Wednesday, May 7, 2008

More Fun with RPC

The students who were absent yesterday started their research projects. It was so fun to say to them"you assignement for today is create a RPC for this project, print it and write down all the answers to Step 1." They all knew what they were doing and got busy. One student who was new this quarter needed help, but not with finding things on my website, other studnets showed her where to go and how to complete everything she just was asking for more information about the RPC!!! She's so excited to have this as a tool for next year at college.

Also today as the studnets went more in depth about their topics they were calling me over to ask my opinion about the reliability of different websites. Whoooda thunk it!!!

Tomorrow I have a challenge, due to IB testing several students will be absent I need to find the right place for a podcast of the lecture they will miss. I'm hoping the district can support it and I can keep it on my web page at school. I will check this afternoon.

Thanks for this opportunity. Over the summer I may even come back here to blog and share my experiences as I learn and do more with the tools I've learned about here.

Tuesday, May 6, 2008

Pleased and Impressed

I haven't finished with all that I want to but I'm am so pleased and impressed with what I learned and accomplished and with what MILI has shared and taught me. I'm also very surprised to see how easy it was to accomplish the 23 plus 1. I need to spend more time going over everything I've learned and finding more ways to apply it to my classroom. This is the way to reach our students, but more importantly we as teachers need to know more and be better at what we want our students to accomplish using the internet. It's too easy to sit back and say, this is their way of learning. If we don't know what we're doing we'll have no way of helping our students. We still need to know, understand and lead. Thanks for the tools to do this!!

Monday, May 5, 2008

SlideShare

Took a look through the list and Thing 19, Just for Fun. Who isn't looking for fun!! After googling Edutopia I looked through the list and found slideshare. As the article says, it's not your Father's slideshow. This tool supposedly beats "powerpoint." Here's the challenge: tomorrow, Tuesday May 6 I begin my last research project of the year with my classes. I will offer 50 extra credit points for students who use Slideshare instead of powerpoint. The I'll see. It's one thing for me to play with it but how productive and useful will it be for my students? Hmmmm, we will see. Too bad we don't have time. But never fear!! I will post on my blog the results, June 4th is presentation day. Stay tuned.