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!