District Administration - June 2007 - (Page 62)

CURRICULUM Multimedia Synching teaching and technology yields great results if administrators and teachers are up to the task. BY JENNIFER MACIEJEWSKI Using a unitedstreaming.com clip on the butterﬂy life cycle, third-graders in California create a short movie using iMovie. They learn how to edit, crop, move video clips around, and add sound, titles and music. USING MULTIMEDIA AND OTHER resources to bring books to life and get pupils in any grade excited about reading isn’t a new concept. For years, English and language arts teachers have turned to outside sources to add another dimension to their instruction, from using historical footage to teach students about the Holocaust prior to their reading The Diary of Anne Frank to analyzing the lyrics of modern songs to ﬁnd examples of metaphors and literary allusions. What has changed over time is the method of sharing these resources with the students: Record albums and ﬁlmstrips gave way to cassette and VCR tapes, which have been replaced by CDs and DVDs. Recently, many of those resources have taken on a virtual form. Teachers and students can use technology to access video clips of the Great Depression at the 62 June 2007 beginning of a unit on John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, track down audio snippets of poets reading their works, or engage in an online chat or a virtual conference with an author. Even realtime Web seminars, sometimes hosted by companies, are used in classrooms. Resources in their virtual form are more accessible. Virtual author visits are less cost prohibitive than onsite appearances, since they lack the travel expenses and speaking fees. Even though such resources in their virtual form are more accessible to educators, they’re essentially useless if schools lack the necessary technology to bring those materials into the classroom. But there are signs the digital divide is getting more narrow. In 2005, 94 percent of public school rooms had Internet access, 97 percent of which used broadband connections, according to “Internet Access in U.S. Public Schools and Classrooms: 19942005,” a November 2006 National Center for Educational Statistics report. Plus, the ratio of public school students to an instructional computer with Internet access has improved from 12 in 1998 to nearly 4 in 2005. But while teachers have unprecedented access to technology in the schools, it often sits unused. Although 79 percent of teachers reported that they use technology as a teaching tool for students in CDW-G’s Teachers Talk Tech 2006 survey, only 66 percent indicated they integrate it into their instruction at least two times each week, with a mere 37 percent using it daily. Here is a peek at how to integrate technology into literature instruction that reveals why it’s a best practice and provides examples of classroom applicaDistrict Administration http://unitedstreaming.com

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of District Administration - June 2007

Contents
Editor's Letter
Letters
News Update
Security Update
Technology Update
Curriculum Update
Inside the Law
Admistrator Profile
District Profile
Refreshing the ISTE Technology Standards
Action Teams
RE-Construction
Professional Development for the New Century
Multimedia LIT
New Products
Leadership Books
Problem/Solution
Online Edge
Speaking Out
Supervisor's Opinion
Professional Opinion
Research Corner
Calendar of Events
Understanding the Times

District Administration - June 2007