Learning, Teaching & Technology

A Labor Day note on a glorious, sunny 80+ degree day on the coast of Maine. The rhythm of the year has already gone to a much faster pace as teachers returned last week. We buffer the beginning by having a short week then a four day weekend before the students return. After working on my own for much of the summer I know that the great thing about having the teachers and students return is that my work becomes immediate and responsive instead of the list that goes on and on of what I could do.

What will be the focus of my time this year? As the integrator, facilitator, coach and instigator of all that might be connected with computer technology it is always a challenge to sort the priorities when the rush of the year begins.

Goals:

1. To use this blog as my professional reflection portfolio as a part of my professional growth process and to connect to the disparate areas of my teaching and collaborating.

2. To initiate web2.0 tools in a few classrooms and teams as exciting ways for students to share their work and collaborate with other K-4 classrooms.

3. To keep the focus on teachers as the ones who make it happen for students.

4. To work closely with my K-12 team of integrators as they are each dynamic contributors to our work.

I’m back from a few days ‘away’ and I have quite a stack of backlog in twitters and blogs. I had just been puzzling how to get some movies back off of DVDs we’d made to store them when allanahk listed handbrake as just the tool to do that. My blueweb’n update led me to new Yahoo tools so I setup jumpcut. Next I need to try animoto and the potential of the privacy options of vimeo. Teachers in my USM course this summer loved voicethread; it’s easy to learn to use and has many applications for the primary grades and ELL students as well as older students. The whole realm of digital storytelling is opening up more and more for access by students. The task ahead for me is to figure out the logistics of student logins, shared accounts, etc. so that elementary age students who don’t have email accounts can be as independent as possible.

I figured out how to add the code to my FirstClass Educational Resources pages so that will be a great tool this year. For example for a particular Science or Social Studies unit of study I can teach students to search within a pre-selected set of sites.