Thinking EdTech: The Classroom Newsletter

Monday, February 16, 2009

The Classroom Newsletter

Classroom newsletters provide a way for teachers to communicate classroom and school happenings with students and their families. This week, we discussed newsletters and other ways teachers can communicate with families and the kinds of information these communications might contain. Here's the list we came up with. With the focus on using technology tools to be more productive in a teacher's professional life, we experimented with Google Docs (and spreadsheets, forms, and presentations) to create sample classroom newsletters. Some of the students used the templates available on Google Docs, others started their newsletters in Word then uploaded them to Google Docs, and others started their newsletters from scratch. We explored the collaborative features of this resource as well as the limitations in formatting and layout.

In an effort to make the W200 pedagogy more transparent, I demonstrated how to create online polls using Poll Everywhere and led the students through the process of creating free accounts. We used the sample poll to find out how many in class knew how to bookmark websites in their Delicious accounts and found that there were just a few in each section that weren't sure how to do this. (I directed these few to tutorials on the Delicious website.)

One student in each section volunteered to show his/her digital story about why they chose the teaching profession. The majority of the students selected this topic for their stories; however, a few did do stories on what makes a teacher great and how to... . Overall, the stories were really interesting to watch, and they helped me to get to know the students better.

Labels: teaching, W200

posted by SG @ 2:35 PM

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