Wow, it has been a long time since my last blog. We had our face to face weekend and I had the chance to try out some new sites.
First, the face to face weekend. I had the chance to present 2 mini-lessons. It is strange but after teaching for 7 years I was more nervous to teach these lessons than I am in front of my class or supervisors. I was also surprised how many people had a basic understanding of Mary Cariola and the type of population we service.
As for my projects, I used Voice Thread and Animoto. It was interesting to see that most of the applications we looked at this week were not really created for education. The educational uses just happened afterwards. It was difficult to think of projects to create with students as they would need a lot of staff assistance. In the end I decided to make a virtual scavenger hunt with voice thread where students are given an image and they have to find community signs that we have been learning. They have to identify on the picture which one they found and then they could record themselves giving a short description of the sign they found. I had the students create an video portfolio of the year using animoto. My students do a lot throughout the year so this would be a great way to document all of the things they do and then save it so they have that visual reminder of what they did. Now, as I am writing this I am thinking that this could be used as a visual task analysis for students doing jobs out in the community. Using pictures to show the sequence of events.
There are just so many ideas. I can not wait to try some of these once I get back into the classroom. I am excited though that I can use this time now to guide and assist other teachers on the technology that is out there as we do not have an educational technology position at our school.
Until next time.
