Originally when thinking about my plan, my “Future Vision for encorporating ICT into my practice”, I was imagining presenting my plan to a group of colleagues at my former school where I knew there was a postioin that I may get. I envisioned trying to pursuade them to join with me to experiment with BYOD, Edmodo, and blogging. I imagined us then having had some results qnd being able to go to the wider staff group in order to encourage a greater adoption of ICT in the school. I felt that in order to reach the more technophobic member of staff it was important to present a limited number of new ICT resources so as not to overwhelm them and to provide real local examples of it in use in our school context so that those teachers could see the benefits of using ICT both for students and for themselves.
Now that my teaching position is settled however I am looking at another audience for a presentation of my own personal plan. I will create a plan for myself for the upcoming year in my new class and present it to our LIBE477 class, as well as my PLN for feedback and support. Perhaps a screen cast or movie with a demonstrations of how elements of my plan fit together? I could then post the that at my own personal blog to get feedback from others.
Looking for my Domain name on godaddy.com
I have yet to decide how I will present it, but my attempts to manipulate my public site are getting mixed results. I am at the moment (as of 7pm) experimenting with Weebly for Education and have looked into purchasing my own domain name. I am using advice from thesitewizard which lists GoDaddy as the worlds largest Domain name registrar. In this picture it shows that sandilandsclass.ca is available as a domain name and that I could register it for $12.95/year. I am not quite ready for that level of commitment at the moment, though it is an idea. If I own my own domain name I can still use Weebly to build the site, for free. If I used Weebly to register the domain they charge a whole lot more.
One Benefit that I have encountered so far to creating student blogs using Weebly is that the student interface uses drag and drop just as the teacher site does. It will be much easier for the students to modify and customize their pages in comparison to SharePoint. It seemed like bulk adding student was very easy and I added two test students Student A and Student B. It appears that you are able to add unlimited student accounts, though to get full functionality (like letting student’s upload multimedia) requires an upgrade to Pro. I am going to work now on content regarding BYOD, Edmodo, and blogging to encorporate into my site.
How I wish we had a national server service for education in Canada. We could order social media applications, and other learning software, as well as publishing or even research applications for school use. We wouldn’t have to worry about where student files were located because they would all be in Canada. Instead, we have district provided servers that are locked down and do not provide the same kind of learning environment we have at our fingertips when we are out of schools. In the meantime, we need to get parent permission to have our students’ use top of the line learning environments because our school system is not yet able to provide the service in-house.