Talkin’ ’bout Tlt

I just returned from the Tlt Summit in Saskatoon and I’m still in the “go” mode of conferences.  There were lots of great ideas and thoughts to ponder.  We were treated to keynotes from the diverse thoughts of George Siemens, Alan November, Rick Schwier and Stephen Downes.  My head is spinning. 

 

At the conference I heard over and over that one of the best parts of this kind of conference is getting to meet face to face with people that you have met online, or at earlier conferences.  This is so true.  The attendees shared a passion for learning and a desire to help their students use technology in effective ways.  The conversation always turned to learning and how to improve it.

 

A couple of primary goodies from the conference: Kelly Christopherson shared Go2Web20, a site that allows you to search web 2.0 tools by tag. (Hint:  Try the “kids” tag.) A great find.  Marnie McMillan presented a wiki to go with her Writing on the Web session.

 

I did a session about using web 2.0 tools with elementary students.  Because I already had a wiki for primary, I set up an elementary wiki for this conference as well, focusing on grades three to eight.  Here is my slide deck from the presentation.

 

Tlt was a great experience.  I can’t wait until next year.

Captivation and Connection

I’m sitting at home working on my computer on a Friday night. (Boring life, I know, but I have to do something between folding loads of laundry.) I hear the little ping that lets me know I have an email.  Thinking it is an email I just sent to a new recipient being returned, I check it.  Instead, it is a blog article from Hailey, one of the six year old students in my class.  She writes “Hi Ncol gess what we got to take with our bogging butty in aschaiea it was fun.”  

 

Two things are noteworthy about this.  First of all it is the weekend, and she is writing on her blog, definitely a school–type activity.  It must be something that she enjoys. 

 

Secondly, she is writing to Nicole, who was her blogging mentor at the University of Regina this past semester.  Although she did get to meet Nicole once, all other interaction with her has been through the blog and somehow she has formed a definite attachment.  (She is referring to a Skype chat she had a couple of evenings before with another blogging buddy her own age in Australia.)

 

These are two things that I love about blogging with my class.  The way it captivates the kids’ interest and the connections that they make.  (Never mind the fact that she demonstrated the use of a capital letter at the beginning and on Nicole’s name and that she ended with a period—two things I’m looking for on her writing rubric next month.)   

 

 

 

Laptop Ups and Downs

We’ve had laptops available to us for almost two full weeks now.  They have been two weeks full of learning—learning how to use them, and learning about my own thinking.  Here are a few of the highs and lows. (It was a stretch to get the two lows.)

 

High  The kids love them.  They vie for them the minute they are in the classroom and remind me if we are late in getting them into our classroom when I have said that we will be using them.  Riley commented, “I like plaeing with the labtops.”

 

Low  Small technical difficulties that interrupt.  For example, each of the computers has a wireless mouse, and the kids have discovered that if the laptops are too close together, one mouse can control two cursors, irritating the user of the second computer.  There have been other difficulties with the wireless mice as well.  I think they might be on their way out of the computer cabinet.  We have also, on occasion, not been able to get all of the computers on the Internet at once.  My principal tells me that this means that the school has reached the limit of its Internet capacity.

 

High  The kids love to watch anything that moves, especially if there is sound attached, and they are now able to view them all without the computer stalling.  I’ve been able to use a couple of new applications (Animoto and One True Media) on my classroom blog that I had tried before, but had to remove because they were just too much for my elderly Sunray computers.  

 

Low  Now what do I do about those Sunray computers?  I can’t recall us using them more than once in the past two weeks, and as we begin to use more applications that they can’t handle, it will be more unlikely that we will.  I’m hesitant to get rid of something that will work for even a few things we want to do, though…