Jeff Utecht – Educator, Consultant, Author
Posts tagged isb
Tracking Independent Reading in high school
Aug 20th
As I started talking about in my last post, we’re in the process of setting every high school student up with a blog to use as an e-portfolio. To help you wrap your head around why we’re using blogs as our container for this, I suggest downloading and reading the Free PDF I produced at the end of last year.
Once you wrap your head around the idea that these blogs are just a container that we can link into and out of then we can build our portfolio taking advantage of all the Web 2.0 world has to offer.
You’ll be able to find More >
At the speed of a click
Aug 20th
(Scribefire, my blogging platform finally updated to work with Firefox Beta 4 so now I’m back!)
I had the most incredible experience today. First of all I’m loving working with the high school kids. They just ‘get it’. I don’t have to explain things at a very deep level and we can just fly through the technology stuff and get down to business.
And when I mean fly….I mean…..at the speed of a click.
Today in a 45 minute session with eighteen 9th graders we:
Finding Common Ground
Aug 7th
One of my biggest challenges this year is going to help the High School as a whole find some common ground on expectations for class work and interaction using our Moodle site. We use Moodle as an extension of the classroom. A place to handout work, to turn in assignments, and to have discussions via forms and chats.
This will be our third year using Moodle at ISB. Up until this year teachers had the option how they set up their course, if they used Moodle at all, what type of documents and resources they places there, and how they interacted More >
Breaking up the Perfect Team
Jun 1st
If you follow baseball than you know that there have been two perfect games thrown this year. These are games in which the pitcher only pitches to 27 batters (3outs x 9innings). It’s a rare thing, in fact it’s only happening 20 times to date in all of baseball history. It’s called the perfect game. Where everything just works, just is….well…..perfect.
As this year comes to an end (3.5 days and counting) I’m put into reflection mode. Thinking about all the things that have made this year fun, frustrating, amazing, and special. All my memories come back to this being the More >
Games and Bugs
Apr 6th
As our first Certificate of Educational Technology and Information Literacy program (COETAIL) draws to a close here at ISB educators are starting to put the finishing touches on their projects for the 5th and final course. They’ve been working all semester on putting into practice what we’ve been learning about the first 4 courses. They have been paired with a mentor (Kim, Dennis, and I) to help them create a unit or lesson to use in their classroom. We then schedule a time to go in and observer them using this rubric that the three of us created (worth checking out) based on More >
The Next Phase of Technology at ISB
Mar 4th
ISB 1:1 Timeline
Last week our IT Director, Chad Bates, gave a presentation to the ISB School Board outlining the next phase of technology use at ISB. The phase includes a plan to go 1:1 starting next year with grade 6 students.
It’s an exciting time to be at ISB and I for one am looking forward to rolling out the 1:1 program over the next couple years.
As part of his presentation Chad went over the history of technology implementation at ISB over the past 10 years. As I sat there reflecting on how far we’ve come with technology in just the past More >
Bring Buzz to Edu Apps
Feb 17th
Google Buzz has been out for a while now and has been slowly making its mark on the social-networking scene.
As I’ve been investigating Buzz (a.k.a. playing with it…but investigating sounds so much more important!) and how it changes social-networking, it hit me the other day how this might just be the communication tool I’ve been looking for in schools ever sense Twitter came out.
I’m hoping that Google brings Buzz to the Education Apps soon. There are a lot of schools (including mine) that are embracing Google Apps and taking a serious look at using the set of tools as the default More >
