Mimio: Technology That Tunes Students into Learning
Candice McDevitt MACUL Grant Recipient
Reenergize your classroom today. It’s simple, easy, inexpensive, and anyone can do it! Do yourself and your students a favor – join the age of “connectivity”. Purchase a Mimio Xi Bar and get “connected” in your classroom so that you can stay “connected” with your students who text, Tweet, and traverse the Internet on a daily basis. Although it is impossible to compete with the technology available to students, the Mimio allows a teacher to inexpensively enhance classroom instruction while engaging and motivating today’s tech savvy students in the learning process.
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The Mimio is affordable and easy to use. It is also portable and easy to hook up. It turned my plain whiteboard into an interactive, digital capture whiteboard in minutes. In fact, as soon as I had the Mimio out of the box, plugged in, and loaded on the computer, I was able to do simple applications. My students were also immediately drawn to the Mimio and were promptly able to use the stylus to complete applications with ease.
Although I rapidly became adept with the basic functions of the Mimio, I wanted additional skills, so I went to MimioConnect. com, which offers free tutorials at various levels of competency. These tutorials are engaging and easy to follow. This website also offers a variety of support and applications at all grade levels, which are free to download. One of my favorites is the stopwatch. I like to use this because the students can see the time on the screen and know how much time they have left to work on as assignment. This is only one of the many different applications and lessons to choose from on
MimioConnect.com, and a multitude of others can be found on the Internet.
You’re probably wondering how you might use a Mimio in your classroom. Well, the possibilities are endless. I use it to show my students the daily lesson plans and the Michigan High School Content Expectations (HSCE’s) and objectives. I also start each class with a “bellringer” or warm up to be completed on the Mimio. (If you have multiple sections of the same class in one day or through out the same school year, save the lesson and use it again.) After the class begins, I use the Mimio in a variety of ways depending on the class. I create lessons that focus on writing, grammar, reading, poetry (See Picture 1), analysis, etc. In Economics, I use it to create lessons with graphs, charts, math, and lists. Sometimes, I have clips from an Internet site or a book that I insert in a file that we are going to work with for part of the hour. My colleague, who teaches science, uses the Internet on a daily basis to show material related to the weather, volcanic activity, etc. By using the Mimio, he is able to allow students to
Spring/Summer 2011 | MACULJOURNAL
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