K-12 School Zone

Woo-hoo!  If you haven't heard yet, TurningPoint AnyWhere 2.0 is available for download for both Mac and PC.  It has a variety of new updates/enhancements, and the interface really looks great.

It's Friday.  School is either out or almost out, so I'm sure most of you are probably reaching for your beach towels about now, but...

Next week Study Island's offering a free webinar related to their integration with our student response systems.  If you're interested, details are below.

Don't forget the sunscreen! :-)
-K.

Date:  Wednesday, June 17, 2009

We're working hard to get these tutorials completed for TurningPoint Anywhere Mac and PC.  We're nearly finished with the Mac tutorials, and hope to have them done by the time the software is released.  The PC ones might be a few days behind, but I think everyone will be pleased with them. 

As for me, I'm getting ready to head to NC State next week, and will continue with a very busy month on the road.  This looks like it's going to be a crazy summer in the training department!

Clayton Christensen's book "Disrupting Class" is a call to action for educators to use technologies in innovative ways in order to customize their teaching to meet the needs of the students. Clearly the implementation of iPod Touches or iPhones can offer K-20 an innovative tool for disrupting the norms of education.

Webinar resources from our Spring 09 Series are now online.  I've also posted all questions submitted during the webinars to the TurningTalk forums for feedback and further discussion since we were not always able to get through the entire list during the one hour sessions.

Over 1,000 users registered to attend.  Thank you to all attendees for your  valuable feedback.

I thought a few suggestions on creating quality multiple choice questions that assess for learning could be useful with our TurningPoint products. I will post these in several parts based on the elements of a multiple choice question. Let's start with some common terminology:

Stem: the question or part to which the student should respond

Options: answer choices

Distractors: incorrect options

Key: correct option

Here are a few best practices for writing the stem:

Yesterday we successfully held our first Spring 09 webinar for K-12 - Finding Funding Opportunities.  Woo-hoo!  John Wilson (Turning Foundation Director), Bill Mullane (School Improvement Supervisor, Ashtabula County Educational Service Center), and Joel Ratner (President, The Raymond John Wean Foundation all provided an exteremely insightful presentation that included current and upcoming funding resources and how best to approach funding requests.

FYI:  The latest version of RemotePoll was released today.  RemotePoll allows for polling at remote locations.  Ideal for video conferencing or satellite broadcasts. 

There have been significant improvements in the ease of use  (No need to configure firewalls.)

Key highlights:

Watch our video and post your own suggestions! For a print version see attachment.

Frequently I am asked the question "what type of doctor are you" and my standard  reply is a "doctor of Instructional Technology" . The reaction has varied from a puzzled stare to my favorite one "oh so your attach artificial limbs" which I could only reply "something like that"!

One of the highlights of my position is that I’ve been able to either attend or hear about some of the more imaginative uses of student response. I know that most of your time is focused on teaching, learning activities, and engaging students in course work – a challenge I admire and respect all educators for taking on every day. The thought of 30 8 year-olds for 7+ hours intimidates me in a way words fail to express. lol

But what about the little moments you’ve carved out just for fun?

One of the first technologies that I previously worked with (I'm not saying how long ago this was.) in an educational setting was video conferencing. Washington state was in the initial stages of implementing its K-20 system across the state, connecting every college and school district to a high-bandwidth statewide video and data network.

During the numerous initial discussions of “What do we do first?” in TurningTalk, one concept always rose to the top of the list – provide a library of resources for users. Between our user conferences, tradeshow events, or on-site visits, users were always interested in learning more – past and current research, other successful ways to use student response systems, strategies, content... Like everyone else now connected to the information superhighway, our users wanted to gather as much information as possible.

If you haven't already heard, Turning is offering several free webinars this month for our education users.

Higher Ed:
April 30th - 5:00 pm: Introduction to Peer Instruction, Dr. Eric Mazur
April 23rd – 12:00 pm: Teaching with Classroom Response Systems, Dr. Derek Bruff

K-12:

Welcome to TurningTalk – Turning Technologies’ new social learning community!

My name is Katherine Kahn. I am the Communications Manager for Turning Technologies' Education Division and have been with the company since August 2005. As Communications Manager I am involved in many different aspects of Turning including PR, web-based initiatives, marketing campaigns, events, and advertising. (Of course I will be keeping the advertising aspect to a minimum in TurningTalk! lol)

Alright, so my last posting offered up some ideas for the higher ed readers. This time its all about my K-12 followers. With the weather warming up in most areas of the country, I bet you are starting to have problems keeping students attention. I'm not too sure what it is, but I went through the same thing. As soon as the weather starts to warm up, kids have a one-track mind and can only think about the next time they are going to go outside, or what kind of after school activity they have that evening. So how do you keep their minds where they need to be - in the classroom?