Tech-minded teachers from across the country are on the Microsoft campus in Redmond this week, sharing some of the new ways they’re incorporating technology into their classrooms. The event is the company’s Partners in Learning U.S. Forum.
See the video above for highlights from my tour of the event earlier today — including teachers incorporating programming, Microsoft Kinect and smartphones into their curriculum. Here are the projects highlighted in the video:
- At Eastlake High School in Sammamish, Wash., teacher Kathy Wright’s students used .Net Gadgeteer modules and wrote a C# program that controls LED lights to help coordinate the flow of traffic leaving the school.
- At Crenshaw High School in South Los Angeles, Daphne Bradford and Jacqueline Lopez use a Kinect game to teach students about the importance of healthy eating to fight obesity and diabetes.
- At Rainier Beach High School in Seattle, teacher Michael Braun has been working with Microsoft employee volunteers (working through the TEALS program) to teach students how to program apps directly on Windows Phones.
“The purpose is to not just showcase their innovative projects but to really share and learn from one another, and celebrate what they have been doing,” said Andrew Ko, general manager of Microsoft’s Partners in Learning program, explaining that the teachers give each other support as they try to push forward with new approaches in their schools.
“In education, many of the challenges are not really about the technology, it’s the culture.”
See a summary of all of the projects here.
