Posted by cindy under
Announcements
Our first annual Summer Tech Institute is over - a week of blogging, podcasting, editing, interviewing, photography, video production, music production, visiting the zoo, creating animations, and sharing the results with a host of visitors on Friday afternoon. We had an energetic and dedicated group of instructors, lots of enthusiastic students, and great dreams. What a wonderful time! Of course, we are all totally exhausted, but it was great.
Posted by cindy under
Announcements
There’s actually a very good reason I haven’t posted anything since May 20. Our Instructional Technology Team has been pedaling like mad to organize our first ever Summer Tech Institute. Seven hundred students from 123 different Memphis City Schools will be attending the week-long institute June 8-12 at two of our school locations. At both the middle school and high school locations, students are divided into 4 tracks, which they will stay with all week, with a culminating project / exhibition on Friday afternoon. The tracks are Animation & Gaming, Blogging, Video / Music Production, and Podcasting / Digital Photography. We are partnering with the Memphis Zoo & Aquarium, so many of our projects will revolve around exotic animals. Some of our students will visit the zoo on a fact-finding / photo-taking / videotaping expedition. They will be interviewing zoo personnel and gathering information for their teammates back at the schools. We’re excited and hope to have a great week! Stay tuned for photos!
Image source: Pete’s PowerPoint Station (art by Phillip Martin)
Posted by cindy under
Uncategorized
Wow! I wish I had read an article like this before my first teaching interview. From The Apple comes a great list of questions that prospective teachers are likely to be asked when applying for a position. Some are philosophical, some more practical. Both beginning and veteran educators can profit from taking the time to look over this material.
Posted by cindy under
Web 2.0
This just in from the VoiceThread team:
“The VoiceThread Digital Library is now open. This new resource is a database of outstanding VoiceThread examples that we hope will guide and inspire other VoiceThreaders to undertake new projects. The intention is not just to ‘favorite’ or ‘tag’ great examples, but to explore and document how these great projects were created and what lessons were learned in the process. Success can be replicated if it’s documented, so we encourage you to share your experiences with the community. As this resource grows we’ll add categories, ratings, and search functions to help you find relevant projects. Thanks in advance for helping us build this resource.”
Posted by cindy under
Music,
SMART Board
I know next to nothing about music, but I found an interesting article while browsing some of my favorite sites. James Hollis of Teachers Love SMART Boards posted SMART Boards and Music to My Ears, listing several sites that may be of interest to teachers of instrumental or vocal music who also have SMART Boards in their classrooms. He also mentions Virtual Keyboard in another post - nice! Thanks, James!
Image credit: Pete’s PowerPoint Station
Posted by cindy under
Google,
Web 2.0,
Wikis
It would be very difficult to do my job efficiently without Wikis and Google Docs. Our Instructional Technology Team does so much collaborative planning; without these tools we would be emailing various versions of documents to each other, making revisions, emailing the documents back, editing again, and so on. What a mess! But with Google Docs and Wikis the whole emailing debacle is avoided. We create and edit our work online, working collaboratively to produce material that is useful to all of us.
In a school setting, Google Docs could be a way to work with colleagues on agendas, lesson plans, presentations, and more - all done online at each person’s convenience. You can find out more about how Google Docs works by clicking here. Sign up for a Gmail account and you’ll have access to Google Docs as well - or you can sign up here.
For larger projects, such as unit plans, a wiki would be the tool of choice. A wiki is basically a website that the users build together, adding and revising content as they go. It can have many pages and as many contributors as you want. I would recommend PBWiki or Wikispaces: each of these has a free version. Watch this video about how a wiki works.
Posted by cindy under
Tips
I ran across a really good article today on The Apple web site (no, not that Apple) entitled 10 Things Teachers Should Never Do. The writer (Jill Hare, Editor) did a great job of expanding on all the points below - it’s worth the read. Just practical things we should all keep in mind as we work in educational settings:
- Don’t try to relive your student days.
- Don’t bad-mouth another school staff member.
- Don’t let loose in a community locale.
- Don’t search for a job while at work.
- Don’t be crass in class, especially at the expense of a student.
- Don’t post questionable items on social networking sites.
- Don’t claim to have all the answers.
- Don’t fail to follow through.
- Don’t give up.
- Don’t stop learning.
Posted by cindy under
Social Bookmarking
For many of you, social bookmarking is a given. You’ve used Delicious for years and can’t live without it. For others, the whole concept is a bit mysterious. Most of us are accustomed to saving our favorite bookmarks on our computer under “Bookmarks” or “Favorites.” The problem with that is twofold: 1) we often don’t take the time to organize our findings and our list becomes practically useless; 2) when we change computers we don’t have access to that list. Although there are some add-ons that can synchronize bookmarks so that you can have access anywhere (XMarks on Firefox, for instance), such a service does not have the power of a social bookmarking tool like Delicious.
Using Delicious, you can easily bookmark any site on the fly, adding keywords (”tags”) to make organizing and finding your favorites a simple task. You can share your bookmarks or keep them private, search sites bookmarked by others, and add other people to your network (those whose bookmarks you like).
A very practical classroom use: An English teacher (with a Delicious account) is teaching a Shakespeare unit. She searches the Internet and locates several sites she wants to share with her students. As she finds each site she tags it with the word “Shakespeare.” Once her searching is complete, she goes to her personal Delicious page and clicks on the tag “Shakespeare” in her sidebar. All of the sites tagged with that word then pop up on the screen. She gives that one URL to her students and they have immediate access to the sites she wishes them to see. They don’t need Delicious accounts; they only need the URL. Pretty cool, I’d say.
Delicious has made keeping up with my “finds” so much more manageable and allowed me to delete almost all of that unwieldy list from my computer. My Delicious bookmarks can be found here.
Posted by cindy under
Web 2.0
Kathy Schrock has compiled a wonderful list of Web 2.0 tools that you’ll definitely enjoy checking out. Anyone who is in education field has benefited from Kathy’s work through the years; she always has great resources to share. I may have mentioned another Web 2.0 list in the past; if you haven’t taken a look at it, click here.
Image Source: Kathy Schrock’s Diigo site
