Katie’s Blog

Wow I can’t believe it has already been a week since class has ended! I have been to work every day this week and keep looking at things from a whole new perspective. Everything that I hear from specialists or principals (I haven’t spoken to many teachers since it is summer) I think ‘wow I could use this particular tool to help students and teachers to explore now ways to think about this.’ I can’t wait to speak with teachers and figure out how all of this can really be put into play. I know that I have definitely gotten an unbelievable amount of information out of this class and can’t wait to come back to visit next summer. That being said, in review of the project evaluations, there are more suggestions from Pat from some other “cool tools for school” that I have yet to check out.

google alert
igoogle page

Our last day of class was saved for our project presentations and some discussion (which got a little hairy).  I think we did pretty well with our project.  I would like to make a few minor changes to my portion of the project and then I think it will be good for the purposes of the class.  I have already tried out some of my “new tools” in another blog that I have set up.  Check it out!

Wow this class has gone quickly!  I can’t believe that our next meeting is our last and that we are doing our final presentations.  I think we are ready for all of this, we’ll see what Pat and the other group think.  I can’t believe the amount of tools I have learned and how many I am actually able to put to good use.  More than that, I can’t believe how quickly I became comfortable with these and how much I rely on them.  I hope I can transfer this over to the teachers in the district!

Today’s book presentations went pretty well once we got our videoconference to work.  We got into some interesting discussions about the books and how they each relate to one another.  We also continued our discussions on our projects and how they will be presented and graded.

Some things to try today:

Jing

Talk about ADD, this morning was really testing all of our focus abilities.  Great job to Karen and Lynette who hung in there during their book presentations while all of the other chaos was happening!  The Kindle was cool, but I’m not sure that it is worth the money especially since each book costs about $10 and you can’t “resell” them.  I think for now I will just wait and see what the next generation looks like.

Second Life was fun to play with again, but I’m still not really sure how this would work out in a classroom setting (especially given that it is closed to districts).

Working in our project groups was great.  I think I finally have my mind wrapped around how all of this is going to play out.  It sounded like Pat agreed that we were on a good track too.  That certainly makes me feel better.  Off to work on objectives and standards for my piece of the project.

I keep finding more and more information that I would like to try out.  Today we got to see the Wiimote turned into an Interactive Whiteboard.  This is fascinating to me because our district is so focused on this technology and has spent quite a bit of money on purchasing various forms of Interactive Whiteboards.  I wonder if it would be practical to try some of these out or if we would just end up spending more money in the end with trying to “create” our own boards?  I think I will mention it to my tech team and see what they have to say about it.

We spent some time in class working on our book presentations (when we weren’t distracted by guitar hero).  I am not sure that we are really ready for this, but I guess things will go OK.  I am also concerned by the fact that we don’t have an activity to present with our book.  I will try to get more creative tonight and see if I can come up with something.

Tony Powell physically joined our class today. He has been reviewing our blogs and came in today to join the class. In his discussion and the rest of the class discussion here are some more things that I would like to check out.

Voki

odiogo

blabberize

wiimote interactive whiteboard – Johnny Lee WiimoteWhiteboard or DarwiinRemote

I have to get a MySpace or facebook account to see what it is all about.

Twitter

Eyespot

Wikimaps

Today was a review of several things that we have been discussing all week long.  We also had time to work with our “readings” group and our project group.  I am still a bit overwhelmed by all of the information that we have gathered this week, but I feel much better about the project.  I think our group is off to a good start with this project.  We have so many great ideas I can’t wait to see how all of this turns out!  Off to the beach now…have a great weekend!

I was much less overwhelmed today (at least until I got home and saw my copy of The World is Flat) and feel more confident about what we are doing. We began by going over everyone’s blog and addressing the issues that we were each experiencing (see my revised blog from yesterday). This served as a nice review of all of the things that we have gone over this far in the class. It also brought up several more things that I would like to try out in the near future (see my “More to Try” post). We then began working on our projects. We decided that two groups of four would work best. I am excited to work on a collaboration project dealing with American and Spanish students sharing their daily life experiences.