Goal Reflection

My goals on Monday were to gain new tools to use with my students and to continue integrating technology in my classroom. These goals are definitely still useful to me as the learning in this area is seemingly endless.

It's Thursday afternoon and my head feels ready to burst. Not in a painful way (yet), but I do feel that I have gained a lot of information in the past 4 days and that information has taken on a life of its own inside my head like a plant spreading its roots through the soil. I know that as children our brains trim down unused cells so that if you stop playing the piano, or speaking French, to a certain extent your brain will cease to use those synapses and dendrites.

In the past four days I feel like I have grown new brain cells (yes, yes I know biologically improbable) and I hope to continue using these skills so that I will deepen and enrich my understanding of how to use these tools in my classroom and in my civilian life.

One of my goals for this next school year will be to make one last concerted effort to get my district to change their filtering system to make it less restrictive. Of the many amazing tools we have learned about, very few will be available to me with our current filter. This makes me incredibly sad.

My top three tools that I'm excited about using with my students (assuming a world with no filter) are blogs, RSS feeds, and google docs and all its fabulous permutations.

RSS in Professional Practice

For me using RSS will require a few filter hurdles. BUT, in a perfect world, I would love to use it to collect my student's blogs in google reader. I would also like to use RSS with my students in the research process. A third use is in my reading class where RSS feeds would provide an excellent source of non-fiction reading materials.

One thing that David Parry touched upon in his article about Blogs for Learning, is the importance of teaching students the difference between reading for quick analysis and slow analysis. I think that skimming, or quick analysis reading is an increasingly important skill in the digital age.

Creating RSS Feeds

I found it very helpful to learn more about RSS feeds, particularly the steps involved to create my own RSS searches. It really takes the whole thing to a new level. This will be potentially very useful for students doing research projects.

This is a feed I created to draw information from google about nasa and the planets to my igoogle page. This feed can be found on my personal igoogle page where I think I will be more likely to look at it. It's crazy going back and forth between google accounts!
http://news.google.com/?pz=1&ned=us&hl=en

A Tale of Two Blogs

The first of the must read blogs that I perused is called Extreme Biology. This is a class blog where the students contribute as frequently (if not more so) than the teacher. The student's postings usually include a photo and an explanation of an interesting study or current event related to all things science. Many of the posts ended with an invitation for other students to take their poll or answer a question to continue the dialogue. This struck me as a great venue for all of those interesting (but somewhat off-topic) questions that we often don't have time for in science class.

In my classroom I do something on Fridays called Science in the News. This is a time when I share current events related to science. We take some time to discuss these topics and how they relate to what we're doing in class. I would love to turn this over to students who could post the current events and then give class time for students to read and comment. This seems like a simple and straightforward way to use blogging in a science classroom.

The second must read blog I checked out is called 2 Cents Worth. The first thing that caught my eye is that it's a wordpress blog. I'm very interested in learning about these for personal use. This is the blog of a non-traditional educator blogging about technology and education. I was initially interested in the blog because the posts were relatively short compared to some of the other ones I looked at. In all the blogs I read I find I tend to prefer shorter blog entries that get right to the point. I can do without a lot of musing and whining. I was especially interested in the article that was about school filters and how they're hamstringing educators. I bookmarked the article and plan to read it. At the end of the day I would rather read Richard Byrne's technology education blog. I find it's a bit more short and sweet.

Group Work Survey

Adding Video

Practice Photo

Every summer I try to get to Acadia and go camping at least once.

Class Website

This is our class website for July 13th-17th.

Nets Standard for Teachers

"Teachers continuously improve their professional practice, model lifelong
learning, and exhibit leadership in their school and professional community by
promoting and demonstrating the effective use of digital tools and
resources."

This was my first year as an mlti teacher leader in my building. I would like to continue to build my own knowledge so that I can model different types of technology usage in my own classroom and also share what I'm doing with other teachers. I would like to get comfortable with tools like wikis, blogs and podcasts both for use in my own classroom and hopefully to encourage others to use them too.

I was very happy to see that there are NETS standards for administrators as well. Creating a school culture where integrating technology is the norm has to come from the administrators, building-wide and district-wide. Administrators need to model the use of technology with the teachers just as teachers need to model it for their students.