Technology Brown Bag Sessions

Wednesday, December 1st marked the first Technology Brown Bag Session at the administration building. Smartboard basics was the topic. There were 19 in attendance with IT/Media, administration, HR, instruction, student services and special education represented.

Dana Dembeck was the primary presenter, I jumped in occasionally, and the other elementary ITRTs helped develop the Notebook file we used during the presentation. The group effort paid off with many of the participants thanking us and providing positive feedback.

We will continue to offer sessions on the remaining Wednesdays in December in hopes that the idea will stick and we can offer sessions on a weekly basis each month for the remainder of the school year or at least through the winter months.

Looking forward to the professional yet informal exchange...So do you have any suggestions for topics?
Please Advise,
rod

<a href="http://www.wordle.net/show/wrdl/1155397/Skills_for_the_21st_Century"
  title="Wordle: Skills for the 21st Century"><img
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  alt="Wordle: Skills for the 21st Century"
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Project Update

Three of the strands of the E=d3L project are completed and are ready for viewership. Several others have moved into authorship and are being further developed for a possible release in mid-June. It is all coming together through a collaborative effort and that in and of itself is exciting.

The conversations that we have had and hope to generate are going to begin to change the way we deliver and receive professional development. The blog, wiki and podcast pieces have come together nicely and we will be sharing those with our ITRT peers in the coming weeks. The format in which they have been developed will then serve as a template for collaborative contribution in building additional offerings.

The hope is that the cumulative effort can be opened up to the division so that teachers can choose from the topics and depth of study that best meets their needs with a easy understand and achievable set of expectations for earning license renewal points in the process. It is also our hope that contributions for future offerings will come from that same target audience. Tapping into an existing knowledge base will both recognize and reward the many talented educators that we are so fortunate to work with on a regular basis.

So this is going to be not only about opportunities for professional growth in the areas of integrating instructional technology, but also an experiment in expanding the ways and means by which professional development is chosen, created, developed, and delivered. Check back to see how things progress!

Embracing Web 2.0

After struggling to get the page and it's contents -just so- we (Liz, Lynel, and I) decided to ditch the fee for service web hosting tool and embrace wikispaces. It was a good decision. Create in word processor, copy and paste into the edit tool for wikispaces and done. Links, images, even videos were so much easier to post there than in the fee for service tool.
I am only slightly embarassed to admit the web 2.0 tool was not my first choice. I mean I knew that the tools on the web were easy to use and that connecting one web resource to another was fairly easy to accomplish. Many of the tools also include the ability to share the management of the sites and make portions public or private.
For our purposes, these will work just fine and the price is right. We just need to live there a little longer to get used to the neighborhood. I also need to brush up on some code in case I want to move to the next level in page appearance or offerings, but one wouldn't have to if they didn't want to...
Blogs, Podcasts and Wiki for E=d3L have a visit and see what you think.

rod

scheduled post

This post was scheduled to appear on 4/20 at 7:00

Did it work?!?!?