Preparing for Tech Camp

This week has been tiring. We have our diocese teacher tech camp next week. It is a wonderful program started last year to introduce the teachers in our diocese to different technology tools and how to integrate them in their classrooms. I am one of the lead teachers and will be helping to present 4 tools. I will be helping with Prezi, VoiceThread, Edmodo and Audacity. I have spent many hours this week preparing and I am beat. I have a habit of putting in far too much time when I prepare a presentation because I am never satisfied with it. At some point you have to stop. For me it is usually when my head hits the keyboard.

My ISTE magazine Learning & Leading came in the mail yesterday. Among the great things in there was an article by Adam Salignam and Leah Armelagos called Conquer the Blank Page in the Classroom. They shared a site called Piclits. This is a web 2.0 tool that gives students prompts for writing. It supplies you with a picture and a word bank to pull in words. The site does, however, require registration to share, save or email.

See the full PicLit at PicLits.com

SmartBoards

The problem I have with the internet is that it feeds your adult ADD. What I mean is that it keeps giving you just one more thing to look at or explore. I am trying to finish up my work for our teacher tech camp next week and somehow I ended up on a SmartBoard blog. This isn't a bad thing because Teachers Love SmartBoards is a great resource for those of us with SmartBoards in our classroom. I spent nearly an hour exploring all the wonderful things here. Lots of links that will have you wandering and experimenting for hours! (like me) So enjoy some smart fun!

Doing this blog thing and an easy to use poll site

I have been thinking about my goals for the coming school year and there are many of them. Perhaps too many. One of my goals after returning from Podstock 2010 in Kansas, was to get on this blog writing ball and keep it rolling. Now that I have started I feel like I am finding some comfort level with writing. I spent a considerable amount of time yesterday locating all of my blog posts from my graduate work and moving them to one blog page. I finished late last night and feel like I accomplished quite a feat. I had these posts in three different places so bringing them all together was a bigger job than I imagined. I couldn't just export and import because they were in these different places. So copy, paste, click click click was what I did. Unfortunately I did not copy them chornologically but they are grouped by the course. I need to go back and put tags though on most of them and it will make it easier to search and find things.

Our teacher tech camp is next week and I need to work on the presentations that I am a part of. Those will be Voicethread, Prezi, Edmodo and Audacity. Shouldn't be too hard. All my favorite things to do. Once I finish these I will put them here for anyone to peruse.

So I was looking for a good link to put up right now and found Flisti. I found this on one of my favorite blogs Free Technology for Teachers by Richard Byrne. Apparently with Flisti you can create a poll without ever registering. Kind of interesting. But one word of caution, a reader of his blog posted a response saying that the ads on the response page seem to be related to the words in the poll so you might need to be careful of what words you choose. Still, it looks pretty cool and is very, very easy to use.

Dogs or Cats?

dogs

cats

or View Results

Create your own poll at Flisti.com

Pick Six

I was reading a new friend's (Tim Holt) Plurk post today which led me to his blog Intended Consequences v 2.0. In it he discusses a story he heard about women choosing only 6 outfits to work with and so on. But the idea was to simplify your choices. So he offered the challenge of what would be the six essential web sites you would use for a week. He extended the challenge to also ask what 2 electronic gadgets would you choose for the week. He made some interesting comments in this post in that there is so many web tools for educators to use that often we are overwhelmed and paralized by the profuse offerings available. I couldn't agree more with this thought. It can become so frustrating when discovering all that is there you tend to feel like the kid at Baskin Robbins that really just wanted chocolate but finds the other 29 flavors equally enticing and what to do?

So given this challenge, what six websites would I have to have for a week? Let me try this:
1. my email
2. plurk or facebook? tough one there...(social networking)
3. It really isn't fair to pick my google reader is it? Although it does streamline my reading. (ed blogs)
4. kxas.com (news)
5.
6.
wow, so I really could live without alot.
Choosing two gadgets, much easier:
1. cell phone
2. laptop
I don't have many gadgets so that narrows my list quickly.
Well it certainly is a lesson in using less. The harder question I would have is as a teacher to select the short list of must have websites to help be more productive in the classroom. So here it it:
1. Edmodo (where my students and I live)
2. Voicethread
3. Podomatic
4. Wikispaces

So how would you answer these questions?

Saturday at the Amon Carter Museum

My husband and I decided to make a visit to the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth, Texas. I don't remember if I have ever been there before and if I was, it was many many years ago. We went with the intent to see a special exhibit they had on Ansel Adams. That was worth the trip itself but this museum also houses an amazing collection of artwork by Frederic Remington and Charles M. Russell.

Among all of this I learned about a style of art called trompe l'oeil. This is French for "deceives the eye". The paintings are created in such a way that they appear three dimensional. Very cool. One of my favorite paintings was by William J. McCloskey titled Wrapped Oranges.

It was a pleasant visit and much to see. The museum website does offer some teaching resources. This museum should be on everyone's must see list when visitng the Fort Worth area. And as a bonus, their admission is FREE!                                                                                                                           

 

Working Late

Ok- So I have this meeting tomorrow to plan and prepare for our Teacher Tech Camp in August. I've come across a very nice site that is related to the 4teachers.org sites. It is called Web Poster Wizard. Simple in design, easy to use and could be a nice tool for lower elementary students. You follow the prompts, fill in the info, add links and a picture and you are done. I really liked this one for the simplicity. Glogster is such a fun filled tool with lots of bells and whistles, but this one is nice and neat. Here is the link to a sample poster I did as my dog. Teachers can set up a class with a code for students to access and then they can manage it from the teachers home page. Pretty cool.nimo

Here is another one. Reminds me of Animoto. This one is called Clipgenerator and here is one I made using pics of my dog.

A New Beginning

Well we shall see. I am making another go at blogging. I've been given a variety of advice on how to keep up with this. So we will see how this goes.

I just returned from Podstock 2010 in Wichita Kansas. I didn't know anything about this until a great friend and mentor (Paul Wood) said to me "you should go". And so I did. First let me explain Podstock. It was a two day technology conference with about 100 people in attendance. I had two goals in attending. One was to pick up some new ideas and tools to use and bring back to share with my colleagues. The other goal was to make some personal connections with people that are passionate about education and using technology to make education better. Did I achieve those goals? Absolutely! The people I met were amazing. Intelligent, giving and truely interested in education. I made some fantastic new friends. I have some exciting plans for the coming school year. It was a great two days. And Wichita was a pretty cool little town also.

So what did I learn? Let's start with Plurk. That was one thing I had to jump into real fast at this conference. Everyone here was on Plurk. Plurk is a social networking site very similar to those you may be familiar with such as Twitter or Facebook. Plurk allows you to have conversations under your posts and the format is more linear. I guess it is alright. I really don't care what social network site I use, I just would like to be able to access it at school. I am guessing that Plurk will work for now. Eventually I am sure it will be blocked. But it would be so nice to throw questions out there when I am stuck. I don't have a nice network in my building of people to talk to so my new Plurk friends would be very helpful.

There were many discussions about tools but a few that I really liked are below:

Lit Tunes

Lit Tunes makes connections between literature and songs. There is a great data base of stories and songs that could be paired with the themes of the book. There are lesson plans and some wonderful links also. This one is worth checking out if you teach literature especially.

Flocabulary Here is another for the language arts teachers. Flocabulary is hip hop in the classroom. This is a commercial product but there are some free teacher things on the site. It might be enough to inspire you or might be just the one thing you need.

So there are my two for the day. I generally only like sites that are totally free but when a site offers free things for teachers I'll give it a point for that one!