Module 1

Module 1 Readings

1. What holds me back?

1. No one to discuss ideas:  I’m pretty much the lone techie at my school; as much as I try to share, no one is interested.  I used to share my blog with colleagues, but they wouldn’t read them. It’s lonely. I think I’d be better with some feedback.
2. Mandates: I feel obligated to get the standards taught and hold back projects to teach specific standards, although my experience is that in projects, students learn what they need and in directives, students still learn what they need but it might not be what I’m teaching and is less than they could be doing.

2. Why bother?

A. Video production tools did save me time and gave my students a resource to review when they needed it.  For example, students couldn’t post videos themselves, and they needed to be changed from .mov to .mp4 so I created videos for the project for how to save their video, open and change format, and upload to my video folder in my Google Drive.  Slick.

B. My students have learned two important skills as 21st century and independent learners: 1) key word searches in the research tool of Google Docs to find information for their chosen part of the project, and 2) the same tool cites the source AND find creative commons licensed images for students to use.

3 Two Tools

A. QR codes: I could use these in the hall to share student links for families and visitors; I could link to models of writing students could choose according to their needs.

B. Magisto: I wonder if students could use this for their projects as a trailer or conclusion.

4 Two Tips

A. Get Clear on the Reason: this is a mind shift — this is important for novices to wrap their objectives with the expectation that the tool helps the learning be more relevant and authentic. Take the writing process: students don’t want to re-write something any more when there are tools for cutting and pasting and spelling. More than that: it’s a visual world, and Google Docs helps students search for and insert appropriately licensed images they can quickly choose to enhance their words.

B. Do Test Runs: Do tests and in the school — sometimes what is visible at home for that great lesson is NOT visible at school do to IT management of filters. Often it can be unblocked, but know that before starting your lesson.

5 One Thing

Tech Gmail Account: That would have been a good idea; I’ll suggest that from now on.  However, my problem is that when I started with tech, the recommendation was to have separate accounts, and I had school, community, business, personal, volunteer activities so now I have a ton of email accounts. Little did we know that our lives would be more public and connected.

6 Tools

Content Curation: So many projects and so many resources. How do I curate them to share, rediscover, and contain? What purposes do I have? What tools would be best? I have many projects that could be gathered for different reasons, and resources I want to remember. With so much in the cloud, we don’t have scrapbooks and boxes [well, I do have boxes] filled with memories anymore. Where should we put them?

Book Publishing: That’s a good one. I love the format of the Tech Guide, the clickable pdf is awesome. How did you create that?  Adobe Acrobat? I have some ideas I’d like to publish. Jennifer answered that question: She created the pdf for Jump Start in PowerPoint, but changed the page orientation; she exported as a pdf.  I can do that in Google Slides and Keynote too.  Ideas are now forming…