2012 and History

Happy New Year and welcome to 2012!
Though it may be a bit cliche to write a post on the first day of the new year, I thought it might encourage me to keep at it throughout the year. The coming months look to be very busy. I will attend a Project Based Learning 3 day workshop in Tyler next week. I expect to return with great ideas to write about. February brings two conferences back to back. The Texas Computer Educator Association in Austin followed (during the same week) by the Texas Music Educators Association. They both are chock full of ways to refresh your teaching. And finally March will take me to the Music EdVentures conference in Vancouver. Should be a very interesting start to the year.

I thought about what sort of education link/post I would provide today and I decided to use a bit of history. I have shared this website with my teachers but I don't think anyone has used it yet. If I taught in a regular classroom I would have jumped on this one. The History Chef  is a fabulous website that brings you our American presidents and the foods of their time, particularly focusing on their favorite foods. The author of this site, Suzy Evans, J.D., Ph. D., began this site to encourage parents and their children to cook together and learn about history at the same time. Her stories and recipes are a fun and engaging way to explore our American history. So I encourage you to explore her site and perhaps share some cooking with your students.

April mid month

The end of the school year is looming before me and I am trying to get it all in before I run out of time. It happens every year. You would think after 29 years in teaching that I would get it by now. Which actually brings me to my topic for the day- time.

I've written in papers and posts about the evil enemy of teachers. Time. Every teacher I know works far more hours than anyone would ever guess. They certainly spend far more than the usual 40 hours a week. Teaching is not a 40 hour week job. If they didn't have families they would probably spend 80 hours a week at their job. Some of them nearly do. And so because of this, finding time to try new things is so very difficult.

I've worked with countless teachers to introduce them to amazing technology tools. They are all so excited when they begin but then that tick of the clock gets louder in their heads and they revert back to the tried and true methods in their classrooms. Please don't think I feel that this is wrong. What they have been doing has worked well for them and children learn. I mostly feel sad that they find it time challenging to use something new and to offer their students a new and engaging way to learn.

This is what I hope to do someday. To help teachers create those lessons that use the "cool tools" of the web. Use those Smart Boards, make a podcast, develop a wiki. There is so much that is just too easy but time time time steals away those opportunities.

24 hours in a day? Never enough.

October 2010

I have not been very good at making posts recently. It seems once school starts my life spins on super fast speed. Christmas program is fast approaching, TMEA and TCEA are in February. Catholic Schools week before that and then it will be Young Authors Day, Art Fest and Graduation.

So here is my link for today- just saw this one and think it is valuable. This comes from one of my daily reads Free Technology for Teachers. If you don't already read this blog you definitely need to bookmark it. Richard Byrne offers more ideas and links than you can imagine. Wonderful, wonderful resource for teachers. In a recent post he shares the link to Open Educational Resources. It is "a place for educators to post lessons and lesson materials that others can use. There are thousands of lessons organized by content area and grade level. After you've made your initial selections of content area and grade level you can refine your search by lesson type, material, media format, and usage rights." (Byrne)

As a fine arts teacher, I naturally look at the lessons for that area. It is common for lesson plan sites to not have many fine arts lessons that I find workable. However, at OER I was able to find a number of lessons that really are nice. The ease of search makes OER a new favorite of mine. I highly recommend this site and thank Richard Byrne for sharing this link.

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?