What I'm learning

Love my google docs!  I am really hoping the district keeps it open and lets our students use it.  The online storage feature is wonderful- no “which thumb drive iis it on?” or “I started it on a Mac so I can’t finish it at school on the Dell”.  Add to that the ability to have several people working on it and this is an impressive tool.

As for uses, I have uploaded some puzzles I developed so I can access them from anywhere.  I am also working on a collaborative effort to get articles for our tech newsletter done in google docs.  Lastly, I have used the power point tool to wor on a shared presentation that I can then share to others with just viewing privileges.  In the future, this could be a way to make class presentations available to students who missed class.

Playing in the Sandbox wiki
My page is called The Changing Tides to reflect the new technology available and how it is impacting education.  This is my 31st year in the classroom.  Things have changed so much over that time.  Some of you may recall the mimeograph machine and the purple ink that would get all over your hands from making copies.  Now I can have my students take a test using the CPS system and the results immediately come up on my computer screen- unless the technology goes bad.  What could go wrong?  The clicker system could stop working before the students finish.  The new technology is a wonderful thing, when it works, but sometimes, the old fashioned way is more reliable.

I looked at this voicethread with different thoughts in mind this time. Last time I was viewing from the perspective of my learning and trying to relate it to my students. This time in the course our coach has asked me to help out. At the onset of this class, members are stuck in different spots, or those “little” technology glitches pop up. With only one Debbie, there is sometimes a wait for help, that’s where “teach/mentor others” comes in. Sometimes I am able to help colleagues get over a hump and continue on.

I also still believe that “play” is essential to all learning. As students gain confidence in their abilities, they need to be encouraged to play with any problem that comes up.

Wow! What a full 10 weeks.  I know I will be able to use some of my tools ths year- I started voicethread a little bit last year and am working on some new ones for this year.  I am planning to use the presentation I did in google docs for a session my supervisor wants me to do.  My plan is to master a tool, incorporate it, evaluate how it works with my students, and revise what I do.  Then try another tool.  Being aware of and having played with them this summer, if my students ask if they can use it, I will at least know what they are talking about!  I am truly glad to have taken this class!

Google Docs has many positive features and a few negatives; I spent several hours working on some documents of different types- a presentation,  a document to summarize what should be in our wiki, and tweaking some documents I uploaded.  The positives: it functions like most other office suites, so you can function fairly quickly, it doesn’t take up space on your computer, you can insert videos and links in presentations, and the best- it automatically saves frequently.  The negatives: I ran into some errors where I lost some changes to my document, formatting the page to hold charts, etc. took more time than it should have, and there are some types of documents it can’t convert or open.

I will use it for the power of being able to share and have multiple editors not in the same room, but I will be choosy about which things I use it to do since there are somethings I need better control over.

I am always interested to see how other teachers use the available technology in their teaching; Classroom 2.0 is an entire group that shares such information. I was impressed enough to join the site with the hope it will help me to find ways to incorporate what I have learned beyond my own ideas. I may even get bold enough to share my ideas.

The videos showing different uses for twitter were interesting. The concept of every student being able to respond is cool. I may eventually try to incorporate it into my teaching, but right now I want to start slowly- use a new tool until I feel comfortable with using it, then move on to another and so forth.

Playing with podcasting took some time.  As nice as online help is, sometimes I’d rather just have a written manual!

Here’s my nun story:

Podcasting is not one of the tools I will rush to use- I need more practice to become adept with it.  Even with a script, it took several tries to get the version here.