Reflections in Tech

I've had several Skype/Google Hangout experiences this year and have learned from each session.  However, each session leaves me longing for more, more, more! My first experience with Mystery Skype took place in November with a 6th grade classroom, and a teacher that had urged me to come up with something to get her students excited and engaged.  During our session we had students poring over atlases, writing questions, taking notes about what we'd learned, giggling with excitement, and working together.  That session lasted more than an hour, and was such a learning experience for everyone involved.  The students were able to write reflectively to describe their participation in the session, detailing what when well, what went not so well, and what they'd like to try next time.   I've been able to participate in 2 additional Mystery Skype sessions with the sixth graders at EBMS, and even took a group of students and teachers to NCTies to share their experie...

Mrs. Stamey and Mrs. Robertson at Icard Elementary have been excellent to work with this year! They have been eager and willing when I bring them an idea for an activity. We've muscled through some iffy situations with geocaching... (mowers, weather, and satellites), but we've had great success with both of our "Mystery Skype" sessions.  We met up in the media center, each student had a job, armed with index cards, and iPad, or a map and marker. This was a simplified version of how we participated in the middle school setting. The 3rd graders needed only to find the state of the partner class. Our first attempt went really well in that we asked a difficult question that had to be answered with both a yes and a no, which led us pretty quickly to where they were. Our second session was definitely a learning experience for the young geographers. We were the 7th call of the day for our partner class, and boy did they have their questioning down pat. We took...