Lesson One – It’s Snowing In The Mid-West

You may be wondering why my lessons learned are being posted on Monday and not Friday as usual. Well I’ve been a little preoccupied…as you can see from the blurry picture above. With snow totals in Northwest Arkansas reaching anywhere from 5″ – 8″, we have not been in school since Thursday and will remain out of school until at least Tuesday. With our corner of the state receiving quite a bit of snow there has been not shortage sledding and snowmen. So, wherever you may be I hope your staying warm and dry…and for our students, enjoy it while it last!

Lesson Two – Air Mouse

Lesson two gets me excited just thinking out about it…

This week I was turned on to a new app by a fellow classmate and teacher…that app is Air Mouse. For those not aware, Air Mouse is an app that allows you to control the features of your computer (over a wireless network) from your iPhone or iPod. This app allows me to move about the classroom while having full range of motion of my mouse (even on extended screen display), control my iTunes library, and create hotkey buttons for all of my favorite programs on my computer.

This tool is a must have for teachers for the fact that it is a dialed down version of an interwrite pad and less complicated. All you need to have is your iPod/iPhone, wireless network, a quick download from the Air Mouse website, and about 5 minutes to set it up.

So, if your in the market for a wireless tool to improve your teaching mobility in the classroom or if you are interested in an interwirte pad but don’t have the funding, I highly recommend you check out this app.

Lesson Three – The Classroom Outside The Classroom

Quite sometime back, I posted about the implementation of using a class Facebook account with my sstudents. The reason for implementing this social networking tool was to improve student/teacher interaction and to be able to share more information to my sstudents through a medium that they use on a daily basis. So far this implementation has been working very well and I would like to share a success story of using Facebook.

One tool that has really worked out well for me is the chat feature. This feature allows me to talk with sstudents in real time and provide quick feedback to them. Recently we had a quiz in my science class. I logged on to my class Facebook page to update some information with I was instant messaged by one of my sstudents that was confused about a certain concept she was going to be quizzed on. I was able to talk to her in real time and help her better understand what was giving her probelms even though it had been hours since school let out.

By having this option to help a student via Facebook Chat, I was able to provide additional help to a student that otherwise taken her quiz without understanding what was being asked of her. Being able to share information with sstudents outside the classroom really expands the classroom and makes tudents think about learning and school that much more…and that’s always a good thing!

Mr. McClung