Tool #9

1. Discuss how the screencast could help your students and how you might have students use Jing.

2. Discuss how you might use Skype with your students and share across the district, the state, the nation, or the world!



1. Jing can be used to help students with concepts/subjects that they are struggling with or have missed due to absence (e.g. being sick, Tuesdays when our students go for SPIRAL) by developing videos of the previously taught lessons. These lessons can then be viewed by students who had trouble with the lesson at the time that it was taught originally (takes them longer to process, for example) or for someone who was absent and happened to miss the lesson. With our new netbooks this can be done very easily! As the teacher meets with small groups after teaching the lesson for the day, students are doing their independent work, students who were absent or struggled can go and watch the previous lesson on the netbooks to help them understand!

2. Many of my family members are on skype and it is a great tool to keep people connected. We were able to speak to and see my grandmother in Iran using skype and it was something that I will always cherish. It is very expensive to fly to Iran to visit with family, and skype is a tool that can bring us all closer together without the cost. In our classrooms, we can use skype to view other lessons going on in classrooms within our own school, within other schools in our district, city and even state. Skype can be used to have reading buddies also! It is so hard to fit this into our daily/weekly schedules but with skype and the netbooks in our classrooms I could have my fifth grade students sign up for times that correspond to times another teacher in our school has her younger students sign up for and we can have 5 students from each class communicate with each other via Skype! My students can read to his/her students, without even leaving the classroom and we will be able to fit this into our schedules (just takes a lot of organization and planning!)