Information Overloaded

If you are having a bad day, just watch this video. His name is William Kamkwamba. I am not even going to ruin it by writing any more…

I was on del.icio.us last week and stumbled upon a very cool site by Austin Kleon where people have been posting newspaper blackout poems. Click here for one of my favorite examples from his site.

This type of poetry is created by taking a black marker and making poetry by coloring around the words in a newspaper article. The video below shows some grade 8 students trying it out! Very cool.

Okay, I am not sure if any of you watched the last season of American Idol or not, but a guy name Blake Lewis, who made it to the final two, was an awesome beatboxer. What is beatboxing you ask? Well, it is where you make drum beats, rhythm, and musical sounds using your voice.

A 15 year old by the name of Alex has become quite an internet phenomenon with his beatboxing skills. One of his youtube videos has in excess of one million hits.

I had the privilege over the last few days to work with Shaneen Jessome, a middle school teacher who decided to incorporate beatboxing with her middle school language arts poetry lesson. Grade 8 students worked in partners to write poems and then used Audacity to record rhythms with the multiple tracks.Too cool! Here are two great ones:Kris and Josh (Click to listen)Courtney and Shelby (Click to listen)

The weather is absolutely beautiful here today. And I am “one with the high pressure system”. But that is not why I am writing today.

I am absolutely giddy about geocaching and wish to tell you about our PD session. Geocaching involves taking a GPS system and locating caches, or hidden treasures, using latitude and longitude coordinates.

We had the opportunity last week to present geocaching to the Vice Principals in our District. I have one word to describe the experience……fun, fun, fun!

We hid 4 caches in Oromocto. VP’s were placed in groups of four and given 2 gps units per group. We programmed the gps’s with the waypoints and away they went.

We wished to model a math lesson, so we hid fraction playing cards in each of the caches. The winner had to return back with all of their cards and show us that they understood equivalent fractions by matching the pairs.

Here is one of the VP’s after her first find:

Here’s what I learned:

• Some VP’s are competitive
• Geocaching is a great way to build teamwork
• People love “doing” things (adults are no exception)
• You could apply geocaching to any subject….hide Math questions in caches, assemble story starters for Language Arts… you could geocache in Science by placing caches beside areas in nature that you want them to notice….oh the endless possibilities.

So, I was all fired up from the PD session and went home afterward bound to find a cache by my house. [This is where the demented comes in.] So I found one that was close and away I went.

Now, if you have been reading my blog, you will remember that we had record snowfalls this winter. Well, that snow is still on the ground, especially in the woods. And there are underground rivers under that melting snow too!

Needless to say, after my experience, I have decided to forgo geocaching expeditions in the woods until either a) the snow is melted or b) I buy a pair of hip waders. I sank in the snow up to my waist and discovered an underground river when I reached the bottom. :-). But I did find that cache!

I do have to say, that April is my favorite month.

No,  its not because I can wear my shorts in spite of the dirty melting snow.

Neither is it because I can pack my car scraper and shovel away.  [Even though this makes me very happy.]

April is officially my new favorite month because April is Christmas in the District. The end of March signifies the end of the budget year and time to spend any outstanding funds.
This year some schools in our District received Discovery Education Streaming.  Yesterday we gave it to the teachers at our notebook school and today we had the opportunity show the principals.  Listen, you have never seen teachers so happy.  It truly was like Christmas!

HoHoHo….I love April!

As many of you know, this New Brunswick winter has been especially taxing for a multitude of reasons. I am running out of places to put the snow in my driveway, my snowblower and broke after storm #2, and I am down a shovel. To make it worse, the St. Paddy’s Day storm is just around the corner.

I digress.

A month ago, Jeff and I were scheduled to present to the University of New Brunswick students on Technology and the Provincial Acceptable Use Policy. We had never given this presentation before and were counting on being able to work together on the Tuesday and then present the following day.

But school was cancelled!

Usually storm days are celebration days in my house. Not that day. Buried under mounds and mounds of snow, there was no chance that we would be able to meet to plan our presentation. Let me tell you, the panic was setting in!

Then I remembered Google Presentations.I had remembered Vicki Davis, a presenter at the ACTEM conference in Maine, using Google Presentations, so I thought I would give it a try. Jeff and I were able to work on the presentation together in real time and finish our slides in a few hours…pain free! The best part was the collaboration that Google Presentations offers. We would not have been able to do this with PowerPoint.

The screenshot above shows over 400 revisions that we made. We were even able to make a .pdf version of our presentation in the event of internet failure. The students loved it.

Take that cruel winter! Ha!

A conversation with my 12 year old daughter:

Me: Why aren’t you wearing your Crocs anymore?

Her: They aren’t cool.

Me: Why? I love mine.

Her: Hello! The teachers are wearing them now! When the teachers start wearing them, they aren’t cool any more.

HA!

We had this conversation last Spring and I was thinking about it the other day. Do students think about some technologies the same way they think of their “outdated”footwear? Once the teachers start using it, they move to something else….

Just wondering…

I just have to say it. 

 I love the beautiful wallpaper  made by digital artist Vlad Gerasimov.  In fact, I love it so much I added one of this works as my blog header (see above), and have plastered his work on my blackberry, my laptop and and my new desktop computer!  I especially love the “Alice in Wonderland” wallpaper that he has created. 

His work is whimsical, and suffused with emotion.

You can get free wallpaper on the site, or pay a small subscription fee and become a member for life!  Vlad Studio makes me happy!

We have had a few District Wide PD days this week where the High School Science and Social Studies teachers came in for training on wikis, podcasting, digital storytelling, advanced searches, screencasting and Smart Board. This was an excellent day and a great opportunity for teachers to sit down and experiment with some of technologies they are able to use with their students. Exciting!

On the second day, we had the teachers from our 1:1 notebook school in to do training on advanced searching with Ebsco and E-Library, wikis and digital stories. And I want to talk about my two favorite parts of the day.

Favorite Part of the Day #1:

During the digital storytelling session, I gave the teachers 6 pictures and they were to create their own original story from the pictures. Everybody had the same photos, but what was amazing was the different story lines that emerged from those 6 pictures. We played some of the stories at the end. We had a great time! Teacher PD needs to be engaging, hands-on, and fun in order for it to be effective.

Favorite Part of the Day #2:

After the sessions were over, a teacher showed me an excellent webquest that she developed. She told me it was fairly easy to do because she had previously taught that unit and was familiar with the content. That got me to thinking….when teachers are very familiar with the content, the tech learning curve is not so steep. What a great tip she has given me for helping other teachers who express anxiety over integrating technology into their lessons.

This is true for students and technology as well. A month ago, I brought down some students to do screencasting. They had just received their laptop a month before. We were working on mental math strategies that they were not comfortable with on two brand-new programs. So, I had set them up to fail before we even began……new format [screencasting] to showcase their work, two new programs to build the work [Smart recorder and Moviemaker] and a new strategy in Math……not a good idea!

I guess what I learned from my PD sessions is that in order to learn, people need to be engaged…it needs to be fun….Also, in order to learn, people need to build on what they know. You have to have some familiar ground when you start.

Thanks Cheryl. I had a great revelation from our webquest talk!

I stumbled on this site called DigHoles.com that I think is absolutely delightful. You can enter your location and the site will determine where you would end up if you started digging a hole through the center of the earth.

For example, if I dug a hole from my house:

I would end up …..

just below Australia, in the Indian Ocean!!

With the amount of snow shovelling I have done this winter, I could have made it to the Indian Ocean and back! [Insert bitter laugh here]

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