Technology Projects

Some Technology Integration Projects I developed with teachers as a district technology director:

Cultural Exchange

MS - Spanish

Spanish Cultural Exchange Project: a flagship student empowerment project, beginning with identifying an international classroom partner and connecting via videoconference and forum. The first activity was teacher driven - creating webquest projects, sharing them via videoconference. The second was student driven - making videos about life in their schools and communities, and sharing these via videoconference.

Simulation

HS - Economics

Beat Japan: Student teams take the role of auto company CEOs, applying investment strategies in competition with each other (and, to their increasing surprise, Japan, which played by very different rules). Through this role-playing simulation, students enthusiastically learn basic economic principles as well as some of the particular history of US/Japan economic competition over automobile markets.This simulation progressively reveals history and rewards intuiting game rules - keep it secret!

Student Multimedia

MS - ELA

Poetry Powerpoints: Students are much more motivated, and take more ownership for the quality of their work when they know it will be appreciated by others, particularly peers. In this project, students collected digital images and created Powerpoint presentations to accompany their readings of selected poems.  The choice of images and use of Powerpoint effects (colors, transitions, titles) deeply conveyed the students' interpretations of each poem, deepening a personal connection while making it more impactful to others.

WebQuest

HS - Science

Elements Webquest: To motivate students entering a new unit of study, students performed a WebQuest to develop familiarity with the periodic table and the properties of common elements. As individuals, students used the web to research the properties of common elements, and recorded these properties in a shared database.  As teams, students developed new periodic table diagrams to highlight different relationships between elements, presenting these for peer review.