November

November was an incredible month. Again, we had stimulating discussions about the use and misuse of technology. There was sharing of frustrations and successes. Ryan’s presentation showing what he is doing in his classroom was inspiring.

After learning so much about Googledocs from Molly Schroeder, I went back to school and tried uploading previously created Word docs. Well, I found out that documents that have tables in them do not appear as they were created. That was frustrating. I then tried recreating the tables in Googledocs and was not as successful as I had hoped. Either I did something wrong or there are limits on what can be uploaded successfully.

During this month at my school, I was able to move the laptop carts to classrooms and there is actually a move to hire the tech assistant. When this is finally in place, I should be able to relinquish the technical upkeep and trouble shooting to someone else and then spend more time on working with the teachers with actual projects with the students. Yeah!!

Following Michael Walker’s presentation about digital storytelling I’m wondering if that should be the area I look at for my presentation. Even without the latest technology, it is something we should be able to do at our district. We could hopefully then incorporate pod or screencasting into that experience. I’m going to start doing more investigating into how that might work for us. I plan to present theses ideas to my principal and see what we have available to purchase microphones and more digital cameras. We do have a digital video camera. I’m embarrassed to say I have not learned how to use it other than taping a cassette.

So now, I have to decide where to focus my energies. My time is so limited that I cannot do everything that I wish. I really want to assist the teachers in becoming more efficient with the tools I mentioned earlier. I also want to start using more of the tools in classrooms collaboratively with the teachers. I’m thinking I may have to present the tools like Googledocs to teachers as a group and let them come to me for more information and assistance. Then my focus with student projects will fulfill the expectations of the district as it builds partnerships with the teachers in using effective methods that will grow as we learn to work together.

We’ll see. It’s a start anyway.