May the Tech Be With You

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Recently, Shawn and I went to the NECC Conference in San Antonio, Texas. There were so many educators and sessions to attend. Some we went to were amazing and others didn't have any new information. Take a little time to attend at least one session and share your thoughts, ideas, questions, concerns, etc. here. Program Search to virtual attend any session through the blogs and handouts Video on Demand Podcasts You do not have to have an iPod or MP3 player to listen.

Make an on-line slide show at www.OneTrueMedia.com

Last week, Shawn and I presented at the Alabama Superintendent's Conference in Orange Beach, Alabama. It was great being able to have my voice heard by Superintendents. Some were quite taken with the content of our presentations and often came up to ask questions and for our contact information. At lunch on Wednesday, Alan November spoke to the group. He is a great speaker who has a dry sense of humor where he is able to say hard things but not in a way that it feels like he is preaching to you but instilling a sense of urgency in those in attendance. His main theme was that schools are setting students up for failure. Are we focused on knowledge learned or the process? He referred to teacher's roles as coach and referee. The teacher coaches with project based lessons that have real life experiences which uses every tool available to deepen understanding. He suggests that the teacher should not grade every single paper during the coaching stages but randomly select 5 pa...

Tiny Ted visits with the Post Master in Trussville before beginning the journey to Dr. Alice Christie at Arizona Sate University. She teaches geocaching to teachers around the US and has volunteered to help Tiny Ted find a good home in Arizona. Thank you for letting Tiny Ted visit Alabama. We will miss him greatly!

School starts on Thrusday for Noah and Luke so the family took a last trip to Mobile, Alabama. We took the boys to the USS Alabama which is a retired Navy ship permanently stationed in Mobile Bay. The boys loved all the big guns. We spent several hours on the USS Alabama, checked out the planes, and went through the submarine. We then traveled by car ferry from Fort Gaines in Mobile to Fort Morgan in Gulf Shores. We ended the long weekend on the beach in Seagrove Beach, Florida before heading home to start school. Noah and Tiny Ted will begin 3rd grade together on Thursday. Look for them to blog about their school adventures on Noah and Luke's blog at http://brotherstwo.blogspot.com/ .

My family and I are hosting Tiny Ted's visit to Alabama. Tiny Ted is a geocacheing teddy bear whoese home is in Wales with Paul Harrington's class at Cefn Forest Primary School. Tiny Ted has also traveled to New Zealand to spend time with Allanah King's Year 3 and Year 4 class. He journeyed to America with Sheryl Nussbaum Beach where he spent time in Virginia. During this summer, Tiny Ted spent the night at the Birmingham Zoo for Harry Potter Zoo Snooze with Noah. They got to get close up with an alligator, snowy owl, and other animals. They made troll boogers in Potion's class. The best part of the night was a nighttime tour of the zoo that ended with a midnight train ride. At 1:00 AM, Noah and Tiny Ted received the new Harry Potter book. The both fell asleep to me reading the first chapter under the stars with the tiger bellowing for food.

Summer has flown by! I was amazed this summer by several teachers who choose to take online classes to learn more about Advanced PowerPoint, Blogs, Skype , Digital Storytelling, and SharePoint . Several teachers will be creating blogs with their students to extending the learning and give students a voice. Ann B. explains that "blogging broadens the learner on all levels, creating a new decibel for their voice while reaching an ever expansive audience." Rachel B. made plans this summer to add podcasting to the Primary School's Library website. The first podcasts can be found in the lower left hand corner at http://www.trussvillecityschools.com/Teachers/rachel.brockman/default.aspx Some teachers are learning how to use Skype to connect to one another and even to bring experts in for professional development. If you would like to make connections with an Alabama teacher please leave your information at http://learning247.wikispaces.com/connection

Wow! Shawn Nutting was awarded the Marbury Award for Technology Coordinators for the State of Alabama . We are so proud of him! Several Fellows presented with Cathy and Sheryl yesterday . We used a form of "speed dating" to share our stories . It was great to share in small groups rather than large with no feed back. I later presented with Shawn about our TETC and Juliana about Eduwikipedia . I am excited about the people I have been able to network with over the last two days! I can't wait to see where those relationships go. Next conference, NECC .

I am working to develop online summer courses for my teachers. Anyone interested in co-teaching?

Students in three 4 th grade classrooms recently read an article in Time for Kids about the malaria problem in Africa. They decided to raise money for Nothing But Nets which for $10 will purchase nets for villages. They created posters to be placed around the school and also we on air with WPIN , Paine Intermediate News, to share their knowledge and concern. Through this broadcast, Sue Koch, gifted teacher, shared with the students that her daughter, Sarah, is currently in a village in Africa where she is experiencing the problem with malaria. She had to bike a 3 year old 10 km to a nearby medical unit who came down with malaria. Kristi Stacks, lab teacher, and I decided to use SKYPE to allow Sarah and the students to talk. One morning during WPIN , we SKYPED Sarah who was on a rare visit to the capital. The conversation was broadcast over the closed circuit morning show for all the students to hear. It was great! The quality of the call was perfect. We have made a movie a...

We have begun to think how Skype could be used in our classrooms. A middle school teachers asked for help in finding a classroom in France that they could Skype. I quickly realized that there was not a good way to find interested classrooms. However, while researching resources for Eduwikipedia , I came across a Skype directory. When I selected the Education category there was only one person who seemed to be truly involved in education. I requested his information because he said he was interested in locating other educators in technology to collaborate with. Last Friday night my Skype phone began to ring. Bill Brennan from New York was on the other line. We began to share how technology is being used in both New York and Alabama. I cannot wait to see where this conversation and collaboration will take us.

I am sitting here in my office amazed at the conference today. The morning began with Sheryl Nussbaum Beach getting everyone going with a motivational video, I Generation, and Skyping in Jeff Utecht from Shanghai, China and Chris Croft. You could literally see everyone sit up a little straighter when they realized it was 10:30 PM in China and Jeff was willing to talk to them in Alabama. Everyone left the keynote session ready for the concurrent sessions. I have to hand it to our tech staff. All of a sudden the wireless shut down on everyone - about 300 people. They fixed the problem quickly and got everyone up and running by the end of the first session. We also awarded technology grants. You can see pictures here - http://www.flickr.com/photos/chambfamily/sets/72157594459574384/ We ended the day with great BBQ and conversations. I have heard from several people that they thought this conference was exactly what they needed but WOW there is so much to take in. I am interest...

Tonight is the eve of our Trussville Educational Technology Conference. The conference is modeled after Alabama Best Practice Center's Octoberfest and the K12 Online Conference. All 289 faculty, staff, directors, and the superintendent will be at the middle school tomorrow for 4 hours of technology training. I am thrilled that Sheryl Nussbaum Beach is our keynote speaker. The teachers will spend one hour with Sheryl then travel to 3 other sessions of their choice. So many of our teachers are new to technology that we did not have sufficient presentors that knows Web 2.0 and are using it. So, we decided to utilize the resources of the K12 Online Conference. We are taking Jeff Utecht's LAN party and making it on a larger scale. All teachers will bring their wireless laptops to get as much hands on as possible. We have created public SharePoint sites for each session with a blogging component added. The moderators for each session will promote the use of the blog to cont...

I get it that technology is not to be taught in isolation but as a media in which to construct meaning for the learner. However, I often get caught up in learning new tech tools that I have to remember that I am learning them to use to educate. Because I now work with helping teacher integrate technology into their classrooms, I am struggling with how much I am teaching the teachers to communicate through e-mail, their SharePoint websites, and teacher productivity tools instead of understanding the educational value that technology tools offer. Don't get me wrong, I do teach both ways but feel sometimes I feel that I am wasting my time teaching how to create a table in word, etc. Most of our 300 teachers are so behind the learning curve because they see technology as another program to add to their busy schedule. We are bombarding them with technology that they do not understand nor really want. How do you cultivate an eagerness to learn? We conduct one on one training, smal...

Our middle school principal create a schedule so that almost all the teachers have two breaks during the day. The first break is for the teacher and the second break is scheduled by her. All teachers must attend the second break activities, called CAPS time. Every other Monday, I am teaching technology integration to all teachers. The principal or assistant principal sits in on all meetings to support the instruction. So far we have worked on setting up gradebooks correctly in STI, individual SharePoint websites, and SAS training. Tuesdays through Thursdays are spent with grade level meetings, designing engaging work, parent communication, and more. Because the teachers are having so much professional conversations together, I am seeing that teachers are impacting other teachers thoughts and ideas quicker than at any other school. A few teachers attending this summer's blogging workshop and are beginning to try blogging through our private SharePoint websites, discussion bo...

The 06-07 school year has begun with me in my new position, District Technology Integration Specialist, for a school system with 4 schools, 300 teachers, and a little over 4,000 students. I worked some over the summer to try to get my feet wet before the full force of the school year began. I conducted Tech. Tuesday classes on Teacher Productivity Tools and Social Networking Tools. There was not an overwellimg response to the workshops, however, at least 3 people attended each Tuesday. These were great because I was able to form relationships with people I had worked with at my old school and those I would come to work with in the future. Also, I created digital handouts which I posted on May the Tech Be With You (wikispaces) for each session I taught. This has helped me tremendously as I re-teach these classes to interested teachers this year. The teachers like the idea that the handouts are online but they still wanted them printed out infront of them. I attended conducting a...