The Congin Technology Buzz
Congin School started the year with a gracious gift from Mr. Lancia – the Smartboard that he won when he was teacher of the year! After being introduced and featured at the Technology Open House in October, the Smartboard has made its way around Congin and has become a very popular tool for student presentations, interactive websites, math and science applets, tracking explorer routes and more! Sarah Bradbury has proven herself to be “technologically fabulous” by finding and sharing Smartboard resources to use with the rest of the staff. Kate Capetta or (Miss Ingenuity as she's known at Congin), created a Jeopardy game using the Smartboard to review information for a test. Cell study really came to life in Gloria Noyes's class when she used the Smartboard too! And speaking of popular items, our new Mimio (makes a whiteboard interactive) has also been making the rounds. A student recently reported that she preferred the Mimio to the Smartboard because, “it was so easy to set up and the record feature is really cool.” Craig Forrest's class the spin on Jerry Spinelli, when his they gathered facts on the author and used the Mimio to manipulate a virtual jigsaw puzzle of the book cover of their current novel!
Blog Mania has taken over Congin, as teachers and students all over the school are participating in and hosting on-line discussions, sharing resources, writing, reading and thinking in blogs. Mr. Lancia's reading blog is practically world famous with an average of 20 hits a day! And guess who's been spoted on Craig Aham's blog - none other than Jan Breton! I wonder who's blog she'll be visiting next?
Congin's top 5 most bloggerific classrooms are:
1. Miss Bradbury's class
2. Mr. Aham's class
3. Miss Doherty's class
4. Mrs. Stultz's class
5. Miss Capetta's class
Sally Chaplin's class has been capturing some great images with the digital microscopes, next they'll be going global with the images when they use their blog to publish their findings. Her gifted math group has created on-line surveys using surveymonkey.com to deliver, collect and disaggregate their data. We're all anxiously awaiting their results as these surveys will provide important information to the physical education department, library, cafeteria, band and technology departments. Their next project involves making a virtual field trip!
It's been busy at Congin! It will be interesting to see what this talented staff of go-getters comes up with for the spring!
