Suzanne's Ed Tech Reflections

Leaving tomorrow morning for Philadelphia to attend the annual International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) conference. We will be doing a two hour poster presentation on Tuesday about the iAchieve grant project. We've been busily working this week to put everything together; creating our poster, developing a handout, finalizing our video presentation. Wow, there has been lots to do. And now the packing! Our poster space is rather large so we asked Antonio, the district's graphic designer, to create a title for our poster. We gave him a very basic design but of course, in true Antonio style, he went above and beyond! The best part is the giant iPod/iPhone he created with the logo for each school as an App! Can't wait to tell you all about our trip and the things we learn.

It was exactly one year ago today that we completed our first iPod training with the iAchieve project teachers. We started the year with 20 teachers and grew to 24 as schools added additional PowerSync carts and iPods. During our first training, the teachers unpacked each of their iPods, numbered them and the slots in the carts, synced them to the laptops, and set some very basic restrictions for the students. Since many of them had never even held an iPod touch before, they had the opportunity for some hands on learning and practice with various apps and procedures. A couple of weeks into school we introduced the iPods to the students. They of course took to them immediately, often showing their teachers how to use certain apps or perform a specific task. It was the students teaching the teachers! We have grown so much this year. We started out with a good assortment of apps to use with our students but have added to the list throughout the year as we found resources that ali...

I recently came across this very simple online test generator called Testmoz ( http://testmoz.com/ ). It allows you to create online tests in four different formats: multiple choice, true/false, yes/no, and fill-in-the-blank. It also scores the tests and provides detailed test reports online that can be downloaded in a CSV file. It does not require you or your students to create an account. You simply create a password for the test so you can access the results, adjust some settings such as the question type(s), enter your questions, answer options, and mark the correct answer choice. You can password protect the test so only your students can take it if you wish. Then you publish the test and get a specific URL for your test. Have students take the test and get your results. There are two things you will need to remember: the password you created for the test and the test URL. Each test you create has a different URL. If you forget either piece of information, they cannot be r...