Today was the first meeting of my school's Technology Committee (and my first technology committee ever!), so I was a little excited and a little nervous all at the same time. The meeting went so well! I am very impressed with our members and am very excited about all of the ideas we came up with. I think it's going to be a fantastic year!
I started out with making sure we had representatives for each grade level and setting the goals up for the group. We decided that we will meet once a month face-to-face and then set up a page on our website where members could check in and post messages online, checking that once a week. So guess what's on my to do list tomorrow? Making sure that page happens! Note to self: talk with our wonderful librarian and webmaster on that!
My goals for the committee this year are this: 1) Make sure we talk about constructive technology uses, 2) keep the members up to date with technology and software, 3) Talk about mentoring programs, where more technology savvy teachers can work with not so technology savvy teachers (spreading around our knowledge and expertise), 4) work on writing grants, and 5) coming up with building technology initiatives. My 9 member team came up with amazing ideas as I talked about these. They added in modeling units and sharing professional development responsibilities, where they can present some of the technology to their teams and grade levels. I couldn't be happier with this idea. They also suggested that we come up with a list of expert areas and each member can be the "expert" for that area. For example, one of the seventh grade teachers has done a lot with the quizdom remotes, so they would be able to help show other teachers and answer questions.
We also decided as a group that our goal for this year will be to make sure that every teacher in our building uses technology at least once. That's every teacher using technology at least once this school year. With all of the new technology in my building this should not be a hard task to accomplish, but it might take some effort on everyone's part.
I think the part I am most excited about is that everyone wants to meet virtually so often! We may not meet together online at precisely the same time, but we can still be passing around ideas and collaborating to make a good technology environment and help everyone. We are definitely off to a good start!
Thursday, September 25, 2008
Tuesday, September 23, 2008
DE Streamathon
Today, I had the unique experience of listening in on the Discovery Education Streamathon, a day filled with professional development and training sessions for using DE streaming (formally unitedstreaming, which I still refer to it as). I multi-tasked throughout the day, as I worked on finishing to put together the Smart Airliners my school bought and working on a few other projects, like my newsletter due tomorrow-(one more article to find) and listened in on the sessions.
The best one of the day by far, was presented by Steve Dembo, who talked about using DE streaming with web 2.0 tools. I got lots of great ideas and wanted to share those with you.
The first tool Steve talked about was Speechable.com. With this website, you can grab pictures out of unitedstreaming, upload them to the website and choose different speech bubbles to add to your picture. Once you've got your bubbles in the picture, you can save it as an image file (.jpeg) and use it anywhere...blog, PowerPoint, Word, etc. I thought this could be good to use with Social Studies. Take a picture of some event in history and add facts to it. Steve mentioned another great use about unitedstreaming...the pictures can be republished...no need to worry about copyright! :)
Next up is www.bighugelabs.com-what a cool site! There are so many things you can do with pictures here. Create historical trading cards (also great idea for study guides), motivational posters, like the ones from Franklin Covey. You can also choose several features, such as photo wall, billboard maker, pocket album. As I learn more about this site, I will come up with ideas for these features. I think this was the best tool featured!
Jump Cut was next. This is basically an online version of MovieMaker or iMovie, the benefit being that students can continue to work on their videos/movies after class time. I also liked that you can record audio in audacity and incorporate it into this too!
Cueprompter.com is awesome! I need to share this with my librarian, if she doesn't read it here first, but this website allows you to copy and paste text and then change the font size and then have it appear on the computer screen as if it's a teleprompter! What a great thing for morning announcements!
MovieMasher.com was next, but I feel like it might be something to Jump Cut. Some other websites suggested was onetruemedia.com and fixmymovie.com.
The last website I was able to see was glogster.com. Another great site! This one creates digital posters! Pictures can be enlarged when rolled over on by the mouse, facts can added, as well as, links and embedded videos. Saved posters can be used on blogs and wikis. Some examples shared were: thescientificshamrock.wikispaces.com, environmentalheroes.pbwiki.com/Jane+Goodall+per+1, and ktitraci.glogster.com/election.
So much to look at, but good ideas all!
The best one of the day by far, was presented by Steve Dembo, who talked about using DE streaming with web 2.0 tools. I got lots of great ideas and wanted to share those with you.
The first tool Steve talked about was Speechable.com. With this website, you can grab pictures out of unitedstreaming, upload them to the website and choose different speech bubbles to add to your picture. Once you've got your bubbles in the picture, you can save it as an image file (.jpeg) and use it anywhere...blog, PowerPoint, Word, etc. I thought this could be good to use with Social Studies. Take a picture of some event in history and add facts to it. Steve mentioned another great use about unitedstreaming...the pictures can be republished...no need to worry about copyright! :)
Next up is www.bighugelabs.com-what a cool site! There are so many things you can do with pictures here. Create historical trading cards (also great idea for study guides), motivational posters, like the ones from Franklin Covey. You can also choose several features, such as photo wall, billboard maker, pocket album. As I learn more about this site, I will come up with ideas for these features. I think this was the best tool featured!
Jump Cut was next. This is basically an online version of MovieMaker or iMovie, the benefit being that students can continue to work on their videos/movies after class time. I also liked that you can record audio in audacity and incorporate it into this too!
Cueprompter.com is awesome! I need to share this with my librarian, if she doesn't read it here first, but this website allows you to copy and paste text and then change the font size and then have it appear on the computer screen as if it's a teleprompter! What a great thing for morning announcements!
MovieMasher.com was next, but I feel like it might be something to Jump Cut. Some other websites suggested was onetruemedia.com and fixmymovie.com.
The last website I was able to see was glogster.com. Another great site! This one creates digital posters! Pictures can be enlarged when rolled over on by the mouse, facts can added, as well as, links and embedded videos. Saved posters can be used on blogs and wikis. Some examples shared were: thescientificshamrock.wikispaces.com, environmentalheroes.pbwiki.com/Jane+Goodall+per+1, and ktitraci.glogster.com/election.
So much to look at, but good ideas all!
Friday, September 19, 2008
Technology Poems
Check this out! Over at Dangerously Irrelevant, Scott McLeod, created a technology poem contest. He just announced the winners and there are great poems! I'm sending you to the original posting so you can look at all the entries. Go down to the comments section and you'll see them. I think my favorite one is the one with the Beatles, "Let It Be". I also liked "Digging Out of the Digital World". Good stuff! I hear a lesson in here somewhere...
Thursday, September 18, 2008
Comic Life
I'm really getting into the swing of things now, so much so, I barely have time to update my blog. I have lots of stuff to add, but little time to do it. I will hopefully be posting more soon!
Today, I started a professional development session on a program called Comic Life. I have heard amazing things about this program and am glad I get the opportunity to get training on it before our mac carts arrive. I also really like the way my new county sets up PD. They use a website called mylearningplan.com and anyone doing PD can offer their classes/sessions on the site. I also get daily emails with new sessions being offered and reminders for upcoming sessions. It keeps a record of everything I have signed up for.
So I saw the Comic Life training being offered by two of my fellow TRT's and jumped at the chance to learn more. Many teachers have already asked if my school is purchasing it, which we are. So this will have me prepared before I go trudging in.
At today's session we learned about the set up of course, which partly will be done using Moodle; something else I have never used before. So lots of learning going on! I think I will like it-I will keep the blog updated with my experiences using it. Comic Life itself is really cool, at least the Mac version is. They've recently come out with a windows version too. You get to pick out templates for your pages, import pictures, play around with background colors, framing, adding panels, twisting and morphing pictures, frames, and adding in two pictures to one panel, add narration and word bubbles, and more. I also learned how to take my picture using the mac with iphoto and dragging the image straight to my pages. You can also take the photos you import and make them look more "comic like" by changing their styles and morphing them into a colored pencil look, a 70's newspaper look, or neon!
In our next face to face session on October 2nd, we will be learning more about creating lessons using Comic Life. My homework....I thought I was done with homework after grad school :) is to research some of the websites the trainers have found and look at different lessons already created. It's due Tuesday, so I'll let you know what I find.
Today, I started a professional development session on a program called Comic Life. I have heard amazing things about this program and am glad I get the opportunity to get training on it before our mac carts arrive. I also really like the way my new county sets up PD. They use a website called mylearningplan.com and anyone doing PD can offer their classes/sessions on the site. I also get daily emails with new sessions being offered and reminders for upcoming sessions. It keeps a record of everything I have signed up for.
So I saw the Comic Life training being offered by two of my fellow TRT's and jumped at the chance to learn more. Many teachers have already asked if my school is purchasing it, which we are. So this will have me prepared before I go trudging in.
At today's session we learned about the set up of course, which partly will be done using Moodle; something else I have never used before. So lots of learning going on! I think I will like it-I will keep the blog updated with my experiences using it. Comic Life itself is really cool, at least the Mac version is. They've recently come out with a windows version too. You get to pick out templates for your pages, import pictures, play around with background colors, framing, adding panels, twisting and morphing pictures, frames, and adding in two pictures to one panel, add narration and word bubbles, and more. I also learned how to take my picture using the mac with iphoto and dragging the image straight to my pages. You can also take the photos you import and make them look more "comic like" by changing their styles and morphing them into a colored pencil look, a 70's newspaper look, or neon!
In our next face to face session on October 2nd, we will be learning more about creating lessons using Comic Life. My homework....I thought I was done with homework after grad school :) is to research some of the websites the trainers have found and look at different lessons already created. It's due Tuesday, so I'll let you know what I find.
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