Cool Way to Poll Students

You all have to check out this site!  I was at a conference last week on Westminster's campus and the speaker for one meeting asked everyone who was able to get out their phones and use them to text their answers to various poll questions he gave us.  We sat there and watched our audience's answers to his questions tally up on the board right in front of our eyes!  Imagine if you could have your students take a test like that or even a poll.  They would be as psyched as we all were.  It was so cool! Check it out:

http://www.polleverywhere.com/

Cool Video to Boost Morale

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/post/matt-damons-clear-headed-speech-to-teachers-rally/2011/07/30/gIQAG9Q6jI_blog.html

If you need a little boost for your educational self-esteem check out the above link. It happens to be Matt Damon giving a speech in support of teachers.  Much needed.

New Programs, New Problems, New Possibilities

So I have been diligently working on an ebook that I can use as an on-line portfolio for all things education related.  I am excited to have this digital compilation of my skills as they relate to education. I love the idea of being able to share it with potential new employers (heaven forbid that I should ever lose my job or have to move). I love that I can go and edit it at the drop of a hat and not have to worry about resubmitting new information/packets (via snailmail, email, or otherwise) to multiple people at multiple addresses.
   
It's always frustrating to learn a new program.  After watching Dr. John's tutorial videos I felt pretty excited and fairly confident that I could accomplish creating an ebook portfolio. There are always little glitches in learning the ins and outs of a new program, but this one is really very user friendly. My only gripe so far has been that the site itself seems to be rather slow.  At one point, the Flash-something-or-other completely crashed. Thankfully the program has a feature that asks you to save every so many minutes, so the work that I lost was only minimal. Whew!

It's amazing to me how quickly one can adapt to new features and new ways of doing things on the web.  It amazes me that they can change the layout of a sight or program and you hear people completely freaking out because they can't find anything.  In a matter of hours to days they have figured out where all of the features are again and would be just as upset if anything were to change in this new layout! I am just as guilty. I think what it boils down to is how busy everyone is.  We like knowing exactly where to find everything because we all just want to log on, get it done, and move on to the next thing. We don't want to spend even a few minutes or hours reestablishing our virtual equilibrium.

Tech Tools

Before the end of the school year, my school's technology guru asked me to lead a three day workshop on the Promethean Board and on-line applications that can be used with it.  Although I was totally overwhelmed and had major anxiety attacks about having to lead my peers through three days of meaningful technology instruction, I felt that I had done a fairly decent job and was able to answer most of their questions.  After having taken this class and exploring the myriad of tools that are available for teachers' use, I feel utterly sickened by what I could have been exposing my colleagues to.  Although the Promethean board and it's software are a fantastic resource to have, the Activ software is nothing more than a fancy PowerPoint presentation.  Now that I have seen these amazing tools that are out there, I can hardly think of why we would even need to use ActivInspire. Sure, It's a great standby, but allowing students to make digital storybooks, comics, videos, is so much more relevant to what they are going to be asked to do in their post-grade school years. I just saw a bunch of my teacher-friends at a retirement party last night and was gushing about all of the cool things that we could do this year.

     One huge thing that comes to mind, is the fact that we have Social Studies books from 1997 and most likely will not be able to get new ones anytime soon.  A lot has happened in the world since 1997, and so we are constantly having to adapt and find resources to expose our students to more current events. I am thrilled to know about news feeds and the various iGoogle homepage aps that we can explore.  Most likely we would make a digital field trip for each of four different units we will do throughout the year, which will kick off our exploration of four major world cultures.  We can then incorporate trade books that the students will read and most likely our old books will be used as resources for our study of geography and geographical terms. I know that their eyes were glazing over as I was explaining that we can use our virtual field trips as a means of cultural immersion, but I know they'll be psyched once they've seen the possibilities!