Give and You Shall Receive

My job as an Educational Technologist has many rewards. First, I get to help teachers learn new ways to integrate technology into their lessons. Almost all are very appreciative that they received help with the technology. It can be confusing. I also get to meet many new people, from different schools and cities. The personal reward that I find beneficial to my role is that not only do I get to share my ideas, but teachers will share theirs. These experiences build my repertoire of tools as I continue to go from school to school. Even questions about how a piece of technology fits into a curricular goal can give me ideas to create new activities in SMART Notebook or other tools. For example, while visiting A.E. Bowers School in Airdrie, Alberta, I not only made new friends with fellow teachers, but a Grade 2 teacher asked me about the hundreds chart in Notebook. She wanted to use it for estimation, but the chart provided in the activity toolkit shows all the numbers, and she wanted them hidden. How can we create a hundreds chart that hides the numbers? Challenge to self. Using a table from Microsoft Word, I created a hundreds chart. I copied and pasted it into a SMART Notebook page. Then I right clicked on each numbered cell and added a screen shade. All of the numbers in the hundreds chart are now hidden. A teacher can ask a student to reveal a number, move in any direction a certain number of spaces, and ask for an estimate of what that number may be. A new idea that is now created and shared. The video below (watch on Youtube for clearer video)shows the process. Teachers need time to collaborate and share their ideas. An idea might not be created right from the start, but through conversation on curriculum and pedagogy, the light bulb might just turn on.