Sunday, November 3, 2013

Technology Configurations



The following whiteboard outlines some common technology configurations in schools, and some common activities in various classrooms. Each scenario addresses some potential challenges and ways to overcome those challenges.

Realtime Board is a fun way to create an interactive presentation. Here is a direct link to the presentation if the embedded board fails to load.


5 comments:

  1. You have some great ideas and options for using the technology, but I thought an issue that might pop up is the teacher's concern that the computer lab is not available, or what if WIFI is not accessible by all devices, then what would the solution be? Unfortunately there are a lot of issues right now. I have heard that some schools don't even have WIFI in the classrooms, only in certain areas. I hope that these issues will be addressed soon with Obama's push for more technology. I also have decided that a one computer classroom is not a good option for any class, if we are going to integrate technology into the common core. But budgets do not always cover materials needed to comply with government mandates, unfortunately.

    The Realtime board is a nice tool, but you have to manually navigate it. Too bad is doesn't flow like Prezi. Another option is Padlet which is like a bulletin board that uses notes, like sticky notes that can be moved around, but I don't think they can be grouped. There was another one called corkboard.me that I think you could attach notes to each other to group them, but it seems to have changed names and the free account is not available yet.

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  2. I'm used to the same program operating differently or having different functionality on the the different devices that I own. However, I had never really thought about how that would impact a classroom with BYOD. Even if all students have devices, a teacher may end up with students trying to operate different flavors of apps that they are not completely confident with. This scenario could be very intimidating to many teachers. Even with a tech savvy teacher, an entire period could be spent doing tech support. Thanks for pointing that out, it will be something to take into account when the school I teach at is ready for BYOD.

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  3. Mike,
    I just realized that the BYOD meant that kids bring their own device, I thought it was geared toward a school system deciding on its own device that may be iPads, netbooks, Chromebooks or a variety of different options. Opps. Great post - like Cindy, I wish Realboard had a play option, I found I was distracted from the content because I was trying to manipulate the screen. I always enjoy reading your posts - I get such great resources!
    Thanks,
    Megan

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  4. Mike, I love the presentation mode. The activities seemed to work well in each of the configurations. As always, thanks for sharing so many great ideas.
    Jenn

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  5. Yes, I do have problems in my school with the wifi not working sometimes and it often goes out during different times in the day. We are so dependent on it because I teach 1:1 all day every day for each class. So it throws our schedule off terribly. This is a great resource as well and I figured out I can just use the arrows to move myself around and I just used the zoom. Nicely done.

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