Contact Me





Twitter:  @jpprezz

School:  636.296.8000 x7177

Popular posts from this blog

5 Technology Tips for the Not-so-Tech-Savvy Teacher

Image
The popularity of social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter, coupled with high-tech video games and 21 st century entertainment for our students outside of school is necessitating a change in the way we as educators prepare and present information to our students.  Gone are the days where we can get away with 50 minutes of lecturing.  Our students are watching engaging Youtube videos and reading Facebook statuses to get their information instead of reading magazines and waiting for their favorite shows to come on TV.  Today’s students want their classroom experience to be as engaging as their lives outside of school.  The only problem is that most of us did not grow up in the same technological age as our students.  Integrating technology into your daily plans can be a very daunting task for an educator who is not familiar with Web 2.0 tools.  Here are 5 tips that will help you start using technology in your classes.  1- Get comfortable with one piece of technolo
Read more

Low-tech methods to teach 21st Century Learners

Image
One of my favorite type of activities to do with students in my 9th and 10th grade language arts classes is to incorproate social media into lessons.  I like to have students make Facebook pages for characters in stories, create Twitter feeds for characters and write blog posts that allow them to compare issues in a text with issues that are faced in our society today.  While this all sounds great in practice, I quickly learned that making my dream of seamless socian media integreation  into a reality was a little harder than I thought it would be. To combat the lack of technology and firewall issues that  have stopped me from incorporating Twitter, Facebook and blogging into my classes, I have come up with low-tech paper-and-pencil replacements.  Below are three sample low-tech activities I do with my students in place of their web-based counterparts.  Click on the name of each project to view the handout for each project. R+J 140 http://goo.gl/QJvlS While reading Romeo an
Read more

5 tech tools to increase teacher productivity

Image
Every time I attend a tech conference I always attend a session or two during which the presenter shares his or her favorite tech tools.  As I have been reflecting on #METC13 , I have been thinking about my favorite tools, the ones that make my life as a teacher so much easier.  Here is my list of 5 tech tools to increase teacher productivity. 1.   Dropbox Dropbox is great for me because I am forgetful.  I have forgotten my flash drive in my pants pocket, in my car, in my desk, at home, at Starbucks, well, everywhere.  My trusty flash drive walked out of my life for good at the beginning of last school year.  At that point, I was forced to find a new way to take files from home to work.  Then I met Dropbox.  Dropbox looks and works just like a file folder on a Windows PC.  However, when you save a file to Dropbox it syncs to every device on which you have Dropbox installed. Dropbox gives users 2GB of free storage, but  users can amassup to 16 GB of Dropbox space by completing sim
Read more