DinoDatabase.com has a great little feature called If Dinosaurs Could Talk. In If Dinosaurs Could Talk you will find twenty audio recordings in which a narrator playing the role of a talking dinosaur shares a little information about that dinosaur.
have students engage in one or both of the following exercises:
Ask students: How are cellphones used, and how can they be used, in our society today?
Engage students in a discussion about your school’s cellphone rules. Ask: What are the rules? What is the reason or philosophy behind them? How do they see students using cellphones in school? If cellphones are banned, how would they like to use cellphones in school? How are the rules enforced?
Finally, ask: Do you think cellphones will continue to be banned in some schools in a year from now? Five years? Ten? Why or why not?
Have students engage in a debate on the pros and cons of using cellphones in school. They should delve into questions of policy, cost, usefulness and innovation along with the potential for mischief, distraction and cheating.
In this lesson, students learn about innovative uses of cellphone technology and applications in the developing world, then explore how their phones can be used as learning tools.
My students learn better when they take the active role in finding and choosing texts, asking their own questions, and creating their own projects. In my 9th grade West Civ class, this means students learn directly from primary sources (see the Internet History Sourcebook, the Perseus Project, the Library of Congress's 'Teaching with Primary Sources' project, and the Internet Archive) without the filter of a textbook middleman.
As for "keeping on the same page"... One of the most exciting things to have come out of the textbookless experience among my West Civ social studies colleagues has been the way in which each of us have the opportunity to share what we know and what we really care about with one another in the active creation of our own courses of study --
able to make appropriate use of Information and
Communication Technologies (ICT) either as a teacher who uses ICT in the classroom,
or as an e-teacher or e-moderator of open and distance learning.
adapt to new educational
changes without compromising the quality of education
Facilitating is providing technical, pedagogical, managerial,
and social activities that maintain sustained and authentic communication between
and among instructors and students.
between an expert and a novice in which the expert
guides the novice by behavioural and cognitive modelling, academic and career
counselling, emotional and scholarly support, advice, professional networking,
and assessment.
Coaching is observing learners' performance and providing
encouragement, diagnosis, directions, feedback, motivational prompts, monitoring
and regulating learner performance, provoking reflection, and perturbing learners'
models.
functions
Technical:
Management Function:
Intellectual Function:
Social Function:
In order to perform these teaching functions, teacher training should focus
on how to develop a series of abilities and strategies
Professional:
e-teacher who plays the role of mentor, coach
(Volman, 2005) and facilitator, (that is the
so called 'e-moderator'
Personal:
advantage
of e-training is that it permits the achievement of really autonomous learning,
for its convenience in time and space.