Week in Review

Just a quick update on our progress with some current projects:

Today we received training on CPS clickers, and brainstormed some ways teachers could use them beyond the standard multiple choice quiz. How about students using them to check in with self-related levels of understanding during lectures or class projects? What CPS software lacks in terms of importing class lists from Gradebook (not impossible, just a few extra steps that might take longer than just typing the names in), it makes up in its ability to integrate with PowerPooint and easily create question banks.

This week I got to see the Walton Farm Video News Team editing its first episode. Things are coming along well, as is the planning for training the teachers involved in the video grant. We'll be trained on Final Cut and other video-related topics next week.

Several teachers ran into issues with uploading files to Wikispaces this week, receiving error messages saying the files were too large. As an avid user of Wikispaces since 2007, I've never had trouble uploading files, so I inquired with their online help and received a quick response. Apparently there has always been a 20 MB limit for free educational wikis, and it wasn't until this week that we all tried to upload larger files. Still seems strange, though. I opened a PowerPoint file, made a few changes, and couldn't re-upload it. I also ran into trouble posting a short video, when I'd posted several similar files before. Will have to keep looking in to this.

In other wiki-related news, a teacher at Hatfield has done some excellent work setting up grade-level wikis for teachers to share resources, particularly SMART Notebook files. While another excellent wiki has been set up by the Reading and Language Arts Supervisor to share district documents, this one will be teacher-driven and exist to share resources from teacher to teacher.

I've also been looking at Google Docs as a potential means for 5th graders to collaborate and share information on the 13 colonies. Students from two different classes would like to share information, links, pictures, and their own projects to learn about the colonies instead of using the textbook chapters. It's a great idea, and we recently had good success with 5th graders using a wiki to learn collaboratively about early explorers. Not sure if Google Docs will require user emails (not all these students have them or would have permission to use email),a nd need to check the TOS for age restrictions.

I'm looking forward to training teachers on CPS clickers soon, working with the teachers in the video grant in the coming weeks, and training secondary administrators on Web 2.0 apps next week. We're stayisng busy and doing some good work for the district and its teachers and students.