Web 2.0 Wows October 19, 2009

This week's Wows!

Congratulations to Catherine Meissner, French Teacher at Mount Vernon High School, who was awarded the Creative Innovation Award at the Washington Association of Teachers of Foreign Languages Conference in Spokane on Oct. 9.  Catherine does a great job of engaging her students through the use of innovative technology.  She returned to her classroom to find that her SmartBoard purchased through the EETT Peer Coaching grant had been installed.  She jumped right in and started creating interactive lessons using this tool.  She was able to incorporate one of last week’s Wows, Triptico, into an interactive lesson the very next day.  Creative and Innovative are definitely two words that describe this talented teacher.

Check out Laventure Social Studies Teacher, Greg Doud’s class blog.  Greg is another innovative teacher who has a talent for finding great ways to integrate technology into his lessons. His students created Glogs, interactive posters about the 13 colonies.  On the right side navigation bar there are links to collaborative Google Docs including a collaborative Cornell Notes and a collaborative glossary.

Free Rice + Google Forms = Vocabulary development, data analysis and an awareness of the needs of others. FreeRice.com is a unique vocabulary building website hosted by the UN World Food Program. For every vocabulary word you get right, 10 grains of rice is donated to feed hungry people.  10 grains is not a lot, but it is amazing how competitive kids will be when they see the rice bowls begin to fill.  A great motivation to build vocabulary. Liz Bagish’s middle school class in New Jersey took this a few steps further.  They created a website and using Google Forms, invited others to share how many grains of rice they have earned.  The information is tallied on their website.  They also have a map that shows where students are contributing and where the rice is being distributed.  This project is a great example of a 21^st Century Skills project.  It is tied to curriculum, it uses a variety of Web 2.0 tools, students are collaborating with others and it helps students be more globally aware.  You can join Liz’s class or use her class project as an example and develop your own 21^st Century Project.