Class 13: Productivity Tools - the last day

By now you are familiar with locating and customizing templates to create newsletters, hall passes, business cards, etc. You have also used PowerPoint to create a seating chart and Excel to create a pictograph and an attendance/grade book record.

Your remaining tasks for the Productivity Tools Project are to create a worksheet and write a reflection on using productivity tools in teaching and learning.

PART ONE: FINDING A WORKSHEET

To find a worksheet to customize, there are two useful websites: Discovery School Teaching Tools and Education World. Another interesting place to find a "worksheet" is at Vicki Blackwell's website. Just make sure that you select a worksheet that can be used for your subject area/grade level. Don't just print out a worksheet that you find - make sure to customize it.

PART TWO: WRITING YOUR REFLECTION

The final portion of your assignment (worth 30% of your grade) is the reflection. Here's an example of what your reflection/webpage should look like.

Here's how you go about doing it:

Go to your portfolio: http://pages.google.com and login. Open the page you created for productivity tools. On this page, include links to each of your productivity tools objects (saved as pdf files - I'll show you how to do this in class today). Give an explanation for each of your artifacts, what you learned in the development of the artifact, and how it could be used in a classroom. You'll also want to include a few screenshots of your different objects (I'll show you how to do this in class on Thursday).

Then, on the same webpage, explain in detail the types of activities students can do using productivity tools. Your discussion and specific descriptions should focus on activities at a LoTi level of 2 or greater. Make sure to publish the page when you are finished.

The easiest way to go about completing this portion of the assignment is to first talk in general about the products you created - what you learned while creating them and how they could be used by a teacher in your subject area. Then, locate 3 or 4 lesson plans that use the productivity tools and discuss them in detail. The focus of this portion of the reflection is on the ways students can use the tools at a LoTi level of 2 or higher.

There are two good places to go to find sample lessons that use productivity tools:

1. Georgia Learning Connections (select your grade level, select "technology integration" for the subject. Select "Lesson Plans" for the resources. Click the "Search QCC" button. Then click the "Productivity" link)

2.Microsoft Lesson Plans

Remember that lower grade levels may use tools like Graph Club (for spreadsheets/graphing) and KidPix (for multimedia presentations) instead of Excel and PowerPoint - but you can use these as examples for your reflection.

Don't forget that all of this goes onto your productivity tools webpage with links to the objects you created.

This assignment is due on Feb 16, which will be next Friday. However, anyone who submit your works on next Monday, Feb 12, will get 3 extra credits. :)

For Friday:
We will talk about Inspiration and Kidspiration.