Sunday, May 4, 2008

MacklinStaff » April 25 PD Day

MacklinStaff » April 25 PD Day

On April 25 I put on a full PD day for our school.  I had three items on my agenda: Digital Citizenship presentation, Digital Story Telling Workshop and finally time to work on, perfect or learn for the first time about our new school website.  Here is how it went.

1. Digital Citizenship Presentation
This started out horribly with major technical problems. (No wireless, speakers not working, wireless working then laptop freezes, etc.)  In the scramble fix it time we conversated about what digital citizenship is and how it pertains to our personal and professional life.  Throughout the rest of the presentation a lot of great conversations happened.  A few points that came out of it were; 1. Facebook is too abused and therefore has no place in the school. 2. It is easy to catch older students doing something wrong if you know a few tricks.  3. There are great programs out there to make life easier and safer for parents, teachers and students alike. ie.google alert

2. Digital Storytelling
Based on what Bready School did, I split my staff into five groups and each group had to retell a story using one of five programs. (Voicethread, Kerpoof, Comiqs, Slideshare, Tuxpaint) This went great since I told my staff that these would stay private.  Each group learned a Web 2.0 application and had some fun, staff morale!  These turned out to be VERY entertaining.

3. School Web Site
Most of my staff had already created their pages off of our school website.  A few more learned how to get their pages going as well.  I also had a number of staff members confident enough that they were helping others.  This was GREAT!!!  We did not have much time for this but it did get us to almost 100% teacher pages.  We still have a couple of teachers that have not started their pages but by next school year, we will have 100% of the teachers maintaining their own websites.

All in all, the day was a huge success.  I realized that for the most part my staff is either computer savvy or willing to learn and therefore we can move forward with our use of the new web 2.0.  Coming out of this day I also have a new crop of attendees coming to my Wednesday TechTips workshops.
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1 comment:

prakashan said...

Hi,

Yes, Kerpoof is cool I think and thought you might want to know about ToonDoo.

ToonDoo. is a free, online comic strip creator tool that allows you to create your own comic strips, publish and share it with the rest of the world.

Hundreds of teachers worldwide have still gone along and used toondoo with great impact in school, assignment, and presentation environments.

Not just that, it also comes with two cool features for creating your own avatar and uploading your photos and images.

It would be nice if you could review the tool and share your comments.

Thanks for your time.

Prakashan