Spring Break and Unplugged

Daylight savings, Spring Break, first day of Spring all in one week and I totally took the week off. My computer use was limited to play time only! It felt good and relaxing but I now feel the pressure to hop back on the proverbial horse and ride again. I don't have any links to offer today but I will later in the week. I did no web tutorials, no conferences, no Skype. I admit I did a bit of Facebook but nothing professional.

But Monday looms and it will be a quick blink of the eye and May will be here. Enjoying the last beautiful day of my break and then off we go!

Where did February go? and a Collaborative Adventure

Well I admit I have been a bit behind in my blog postings. I suppose though that having only 28 days in February is not a good excuse? It was certainly a busy, busy month. I attended two conferences in one week. We missed nearly a week of school because of snow and ice. February disappeared rather quickly.

So to update my world here, I want to share an experience I had during my days off school from the weather first. It was an amazing example of true collaboration.

The day began with a phone call and text messages from school telling me what I already knew, that school would be closed. Sitting down with a cup of coffee, I logged on to my laptop and took at look at the postings on Facebook. One of the postings was from Discovery Education about live streaming from the the Florida Technology pre-Conference event. Hall Davidson was speaking so I jumped on over to LiveStream and logged in to view. I only caught the end of his talk and then Kathy Schorck was speaking. At a point during her talk she gave the people attending an assignment. Divided into groups, they were given the rest of the day to create a presentation of some sort with a science focus.

This is where the fun began.

There were about 12-15 of us logged in at LiveStream and a constant back channel was happening with conversations ranging from the topic, to links, to the weather which was keeping many of us at home. I am not sure who suggested it, but someone said "Let's be a virtual table and do a project also." And we were off!

Each of us collected a picture of what was outside our door, the weather report for our area. A google form was created where we entered information. We then created a google presentation where we inserted our pictures and weather information. We also had a tag in flicker to upload our pictures to also. We found lessons and activities from different sources about weather and included them on the end slides of the presentation. It was a wonderful collaborative presentation.

At the end of the pre-con event, all of the "live" tables presented their projects. I am not sure who presented ours, but someone shared it at the event. I must say the room was quite surprised that people who were not even there were able to participate in the activity. It was quite awesome!

I was so excited after this. It really represented what can be done collaboratively using web tools with people from all over the United States. I am thrilled that I was able to be a part of this true collaborative effort.

Kahn Academy

Whenever I see sites that offer fun, interactive ways to enhance learning subjects that I found difficult in school I get very excited. I wish there had been things like this when I was going to school. I might have become something different had I actually understood math!

I learned about this site from one of my favorite bloggers, Richard Byrne, on his Free Technology for Teachers site. I am always thankful for people like him who find or remind us of these wonderful resources.

The Khan Academy offers videos and lessons online and apparently now they have a mobile app that gives you the same access to the material. I took a quick look at the list of topics and was amazed at the areas covered. If you want to play the videos directly from the site, the only issue I see is that the videos are from YouTube which is possibly blocked at your school. So what to do? First, ask the tech manager of your building to unblock only the teacher station. If that isn't possible, you can also download individual videos as flv files (flash video). You will need a flash video player although the latest version of WMP should play your flv files. Alternately, there is an offline capable version available. See this link for instructions. You can also access most of the videos through iTunes U. This link will take you to a sample in the Algebra videos on iTunes.

This site is definitely worth the time and effort to use.

2011 Beginning Again

I really did try to get a post in before 2010 came to a close but I swore off the computer during my Christmas break from school. It was hard and I admit to hopping on Facebook and posting here and there but remember those don't really count as notable postings.

I have been hard at work updating my resume and thinking about the future of my career. What direction I should head, how to know what is the best direction and so on. So here it is January 2, 2011 and I knew I had to sneak back into this digital world and get moving again. As I was looking over my Google Reader, one of my favorite blogs (Larry Ferlazzo - I don't know how he has the time but I thank him everyday for his work here) was a posting about the demise of the social bookmarking site Delicious. I am naturally upset about Delicious shutting down and thinking "how could they?" when I use it extensively and can't imagine my digital life without it. But like most things in this digital world, things change and they change rapidly. So moving on we go and I now will give a second look back at Diigo. It was not my first choice for bookmarking, it seemed more complicated than Delicious, but it really doesn't matter now, does it? Larry Ferlazzo has a post on The Best Sites For Figuring Out What To Do If Delicious Shuts Down . I will have to make a choice in this book marking dilemma and change my links.

The Year of Change? It looks like there may be many transformations coming up this year. I will do my best to "keep you posted"!