ After working with Kid Pix slideshows, we found out that to export a slideshow with student recorded voices to a Quicktime movie, the program crashes. This problem is apparently a known issue with the company. As such, many of the teachers had to have Kid Pix installed on their computers in order to show a show within the Kid Pix Program. If a teacher had a slideshow without student voices reading the words, the files worked fine. All of the second grade spelling lists were added to the Smartboard program as a sample, but we did not have time to work on ways to use these lists in the classroom even though we have ideas. More time is needed to present and work with this idea. Note: Our Palm Pilots were used with the second grade lists and we could use more time to develop this idea as well. The Palms were used to support vocabulary development connected to reading instruction. There are still major concerns that we do not have the “hardware” such as Smart boards accessible to all teachers for quick and easy use. It is still difficult to integrate technology into many classrooms due to accessibility, time, and ease of use or knowledge. There has been some headway to educate the teachers as to what is there is and how to use (Thanks Pat and Leigh Anna) but there is still far to go for the teachers to feel it will work for them.