My first session of the day on Wednesday was Differentiating NETS*T: Moving Teachers Toward Transformative Technology with Kurt Kohls, Amy Crowley-Gonsoulin, and Aron Sterling from Fairfax County. This was a great presentation and helped me to see some avenues I can use when explaining and implementing the NETS*T with teachers.
The first thing they did was to introduce themselves via a voki avatar. Then they gave us the website they created where we could find more information after the presentation at http://conferenceconnection2009.edublogs.org In the NETS*T there are initially 5 different categories which are further broken down into 4 indicators, those being beginning, developing, proficient, and transformative indicators. They are going to walk us through the stages showing examples for how to implement technology with each category/indicator.
The first category they chose was, "teachers must use their knowledge with use of technology to promote student creativity and learning". The indicator was moving from a beginning stage to a developing stage and the technology tool they chose is one called Blabberize. This website is very easy to use as you select images and animate them in such a way as to make the image talk. The hardest part of this webiste is define where mouth should be. Then record your voice, make sure mouth is moving the way you want, save, and you can create an account to save all of your characters, and then you can share it!
The next category they chose was "Digital Age Learning Experience and Assessment- Creating learning experience for students who is going to be using digital age tools". Indicator level is developing stage to proficient stage. Technology tools to use is combining Blabberize characters into a blog, wiki, (even schoolfusion page) etc. The blogging page they use is Edublogs. This is also a great way to differentiate with different learning styles. They way to incorporate the two is by using the embed code from Blabberize and copy/pasting it into blog, schoolfusion page, etc. Their number one hint: Don’t be scared of the embed code!!!
The next category is addressing diverse needs of students and the indicator is developing stage to proficient stage and the technology tool is a voki, where you can put in pictures of your own for backgrounds and use phone, mic, or text to type to make voices. Here's a great way to use this with Social Studies: Could take picture of politician, president and use it that way!
Later on in the session they continued to share these great tools and ideas for the NETS*T. I definitely enjoyed this session and found it to be very helpful.
The next session I went to was Caravans Around the World with Google Earth which was a model lesson session and I got to play around with Google Earth and create a tour of Spain. It was a great session, because I got to learn more about Google Earth and meet some nice people from Canada and help them out a little as we were all learning. I'll have more on this session later as Google Earth is one of my summer goals to work on.
The last session I attended on Wednesday wasCool Google Tools with Tammy Worcester. Another great session! I am an avid user of all things Google and did already know much about what Worcester presented, but I did learn some new moves too! The first thing I learned is that I can use Email or a mobile phone to send posts to my blog. I kinda of already knew that, but Worcester made is sound so easy! I could also set up an sms service and send text messages from my phone to my blog. Worcester also showed us Google Docs, and in the forms section I got a brillant idea. We could use Google Docs to get information from parents. At the beginning of the year, I could work with teachers/team leaders to create a form and put on their schoolfusion pages and then during back to school night, during a schoolfusion training session, parents put info, and teachers get their information already put into a spreadsheet-with no typing on their behalf!!
Another thing I really liked was Google Alerts, which Wwill email you when something new is indexed on internet and it sends you an email. This is a great idea for parents who want to know if something new is on the internet, most especially your kids name!!
Just put in search terms and how often you want it to be sent to you and you don’t have to have google account to do this!
Wednesday was a great day as far as session went and I thought this was my most productive day at the conference.
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