From My Summer Vacation-Portage Glacier Alaska

Thing 23-You Made It!

Whew....finally made it. I now have a lot of stuff to ponder and use in class. Hopefully, I will be able to do this in the next few weeks. After all of the business surrounding layoffs in my district I hope now to get back to teaching my students. I will recommend this course to other teachers.

Thing 22-Online Video Addendum

I have found TED.com to be a excellent resource and have created my own TED page for parents, students and teachers to access. http://www.hs.bcpsk12.net/dprindle/ted.html This will soon be migrated over to my new site.

Thing 22-Online Video

This year (through the inspiration of a friend see her channel www.youtube.com/user/kristadawnprice/) I have started using online video. I have a Youtube channel and also have them stored on my website. www.davidprindle.com and www.youtube.com/user/dprindle1/ . I and many of my fellow teachers feel that Youtube is a great tool for the classroom. However, at BCPS it is blocked during the school day. It is accessible from 3 pm to 745 am which in my view makes no sense. The only dislike is you don't know what is going to be the next video that may be recommended by YouTube and they may not be appropriate for class. I assume if the student watches the video through my channel that won't happen. I plan on continuing the use of this. I will be saving my videos in several forms....Quicktime movies to be stored on our school server (since streaming video is blocked at school), podcast form (playable on an iPod) and if necessary mobile phone size. In order to be better at all of this I went out and bought a MacBook Pro. Having been a long time PC user this was a huge move. But the Mac does everything easier than a PC with preinstalled software.

Thing 21- Twitter

I do have 3 twitter accounts. 2 for class and my own. However, I have not really used them yet to there full potential. I told my students that the class sites would be mainly for "flash" traffic. Snow day notices, good tv shows that would be of interest in class. Personally right now I only follow the Alaska Volcano Observatory. I am still trying to determine if Twitter will be a good thing to use in my personal or professional life. This is one of the tools that I will have to exam and/or develop further.

Thing 20-Bookmarking with del.icio.us

Here is my username dprindle. I have put all of my bookmarks up. As soon as I can find time I will edit some of them down or create a new user name and just put up select ones. I will be using these in class and for EdTech PD in our district. As far as productivity I can see the benefit of having your bookmarks online when you don't have your own machine with you. Anything I can use to when I don't have my own machine with me with enhance my productivity.

Thing 19-Introduction to Social Bookmarking

Not only would tagging be beneficial to fellow teachers but also to my students. If they can go directly to my delicious site they can then easily search it for current material rather than trying to weed through all of my book marks. I don't really see any disadvantages to this tool. An advantage is it also lets you control what fellow teachers and students need to see. I do like the tag cloud concept and will most likely add it to the sites that I manage so users can tell if my site has what they need.

Thing 18-Building Personal Learning Networks

It is not a question if we will use a PLN for our staff PD it is when. We are in the process of formulating our Ed Tech PD plan. I have already created and compiled our resources at http://www.hs.bcpsk12.net/dprindle/edtech/ . The benefits I see to this type of learning is tht we can have a place for training videos, podcasts, discussions, ideas and suggestions. The problem will be getting more "seasoned" teachers to participate. However, for the most part most of the teachers in BCPS are open to new ideas . But in any organization you will have laggards whether by choice or lack of experience. Here is an interesting graph I saw at a MACUL conference. We for the most part this shows you can get about 85% of your district on board. Here is the conference website: http://survive-and-thrive.wikispaces.com/

Early Summer Morning in the Brook Range Alaska

Early morning in the Brooks Range in July. Taken by the Koyukuk River in Wiseman Alaska.

Thing 17-More Web 2.0 Winners

I already use several of these tools. Google Docs, Google Maps, Google Earth, Flickr, Facebook, Twitter, You tube and one not listed Bing Maps. The main drawbacks to all of the these tools are students without internet at home, slow and blocked technology and sites at school, breaking the kids old school modes of wanting teachers to just stand and deliver and hand out worksheets.

Played the travel IQ game at least on my computer the map was too small.

Thing 16-Teach Digital

All of the videos have good points. However, the third one was a little annoying. True there are teachers out there that need to get into the future. But, we still have to get information to the student and sometimes this is boring. I have long recognized that we are dealing with a TV generation that have a 10 minute attention span before they are ready for a commercial. Recently I have been letting students use what ever means they want to communicate their assignments. I am moving toward teaching more digitally but try to balance that with hands on and some getting the information out. Part of the problem at BCPS is all of the blocking that goes on and older slower technology and not enough to go around. I do love the TED talks and have created a page on my website of my favorite picks. www.davidprindle.com I along with others in the district have brought our Educational Technology group back together to help teachers do a better job in the classroom of using appropriate technologies and applications.

Thing 15- How to Use Podcasts In Class

Actually I will be making my own video podcasts. As I said in Thing 14 my classes are visual. I will most likely record my presentations along with my class discussion in one of my classes. I have set up a podcast page on my website see http://www.davidprindle.com The one drawback to podcasting are the kids that don't have access to a computer and the internet at home. I still have to figure out how to combat that. In the future I could burn a dvd or cd for those students. The only push back I will get will be from the IT people in that they block all streaming media at school. My principal, curriculum director and supt, are foward looking and see teaching digital as a important tool.

Thing 14- Learning with Podcasts

I have no doubt that podcast can be valuable in students learning. Our student in BCPS do dual enrollment Calculus and each class is also on a podcast. In math and science these casts can be useful for review or if just plain forgot how to do something. However, I don't feel that an audio podcast if OK for Science and Math from the standpoint you need to see some of what is being demonstrated or taught. I would prefer to use a video podcast.

As for the casts I liked here is one from Elizabeth Fagen superintendent of Tucson, Arizona, Talking about school funding in the recession. http://learningmatters.tv/blog/podcasts/schools-in-the-recession-podcast-50th-in-the-nation/3506/ She is expressing the same frustrations that we are going through here in BCPS and Michigan. It helps to know we are not alone.

Next is a Race to the Top podcast. By Historian Diane Ravitch. I chose this because we are in the midst of trying to obtain this money. http://learningmatters.tv/blog/podcasts/race-to-the-top-podcast-play-money/3428/ She outlines the weakness of the strings attached to money. She has some very valid points.

I chose to listen to a alternate view of the RTTT by Kati Haycock is president of the Education Trust. http://learningmatters.tv/blog/podcasts/race-to-the-top-podcast-a-fascinating-impact/3426/ It seems that she is on the side of charter schools. Based on looking at their website they seem not to be a promoter of public education. She does have some valid points about data collection and analysis.

On a personal note I am afraid that everyday we are losing more and more local control over our schools.

I have found a couple of "podcasts" made by a friend of mine I will use in school. They are more video's than podcasts. http://www.youtube.com/user/kristadawnprice#p/u/16/k4n7XlHa69I and http://www.youtube.com/user/kristadawnprice#p/u/14/AJBjnslKwac I am going to use these for our long term projects.