I had the pleasure of attending the Long Island Tech Summit on October 27 with Lakeland High School Principal Cheryl Champ. Tony Wagner, author of “The Global Achievement Gap” was the keynote speaker, brought in through the generosity of Scholastic. If you have read Tony’s book, you know that he presents compelling data to support the notion that our schools are not successfully preparing our students for the 21st century global economy. It’s a great read; each of the attendees received a copy of his book.
Principal Champ and I presented a session on “Using Interactive Whiteboards to Differentiate Instruction” to an audience of about 50 educators. We showed a variety of strategies to engage students’ different learning styles to provide active, multi-sensory classroom experiences that also engage critical thinking and problem solving. It seemed as if our audience enjoyed our presentation, and we did not let them sit and listen. We used interactive “clickers” to gather reactions and responses and the “Student Picker” feature to call up our participants. (Each was handed a piece of paper when they walked in with an “alias.” Our audience contained the likes of Aristotle, Lady Gaga and Bill Clinton.
Using interactive whiteboards in the classroom should be just that – INTERACTIVE, so that is why we decided to give everyone an identity and demand that they participate. We, we didn’t really demand it, but they did come willingly up to the board to demonstrate the various ways that these boards can engage students.
I attended a workshop in the morning following the keynote on Wild, Wacky and Worthy: Web 2.0 Tools for Schools presented by Ellen Phillips and Mike Swirsky. Just when you think you know about all of the BEST Web 2.0 tools, more and more become available and are being embraced and used effectively in the classroom. I was so happy that I attended this session because I learned about at least a half a dozen new tools that I will be experimenting with and sharing with our teachers. In my next blog post, I will write about a couple of them.
All in all, a great day, despite the LONG drive out there on a windy, rainy day.
