Tuesday, April 15, 2008

a GRAY Day

At my seminar in Lisle, I was able to attend a seminar about Google presented by Lucy Gray of the Center for Urban School Improvement. The presentation was informative and almost overwhelming with the amount of options presented to Google users. Microsoft probably better watch out. The philosophy at Google is that things should be available to everyone, not just those who pay. Many comments and ideas com from the Google Teacher Academy Blog

Monday, April 14, 2008

The value of networking

Well, I have waited an entire month to blog again. So much for persistence. My husband continually refers to me as a procrastinator. I need to remember not to tell him about the blog because it will support his opinion. Lord knows, that is NOT what marriage is about;)
I ventured out to the wilds of the southwest suburbs over the weekend to attend the ICE conference for the DuPage county branch of Illinois Computing Educators. The weather continued to be grey,wet and blustery, so why not? The group was small, but the 3 sessions were interesting. I was impressed by the amount of catholic school teachers there as well. Nadine Norris, who led a seminar I attended through the archdiocese, is the current president of this chapter and had some good speakers. I was particularly pleased to be able to attend consecutive sessions 1 and 2 on Google and its plethora of options for educators that was presented by Lucy Gray. Mind boggling and extremely informative. So much to learn and a great teacher.
I also attended a session on wikis held by a teacher who is admittedly not tech savvy, yet she has created quite a wikispace area for her social studies classes out in LaGrange, even going so far as to archive the material. I learned some interesting stuff such as how to add documents and photos to a wiki as well as the idea of creating a blog of sorts right on a wiki space for your students. She even has her study guides and rubrics attached to the wikis so that it is actually a bit more energy efficient, at least in terms of the amount of xeroxing the school no longer needs to do. Some teachers in the session questioned trusting the students to be sincere or to avoid the temptation to change information or adjust/alter the work of others. While those concerns are valid, it is not the type of thinking that is going to allow us to give the students ownership for the knowledge and the ability to create content for their peers.
In addition, her entire school has elected to use wikispaces versus a web page for the school.I find that to be an interesting concept as well.
I also found it interesting to find out about how she manages space members, assigning each student their student password number as a password. another interesting point is that their school has banned YouTube from the students at school. This is an idea that I would support at my own school as well.