Use this area to highlight the experiences that you have had related to educational technology that was not directly a result of our more structured class session activities. Experiences with workshop, in-service, online trainings, etc. are all fair game for your contributions here.

Andrea

• Attended E-Learning and Student Engagement Faculty Forum, Friday Sept. 29, 2006, James Madison University, [link]

Kevin

• Attended interactive whiteboard presentations by the Promethean (ActivBoard) and SMART (SMARTBoard) companies. We scheduled these for the same day so that we could efficiently evaluate which type of board we plan on recommending for purchase by schools. Promethean touted their company as being more education minded and their boards as being sturdier. The SMART representative pointed out that they were the first big player in the business and stressed the user-friendliness of their software. In the end we decided that SMART was the company to recommend. While Promethan's products do have more bells and whistles in many cases, the intuitive feel of the SMART software makes their product superior.

• Attended UnitedStreaming workshop at WVPT on November 17. A regional training representative from the Discovery Channel led the session of around 20 area teachers and ITRTs. UnitedStreaming received an overhaul this past summer and contains lots of new features. Most of the features RCPS ITRTs found most useful are in the Professional Development section of the website. There are short video clips in the Teaching Tips and Best Practices sections that provide specific ideas for using UnitedStreaming in the classroom. There are Interactive Training modules that provide teachers with self-guided opportunities for learning how to use features of the website. The Trainer's Toolkit provides ITRTs with resources for professional development. There are downloadable PowerPoint files for inservice session use and several downloadable PDFs which can serve as effective "how-to" email attachments. The Discovery Educator Network is designed for teachers comfortable with using the resource but wanting an online collaborative environment to share ideas and resources. Teachers who submit at least five activities that incorporate UnitedStreaming into instruction become Star Discovery Ecucators. These teachers are then able to create content on the site (their own blogs, for example) as well as interact in discussion boards and participate in regularly scheduled webinars. We were generally impressed with the improvements to the site, but found several features of the Teacher Center to be impractical. The Assignment, Quiz, and Writing Prompt Builders are all designed for students to individually interact with streaming content. Streaming video is a bandwidth hog so most school divisions, RCPS included, are simply not equipped to meet that sort of demand. While those features are enticing they are largely useless to the average teacher.

Links

• TappedIn [link] is an online community of educators you may want to explore sometime.

Denise

My use of Protopage for students to create a website about a specific climate region was very successful. You can view some of the pages from links on my Portaportal page http://www.portaportal.com and type dlam as guest access. The students' pages are linked at the bottom. Some were creative with pictures and songs, while others just did the basic requirements.

Denise Photo Story 3 for Windows http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/download/AllDownloads.aspx?displang=en&qstechnology= I discovered this at the State Social Studies Conference and found it to be very interesting. I am still working with it and I hope to have a demo in class. It is a free download for Windows only, and can be used to make a slide show set to music or you can record narration. It does allow for some effects as well.

Dennis Ray I was able to judge a portion of the First Lego League Tournament. My event was to judge the technical aspects of the team's robots by both watching a demonstration and by posing assorted questions to the team members. Team members, ranging in age from 9 to 14, designed robots to perform a variety of tasks. They were judged on programming, teamwork, and the performance of their creation.