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| You say you want a revolution... |
| 07.31.04 (5:50 pm) [edit] |
Well, the Teach the Teachers Collaborative at Thacher School is over and I’m at home recovering from brain overload and pain from prolonged sitting. The experience was awesome but really, what is up with having 100 teachers sit day and night with their laptops on plastic folding chairs!?! Why, the even offered a “Healthy Computing” workshop but had to cancel it because no one signed up! Gee, I wonder why… All that aside, it really was an awesome experience.
The blogging workshops went great. Everybody enjoyed it and two of our Harrison Bloggers Network teachers attended so they helped others when they got stuck. Two teachers loved blogging so much that they got their blogs up and running and then spent hours writing up a $5,000 CTAP mini-grant asking for computers, digital cameras, and scanners so that students can blog and post their work! And, two teachers from my school (one kinder and one 8th grade) felt the same way so the three of us got together and applied for the same grant, which was due Friday at 2pm (both grants made the deadline!) We requested LCD projectors, digital cameras, and microphones.
Our grant project, which we titled “Bridges to Learning” Digital Narratives and Blogging,” involves a kinder classroom and 8th grade classroom creating digital narratives using iMovie which will include student chosen/created digital images, student created soundtracks, and student created voiceovers that narrate the stories. 8th grade students, most of which were English learners, will mentor kinder students, most of which are English learners. Both classrooms will share the process using a project blog!
I’ll share more about the experience after I’ve recuperated more, so for now, I leave you with this:
For the most awesome thing we learned at Thacher! view the 30 second video—it will start a revolution!!!! Click here for video
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| Thacher: learning, collaborating, and blogging |
| 07.28.04 (12:58 pm) [edit] |
Wow, Thacher has been great so far! I'm here with our school principal, our coordinator, a kinder teacher, RSP teacher, 5th grade teacher, 6 grade science teacher, and 8th grade language teacher, all from our PreK-8th grade span school! We've all been working on creating technology lessons which we will go back and teach, assess, and then present to the district in November.
I'm working on digital narratives, something I'm trying out as a result of blogging. I followed the link on one of Will's posts to Hector Villa's blogmediainquiry. which led me to many digital storytelling sites like this one: MediaThatMatters. I emailed Hector to ask some questions, and received immeidate feedback from him and his partner, Barbara, offering online support and collaboration! Here's her blog: bgblogging. As I keep saying over and over, this is what I love about blogging--collaboration and community!!!
I'm scheduled to do a blogging workshop tomorrow but ended up doing a workshop yesterday, on the fly. It was great--so much fun that the group asked me to meet with them tomorrow before dinner for another workshop, to take them further! We started blogs here at tblog (tabulas was down) and we did bloglines. Here are links to some of their blogs:
DinoBloggin
coordinator2
MMM...MMM...Math
My Weblog
As you can see, we got off to a great start with only an hour and a half! And the best thing--everyone wants to meet again tomorrow to go further! I'll post the links to the rest of the blogs after tomorrow's session.
There were several workshops on dreamweaver and the comments were that, although dreamweaver is wonderful and very powerful, blogs are THE thing because you can easily create a web presence. I'm getting so many questions from people who are really interested in blogging for that reason! NEVER would I have thought of comparing dreamweaver and blogs--but it just goes to show how powerful this medium is!
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| Thatcher is a go! |
| 07.25.04 (10:50 pm) [edit] |
Whew! It's after 11pm and I'm barely settled into my dorm room at Thatcher. We made the trekk to Ojai this afternoon, registered, attended the group dinner, listened to the keynote speaker, and went to class until 10:15pm! And, we have homework--25 online pages!!! Good god, they're going to cram as much learning in as humanly possible! The keynote speaker, Hall Davidson, was fabulous! He spoke about using the right tech tools for the job and showed us how to help students create powerful multimedia projects embedded with various snippets of content rich video available from sites listed on this handout.This information will come in handy because my idea is to work on digital narratives as a blog project. More about that later--I have to finish my homework!
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| Tech training with Teach the Teachers Collaborative |
| 07.23.04 (1:57 pm) [edit] |
Well, my daughter is recuperating at home and I'm back at work. I'm very excited because on Sunday I attend the Teach the Teachers Collaborative at Thatcher school with a teach of 7 other educators from my school. We will stay in beautiful Ojai from Sunday through Friday, participating in project based learning workshops during the day and attending workshops, listening to speakers, and working on our tech plans in the evening. I've heard it is wonderful with excellent food and lots of opportunities to hike and swim.
I'm scheduled to teach an evening workshop on blogging Thursday evening. I'll only have a half hour so I'm going to direct teachers to Anne's site Weblogs: The Possibilities are Limitless! She's done a great job creating a rich yet succinct introduction to blogging and I'm very grateful that it's available.
I will blog from Thatcher. Now I wish I had one of those "I'm blogging this" t-shirts.
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| My daughter was sick! |
| 07.17.04 (11:26 am) [edit] |
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My daughter went for an outpatient tonsilectomy last week and ended up developing pneumonia. She's been hospitalized most of the week! There's nothing worse than watching your baby (she's 25 but she's my baby) struggle with pain and illness. Thankfully, the hospital staff was wonderful--patient and kind. She'll be coming home today. Hurray! When she's settled I'll be back to blogging!
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| 65 ways people have used their Tablet PC's |
| 07.10.04 (1:03 pm) [edit] |
As if I needed more reasons to love Tablet PC's, from What is New, a post that lists 65 interesting ways people are using their Tablet PC's. Here are some of my favorites:
18. Collect and store autographs (Scoble’s Hillary Clinton picture) 
28. When I sold a car I took a picture of the person in front of it, inserted that into the contract, and then had the person sign the bill of sale
33. The bathroom faucet was dripping and I didn’t know how to fix it. I used the Tablet PC to access repair instructions at the same time I was repairing it. (It didn't get wet.)
38. Excursions to Home Depot/Lowe's. Well, it actually depends on what I'm doing, but this is a great way to accumulate ideas. With a USB camera attached to the Tablet PC, I snap a picture into a custom paper-app and scribble product information, prices, ideas, diagrams, etc.
46. Use it in RV / truck with a GPS and then email photos when get to a stopping point – or passenger can email photos with cell phone while still on the road!
57. Students download and read eBooks.
58. Teachers connect it to a projector to share those primary sources with your students and write annotations on images as they talk about them.
-Other ways I use a Tablet PC
* Store thousands of pieces of sheet music on it and play directly from it at the piano
* Edit music directly from MIDI inputs while at keyboard
* Use mapping software, Journal and OneNote to help look for real-estate
Very cool!
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| Pushing furl onto my blog |
| 07.03.04 (8:31 am) [edit] |
I read a lot of blogs and I'm usually impressed with the work people do. I don't just read edublogs. I read lots tech blogs--mostly tablet pc users, people who tinker with gadgets--and I also read what I've titled "miscellaneous" in my bloglines folder--more of the personal type of blogs by interesting and funny people. I've learned alot from reading these blogs.
But my absolute must reads are Will and Anne. They're my heroes! They always, always make me think, stretch myself, and lead me to interesting links, even essential information. Will posts great links but it's his vision and ability to just try things that inspires me. Anne's spunky down to earth posts are so uplifting, they inspire me to collaborate more. (BTW, when the Wrinkles group graduated last month, I... that is, SuperThinker called her at JH House in Georgia. It was fun! The school secretary knew who SuperThinker was! And it was fun hearing Anne's voice. It's as cute and spunky as her posts are, with her southern accent! If I didn't blog I would never have had the opportunity to collaborate with someone on the other side of the country, so different from me on the surface--me, a little 'ol cubanita and Anne, a little 'ol southern girl--yet so well suited to work together.)
Because of their most recent posts, I'm trying something new. Last week Will posted 10 Cool Things to Do with Furl, and comments about a list:
"On first blush, one addition I would make to her list is to use Furl to push content to various pages similar to what I did with the "What's Mr. R. Reading?" section of my journalism portal. But this is a great list of creative ways to use the tool, one definitely worth Furling."
Will's been blogging about pushing content into a blog with furl for a while now. I thought it was really cool but I thought it would be very difficult and time consuming. But the "10 Cool Things..." link led me to the how to page right on bloglines and it was SIMPLE! So I tried it. If you look below my links you'll see a box that says, "Furl4blahblahblog." That's it. It's not pretty--I have to figure out how to make it more organized, attractive, etc. Nevertheless, it's there!!!
And, it's filled with links from Anne! She is always posting links to great articles about research on blogging. What better way to share them than as Will suggests--collecting them and pushing them onto my blog with furl.
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