Featured Teacher: Tracy Brady
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Tracy Brady French and Spanish Teacher East Syracuse Minoa Central School District Tracy Brady is in her 17th year as a middle school/high school French and Spanish teacher in the East Syracuse Minoa school district. She currently teaches grades 8-11, but spent her first year teaching 5th grade French in the Indian River school district. What are some of the innovative ways you are integrating technology into your curriculum? The biggest tech tool that Tracy uses with her students is Wikispaces, which serves as a "container" for all the other tech tools she uses. It can also be used as a student portfolio. Tracy uses Wikispaces for instructional delivery in conjunction with Mentormob, a tool that allows for creation of "playlists" consisting of videos, documents, and outside links. Teachers can build step by step instructions guiding students through self-paced or teacher-paced lessons. Each student has his/her own page within the class wiki which serves as an electronic portfolio. Student work, such as word documents, voice recordings, slide-shows, video, etc. can be embedded directly on to the individual pages as a record of student development throughout the year. Preferences can be set to keep student pages private, although parents are invited to view their students' work as well as to help their students use the instructional page. Be sure to check out some of the Web-based projects Tracy's students have created and posted to her Wiki:
How have students benefitted from your technology integration initiatives?
Students enjoy the creativity the portfolio system allows them. They can personalize their portfolios to reflect their personality, and due to the flexibility of the platform they can often choose different methods of showing their learning. A huge benefit is that Wikispaces is cloud-based, allowing students to view the instructional pages and use the practice activities from any computer, and many tablets/smartphones. Being a form of social media, it also allows for conversations between teachers and students as part of the feedback process. |
