New Teacher Academy
Today was New Teacher Academy, our county’s training session for newly hired teachers. My team’s job was to share ideas for using technology in the classroom. Alfonso and I presented a session called “Mysteryland” with the 4th grade teachers. Mysteryland is a music festival that I attended one summer, but it could also be your classroom, because classrooms are places for exploring mysteries. When you present topics as mysteries to solve, it stimulates students’ natural curiosity and increases motivation to learn. We used clouds (SOL4.6) as an example to show that every topic has plenty of mysteries to investigate: How much does a cloud weigh? Why does a cloud form in one spot and not another? Does anything live inside a cloud? Does lighting come down from clouds or up from the ground? Do clouds protect us from anything? Does wind speed and direction have anything to do with cloud cover? (Look here or here and turn on cloud cover)? Technology can be used by teachers to present these mysteries to the students in creative ways, but once a few mysteries have been presented, technology can be used by students to share their own questions with each other, research the answers collaboratively, and publish their findings online. We shared a variety of webtools for accomplishing these tasks. For example, we asked each new teacher to research a cloud mystery and post their answers on a shared Google spreadsheet. Try adding an element of mystery to your lessons this year!