Okay, So Twitter Away!

Back in October, I talked about starting up on Twitter. I was really excited to see what this new tech phenomenon was all about. Once on my page though, I kinda of didn't see the whole point. Who would want to read about what I was doing at any given point during the day? I tweeted a few times, but other than that not much; that is until FETC.

What made the difference? Talking with other educators and finding out how they use it. Because I had only subscribed to a few people and them to me, I don't think I was getting the full effect. Friday night at dinner with some other edubloggers (at the edubloggercon meet up at Front Row Friday's), the very first question I was asked was, "What is your Twitter user name?" Technication was how I was introduced. Then we got around to real first names. I was completely taken aback. Was I missing something?

Yes, was the answer, of course. All day Friday, subscribers were posting info about sessions, who was in what session, how their session was going, hoping out of one room to another if they heard another session was better. Now, I don't like skipping out on someone's session, but sometimes you end up in a session that is completely different than the session description, or you hear stuff you already know about. I was excited to see how others were using Twitter during the conference.

Then I received a bunch of recommendations for who I should follow. I went from 3 to I think about 19 and I have a bunch more following me now. And I have a great way to stay in contact with the awesome educators I met. I see how everyone is using it and just the other night, got great ideas from those posting. I found out the YouTube now has a channel with the White House and already four videos have been posted. I also found a great website about the Holocaust that will help out the 8th graders who just finished up "The Diary of Anne Frank". I also found Cool Web Tools for Schools, Using Flip Video in the Classroom, and 28 Interesting Ways to Use a Pocket Video Camera. Most of these came from Angela Maiers, who is constantly posting online resources, I don't know how she has the time to do it! Plus keep her blog up to date! She, along with Steve Dembo (Teach42) and Coolcatteacher, have great ideas to share.

I can strongly say my opinion of Twitter has changed and I will be trying to keep up as much as possible! Here are a few other blog posts you can check out, as well: Twitter and FETC 2009 - a new experience, and Chris Brogan about Twitter from Coolcatteacher
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Just A Test!

I've been having problems getting glogster glogs to embed properly in my blog, so Glogster has been nice enough to go back and forth with me trying to get the problem fixed. Below is just one of things we have tried and they needed to see what it's doing and be able to view it on the internet...so this is just a TEST!

FETC Continued

Friday was another full day at FETC. I started out with "It’s Not the Tools You Have in Your Math Class, But How You Use Them". It wasn't quite the session I thought it would be, but I think I got some good resources. I have to give the presenters credit though. Both were former teachers in New Orleans (pre-Katrina, as they called it) and after the hurricane lost their jobs. Somehow they both ended up with jobs in Canada, but have now come back to New Orleans to work as consultants with their old school district.

They had a lot of math lessons already created on this site: http://mathology.pbwiki.com. I think this will be a good resource.

Then I moved onto "Online Technology Application Can Be Used To Teach Middle School Math" I was expecting a bunch of free websites math teachers could use, but I didn't get that. So I decided to go walk around the exhibit hall. I got some free stuff, but didn't see many tools that I would be interested in finding out more about.

After that I joined other DEN educators for lunch in the DEN room. During lunch we had a presentation by tech4learning.com on one of their new programs called Frames. What a neat little animation program. I think this will come in handy and I will be getting one soon! Then we got a tour of the new Discovery Educator website and the new features. I am thinking of adding blog posts there too...we'll see.

Then I stopped by the Digital Language Arts session and got some great ideas by some Virginia Beach educators. The intelthinking.com website has some great tools, such as the ranking tool. I think this will come in handy with SmartBoards and Airliners. These educators also really like thinkquest.com, a website I used last year with students in a website competition. But there were other features I learned about too, such as the discussion boards. Here is a website that includes their information: www.Digitallanguagearts.net

Then I went to another session that I ended up not being too thrilled about, and on a whim, (I'm going to eat my words here) walked into another SmartBoard session. It was about time as I finally found teachers explaining how they use SmartBoards in their class. THANK YOU! Granted, it was elementary, but I got ideas to use with middle school. Did you know you could animate things in Smart Notebook 10-as in movies? I didn't know the page recorder could do that! And it's so easy! They are going to send me a CD of some of their resources. So that ended a great day at the convention center.

Some time mid-day I was looking at twitter and found out a bunch of edubloggers were going to the restaurant across the street from my hotel. So around 9, I wandered over and got to know some great educators and exchanged info and am excited to see most of them at NECC in June! If you are attending some conferences in the next few months, check out this website and schedule a meet up! http://www.edubloggercon.com

It was a long day, but well worth it. I am almost over with today's sessions and then we get to hear the great Hall Davidson for our closing ceremonies.

Happy Birthday!

No, not me, although I did celebrate my birthday recently, but it is my blog's birthday! Happy Birthday to My Technication! A lot has happened in this past year and it's great that I have been able to share it through such a great medium. I got my master's degree, switched counties and schools, starting looking for a house...so much!

As many know, my blog began as part of my graduate program at George Mason University. As I learned more about blogs and saw how many educators were using it, I started blogging more often that my classes were requiring. I truly became inspired! So I guess it's also fitting that this birthday falls while I am at FETC. I'm being inspired again. Today, I am blogging from a new tool I discovered here...who knew you could blog from your igoogle page? Well, it's there...go into "add stuff" and search for blogger and add it to your page. Great idea! Here's hoping to another great blogging year!

FETC So Far

Yesterday was a busy day and with trying to fight off a sinus infection too I was pretty run down by the end of it. My day started out with the first timer's session and was a great way to get introduced to the conference and what all is available.

Then I moved onto Web Tools to Enhance the Classroom Experience with Jerry Swiatek, Technology Specialist at Citrus HS, in Inverness, FL. Found some great free websites to use, such as dipity.com, a website that you can make timelines out of and add links and http://studio4learning.tv, a website that contains instructional videos on a variety of content areas, especially math. Jerry also created a wiki on pbwiki.com to hold all the websites he talked about at Fetc.pbwiki.com.

I debated for awhile on my next session, but finally decided on a SmartBoard session. I was a little leery on doing this because I have attended sessions with SmartBoards before and it turns out that it's just a selling pitch and I learn little to nothing except how great the salesperson thinks SmartBoards are. Granted, I think they're great too, but I want to know how I and other teachers can use them better in a classroom and not just as a presentation tool. This session promised that teachers were involved (as well as the salesperson) and plenty of examples of how students have used them. So I gave it one more chance. I should have gone to the Google Docs session; later I heard it was great. Why is it that whenever there is a session with SmartBoard at a conference, I never learn anything more about it than what I have already taught myself? I want to see what other teachers are doing with them!

Frustrated, I moved onto Tammy Worcestor's session on her Favorite Tech Tips. Much better! I first heard about Tammy last year at VSTE and heard you don't ever miss her sessions! Very true. Got more great free websites. One of the best websites I heard about was vocaroo.com. It allows you to record your voice and then email it! So, students can practice reading, practice a foreign language, and then email it to their teacher. Great idea! I also liked issuu.com, which creates ebooks for free. Students can upload books, teachers can upload handouts, and then you can turn the pages and also embed in a blog, wiki, etc. Go to www.tammyworcestor.com and select handouts and then FETC, you can get the whole list of websites Tammy talked about.

That was the last session of the day as the opening ceremonies began. Our keynote speaker, Phillipe Costeau talked about his experiences with education and how he has tried to give that back to students. One of his first expeditions at sea, he brought high school juniors with him and shared the experience of the oceans with them. They all want off to college to study something with the environment. After that, I got the great opportunity through the DEN, to go to a reception where I met Mr. Costeau and had my picture taken with him. I also got an autograph! Thank you DEN!



Then a bunch of DEN members were invited out to dinner at Front Row Friday's. Overall a great day!

Today, I'm starting out with "It's Not the Tools You Have In Your Math Class, But How You Use Them".

FETC

I'm off to FETC tomorrow! What's FETC? It stands for the Florida Educational Technology Conference in Orlando, FL-it's the one you don't want to miss, and I'm not! The conference officially kicks off Thursday morning and I already know the first session I'll be attending, the first timers session, of course! From there, I'm not too sure, but I know I want to hit some math and language arts sessions, because those are the areas we want to target at my school this year.

I'll be live blogging when I can and reporting back later when I can't! I will report back on the great exhibit hall demos and the reception with Philippe Cousteau, who is currently the Chief Ocean Correspondent for Animal Planet on Thursday. I was one of the lucky winners to get a ticket to this event!

So keep watching this space for updates!

Video + Math

I recently read an article in the December 2008 issue of THE Journal on the 2008 Teaching Innovators that intrigued me. Ronda Stonecipher, a teacher from Texas has been working with students on videotaping their struggles in concept areas, especially math. It's a very interesting article that you can read at http://www.thejournal.com/articles/23703_3.

Being at a new school, this is something that we could implement now and have for many years as another teaching tool. I'm very excited to see if we could implement this.

Win a Wireless Lab

CDWG and Discovery Education have announced the seventh annual “Win a Wireless Lab” sweepstakes. The program gives K-12 schools the opportunity to win a 21st-century classroom, complete with tablet or notebook computers, wireless cart, interactive whiteboard, student response system, projector, printer and document camera. The 2009 program will award five grand-prize winners. The best part? You can enter once a day until May 1, 2009! Go to http://cdwg.discoveryeducation.com/1208 to enter.

Even if our school isn't selected for one of the grand prizes we could still win a video projector from Epson or NEC Solutions, a notebook computer from Acer or Sony, or a digital camcorder from Canon. Random drawings will take place on Feb. 5th, Mar. 4th, Apr. 4th, and May 6th. You must have entered to win at least once in the preceding month to be chosen from this random selection.

So let's get out there and start entering!

Uglies

I try and keep this blog specifically to technology in education, but everyone once in a while I think it's important to add a little something else. This is one of those times. One of the things I was most happy about this past summer was that I was finally going to get a chance to catch up on my reading. It felt like it had been ages since I got to sit down with a good book. So I was pleasantly surprised when I discovered my school was going to have a book club! I have been enjoying the books so much and have discovered a new found love for adolescent lit. It's funny, because I never really liked it when I was an adolescent. Apparently I was too busy reading older books.

So far in our book club we have read Unwind by Neal Shusterman, Schooled by Gordon Korman, and Uglies by Scott Westerfeld. One of the first things that I noticed with these books is the language. I assumed that some of these books and plots would be a bit too young feeling for more. Wow! Not at all! The content in these books are nothing like I remember. I'm not sure, but I think pre-teens and teenagers are getting more sophiscated in their reading styles then 15 years ago.

While I have enjoyed all the books so far, I don't want to back track, therefore I will comment on the most recent book Uglies. Our club meets this Thursday so this should get my mind running with ideas to comment on.

At first, I thought this book was going to be too much like the first book Unwind. I wasn't too sure about it and didn't immediately like the idea of uglies vs. pretties. One of the repeating thoughts I kept having was how these kids what so badly to look pretty and be popular and can't wait for the impending day when they get their pretty surgery, a rite of passage for all 16 year olds. They couldn't see how beautiful and smart and amazing they already were! But isn't that
so true of all of us? When hasn't one of us thought about looking prettier or wanting to change some part of our being? So this made me relate to the main characters more and understand why their society starting this surgery.

So this made me start thinking about how kids could show what beauty is to them. Two ideas immediately popped into my head, the first using PhotoStory 3 and the second using glogster.com. Using PhotoStory, students could take pictures and words and create a moving definition of beauty. I like this program because you can take still pictures and use the effects to make the pictures feel as if their part of a movie. It's a very quick program too and uses a wizard like quality to guide students through the process of creating their "photo" story. With glogster, you could do something similar just in the form of a digital poster.

Do you have any other ideas? Add your comments in the section below!