I had my first opportunity to share this year at the 2009 Illinois Education and Technology Conference. My presentation was titled, “Creating a Digital Substitute”.  The presentation was basically about using tools such as Flip Video cameras, MP3 Recorders, myplick.com, Microsoft  MovieMaker, Audacity and a variety of other tools. These tools allow a teacher to leave materials for a substitute teacher to utilize during a planned absence or  a staffing. Other opportunities could be a digital field trip, notes for an absent student or review for science lab setup and notes from class.

The idea of creating a digital substitute is a ultimately a way for the teacher to learn the technologies that eventually they will feel comfortable in sharing these technologies with their students. Two speakers (Charlene Chausis and David Jakes) at the 2007 conference shared that we need to immerse ourselves in these tools/technologies  in order for us to have a comfort level that we can then share these tools with others (students).

MyPlick.com allows you to sync audio with slides. I find it much more informational than just uploading your slides, especially as it is becoming more popular to use less words on slides.

MyPlick allows you to upload slides from various sources such as PDFs, Powerpoint, and even Google Presentations. It allows you to upload audio to the site, so no need to host the .mp3 elsewhere.

Here is an example of a recent myplick “podcast” that our JH Principal put together. He is now scheduling a Tech Breakfast for the teachers to learn as we share the process. Give it a try and let me know what you think of myplick and what other tools and techniques you utilize for podcasting.

7. Are there other ways to share items in Google Reader?Google Reader allows you to assign tags to individual items. To tag an item, click on the ‘add tag’ link and enter a descriptive tag name. You can then go to the Settings page and make the tag public. A unique URL is created that links to the latest items with your public tag. You can then post this link online or send it to your friends.

Google Reader – Sharing FAQ

As I explore more and more of the technologies that are available on the Internet and the impact that these tools have on my education. The more, I realize the impact that these tools can and will have on K-12 education.

Keep learning more and sharing more,
chris

Keep learning and sharing,
Chris

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

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

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

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.