Fellow educators, if you haven’t seen this video yet, please take a few minutes to watch. A few of the facts are from Karl Fisch’s Did You Know? presentation, but this takes that conversation quite a bit farther.

Pay Attention!

Technorati Tags: 21st_Century Education KarlFisch T4JordanDistrict DidYouKnow? PayAttention!

This is a great video about using technology tools in the classroom. I found it online at the T4-Jordan School District. I haven’t explored the whole site yet, but what I’ve seen so far looks like a pretty amazing pool of resources. Thanks very much to those in charge of organizing and sharing this site.

Technorati Tags: PayAttention T4JordanSchool Education Technology 21stCenturyLearning

This is the text of the grant we are submitting to the District 70 Education Foundation. Last year they very generously supported our initial grant, iPod therefore iLearn. This request is for the second phrase of that project, which is to develop a multimedia podcasting studio for our school.

rye-pod-grant.doc

Update: Good news and bad news

First the good news: Two grants from our school were funded by the Foundation this go around. Congratulations to Mr. Blackhurst for his top-rated grant proposal for science probeware. And more congratulations to Mrs. Ervin for her winning grant for materials and supplies to support our school-wide project on The 60’s next year.

Now for the bad news: sadly, my grant for the Rye-pod studio was not funded this year. No defeat though. We’ll just have to do some fund-raising with concessions (ugh!). Popcorn, anyone? How about a hotdog? Would you like cheese on that? <grin>

Vicki Davis linked this very cool YouTube video on her CoolCat Teacher blog today.

Communication is not the same as it was 5 years ago. Heck, it’s not the same as it was 1 year ago! Literacy skills are not the same, and if I don’t change the way I teach my students to communicate, I AM NOT DOING MY JOB! And if you’re a teacher (or a parent, for that matter) and all you’re doing is teaching your kids to read and write the same way you were taught to read and write, you’re not doing your job either. (Sorry if that offends anyone, but I calls ‘em as I sees ‘em.)
Watch the video–it does a beautiful job of explaing Web 2.0. You’ll be a lot smarter in 5 minutes. Trust me.

Technorati Tags: Web_2.0 VickiDavis CoolCat YouTube

It’s been a while since I had any thoughts that I considered worthy of blogging. But this morning I had one that I want to explore more.

So now, at age 41, I’ve finally figured out what I want to do when I grow up. What I really want to be is a pyromaniac. As a teacher, as a mother and grandmother, as a wife, and (most importantly) as a Christian, I want to go around lighting fires in the lives other people. I want to get the sparks going and watch them blaze into glory.

I think that’s one of the most important things I can do–light a fire in other people.

These links to some of the presentations from the K12 Online Conference will give you more information about all the cool things you can do with Flickr.

Check out this one from Alan Levine. Click on the various “hot spots” to learn more about the cool things you can do (very easily, btw) with Flickr. Really fun!

This video by Jeff Utecht will show you even more–enjoy! Can I embed this puppy? Okay, well, that worked, but I had no controls over the video. It started playing automatically, and I couldn’t stop, pause, etc. so I removed the link to the .swf video file.

Technorati Tags: K12Online Flickr AlanLevine JeffUtecht

This PowerPoint is from notes I took while watching Clarence Fisher’s presentation, Global Literacy, at the K12 Online Conference.

global-literacy.ppt

This is somewhat belated, but I’ll take a few minutes to write about the grant that I helped work on for our school last spring. I didn’t have a blog at the time we did the grant. Over the weekend, I participated in the When Night Falls… Skypecast as the culminating event for the K12 Online Conference (which was AWESOME, btw). This was brought up in the conversation, and Vicki Davis (Coolcatteacher) asked if I’d blogged about this grant. So here goes…

It all started last Valentine’s Day when my dear husband gave me a 60-gig video iPod.(Roses and chocolates last only so long, but an iPod is forever.) I started searching for educational podcasts in iTunes, and found several that I found interesting. Also, our principal had showed us a video in January that was of an Alan November presentation to the Colorado Association of School Boards. From Alan November’s site, I watched several videos and found Will Richardson, whom I started following. I ordered Will’s book, Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms,  when it became available, and my learning really picked up there!

It didn’t take long for me to see that HUGE impact these Web 2.0 techonlogies will have on education. I wanted to be part of this revolution, and I wanted to spread the word throughout our school. Our district Foundation offered a spring grant period, and two other teachers worked with me to write a grant to get an iPod and microphone for each teacher at our school.  Our grant focused on taking the technologies that students currently use for entertainment and exploiting those tools for educational purposes.

Our grant was chosen as the highest rated of the proposals, and we received half of our requested amount. Our principal matched another $1000, and our local Lion’s Club matched another $1000. We had enough to purchase 18 30-gig video iPods and 18 microphones.

I took an online class about Podcasting for Teaching and Learning from GlobalClassroom and continued studying Will’s book, as well as subscribing to several blogs and podcasts.  (See the BlogRoll on this page.) We scheduled a two-day training class in the summer for our staff, and we offered it to the rest of our district in the Summer Teacher Academy. I thought it would be a popular class, but sadly, only one person registered, so the Summer Academy classes were cancelled. I was disappointed in the lack of interest, but maybe we’ll try again next summer. The training for our own staff had to be postponed because some power-crazed person in our ad. building’s purchasing department wouldn’t allow the PO for the iPods to go through until August (we sent in the PO before school ended in May). It was an incredibily frustrating time. We still didn’t have the iPods when we had training in August, but they finally (!) arrived in mid-September.

I still feel like such a baby at all of this. I used Will’s book heavily as a resource for the summer training. Will sent us a couple of boxes of the book, and most everyone on the staff purchased a copy. We focused a lot of our time on blogs, recording mp3 files with Audacity, and taking a quick look at Flickr. I continue to try to work on staff development throughout the school year, but I feel so inadequate at times, like I’m barely a step ahead. Of course, the K12 Online Conference was a HUGE help in my personal learning, and I feel as though I’ve only scratched the surface with all the resources there. That will be an ongoing gold mine for me to continue to dig in.

At this point, I don’t see many of the teachers using the iPods for school-related stuff. A couple of them are using blogs, but many are not yet “on the bandwagon” it seems. I need to do a better job of showing them specifically how to use their iPods for classes. Maybe if anyone out there reads all this rambling, you could drop a comment and give us some suggestions.

Okay, this has gone on far too long….see you in the “blogosphere”

Can I figure out how to upload a podcast?

sample podcast

How about a Word file?

notes for first paper.doc

PowerPoint, anyone?

Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts.ppt
Excel didn’t work. How about PDF?

Daily_Food_Diary.pdf

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