Billy at LRMS

In starting to plan for next year, I have been thinking about making new goals for myself. As I thought about my goals, I wondered if it wouldbe appropriate to consider a school wide goal, and ask teachers to consider jumping on board and use it as their own. Now remember, this is only a suggestion. Something to think about. But I think we are ready. Here it is:

I think the school should transition to ELECTRONIC PORTFOLIO’S.
NOTESHARE could be the software.
Some of us have gone to conferences and have information on how to do this.
Becoming more familiar with Noteshare would be a priority over the summer and fall.

A template could be provided for students to start with.  This would be like what Kennebec did when they used Noteshare to organize a team project.

Test Podcast

GOOD SITES FOR FINDING GOOD SITES:

This is a great source for many web sites that will help. Most of the links are provided by government agencies. The sites are geared towards providing teachers with a place to review ideas to enhance curriculum.

EDUCATION PODCAST NETWORK

The Education Podcast Network is an effort to bring together into one place, the wide range of podcast programming that may be helpful to teachers looking for content to teach with and about, and to explore issues of teaching and learning in the 21st century.

A TALE OF TWO FISH

A short tale of copyright and fair-use. This is an actual lesson on copyright and fair-use information that is important for students to understand if they are going to publish digital information on the internet.

Web 2.0 effects are going to be that students and teachers are going to be able to become truely collegial.  People are going to be able to share information, ideas and reflections.  You won’t have to be with someone in the same room to learn from them.  You can have information delivered to you, instead of searching for it yourself.

Web 2.0 is changing the face of the Learning environment.  Who, what, where, when, why, and how all in one place. (If you can organize yourself for it)

WHAT WORKED:

The way this course was set up by Alice was really impressive. She integrated, or combined so many learning opportunities together at the same time you can’t help but get a hole lot of information.  Example: While teaching blogs, we didn’t just learn blogs, we used them to research some important information that is important to us if we are going to successfully integrated technology into the school curriculum.

The resources where terrific.

WHAT DIDN’T WORK:

The amount of information was at times overhelming.  Coming to class everyday and not having time to injest the information was difficult at times.  But on the other hand, if we didn’t come in and keep practicing the skills taught, we may have forgotten them, so it was good to come in every day.  Kind of a catch 22.  So I guess I am saying the hard part was taking in all the info, but it really was a great way to do it.

SUGGESTIONS:

Frustrated only during mix ups on how to use a program.

My big concern as a Technical Integrator is providing teachers who are still uncomfortable with teaching technology skills in their classroom the opportunity to see that the benefits of teaching technology far outweighs the downside of losing class time.  Teaching meaningfully is the most important role a teacher has.  Using technology can be an important source of learning with meaning.

So my project will be on creating a Lesson Plan for teaching students how to Blog.

The Lesson plan has to be user friendly, and must incorporate some very important curriculum to be a success.  The curriculum that is incorporated can be left up to the teacher.  But how that specific topic is taught in combination with teaching blogging is a hurdle I feel I need to help the teachers in my school overcome.  When I am finished, I will have a Lesson Plan Template that I can share with the teacher, so that they can fill in the subject area work they wish to teach during this part of their curriculum.

The measure for success, for me, will be that I am able to make 1 teacher from each of the 4 teams in our school feel comfortable enough to use this Lesson Plan in their classroom.  More obviously would be great, but baby steps are important.  Once teachers see the benefits of blogging, more will jump on board.

Timeline:  With computers coming later in the school year, I am expecting to be able to have some time to go to Team meetings and share with the teams what type of services I will provide.  I think blogs should be taught early in the year, so they can be used throughout the school year.  This however, does hinge on when the teacher wants to take advantage of the usefulness blog writing can give in the learning process.  Peer editing;  analysis of writing;  Compare and contrast;  Reflections; etc.

Society has always been worried about how much Media children are exposed to each day.  So it doesn’t surprise me that they are still talking about it now.  The thing is however, there are far more digital media options for young people, so this topic is never going to go away.  I think that since it isn’t going to go away, we should try to take advantage of the positive things that digital media can provide our youth, but also continue to limit digital media exposure so that children can enjoy other formats of entertainment, and information gathering.  Reading continues to be very important skill for entertainment and info gathering.  As with anything, moderation is important.  Parents need to continue to monitor and set guidelines for their children to make sure they are exposed to Multi-medias.

Podcasts are another way for students to show what they are learning.  I can see in a Math class having students writing reflections, which they are asked to do, and then recording those reflections and sharing it with other students in the class, school, on the internet.

Math is a difficult subject to express yourself in the written form.  By giving the students the opportunity to share what they know, may be a very good motivator to encourage them to do their best.  Especially when they know that other people, including their parents, will have access to their reflections and ideas.

If you take into consideration the article “Adopt or Adapt”, this idea is an “Old Thing in a New Way”.  Teaching critical thinking skills through the process of gathering and processing information is not a new concept.  Using the computer and the on line information does, however, give the person reasearching a much larger amount of information to sift through during their decision making process.  It is good to have students use the computer for this purpose because they need to know that not all information coming off the internet is reliable.  And it is a good way to teach collaborative skills.  There is so much information, that is advantagious for more than one student to research a topic in the different areas of the internet, and share what they have learned.

The use of a blog in a classroom has many different and interesting applications, but the one thing that I know I will be using is the instructional process Alice has used in this class.

In teaching the class how to do a blog, she incorporated learning about other aspects of what she was trying to teach us during this class.  We had to read and reflect on computer topics, and it was an easy transition to reflect on a blog.  It was an interesting and useful technique.  Kind of “killing 2 birds with one stone” which teachers are interested in with all the curriculum topics they have to squeeze into a school year.