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.