Technology Committee Meets

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!

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!

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...

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.

Some Changes...

If you're following my blog, you may have noticed a few changes. The biggest being the name change. When I first started this blog it was for one of my graduate classes. I had to come up with a name pretty quickly and wasn't quite prepared for it. I chose two things close to me and threw the name together. When my parents moved into the first real home I remember, they planted a Dogwood tree in the back yard, as my tree. We've grown together over the years and sadly to say, the tree is now taller than me. (They don't get very big, but I'm not that tall either). There is also a creek that runs behind my parents house and it seems that every where I move, I'm by water. So it was my first attempt at a name for my blog.

Recently, however, I've wondering about the name and decided I needed something more professional and in tune with technology and education. So I played with some words again and came up technication, a hybrid of the words technology and education. I hope you'll enjoy some of the changes and stick with me. I plan to have a rotating picture at the top of the page and I've added a place to subscribe to posts and a blogroll of the blogs I frequently read, straight from my Google reader.

Take care!

Politics, Blogs, and Education?

Another post I've been meaning to write about for several days and just couldn't find the time...

I was surfing channels on my television recently and saw an ad for an upcoming episode of the Chris Mathews Show. In the ad, Chris Mathews is plugging away at a guest whose opinion had to do with the upcoming presidential election and what bloggers have to say about the candidates. What hit me about this ad, is that Mathews berates the guest as to not having credited sources for the topic at hand. The guest attempts to explain that the blogosphere itself and the authors of these blogs is their source, however, Mathews cuts the guest off and I for one was left feeling that we, the audience, are supposed to think these "bloggers" have no idea what they're talking about.

Now why am I blogging about this? Because I feel that bloggers do know what they're talking about and that Mathews is missing a very large picture to our nation's and our world's future. I found this ad to be ironic, especially because both presidential candidates are using the Internet and blogs and youtube in particular, in ways never imaginable before now. A few months ago, two of my friends, who are very strict democrats, showed me how celebrities were supporting Obama on youtube. I had never really done much with it before and was very surprised to see music videos dedicated to his campaign! There was even one that had cut quotes from his speeches and was put to music! I all of sudden realized that this was going to be a very different campaign. But how could I use this? My head started going into overdrive with ideas for work.

On the flip side, before school ended I had discovered McCain's daughter's blog. She wasn't blogging quite the way I've seen typical blogs, and there were more pictures than I was used to, but she was blogging on the campaign trail and spreading the word.

So basically, the idea I'm trying to get at here is...how is the Internet and bloggers, specifically, not effecting this election and why would someone say that what they are saying on the Internet has no credibility outside the Internet? These candidates are smart...they are going straight at my generation and where they are located the most...the Internet.

I do realize that he is also a journalist and that he may think of "sources" in a different way than I am. I graduated with a degree in journalism and a source had to be reliable. I could see where someone posting on the Internet would not always be reliable. We certainly didn't talk about the impact of the Internet on journalism or other topics, because this problem didn't exist six years ago. Yes, six years ago! We're on a different playing ground now, where anyone can be a journalist in a matter of seconds. I get that...but will others miss how blogs are changing things, just as Mathews seems to have?

In terms of education, we need to think about how to prepare our students for these growing changes. Could elections be completely online one day...like testing? Will they only see political ads on the Internet, instead of t.v.? What if you had the power to just skip them, similar to skipping or closing a pop up window on ads now? Would that change outcomes? What about what our students may write about future elections? Will something they say, change the course of the future?

Summer's Over, For Me!

I'm back....I didn't really mean to take the summer off from blogging, but that's just what ended up happening. Most of my summer was spent visiting with family and friends, reading (oh, how I missed you!), doing yard work, bike riding (6 miles daily now!), scrapbooking, and mentoring for the GMU online certificate program. However, I go back to work tomorrow; my first day in Stafford and it's time to get back on the bandwagon of blogging. It'll be nice to get back into a routine and see what new stuff is in store for me this year.

I've already seen the school, been inside, know where the labs are, and seen my office. It's amazing looking inside (brand new) and I can't wait. I'm assuming the next few days will be filled with setting up my office, meeting staff, and getting settled. I'll see if I can post pictures soon too.

One of the ideas I have for this year is to chronicle the year. I want to have pictures from events throughout the year and not only blog about the things that happen, but also have great stuff for my scrapbook. Hopefully, we can use some of it for a great end of the year event or something like that. So let's see if I can do this! My new challenge, I'm sure among others, for the year.