Technology Mentoring at Belle Sherman Annex

May 2009

2009-05-18T16:58:00.000-04:00

I've been using the SMARTboard in my classroom (struggled with Notebook version 10 issues - thanks for the help, Andy, and found many appropriate interactive websites)
Brief announcement at staff mtg re: forwarding ICSD emails to other email accounts
Picasa Web Album suppport for several teachers
Shared pictures from our KDT trip to IPEI representative for use in publications via Picasa
Offered a blog workshop on a Wed after school (3 teachers participating, 3 supporting) and will continue on a bi-weekly basis
How edit website for Belle Sherman? Specifically, adding emails and websites to staff directory page Our tech committee chair/librarian was looking into this for me but any additional follow-up would be appreciated. Our principal would like to have emails listed.

April 2009

2009-04-12T15:32:00.000-04:00

This month we were able to complete the second part of the Belle Sherman staff meeting technology showcase with the following presentations:

Rachels' class blog which featuresVoicethread, Google docs, Picasa and her weekly newsletter attached as a PDF
Kidspiration graphic organizers and images
SMARTboard (interactive white board) math and literacy tools
Using images (from the web or digital photos) in Word documents

Special thanks to Rachel, Jennifer, Andy, and Nancy for being willing to share your time and expertise! Thanks also to Randi and Jayne for being willing to share despite the scheduling conflict.

I have spent time this month helping staff use their email (specifically attaching documents) and setting up an account with Picasa. After helping a teacher get set-up with Kodak Gallery earlier this year. I was disappointed to learn of their new policy about having to spend a certain amount of money in their store in order to keep an archive of past pictures posted/shared online. We switched her into Picasa which does not have the same "address book" feature but rather looks in the user's gmail Contacts for email addresses, which meant we also had to get this teacher set-up in gmail and send a message from the gmail account to her email distribution list in order to have them become Contacts in her account. I also helped her trouble shoot some settings on her camera to improve the quality of her pictures.

I met with Nancy after school to help her get a ed.voicethread.com account set-up and to show her the basics of commenting. We had a student who was in her room for the Extended Day program make a sample recording and she was very excited about the visual of the bar at the bottom of the image showing the length of the recording. She is going to create identities for the rest of her class and choose images for them over the break, and then we'll meet again to go over more specific uses of this tool to supplement her curriculum, and to get her webcam set-up for video recordings.

This month the Belle Sherman technology committee met to plan for the school-wide Request for Proposals (due May 5). Under Jennifer's leadership and Andy's guidance we had a good discussion about where we have been, where we are, and where we are going. We came up with an exciting long-term vision and some priorities for the next year, trying to also balance individual teacher requests for new equipment. Jennifer is going to write up the initial draft and the rest of the committee will give input and help her finalize it around the end of the month.

After the break (April 13-17) I will have the SMARTboard moved over to the Annex so we can experiment with it!

March 2009

2009-03-16T16:27:00.001-04:00

This month I organized a technology showcase at a staff meeting. Several staff members presented the following technology tools:

class blogs
Voicethread
Gcast
Google calendar
Google docs
ichat
Skype
raz-kids.com and tumblebooks.com
readinga-z.com
proteacher.net

The staff was really engaged and made good connections to the examples, even brainstorming additional applications of the programs and exploring for specific uses. We ran out of time for the remaining presenters who were going to demonstrate the SMARTboard, Kidspiration, and using Google images and iphoto images in Word documents. We are waiting to hear which future staff meeting we can schedule for those presentations.

For my class blog I had my class use Voicethread and gcast to record their reflections on our class field trip to the Museum of the Earth. I also used Slide to embed a slideshow of recent classroom pictures in the blog and I experimented with uploading several classroom pictures directly in the blog so the printed version would include the images (the slideshow images don't appear in the print-out). We also had a webchat with the Museum of the Earth program coordinator to ask some follow-up questions after our field trip last week.

Future plans include helping my principal and the technology committee gather input from grade-level teams to formulate the school RFP in April. I also have plans to assist some teachers in getting a blog started for their class and in using Voicethread and Garage Band to record student read alouds. I am working with my class on some skits about being a good friend and some read aloud plays that I plan to record and embed in my blog using Voicethread and/or Garage Band.

3/11/09 Staff Meeting

2009-03-05T23:35:00.002-05:00

February 2009

2009-02-13T15:50:00.000-05:00

- Continued to communicate class news to families via class website.

- Helped another teacher get accounts set-up in both raz-kids.com and Kodak Gallery. Assisted her in sending out first slideshow through Kodak Gallery.

- Helped another teacher set-up a class blog in blogger and make initial post.

- Supported another teacher with an existing class blog to troubleshoot embedding google calendar in her blog.

- Helped a teacher from another school (and her student teacher) get set-up and oriented to Voicethread. Spent most of the time creating account and discussing possible applications of the program. Her homework was to get the identities for each student (along with a profile picture) set-up and to confirm she had proper permission slips for all of them before moving on to create her first thread.

- Planned "Technology Showcase" for March 11 staff meeting: got principal support, recruited about 10 teachers to demonstrate and am still waiting to hear back from a few others. Technology to be shown includes: class websites/blogs, google forms, youtube, web chats (ichat and skype), sharing digital pictures with parents (picasa and kodak gallery), using google images in newsletters with ESOL and early childhood populations, kidspiration, EM games, raz-kids, voicethread and smartboards. It may get videotaped and put on the ICSD home page....

January 2009 Voicethread

2009-01-10T14:15:00.002-05:00

I had a parent volunteer install a webcam on our classroom eMac and then he helped each student record themselves reading aloud a book they wrote. The parent is a real techie who was enthusiastic about this took and had great ideas for how to enhance the quality of the video comments. Since he volunteers every Friday morning I will be able to create many more recordings of students reading aloud, sharing their ideas, and reflecting on classroom activities! The first grade music concert is next week and I hope to make a short video of it and post that for them to comment on. Here's what we did this week:

Here are some video clips from the first grade music concert and my class's reflections on the new President. We watched this voicethread in the classroom using our projector so they could hear each other's comments and see how it's important to speak up and look at the camera when recording!

January 2009

2009-01-07T23:06:00.005-05:00

This month I worked with a fellow teacher in the Annex a few afternoons after school to help her set-up some checklists and writing paper templates in Excel and to help her navigate the online Everyday Math game. Still working with another teacher on helping her upload/share digital pictures through Picasa. She wasn't able to check her home email account at school because we got an error message about not being able to establish a secure connection to https//:webmail.firman.us which was frustrating when she had to retrieve her password via email and thus delay the project until she could check that email account at home.

I helped our Pre-K teacher, Arne, troubleshoot using the projector. I ended up having to submit a Snoopy request to help get his Dell working (turned out to be a problem with his resolution settings) and an external video output adaptor for my laptop as I realized I currently can't connect to the projector! Peter Stromberg came out to address the issue and was able to get both of us set-up.

We had a webchat via Skype with our Kids Discover the Trail class at Northeast when Samantha Sands, the museum's public program coordinator came to our classroom. The kids really enjoyed seeing their classroom and comparing what was similar/different. They were a little shy to introduce themselves and ask questions of each other in front of the camera but overall it was a big hit. We will have another webchat when Samantha visits their class and then start writing letters to each other which should help facilitate better teamwork and communication when we go on the field trip in March. I hope to use gcast during the field trip to record their impressions and ideas at the museum.

I have also been doing some more Voicethread recordings with the help of a parent volunteer (see above).

I didn't really do my Literacy Academy homework in that I haven't been using Kidspiration in my classroom yet... it's been a busy month with assessments and I hope to get to it in February!

December 2008

2008-11-30T17:52:00.004-05:00

I have all my students on Raz-kids now and have been slowly incorporating it into reading and choice times. The scheduling to make sure all students get a turn each week has been a little tricky as they are quick to claim it isn't fair, so I'm still working on a system that they can manage independently.

Near the end of December I scheduled a tech help session for the staff in the Annex to go over various OS X, EM games and gcast questions. Jennifer was kind enough to bring over a few laptops for it so we could all sit in my classroom. Unfortunately a few of the staff who had requested the session had to cancel at the last minute so it ended up being one-on-one support for Lisa, our reading specialist, but she definitely benefitted from it and I've rescheduled for the second Monday in January.

I had a lot of fun this month with Andy's visit to help implement Voicethread with my class! He and I were able to work with 2 students at a time to make their first recordings, commenting on pictures of classroom events and experimenting with various features of the website. Since his visit I have rotated the class through a Voicethread center two more times and they have picked it up very quickly. So far they have just been talking about what's going on in the pictures and using sight words in sentences, but next I plan to use a parent volunteer to help record them reading aloud some of their writing. I'm pretty excited about the possibilities of this program.

Second round of Voicethread recordings:

First round of Voicethread recordings: (Thanks again, Andy!)

Raz-kids Support Sign Up Sheet

2008-11-20T14:01:00.000-05:00

November 2008

2008-11-10T21:41:00.006-05:00

I've been helping our principal set-up her Smartphone so she can have access to email and her calendar when she's not on her computer. It's proved to be more complicated than I expected to troubleshoot the hotsync/wireless sync failures with her calendar and email, so after several afternoons of playing around with it I finally had our librarian submit a Track-it to get the pros involved.

I also uploaded a video of students reading a play to my class blog (which I recorded with my personal digital camera) and used Picasa to upload more pictures. I think I like Slide's embedded slideshows more than Picasa's but it's hard to admit that since I'm a big fan of anything Google makes!

I've also been helping a fellow teacher create a more streamlined template for her newsletter in Word by using text boxes to divide the page and inserting pictures to illustrate what she's writing about. She is eager to post pictures online to share with the families in her class through Picasa or a similar website. In playing around with Picasa I'm thinking she would be better off using Kodak Gallery which would save the email addresses she wants to send slideshows to and would enable the viewers to order prints directly from the site. I think Picasa works well for people who want to embed pictures in blogs or other websites, or email to other Google account holders tagged in the album, but it's not quite as user friendly for just emailing slideshows on a regular basis.

I was frustrated with the new electronic report cards as some of the text fields were finicky in Word but I only discovered this after I had set-up a file for each student. While I appreciate that it's a big project to develop a template that will work in both PCs and Macs with a variety of versions of Word, I'm hoping next year's version of the report cards will have these issues sorted out so I can encourage and support more teachers to use them. I think we've missed the boat for many this year as they will want to work off of the hardcopies they started this grading period for the rest of the year.

Another workshop idea that came up at Belle Sherman was using Garage Band to record students' oral reading. I would also like to use Gcast to do this and I gave our reading specialist a brief overview of the program. I hope to implement it before the holidays to get a "fall" sample of each student reading aloud, and then record at least two more throughout the year so they can monitor their progress. I'm also curious to use Voicethread for this purpose but I don't think I'll bother creating a separate account/log in for each student. I wonder if you can record conversations in Skype or a similar free webcam chat interface....

I plan to use Voicethread in my classroom in early December (with Andy's support) and have gone ahead to create an identity for each of my students under my account. I am excited to try it out by having students read aloud thank you letters they will write and explain their pictures, and by having them comment on a few pictures I've taken of classroom activities this fall. I think it will be a big hit with the families and a popular choice when students get on the computers!

I've been really annoyed with my class blog because the comment feature isn't working despite using a standard Blogger template and having the comments enabled in all 3 places you can indicate that in Blogger. Arrrgh!

October 2008

2008-11-04T20:55:00.020-05:00

It took a few extra notes home but I now have permissions slips for ALL of my students to use their images online. One family said no to any audio, which is a shame because I would like to record readers' theater performances and assemblies/music concerts to post those on the blog, too. Maybe I can bring it up at our conference later this month and see if they change their mind....

I just discovered Slide which enabled me to post slideshows on my class blog that I've been sharing with the families in my class via Kodak Gallery. I had required families to login to view the first slideshow I emailed out in September and it was interesting to see who actually visited it but I think the convenience of having pictures embedded in the blog is worth the sacrifice of documenting useage.

I now have all of my students registered on raz-kids and EM games and have sent home information to the families about how to use those resources outside of school, but I haven't yet integrated them as a regular part of our classroom activities (they are optional during our "choice time").

I need to install the latest version of shockwave on my computers and to walk the children through the log in process for each site. I have posted a class list with their name and passwords for each site by the computers but have yet to give direct instruction/modeling on how to use that information. I have 1 reliable computer online (eMac), 1 computer that our librarian has strongly encouraged me to not use online (classic blue iMac), and my laptop (iBook) that I plan to let them use once training them carefully. That's a bit of a bottleneck but with a clear rotation schedule I think I could get each student on those sites for at least 15 minutes per week (plus additional opportunities to choose to go online).

Many teachers were curious about Raz-kids and Reading A-Z so Pat and I invited Andy to come to our school to offer a workshop on it. Our principal is eager to attend that, too. When we compared our busy schedules the next available after school timeslot was December 8 and Andy generously offered to spend his next available day (Dec 11) doing follow-up support with teachers in their classes.

I also made my first Google document (thanks, Andy!) for scheduling Parent Teacher Conferences. I gave checkbox options for November 14 and a few times after school before and after the 14th, then I had an optional textbox for notes/preferences and a required textbox for the family's name. I had 5 out of 16 families use the webform! Another 7 returned the hardcopy printout of the webform (my weekly newsletter is now a printed version of the blog), and I'm still waiting to hear from the remaining 4.

This month I also helped our principal distribute the report card templates to the staff, and discovered her lack of access to administrative files on the server. I am scheduled to help her create e-mail groups in Outlook tomorrow after school and I am trying to confirm that she has the most up-to-date e-mail addresses for our teaching staff.

Pat and I offered a "report card troubleshooting" time after school this past Monday but, alas, no one showed up. I have helped a few teachers learn how to save files to the server but no one has asked me for help with the electronic version of the report card as most people seem to be using a paper copy for this grading period. Hopefully we can support any teachers looking to use the electronic version for the next two grading periods.

There seems to be a lot of uncertainty surrounding the use of Macs (most of which are on OS X) and I plan to develop a "Workshop In A Box" during a half day on Nov 20 to answer those FAQs and teach some time-saving shortcuts to help the PC people be more comfortable and efficient on a Mac. I have collected a few issues/questions from users but I will try to gather more information from the staff in the coming weeks so I can be sure to address all of their needs. I will talk to the few staff who have approached me to be sure I can find a date in early December that works with their schedules and then advertise it to the rest of the school/District and put it on My Learning Plan. I plan to develop a Google form for the workshop so participants can submit more questions and provide feedback during it to both guide it and provide information for follow-up.

I also spent a lot of time this month helping teachers and staff troubleshoot a variety of problems with Microsoft Word (ranging from inserting pictures into a document, to creating a template for our principal's weekly newsletter, to finding where documents had been saved on the hard drive) and e-mail (ranging from saving downloads to resetting the default reply-to e-mail address). I showed many teachers how to submit a Snoopy Help Request.

September 2008

2008-10-02T18:29:00.001-04:00

This month I helped a number of teachers in the Annex with basic questions about printing, inserting images into Word documents, transferring files from the computer to their memory stick, installing fonts on their computer, and correcting changes to the default settings on computers in our library. I created a series of labels for the common materials found in classrooms (e.g. pencils, geoboards, etc.) using Google images and distributed these to the teachers via email and hard copy.

I also created a hand-out for the entire school staff detailing how to save documents to the District's secure server vs. the computer they are working on. This was in anticipation of editing report cards electronically but obviously could be used for any files. I demonstrated the steps and passed out the hand-out at our staff meeting yesterday (10/1/08). The hand-out is available on Blackboard under For TMs.

Both K and 1 are studying butterflies with live monarch caterpillars in each room (who have all turned into butterflies and been released by now). I found a series of four short videos documenting the four stages of a butterfly's life cycle (egg, caterpillar/larva, chrysalis/pupa, and butterfly/adult) which I emailed to all of the teachers in the Annex and showed to my class:

My students really enjoyed watching the videos and noticed lots of details about both the content of the videos and the format of the videos (e.g. "the red bar across the bottom shows how much longer it will play").

Finally, I started a blog for my class. It is in a very initial stage right now but I did figure out how to remove the "next blog" button in the header (and the entire header, actually). I hope to use the blog to supplement my weekly newsletter (distributed via hardcopy on Fridays) and the digital slideshows I email out monthly to families (all but one of whom use email, so I print a copy for the one family not online).

As a part of the blog I created a Google calendar detailing which child is designated to bring snack each day and listing major school events (e.g. picture day). I hope it will be helpful for those families who don't seem to receive/keep/read the hand-outs from school. I just announced it in this week's newsletter and am eager to get some comments on it from the families. Many of them seemed very excited about the first digital slideshow I sent out last week so I am hopeful that they will be tech savvy enough to check the blog when they receive an update notification email!

I'm now in the process of setting up my class in Raz-kids and hoping to send home the log in information to my families next week. I plan to have some time during the schoolday for my students to use the program in addition to encouraging families to help their children log on at home/the public library/etc. Last spring I set up the K class I was working with and many children enjoyed using it at school and 3 used it regularly at home - one contacted me over the summer requesting that I add new books! The next steps will then be to document the process of setting up a class and then offer a workshop to help other teachers get their classes set-up.

Wow - when I sat down to write this I didn't think I had much to say but I guess I've been pretty busy these past few weeks!