Hello VPE teachers and staff! I’ve created a how-to video that I hope will be helpful to you as you log in to the Vance-Providence Elementary School website to change your password, edit your profile, and create your class page. (Note: I blurred out the user name and password I used for the demo.) If you run into problems with any step of the process, or you’ve forgotten the password, just let me know and I’ll be happy to help. #JaguarPride
In honor of National Poetry Month, I’ve been pulling together some poetry resources to share with my teachers in an after-school workshop tomorrow. (Click on the image to download the flier I sent out.) The focus is on using technology to enhance poetry lessons.
I’ve created a Poetry LiveBinder to organize all the resources to make it easier for teachers to plan poetry lessons for their students. I especially like the lessons at the Read/Write/Think website, so I’ve given them their own Tab in the binder. I’ve also included several sites featuring online poetry, and sites that offer interactive poetry-writing tools.
I’m also excited about sharing my ThingLink Channel, which features links to resources for some of the poetry books we have in our school library. These images are “re-mixable,” which means anyone can add links to any of the books I’ve uploaded. This way teachers can share their own lesson plans and activity websites for these books. It’s a great way for them to collaborate, even when they can’t meet together in person.
In addition to the web resources I’m sharing, I’ve also pulled about 75 poetry books to have on display for teachers to check out after the workshop. The books will be grouped into categories such as Haiku, Curriculum Connections, Concrete Poetry, Novels in Verse, and more.
Of course we’ll have snacks and door prizes as well, and I’ll have a few computer stations set up where teachers can play around with responding to poetry using VoiceThread and Padlet.
I’ll update this post later with photos and more resources. In the meantime, please leave a comment sharing your favorite poetry site for elementary students so that I can add it to the collection!
As of today, I have officially been using Twitter for one month!
I sent my first tweet to school library guru @gwynethjones (aka The Daring Librarian) on Sept 10 to thank her for so generously sharing with her personal learning network (PLN). It was actually two and a half weeks later before I sent my second tweet, because for some reason I felt very intimidated about tweeting, as though I didn’t have anything important enough to share. But once I got over my shyness it didn’t take long to get the hang of using Twitter, and so far in the past eleven days I have:
Quite a crash course in using Twitter, eh? I’ve known for quite some time that Twitter could be a valuable networking tool, but I resisted signing up because I knew that a) it would be another online presence that would require maintenance to keep it updated, and b) I was afraid I might become addicted to it since I do tend to develop obsessions about things. (Do you think I called that one right?!?) But until I started using it myself, I didn’t realize just how powerful and versatile it could be.
Just like any other Web 2.0 tool, Twitter is what you make it. Please consider leaving a comment to share what you find most valuable about Twitter, and if you aren’t using it yet maybe this post will convince you to give it a try!
As I was checking my feed reader yesterday, I saw a post by Mother Reader titled Kidlit Con 2010 Recap. (By the way, Kidlit Con is a conference for children’s literary bloggers, authors, illustrators, and publishers. Doesn’t that sound heavenly!) I was interested to see what she had to say about the conference, but the opening paragraphs of her post are what really struck me:
I’ve been wondering why I’ve been having trouble writing up my experience at KidlitCon 2010, and I finally realized that I was trying to write about the wrong thing — the conference itself.
Please don’t take that the wrong way. The sessions boasted wonderful speakers featuring interesting presentations with useful applications for blogging. You’ll find helpful recaps from a variety of posts on the KidlitCon blog…. But though I enjoyed the sessions, the KidlitCon experience for me was the people.
That really resonated, because I have also been struggling this week to blog about my experience at the SC EdTech Conference, but I couldn’t figure out why it was so difficult to write the post. Now I understand that what made the conference so invigorating for me wasn’t merely the words of the speakers, or the resources they shared. It was the ideas those words and resources sparked within me, and it was having the time apart from work and family to really develop those ideas and form a plan to put them into practice. So actually, just sharing a description of the sessions I attended doesn’t tell the full story.
For example, in my post on Thursday I mentioned that Lights Camera Action shared many different ways to use video in the classroom, which is a great session topic. However, with all due respect to Dennis Duszynski, the most important thing to me about his session was the cool video idea I thought of during his presentation! *
So I’ll continue sharing my conference experiences with you via this blog, but to paraphrase Levar Burton, don’t just take my word for it! Check out the links for yourself, view the presentation notes through the lens of your own mission and vision, and let your imagination lead you into brand new territory!
*In case you’re wondering what my idea was, our book fair starts next week and I’m going to make my own promotional video to display on my school website, since the book fair company doesn’t supply any online videos of their own for us to use. Can you believe Scholastic hasn’t already thought of that as a marketing tool?)
…to register for the Upstate Technology Conference going on June 22 & 23! The Theme is “The Face of Today’s Learner,” and the event will be hosted by Wade Hampton High School. This year’s keynote speaker is Hall Davidson, of Discovery Education. And best of all? No registration fee! That’s right – this is a FREE technology conference!
The schedule of sessions is posted now, and I can’t believe how many are being offered! (There are 90 on Tuesday alone!) The variety of tools and topics included here will ensure that there’s something for everyone, so please share this info with your colleagues.
By the way, I’ll be presenting a session myself:
Managing Web 2.0 Tools for Today’s Learner
Online journals, podcasts, blogs, wikis, Twitter – all are invaluable resources for teachers, administrators, and students, but keeping track of so much information can be overwhelming! Learn how to use a free personalized start page to organize all your Internet content in one place. I’ll share my best resources with you, and walk you through creating your own start page so you can leave with a handy one-page view of all your Web 2.0 tools.
Hope to see you there!
If you live near Greenville, SC, I hope you will consider attending the Upstate Technology Conference June 22 & 23. The Theme is “The Face of Today’s Learner,” and the event will be hosted by Wade Hampton High School. This year’s keynote speaker is Hall Davidson, of Discovery Education. And best of all? No registration fee! That’s right – this is a FREE technology conference, so please share this info with other educators who might be interested.
By the way, I’ll be presenting a session myself:
Managing Web 2.0 Tools for Today’s Learner
Online journals, podcasts, blogs, wikis, Twitter – all are invaluable resources for teachers, administrators, and students, but keeping track of so much information can be overwhelming! Learn how to use a free personalized start page to organize all your Internet content in one place. I’ll share my best resources with you, and walk you through creating your own start page so you can leave with a handy one-page view of all your Web 2.0 tools.
Hope to see you there!
As promised, I gave my teachers a very informal technology survey, and the results are in. I simply sent an email asking them to respond with suggestions for after-school technology workshops that would meet their needs. I included a few examples of possible topics, and left it wide open for them to reply with whatever interested them. Out of 45 teachers, I received 12 responses, and some people made more than one suggestion.
Using Promethean Software (our brand of interactive whiteboard) – 5
eChalk (our web authoring software) – 4
PowerSchool (our state’s new school management software) – 4
Accelerated Reader – 1
Starting a Blog – 1
PhotoStory – 1
Excel – 1
Publisher – 1
School Set of Laptops – 1
So there you have it.
I wish I had heard from more teachers. Granted, there may be any number of good reasons why most of my teachers failed to respond, but it’s still a bit discouraging. Hmmm, I bet I wouldn’t be lacking for responses if I had polled the students on what they are interested in! That will be my next survey….