It’s been a long and rewarding journey. I feel absolutely exhausted from it all! But in the end, I learned a lot about the need for teachers to lead the way in the world of technology in education. I was able to try countless different online applications and tools, and got so many ideas for my teaching practice. Best of all I was able to co-create a website that will help other teachers in their professional practice. Not bad for 3 weeks worth of work!
I think my favourite part of the course was the various 10 minutes of fame presentations. I wish they could have been longer so we could have had time to ask more questions and go into more depth. I also really loved Kate’s approach to her 10 minutes; giving us 10 online “gems” that we may not have seen before. I was lucky and hadn’t seen any of the 10 sites that she presented on and I’m so excited to try them out. A good addition to this course would be to have everyone do something similar and present their top 10 favourite sites that they use in education. The problem with the online world is the sheer vastness of information available – it’s so nice to hear from other teachers about what they’re using and what works. I know that I personally could go on and on about my favourite online spaces.
I’m really looking forward to not thinking about school and projects this weekend! I start my last 2 classes on Monday and definitely need the time to clear my brain. 🙂
So here’s my final project that I co-created with Christine Bodt: www.ipads4literacy.weebly.com
While we worked collaboratively throughout, I was responsible for the Reading Skills, Responding to Literature, and Accessing Literature pages on the site.
Julie,
Thank you for providing a link to the website you and Christine created – it is so full of great teaching and learning ideas! I have downloaded One Minute Reader and will ask Tech Support to load it onto our iPads. I am going to look into Hairy Phonics before passing it on to my teachers, and possibly providing a link to my library page. I like the way you organized your tabs and will keep that in mind when modifying my library web page (Virtual Commons) this Fall with my district TLs. I had thought that buttons spread out across the page in columns would look best, but your site offers such a clean look and is very user friendly.
I have also subscribed to TechRadar – if its content is anything like MindShift (which it appears to be), then I will be happy with a weekly subscription. Several times last year, I forwarded great articles and links to my staff, based on MindShift’s recos. Several of my staff now subscribe too!
Like you, I have also enjoyed the 10 Minutes of Fame in our class, as it is always better to learn from someone who has used a resource before and is excited about its potential. I have copied or bookmarked at least 2 dozen links in this course! I hope we can access this blog for the next several weeks, as I’m sure once school starts and I connect with staff again, there will be other sites I want to pass on.
Doni
Julie,
I love the look of your website, it is clean and not overwhelming. Like you said, there are a TON of resources online. The fact that your site is calm (white and gray background, blue text) and not cluttered, makes it a comfortable space to look for ideas.
My school is getting more iPads in the fall, so I may be coming back to your site for recommendations. If you maintain it during the school year it might be nice to have a featured app on your homepage. Get people coming back every week to see what you recommend next!
I totally agree that teachers are the best resources for sharing digital technologies for teaching and learning. I think this kind of learning would be useful as school-based, district-based and provincially-based knowledge sharing. Every school is different, but teacher concerns tend to address similar issues. I am amazed at the amount of work this learning group has accomplished in these three weeks, not the least of which is shifting attention from using digital technologies in the library to positioning educators as leaders in learning and living with digital technologies in human societies.
I looked at the website, I am posting my comments for the website here. A very good start to an interesting project! The pictures are illustrative of the feelings you want to convey – an excitement about reading, literature, and the use of iPads in the classroom. I like the way you have organized the topics as a series of reading processes. I would encourage you to think about ways to make the online site of iPads4Literacy interactive, a way for teachers to become part of the process of developing teaching concepts and resources for teaching literacy with iPads. It is nice to see the convergence of different online sites and resources to support learning activities, management and assessment. I also appreciate the way you have framed the content of the site in terms of educational practice, rather than simply listing pages of lists. The conversational tone of the pages invites response. Perhaps in the next iteration of this idea it can include an interactive component.