Simmons Classroom Blog

This week I am finally going to be replacing the ancient signs that I have hung up in the faculty restrooms at BEMS and BEHS. As a lead in to the new signs, I wanted to pass along more information to get you thinking. Basically, I have a Swivl kit with an iPad available for teachers to borrow from me whenever they'd like to use it. For those of you who are questioning what a Swivl is in the first place, it is basically a robotic base for a mobile device (such as an iPad) that then follows a wireless remote/microphone. There are a plethora of different uses for it. The most popular use based on user studies from Swivl is surrounding observations since it gives the teacher an easy way to record their class to review it later on their own or to send to another faculty member for their feedback. If you would like to be inspired by their other suggested uses, just check out the slideshow that I found from Swivl. I modified the information slide to include my own text instead, but the …

Earlier this week I spent the day with a sixth grade class as they were learning how to use Google's Tour Builder for their geography project. The teacher that invited me in covered the content portion of their project while I helped by instructing the students on how to put their content into Tour Builder itself. It was a really fun collaboration! And, on the occasion that things didn't go as expected, I was able to back the teacher up and answer the students' questions.