Technology and Its Place in the Classroom

While there are great advantages to using technology in the classroom, there are also many dangers and pitfalls that teachers and students may encounter as they use ICT in their studies and their work. The article by Edward Tufte in Wired 11.09 "PowerPoint is Evil" outlines a lot of these points nicely as well as showing how Stalin might have used this technology. If you plan to use PowerPoint there are some helpful hints from Presentation Zen's Garth Reynold's presentation tips for creating and giving presentations.

Interactive Whiteboards

There is an excellent set of case studies for teachers by teachers using interactive whiteboards and The Handbook for Classroom Instruction that Works (Marzano, 2000) found on the ESD 112 site. These case studies show how a variety of teachers have used the technology to improve student interest and student learning in their classrooms. These teachers are critical and realistic when describing what worked and did not work in terms of the technology and their lesson plans. The implementation plan is based upon the "sustainable classroom model" which includes one computer, one interactive whiteboard, a document camera, and one or two other pieces of hardware.


There are sets of resources and links to resources at the Smartboard site, as well as at the Promethean site and the Eduscape site.

You now have a tablet PC

Welcome to the world of tablet computing.
Here are several programs that you may wish to download as they are specifically designed for tablet use.
-Education pack for tablet pc
-Experience pack for tablet pc
-Xthink calculator

See the screen shot below and note that the blue text is from the calculator as it solves the problem...



Configuring your Start button menu
I have found that it is a good idea to put a shortcut to the "rotation utility" program in the start menu because then you can easily switch between landscape and portrait views.

Using your tablet with a projector
It is best to have the tablet in landscape mode for use with the projector as a lot of space is lost when you keep it in the default portrait mode.

The pen option works well in powerpoint, click on the bottom left set of buttons that appear when you present with powerpoint with a tablet.

Same blog new title

This blog picks up where "school tech ideas" left off. This blog will provide ideas, links to sites and software, and methods for teachers using ICT in their classrooms.

Posts on the old site included:
-Cutting and pasting from PDF documents
-Using Moodle
-Jeopardy! template with PowerPoint
-Streaming video for education
-Blogs and education