Thinking of choosing this Winterim?

Advisory:

Students need to be comfortable using a computer and will need a personal e-mail account in order to join or create various online accounts. Do not sign up for this expecting to play online computer games, learn HTML, or write programs using HTML, JavaScript, and etc. Do sign up for this to learn about using social media tools (a.k.a. internet technologies) for writing/reporting, creating visual/virtual media and collaborating.

Students will work collaboratively to design and upkeep Lawrence Academy’s first Winterim homepage blog. Students will write and post short articles about on/near campus Winterim projects. If possible, information and visuals about off-campus projects will also be featured. Students will take and upload photos/video of projects/activities, embed slideshows created by Animoto, create an embedded virtual Gmap of all Winterims, and place links to other Winterim blogs /websites on the site. A wiki will be used to track our work, Picasa or Flickr to save our photos, and a private blog to journal/reflect about our process through the comment feature. Students will also use Delicious, a social bookmarking site to save and tag the sites visited. This will be a paper free course, as Google Docs, Google Reader, Google Calendar and other sites will be used to help students collaborate on their work together. If any of the bolded terms seem interesting or new, then consider “surfing the web”, “joining the cloud”, or “publishing yourself” during this Winterim.

Students will learn how to write effective news articles, take captivating photos, use the internet as a resource, and use specific sites as tools for creating visual and digital media. In addition to learning about the appropriate use of the internet and how to stay safe while online, the group may visit a school and/or business currently integrating or utilizing similar social media tools.

This course will be lead by certified teacher and LA faculty member, Kimberly Poulin. She has 15 years of experience teaching high school students and has taught similar workshops to middle school students. Other presenters may include her former colleagues from New Hampton School who are currently technology educators or directors.