SMART Response

Last week I used SMART Response (the VE-version in Notebook 14) in my SMART Collaborative Classroom during geography class. Students needed to learn how to work with climate charts and had to look them up in the atlas and answer some questions. I used one of the SMART Boards for the instruction and after the instruction I shared a few Response questions: single questions and not a question set. Here's what happened:

After the first question, I could see that hardly anyone had understand anything of it and couldn't tell anything from the climate charts in the atlas being used. And at that point they really wanted to know what they've done wrong. This continued until question nr. 3 which had a percentage of more than 80%. They were really getting it and of course they scored all 100% on the final question.
It was really nice to see that after a little failure, they wanted to learn themselves and were eager to check their answers with me each time in order to have a good score on the next question (and for me to know that they finally understood how to work with climate charts). Mission accomplished.

Global SMARTamp collaboration project

After the spring break my students will start collaborating with classes from the US. The topic of this geography semester is the United States of America and I've asked in the Global Collaboration Google+ group if teachers, classes and students from the US felt like collaborating. SMARTamp will be the platform to be used by the groups of students.

My class of 27 students will be divided in 9 smaller groups of three and each group will have their own workspace within SMARTamp and each school from the US will have access to one of the workspaces in order to collaborate and work with my students in order to gain information about school, climate, landscape, culture (art, sports etc.) and daily life.

I will need to create guest accounts within my Google domain, so classes from abroad can join in on the workspaces and collaborate with my students, regardless of the time differences, and learn from and with each other. I have done it a few times before with students from the Czech Republic and will start a grant project within two weeks, where 9(!) classes from different places in the US can join in on the workspaces from our my students in the Netherlands. They will need to share information, experiences, pictures etc. and in that way learn from each other and the extra for my students is that their English will be improved. ;)

At this moment we are going to collaborate with classes from:

• Escondido, CA
• Hughson, CA
• Orland Park, IL
• Plantation, FL
• Pittsburgh, PA
• Kandiyohi, MN
• San Antonio, TX
• Lexington, KY
• Green Bay, WI

How awesome is that! Will share more of our experience within two weeks.