2/20-Reading Response

As I read Dr. November's chapter on expanding relationships, I was pleased to see that many of the teachers in my school and district are on the right track in building and expanding relationships through technology. We are very fortunate to have video conferencing capabilities on each campus and have several teachers that utilize this technology. In the next few weeks we will be connecting with schools around the nation to celebrate Read Across America. Of course there is always room for improvement and part of our technology vision is to have more teachers use this forum to build connections and broaden our learning community. Our greater challenge is to make sure that students are not just passive participants but are learning actively. Each classroom teacher in my district is also required to have a district hosted website to post their lesson plans, schedules and homework assignments. As in any business we have some teachers that post the bare minimum and others that go above and beyond. I love the idea of posting student work through these websites to give affirmation to the student and create more connections with parents.
Romano's chapter on the technology gap in the classroom made me smile. It is wonderful to read someone who sees that there will never be a total education revolution. Educators are not going to give up completely on traditional teaching practices, but they must be persuaded to evolve if we are going to close the gaps in education. The importance of teachers realizing that our students learn differently than they did in the past and then being able to utilize the appropriate technology effectively to reach them is tantamount to that evolution. Hopefully through staff development and in my classroom, I can help facilitate this evolution by sharing tools such as blogging, desktop publishing, critically evaluating websites, and managing the information we find through RSS and del.icio.us.

Desktop Publishing

Desktop publishing is a great way for students and teachers to provide information to their selected audience in an easy and creative way. Teaching students to plan what information they want to convey and then giving them the opportunity to choose from different formats, i.e. poster, newsletter, greeting card, sign, etc... helps students think critically and consider design aspects as well. Students in my technology club are going to be working on print and video public service announcements towards the end of the semester about our school. They will use desktop publishing and word for their print ads. I then hope to use these students as peer tutors for other students and perhaps for their teachers .
I, like most, have used Microsoft Word for basic word processing. It was very enlightening to find out about the tracking capabilities. My daughter is a freshman at Texas State and often sends me papers to critique. I have played around with inserting comments, but she or I knew how to get them off once they were there. She'll be glad to know that she does have the option of accepting or declining my changes. This will also be great to share with language arts teachers to use with their writing students. I'm already planning staff development sessions on all the skills I've learned through this course. I can't wait to learn more!

Cool Tools-Using RSS,Bloglines, and del.icio.us

Wow! How exciting to find all these great ways to organize and keep up to date on information. I know I've spent uncountable time searching through history or unorganized bookmarks. Now I can tag them in del.icio.us and always be able to access them from anywhere. I'm pretty new to the blogging experience, but after attending TCEA and finding out that everybody has a blog(or it seems that way), I was so happy to find that I could not only access blogs about information I'm intereseted in, but now through Bloglines and RSS can save them and be kept up to date on their newest blogs. It was awesome to be able to find presenters and attendees blogs about their TCEA convention experiences and to add them to my bloglines. A recurring theme at the convention was our responsiblity in teaching children how to find and disaggregate information. The cool tools that we learned through the last 2 weeks TSD's are definitley helping us do just that.

Good News to Share

Yesterday I received the great news that the two students whose products I had entered into the Region VIII Student Technology Contest had won 1st and 2nd places in the 3-5 Multimedia category. The students had done PowerPoint presentations over Togo, West Africa and Albania. The students were assigned to find a country that they knew nothing about, research their chosen countries through the internet (citing their sources), and then put the information into a PowerPoint following the contest criteria. They did an awesome job, and now we are making improvements in order to enter them in the state TCEA contest. It's awesome to think that these students were able to learn about places and people that they probably would never have been exposed to without technology, and to be able to present it in a way that was engaging and informative.