Back home

I love to travel and especially learn new things, but it's also nice to be back home. The drive home was rough with the worst fog I have ever seen with almost zero visibility in front of you.

I learned lots of great things about Google Earth such as how to create placemarks, paths, traveling journeys for students, and imbedding icons, descriptions, pictures, and websites. I can't wait to put together a workshop for staff. The presenter was Scott Meisenzahl, a Technology Resource Teacher from Loudoun County. You can find this presentation and others from Loudoun at their It's a jungle out there...get technofied site.

I also learned a few more tricks for podcasts, digital storytelling, and this thing called stop-motion animation or "claymation", which allows students to make models out of clay, take pictures of every movement, and throw the pictures into movie maker or imovie and create a short video. It sounds very similar to what we did in the ITS program during spring 2007 with adding visual effects to our movies. This type of animation can work well with any curriculum, but I liked that it would work with cycles/changes in science and math concepts. Now, that's pretty cool. There are examples of some movies at Tech4learning. The exact web page is www.tech4learning.com/claykits/samples.html. The presenter for this was Michael Butler from Botetourt County. He also did a great presentation on Google Sketchup! and how you can use it in the middle school math classroom. There's a few teachers I can think of to show this to.

I have some pictures from VSTE, as well, and I should be posting those shortly! Have a great week!