Laptop Learning Projects

     The Laptop Learning projects have been such a learning experience for me this year.  Having a laptop that I could take with me to planning sessions, training, and home, helped me be more efficient with my work.  We have learned so many great technology concepts, from keeping current on educational bloggers to blogging ourselves.   We have created our own Google Homepages and dabbled with podcasting and geocaching.  If technology leaders of our schools are not learning new concepts and keeping up with the growing tends in technology, then the entire school will be falling behind.

    I have been able to bring many of these concepts back to the students and teachers at White Oak Elementary.  Many adults underestimate what elementary children can do.  White Oak’s students were able to begin taking the concept of podcasting and creating presentations in Powerpoint and Photostory3 with narration.  While the students did not create blogs, we used Gaggle to do discussion threads.   The county’s GPSs are coming to White Oak next week for a little geocaching with fourth and fifth grade. 

   We are already making plans for projects to do next year.  There were so many things the teachers and I wanted to do with the students, but there was just not enough time or space available in the computer lab to get to everything. 

NCaect Conference and Blogging

I am here at the NCaect conference. After a day of attending some wonderful sessions, I’m beginning to warm up to the idea of blogging. Will Richardson had some interesting things to say about the value of publishing and sharing ideas on the web and the need for collaboration. With my own children very much into social tools, such as My Space and Facebook, I have, in the past, viewed these tools as valuable as video games. I can now see some uses of blogging, message boards, and podcasting in an elementary classroom.

I attended a session on Gaggle and found that it has some excellent tools for blogging and message boards. I went into the session, because I planned to use Gaggle for the first time next week. One of our fourth grade teachers wanted to do email as usual, but also wanted a kid safe email that students could use to email local politicians. I found Gaggle. I attended hoping to learn more about using it. I found that Gaggle also gives students the ability to blog safely. With Will Richardson’s ideas still in my head, I have really opened up to the idea of students blogging with Gaggle.

I also attended a session on podcasting. I found some really easy ways to do podcast with my students using gcast.com, Audacity, and Clickcaster . I can see some real possibilities for getting students excited about things they are learning bout in class, by sharing their responses to it in a podcast.

I can say that the NCaect Conference has really given me a lot to think about. I’ve learned things about technology skills I came to find out more about and have been given new things to consider. The challenges I now face will be finding time in an already full computer lab schedule to fit in new lessons and to convince classroom teachers that blogging, message boards, and podcast could be real learning tools for their students.