What's your baby step?This is back to school week. On Monday and Tuesday we had the traditional teacher inservice days. I needed to make the a tech status report. After a variety of tech announcements I told them the baby step insight that I shared with you all. I tacked a colored piece of paper to the ceiling in the center of the room and passed out rubber bands to everyone. I asked them to think about one baby step that they would like to make this year. On the count of three we launched the rubber bands at the target. This was a figurative representation of our potential growth. People were amused and it broke up a potentially boring morning.
Reactions since that meeting have been very interesting. On an hourly basis people have been sharing or asking for help with their baby steps. We laughed and celebrated them. This has been a very positive and playful tone for the beginning of the year.
I am making my own baby steps thanks to Raw Materials. I have two blogs in addition to this one. One started out as a Necc share and has transitioned to a tech blog for our school. I did this after I after I was inspired by Chris Hunewell's blog Techjaki. The other is called OPUS. We are using it to promote discussions and sharing between those professionals who are often assigned independent study while other are doing more content related staff development on early release days. I also have become indebted to David for getting me into Bloglines. Otherwise I couldn't keep track of what I am doing.
I am still "struggling" with the differenced in purpose and effective use of blogs, wikkis, podcasts, stranded discussion ... Any thoughts?
posted by DebTech @ 5:50 PM
2 Comments:
Deb:
I humbly thank you for the Techjaki plug! Knowing that my blog has inspired yours has made my week!
We had our teacher inservice days last week and I too was asked to make a presentation. Ten minutes was all the time that was allotted in the busy day and I struggled with ways to use it most effectlvely. I finally decided on a mini-presentation highlighting some of last year's projects - with the teachers involved explaining the process and products. I ended with the promise of a larger sampling of last year's work being available to teachers so they could view them at their leisure throughout the year. In creating this movie, my hope was that seeing a colleague's work might inspire someone to take that baby step you're talking about! I've had good verbal feedback from staff and am crossing my fingers that it works!
Jeff-
I did a really quick podcast with 3rd & 4th graders at Bristol Elementary in June - mostly to see if I could figure out the process. It's here if you want to listen. I am in the process of organizing another one now that school's begun. I'm hoping to pair up kids of differing ages and abilities to work together on the same segments.
I use Audio Recorder and the built-in mic to do the recording. I edit in Audacity and publish the podcast as an .mp3 file. No iPod needed! I am still trying to figure out the .rss part that allows people to subsrcibe to the podcast and get automatic updates.
chris
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