My NECC of the woods

My first NECC conference was absolutely amazing. A three member team from my small Catholic high school in Louisiana braved the trip to Atlanta and found a whole new world of technology. Just the number of people using laptops was a novelty to us. The other teacher on the team and I have never even unhooked our laptop tablets from the InFocus machine to take home. We are concerned we cannot rehook them the next day and then we will not be able to use the InFocus viewer. Obviously, our technology level is somewhere way at the bottom of the ladder. At least one of the immediate things we are going to do is learn that skill and how to effectively use those tablet laptops. Our technology supervisor member of the team has promised to give us the training we never had.

Our group split up the sessions we attended and for my part, I was wowed by the amount of information being distributed and the level of energy used in presenting the ideas. I met Will Richardson whose book I had just read, heard David Warlick give a most inspiring talk, and saw Vicki Davis present on wikis and her international project. Everyone was interesting and the whole experience for a novice to web 2.0 is overwhelming. However, the best information I came away with concerns the use of Google Earth and I missed the poster talk of Joan Kane from the Chicago Public Schools. By the time I got to her table she was packing up her things. But, she told me to download the handout and boy, am I glad I did. Her tag is n07s511 and I cannot say how much all the information she gives out will help me. I needed basic ideas and instructions in a not so techky format. Hall Davidson's Staggeringly Good Things Integrating Media and Google Earth got too technical too quick and I am having trouble dealing with the handout. Thank you, Ms. Kane, for a real help to someone trying to incorporate Google Earth into a World Geography class. I finally feel that I can do some simple tasks and create some projects. I know I will get better as I go but starting was a little harder than I imagined. Many thanks, again.

Plagiarism Discussion

A very good discussion on traditional writing versus web 2.0 applications encouraged me to partaicipate. The forum was a blog by one of the more interesting people I try to read often and learn from.

How do you spell "potatoes"?

After spending a funfilled morning choosing plants at a nursery in Forest Hill, LA, "The Nursery Capital of Louisiana", my elderly mother, granddaughter, and I were eating lunch in a well known establishment in LeCompte, LA. During the course of our excellent meal, the young waitress came to the table and asked if I could spell "potatoes" for her; she and a couple of other young people working there needed to know. Without much thought, I spelled it correctly adding the es for the plural ending and made a cute comment about Dan Quayle not knowing to how to correctly add es and not just s to the end of the word. "It's funny you mention that", she said, "someone else told us about him too." Maybe she didn't believe the first person who had spelled the word for her???

Anyway, the other baby boomer customers in the restaurant and I had a quiet chuckle amongst ourselves about her not knowing either how to spell "potatoes" or who Dan Quayle was.

I found this incident most interesting in light of all that I have read about web 2.0 learning and the new literacy and the information age and the generation of digital natives. I could spell "potatoes" with my 1950s and 1960s education even though I am struggling with going up the next rung of the technology ladder and trying to engage my students to learn in a new age. Yet, this young person who was certainly out of high school and probably most adept at using all the new technologies didn't know how to spell a simple English word with perhaps a tricky plural ending but certainly something any baby boomer except Dan Quayle would know. It is just that sometimes it seems that basics are still important and despite all the technology, one must be able to communicate using the written word correctly. Anyway, I persist in trying to absorb all the new ideas in education.

Technology Successes this past school year

Self evaluation is a positive tool for seeing where you are and where you are going. So here is how I stand:

Technology Successes for school year 2006-2007
1. 1-1 laptop environment for all classes (American History, World History, and World Geography)
2. completion of two major projects per class including WWI comic books in American History and Digital Memory Books for a historical novel in World History
3. online testing via Quizstar.com for World Geography and at least three tests each for other two classes as well as using turnitin.com to check for plagiarism in writing
4. beginning of web 2.0 journey by reading several key books such as The World is Flat by Thomas L. Friedman, Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts by Will Richardson, and Classroom Blogging by David F. Warlick
5. starting this blog and trying to feel more confident in writing more assertively
6. agreeing to write a new grant for high school to incorporate blogging, wikis, and podcasting into teaching
7. trying to learn more about Google Earth and Google maps and how to use them in the classroom particularly for projects
8. attending the NECC convention Georgia this summer
9. trying to push the edge of the envelope by learning technology skills such as taking an online class about Microsoft Word and using a lot of new web 2.0 sites I read about

Things I really need to accomplish to get to the next rung on the technology ladder:
1. include more web 2.0 aspects into my teaching and revamp projects to include these; that will entail discarding some of the things I have done in the past and incorporating new ideas
2. incorporate more online testing into each subject and to continue using turnitin.com
3. continue to personally blog and start commenting on ideas brought forth by other bloggers and perhaps commenting on their blogs
4. do a podcast this next school year using that VFW essay contest
5. attempt to do a project using a wiki
6. learn enough about Google Earth and Google maps to do projects in World Geography using these
7. write the grant well enough to get the funding
8. continue to learn how to use flickr, bloglines, and other tools to stay abreast with emerging technologies

Crash Course in another technology

My newest challenge this month is to learn how to use a palm pilot to some degree in time for the NECC convention. The Diocese is loaning each member of our Grant Team one for the duration of the convention. Since school is now out, I will focus on that for a few days. The backup plan is just to take notes and manage myself the old fashioned way--via a binder. We'll see how quickly I can gain a comfort zone with this new technology.