So yesterday I presented for year four teachers on Podcasting and CPS Clickers. I took the day and watched the other presentations as well. Picked up some tips and tricks for word, excel, camtasia/Jing, ClassServer, and voice recognition. Of course, I'm never in a quiet room, so voice recognition is tough, and I have some questions about how class server fits (or is even necessary) in a scorm compliant Sharepoint SLK environment.
It was a lot of fun, and draining, too. I really enjoyed working with LB on Podcasting, but honestly she uses it for so many more applications than I do that I felt guilty even putting my name on the header. I podcast to students and parents about assignments and course announcements. She has students create podcasts for all kinds of sorts of reasons with clear assessment rubrics and strong ties to the curriculum. It inspired me to rethink how I'm going to get kids working on Audacity to create digital story telling lessons. Working with LB was cool and we promised to do it again. She knows the conference circuit better than I do, so I hope she finds a venue. That's two new self-assigned directives. Geez, no wonder it took two weeks to get the Xmas lights up.
Sat in the back with a couple parents from a district parent technology committee and PB an Assistant Prnicipal over at Central (with whom I had worked a long time ago and who I respect a lot). I think it was a good opportunity for people with focused expertise to share perspective informally (meaning we chatted between sessions and sometimes when we shouldn't have). I'll tell me (you) what I was hoping to convey and also what I understood to be everybody's point of view. First, teachers are excited about, experimental with, and determined to use educational technologies. But there are a lot of very real obstacles that make the effective implementation of technologies and the integration of (what should be) complementary technologies difficult. Many of the delays in teachers implementing technology result from factors other than teacher-resistance. From the parents, I got the sense that there's a lot of positive support for teacher implementation of technology and a desire to ses more evidence of the 21'st century portable, reactive, and personalized technologies that would benefit the students. From PB, I got the characteristic enthusiasm for teachers who experiment with technology, as well as the sense that there are important and unexplored connections between technology applications and other initiatives at the school or district level. It certainly got me thinking when she showed me some of the work on student self-monitoring of growth. Since I've got "decent" standards tracking in place already, it wouldn't be hard to share data sets like that with the students so they can track their own progress in visual and graphic ways.
In a reflective mode, I thought that the presentation on clickers went well. My remote mouse broke :( so I was tied to the machine more than I wanted to be. I was really nervous and there were just over 32 people, so not everybody got a remote :( We got it all done on time, though, and I think teachers both had fun and saw the value in the clicker technology. One of the big questions that came up was about other brands of remotes (I think there are three or four brands floating between the schools). I don't think these will be particularly easy to service or support unless we can agree on a standard. I propose (of course) that future purchases use CPS either IR or RF depending upon proven need. But, hey, maybe they'll choose something else. In any case, there should be a standard. I also think there's going to be increased demand for the product, so I should be ready to lend a hand (and Dr. G better be ready to have cash on hand or to break some hearts!)
Geez, what am I doing? I need to grade lots of stuff that came in yesterday. And I didn't even mention a bunch of stuff that I wanted to get in. Next time. Oh, wait. Examview is going to give me access to something called REAP (a data export tool) so I'll keep you informed on that front. OK, busy. Bye.
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