For the first time in what seems like ages, my wife and I went to the movies on a Saturday night. We were taking advantage of AMC Theater’s offer that allows teacher who teach in grades k through 12 the opportunity to view Freedom Writers for free. It was a good movie with a good message, that even though we may be different, we have similarities. It was a bit formulaic, but heartwarming. Driving home, I could only wonder what would have happened to those students if in addition to journaling. that they had the opportunity to blog. How would […]
Month: January 2007
Reflections on Reflections – Creating a Movie using Still Images and Sound
Over the past five school weeks, I have been supporting our United States History teacher, Kevin Randolph, and the juniors in his class on a project, entitled, Reflections:What Does Vietnam Mean? It was invigorating working with Kevin and the students on this project. I was able to introduce the students to a use of a wiki to support the project. The assignment that the students were asked to complete was: To create a 1 – 3 minute film that must have still photos and a musical soundtrack which answers the question: what does Vietnam mean? The film may also include […]
Personal Learning – I Created my First Podcast
And better yet, I learned how to structure the rss feed so that it can be subscribed to via iTunes! Some of you may be thinking, “so what. Big deal. I have been doing that for months or years now. He is a Directory of Academic Technology, he should have known this.” To some extent, you may be right. But it is one thing to know how to do something in theory but not have practical experience, it may be another thing to be able to go out to Google using the correct search terms and find the information, but […]
Educating Parents Through Participation
Because of the personal and professional learning journey that I have been on these last two years and the success stories that I have heard from the k12 Online Conference, I decided to try something this winter. It is during this time of the year that I typically hold some kind of seminar or class for the parents at our school about the Internet, technology, and society. Last year, with mainstream media’s discovery of digital social networks (MySpace and FaceBook), the focus of the conversations were on these tools. I presented at various parent dialogues that our our Parent’s Association […]
Back in the Saddle Again
Like many, we returned back to school on Monday, January 8th. I always find the first week back after an extended break challenging. This year was no different, as I had multiple projects starting and there was a significant amount of preparation that was required in order to get these projects off of the group. This is also a time to sit down with the administrators and plan for the second third of the year. There are a number of projects that the division heads in my school would like to implement between now and the end of the school […]