Its Been a While

Wow! It's been like three months since I have posted to my blog. Don't think that the reason is because I have had nothing new to post about technology integration. On the contrary, there has been A LOT going on.

The health teacher at CRES, Terry Reed, asked me to create a presentation for the 6th graders on Internet Safety which would become a part of her unit on safety. I used some of the videos and activities from NetSmartz.org to create a presentation which students took part in during late February.

The biggest project I worked on during the last few months turned out to be time-consuming, but extremely fun and educational. This project was a movie about the 1960's which was played for the students of CRES during 60's Day. 60's Day was the culminating activity for the 60's unit taught by the Phys. Ed., Library, Art and Music specialist. They asked me to create a movie that the students would see which would include music, news, and pop-culture of the era. What an educational experience it was for me personally. I made connections and learned about topics that I didn't know before. It was well received by the students, but I think it was the teachers who enjoyed it the most.

I have also be trying to get some teachers to use blogging as a means to help students with peer editing for their writing. I have a few teachers (C. Albert & B. Wandishin) who have created blogs for this purpose. Some are prolific while others have yet to post anything written by their students. Granted, this has been an extremely busy time of year for the teachers with MEA's, report cards, and parent-teacher conferences, so I hope that when things settle down, they will get back on the stick.

I am also splitting up my time now between CRES and Songo Locks School. I am at SLS on Tuesday afternoons and Wednesday mornings. So, if you are trying to catch me, that is where you will find me.

Starting, today as a matter of fact, I will be doing a series of after-school workshops on the use of some Web2.0 tools in classrooms. I will be covering Podcasts, Blogs, Wikis, and Social Bookmarking. Some people have been asking me when I was going to do some afternoon workshops (which were my bread and butter when I was in this position a few years ago) like I used to do. So, to appease them, and to practice my presentation skills, I set up these quick, down and dirty, workshops. I have about a half dozen educators signed up for each topic. I like having small numbers in workshops like this so that I can get to everyone in the group with questions.

So, this has been me checking in with my blog. I will try to post more often and share with you some of the neat resources I have come across in the past few months.