class website

I just made a class website - woohoo! At the moment it is simply a blog where I am posting the stories from class (one class at a time only) and basic structures covered. Students will not be able to post comments - there's a liability issue there that I'm not willing to go into at the moment. Eventually I hope to add audio podcasts of the story and the structures.

My primary goal here is to provide students with a resource if they have missed class, or if they would like some extra practice outside of class.

Here is the url: http://profeburchill.wordpress.com/

absences and making up work

Right now my policy is that students must hand write a 100 word essay in Spanish, which incorporates vocabulary from the class they missed, for each day a student was absent.

I am wondering if perhaps I cannot set up a student blog where I post the stories from class with the highlighted vocabulary so that students have access at least to the written version of class and can get some comprehensible input from their absences.

I don't know how much effort it would take to make audio podcasts of the stories so that students can also hear the stories online. It wouldn't work if they had no computer access, but for the majority of my students the majority of the time this would give them some access to the classroom.

I just don't want to create endless work for myself that will have little educational impact.

technology workshop

Well, my workshop went off without a hitch. Or, that's what I'd like to say :)

I didn't plan for how long it would take to get everybody logged on in the computer lab. And I compensated by randomly spewing out way too much information at everybody. And then... the internet went down. LOL

There we were telling everybody how wonderful technology is and how much work time you can save, and... nothing. Absolutely predictable. But all in all, it went fairly well and was not nearly as terrifying as I thought it might be.

Web 2.0

As my colleague and I have prepared for our presentation tomorrow I have had the opportunity to reflect on my own thoughts about technology. In some ways I am no stranger to technology. My step-mother was programming computers before PCs even existed. She taught me BASIC when I was in elementary school. I used to chat on irc (does anybody even remember what that is/was?) and I regularly frequented bbs's (bulletin boards). I remember when the move was first made away from dos - I was upset because now people who didn't know anything about computers would still be able to use them.

But for all that I'm not technologically savvy. I have never cared to learn more than I absolutely needed to know at that exact moment. And, for the most part, I have not used technology in my classroom. Basically, it boils down to the learning curve. I find that I do not have much free time, and the time that I have I am loathe to spend figuring out something else that may or may not work. :)

My colleague and I were discussing Web 2.0 and all the collaborative tools it offers. And I just lit up. I have found new colleagues, some on the other side of the globe, and suddenly I am not an isolated teacher in my classroom anymore. A student asks me a question, and where before my answer would have been I don't know, now I can add but let me ask somebody. And within minutes I have an answer. As I was reading Harry Potter I came across two terms I was unfamiliar with (well that I thought may have been misused - there were many terms I was unfamiliar with!) and from around the world came responses: one was most certainly a mistranslation, while apparently the other was not. I have even met local friends and mentors.

Yes, there has been a small learning curve. No, I'm not the world's most savvy wiki user/blogger/moodler :) But, from my perspective here in a small corner of the universe, the benefits are amazing.

Now, here's hoping that the technology all works tomorrow and that I don't make a complete fool of myself. :)

staff development

A friend of mine and I are planning a staff development for our school. We've been given two hours in which to work. So, we promptly divided our session into three one hour blocks. LOL

Actually, it will work. The second half of the session is divided into two groups, and everybody can choose where to go based on their comfort level with technology, or their interest in the topics being covered.

My friend and I worked for several hours the other day planning this out. We have a fairly good skeleton of what we're doing now. We kept getting sidetracked with all the really cool things we could do, and finding that we needed to bring ourselves back into : What do we really hope to accomplish? What is feasible for the time frame?

The first half of the session will be a basic intro. We have two questions that we're going to ask each small group to brainstorm. 1. What are some of the benefits you can think of with technology in the classroom? 2. What are some of the roadblocks to using it?

After the small group brainstorms, we will go to a large group discussion on the topic.

After that, we will do a brief brainstorm on how to use the internet in a classroom setting safely and responsibly (i.e. internet safety, and teacher management)

Then the group will divide into two groups. My session will talk about some of the tools that require very little learning curve and will provide instant resources to teachers. I plan on having everybody make a track at trackstar, and a delicious account to track the sites we go to. Other than that, I just want to show some good, generally useful sites like google lit.

It was great working collaboratively like that, right up until I realized that I go back to work next week!!!