Hello and welcome to Middletown chat!
This blog is a creation of Marc Seigel, Regina Schaffer, Katie Katzgrau and Michelle Grezner.
We are Middletown teachers, too.
Marc teaches Science at High School South, Regina teaches Social Studies at Bayshore, Katie is a Fourth grade teacher at Port Monmouth and Michelle is a Third grade teacher at Ocean Ave.
We wanted to create a blog for the teachers of Middletown schools, so that you could find ways to incorporate technology into your classroom. We will share examples of how we use technology in our own rooms. We would really like you to take what we share and use it with your students, in ways that make sense for your class, and then come back to the blog and share it with us and the Middletown community.
We will be writing about 5 different topics over the course of the year.
1. Digital Citizenship: including how to search and verify sources as well as "Digital footprint" issues
2. Learning 24/7: which will cover Edmodo and Moodle and how to use them in conjunction with other tools like Google Docs.
3. Research: this will be more about organizing research using tools like Livebinder and Evernote
4. Collaboration: how to build personal learning networks using Twitter, Skype, and other education communities.
5. Information organization: this will be a focused look at Google apps and how to use them to keep sources, sites and information in an easily accessible location.
Each of our blog posts will focus on a different age group; but most of the ideas we share can be adapted to any classroom. Technology is like Oxygen to today’s youth. By spinning our current learning techniques with digital tools we will hopefully make the material more meaningful. At no time should it feel like one more thing you have to do. Everything presented here is intended to make your job less stressful and get you back to doing more of what brought you to this job in the first place: to teach great kids.
We would like to encourage you to ask questions, either here on the blog or through Twitter to #mtwnchat. Let’s have a great year!
