Learning Web 2.0

Just loaded MaemoWordPy on my Nokia N800. I am using my stylus to type this entry. I am trying to figure out how this unit could be utilized in a K-12 educational environment? Open to all suggestions.

Keep learning and sharing,
Chris

It has been a good year.

I learned a lot this year and hopefully people feel that I have shared a lot as well.

Learning and sharing about edublogs, wikispaces, OpenPD, Ustream, Twitter, Ning, and many other new technologies that we can utilize within the educational environment has been very energizing.

I look forward to next year and having Computer Club for our teachers starting in September. It will also be good to have an office in the Junior High building. We will be implementing the web edition of our student management system which will replace the necessity for Gradequick and Edline.

I get to share with a group of 5th-8th Grade students this summer during TechnoKids summer camp.

I also get to share to a group of Educators at the Missouri Learning Distance Association summer conference.

I look forward to this summer and getting ready for another school year, which will be starting sooner than I think.

Keep learning and sharing,
chris

Next week will be the last week for Computer Club (CC) at the buildings. It has given me a little more time with a few teachers this year to look at technology tools that could assist them instructionally, professionally and/or personally.

I will continue the Computer Club for teachers next year and try to coordinate the materials with Inservice and School Improvement (SI) agendas. Next year, we will actually have SI days that students dismiss at 11:30. This is compared to dismissing at 2:15 in the past few years.

Really we are still very limited on Professional Development (PD) time. 36 hours according to my calculations. Then you take away time for breaks (restroom and eating) and you have even less time. If this was just technology time, cool, but then you throw in RTI, School Safety, Curriculum, Classroom Management, Special Education, etc, etc, etc…

I am not saying these are not important issues, but I am saying we need need more PD time for all of these things.

I recently listened to a Podcast from Sylvia Martinez from a Online K-12 2007 Conference session, where she talked about teaching being one of the only professions where you get training and then go back to your job and are alone in trying to implement the newly gained knowledge.

Also Darren Drape in a recent blog entry that it is important that teachers could get involved with OpenPD. I attended the most recent session of OpenPD and found it very valuable, learning about wikis and blogs and how others are utilizing them. I also value the knowledge gained about the technologies utilized in the process of OpenPD with skype, ustream and wikispaces.

So between CC, Inservice, SI and OpenPD, I hope to reach more teachers with Technology PD next year.

Keep Learning and Sharing,
chris

Thursday night I checked into the Union Station hotel in Indy. When checking in the front desk person let me know, “This is an active train station. Your room should be far enough from the tracks, but you may notice some noise or vibration and we just let patrons know that if you hear anything or feel any vibrations, that it is not a hurricane.”

I said, “You mean an earthquake.”

She said laughingly, “Yes. Not an earthquake and definitely not a hurricane.”

So on Friday morning at around 5:30 Indy time, I was probably the most relaxed person in the Midwest when I was awakened by the vibration and noise of the the closet doors in the hotel room. Not until I turned on the TV around 6:30, did I hear the morning news person say earthquake. I just started laughing and changed the channel and sure enough they were telling about the earthquake as well. 

I always thought that it was tornados, that sound just like a train.

It still makes me laugh.  It was an earthquake, but I just thought it was a train.

I think the hotel will need to need to retrain their front desk personnel and what they tell people when checking in.

Hello All or Noone,

I come to you tonight after several weeks of not writing an entry on my blog. I attended OpenPD this week learning from Sue Waters and others about blogging. I learned that it takes a committment to get your blog to be read and even though it may be read, you may not receive any comments. So Why? Why continue to write a blog?

I guess my main reason for plugging away at writing a blog is that if I write a blog, then I can talk with administrators, teachers, staff, students, parents, and community members about writing blogs.

I started this blog on Edublogs because I knew that more than likely I could keep edublogs from being blocked by the content filter at school because it seemed like it had an Education feel. I (we, Lindsey has taken over) started a blog at blogger.com for our family in order to keep our families updated on what is going on with our lives.

A blog can take many forms including personal, professional, hobby, career, memories, journaling, informational, opinion and can be thematic or can bounce from subject to subject depending on your desired audience. Learn from others how they blog or what they blog about by reading their blogs using a RSS reader such as Google Reader or Bloglines.

So I guess the answer to my own question, “Why continue to write a blog?”, is  just because I should and why wouldn’t I.

Keep Learning and Sharing,
chris

I am writing this blog entry from diigo.com using the toolbar and Send to Blog feature.

The annotations at the bottom of this entry are what I had highlighted using diigo toolbar on the OpenPD website. The “Topics” was a highlight and the “Welcome” was another highlight.

I will be participating for the first time this afternoon in OpenPD. I will share my thoughts and ideas about OpenPD at a later time.

OpenPD meets the next 5 or 6 Wednesdays at 4 pm Central Time.

Keep Learning and Sharing,

chris

—-Content below automagically generated from diigo—–

openpd » home Annotated

tags: Draper, OpenPD, PD, professionaldevelopment

• Open Professional Development Welcome to our collaborative space for this open staff development course. - post by chriswherley

Topics
Why Open PD?
Why Social?
Wikis
Google Tools
Yahoo Tools
Blogging
Social Networking

Welcome to our collaborative space for this open staff development course. We encourage all of you to utilize any and all resources posted here, use the discussion tabs to ask questions, post suggestions, and engage in conversation together throughout the course.

Jason on web2oh4teachers.ning.com proposed a question this week, “How do you get buy in from your community?”. I think a great deal of this is just sharing ideas with teachers so they can pick and choose among the various tools that are available. I shared with 2 teachers at JH CC, 1 teacher at ES CC, 2 at MS CC and 0 at HS CC. Doesn’t seem like that many people but it is a start. If I can share with 1 or 2 and they share with 1 or 2, it can spread pretty fast.

So many tools, so little time.

Spring Break starts tomorrow. I want to invest my time this break taking a serious look at Google Sites and ed.voicethread.com.

I have started to form my Personal Learning Network (PLN). I have found listening to the discussions on EdTechTalk.com to be very helpful. Also Twitter and Delicious continue to be valuable resources to learn about live streamed conference sessions and new websites. Also I learned how to list my Blog Roll on my blog. See “Reading List” on the lower left sidebar. This is a list of the blogs that I access through Google Reader

As you can tell from all the hyperlinks in this entry, it should be a full Spring Break week.

Keep on Learning and Sharing,
chris

It was a short week at school.

Mon - Holiday
Tues - Sick
Wed - Work
Thu - Tech Plan Reviewer Camp
Friday - Presentation about LSTA Grant In Sync with Technology at RPLS

The Presentation today was at Rolling Prairie Library System and presented by Karen Egan, LSTA grant consultant with the Illinois State Library. Those in attendance were employees of RPLS and member school librarians and member public librarians and me, school technology coordinator. I was there with our District Librarian.

A couple of them had been to ICE in St. Charles and where talking about Vicki Davis and nings and wikis and blogs. Most all of the librarians were wanting to do more with Library 2.0 for their patrons but each had their own set of limitations, whether it be hardware, software, and/or support from teachers, administrators, or even their tech people.

There is definitely an excitement around the Web 2.0 technology tools available.

I look forward to the grant process and working with our District Librarian on future projects.

I am presenting at the East Central Illinois Technology Conference Friday, February 29 at Lake Land CC in Mattoon, IL.

I created the presentation, “Web 2.0 Show and Tell” in Google Docs. Our school is  experimenting with the Google Apps Education Edition for email, word processing, spreadsheets, and slideshows. As of today or yesterday, Google Apps also has “Sites” which looks like wikis and a way for individuals to create webpages.

Web 2.0 Show and Tell on myplick.com using slideshow from Google Apps and audio from Gcast.com

I have moved my edublogs.org blog to chriswherley.edublogs.org
I just decided to make it more consistent across different Web 2.0 tools and utilize the same naming strategy.

For example:
Social Bookmarks - http://del.icio.us/chriswherley

MicroBlog - http://chriswherley.tumblr.com/

Wiki - http://chriswherley.wikispaces.com/

Podcasting - http://www.gcast.com/u/chriswherley