Inservice, Meetings and getting ready for the First Day!

This was our "official" week back to school. It was a week filled with meetings and pages of information. The best day of the week of course was Monday which was my day. By that I mean, it was my day to present technology to our staff. We had quite a bit to cover and I wanted to show them some cool tools also. We did a quick review of Discovery Education, Thinkfinity and the ever important presentation on Copyright in the Classroom. Besides all of that we were able to do a quick "look-see" at Edmodo, Google Timeline and Wonderwheel, Batchgeo and we ended with Voki, everyone's favorite. I was excited to see many of our teachers want to set up their own wiki space for their classrooms. They are also wanting to use as much technology as they can. Today one of our teachers was working on a bullitin board and created a word cloud. I love seeing their enthusiasm and willingness to learn.

Unfortunately the bulk of the rest of the week was devoted to meetings. Not that they were all that bad, it is just hard to focus when I am thinking of all the unfinished things I have to do before the first day with students. I understand that we must have these meetings prior to the start of school to prepare our teachers for any new requirements within their schools or districts. The problem I see is that teachers do not have enough time to prepare their classrooms (basically redecorating every year) and plan those new and exciting lessons for the first week of school. It seems they must do all of this on their own time. Coming to school a week ahead of the required start or staying long into the evening.

My intent is not to whine and complain. It is the nature of the beast. This is just my observation of many years of first days of school. I also offer no solution since there is not simple way to resolve this. I hope though that administrations recognize this devotion and remember when their staff might make requests.

End of Teacher Tech Camp

This has been a great week. Our teacher students this week were so awesome. They had wonderful ideas on how to use all the new technology tools we introduced them to. One of them, Brian, was immediately embedding widgets and such on his classroom website. It was great to see everyone so excited. Ideas were popping up everywhere!

One of the reasons this week went so well was that our students (the teachers) were all eager to learn. They were excited about something new. This is how we want all of our students to be. It doesn't matter if they are teachers coming to learn new computer skills or young students coming to learn new skills. The instructors were also excited to teach and I know that made the difference in how the week went. Is it that hard for us to bring that excitement into our own classrooms? Now that August is here and we are all heading back to our schools, we need to keep that energy going. You cannot start the year with a ho-hum attitude and expect your students to be happy and ready to learn. I love summer and could live in perpetual summer but I am ready to start the school year. My brain is churning with new ideas and I am looking forward to trying some new things with my classes.

So here are some goals for my year:
1- keep an updated wiki for all the things my students do during the year
2- kind of related to #1 since I will need to keep my students active to have something to put on the wiki!
3- all grades, not just 6-7-8 will do some sort of project with technology- not sure what, yet, but they will!

My favorite tools to use for this year will be VoiceThread, Voki, Wikispaces, Edmodo

Check this out from Larry Ferlazzo: (one of my favorite blogs! This man is awesome!)
“Only Connect” Is A Great Game For The Classroom
Only Connect is a BBC game show that also has an online site.
There are sixteen squares with words on each one. The player needs to use the words to create four categories of four words each. It’s a great game that helps develop the higher-order thinking skill of categorization.
The online game is too difficult for all but advanced English Language Learners, plus you only get three minutes to complete it.
However, the idea is a wonderful one for the English Language Learner classroom (and even mainstream ones, too). Students can create their own, and then can exchange their creations with a classmate, who in turn can try to solve them. All students need is to make sixteen boxes on their paper.

Day One Teacher Tech Camp

Today was the first day of our tech camp in the diocese for the teachers. I think we had almost 50 in attendance. I was part of  the team that presented copyright and Prezi. Copyright is so dry, I really hope I didn't bore anyone too much. Prezi went ok I suppose. It is a fun tool and everyone seemed to enjoy it. In fact, we changed the way we do some things and I think the whole day went  well. I especially like how we let them break into groups and discuss ways to use the tool and then we had a wallwisher for them to post their ideas or questions. Good ideas all around.

Tomorrow we present Edmodo (that's me) and extended uses in Discovery Education. I think that once again it will be a good day. It is so wonderful to see all these teachers who are so eager to learn new things. They are a wonderful group to teach. I would like to believe that there are more teachers out there just like this group. They just have never been given the right opportunity to learn and grow.

Barking Voki Dog

There are too many things I should be doing but I had to make a Voki barking dog. Long story, but he is so cute.

Get a Voki now!