Let's see if I can deliver!

I am going to try to present myself with a Lenten challenge. I have always contended that it is harder to do something more than to give something up, so here is my opportunity to try. I have been trying to do MORE exercising, but that is easy to write off with " I have not time" or "I am too tired" or "I'm just too busy." Well, since I work in front of my computer most of the day, I will either have to stick to my guns on this or get far more creative with my excuses. Either way, I will need to be thinking on another track.

I am on the Independent School Network list serv which is attempting to gather educational blogger sites. I am going to take the leap and see if I can follow through. I can't imagine anyone else wanted to read what I have, but I had originally started this blog as a way to reflect on things I have learned since beginning the 2.o journey. that journey AND that learning continue.

Currently, I am only teach Grade 6, mostly about Internet Literacy. We call the class Tech, but my personal preference would be Digital Literacy. The students have spent time on validating sources, investigating sites, learning about back links, various algorithms of search engines, the wonderful tools provided by Google Search that the kids didn't even know existed, and just general ideas about being more efficient with their use of technology and how to find things.

Our present project is a follow up to our study of the features of Google search. We are engaged in an Olympic Scavenger Hunt of sorts on our Olympics wikipage . The students have recorded their answers on a Google doc that they have shared with me. After class, I make comments and corrections on their documents so we can get practice with collaboration and drafts. The students seem to be pretty engaged and are getting a feel for the idea of keywords and search shortcuts. Our next step will be to create a Voicethread on the Olympics using not just our vocal skills, but learning how to find appropriate images and give credit to the creators. In addition, we will be creating medal pictographs using Excel and also create a medal spreadsheet with Google. i suspect , however, that Google spreadsheets won't provide us with the option to insert images, but I will find that out later today!