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).

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