Week+7+(6.18-6.22)

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= = = Return to Tech Camp page = Tech Camp reflections:

I was not sure what to expect when I arrived the first day of Tech Camp because I had never participated in the camp before. I also felt a little in the dark as to what was expected of me as far as the coordinating position and paperwork for the students who were signed up for the credits through Neumann University. I knew that this would be a learning experience, and I would definitely deliver paperwork and complete registration the first day a lot more differently. I do not like to feel disorganized, and it seemed like I could not avoid it. Most of my morning consisted of ensuring that the participants had their packets of information.

I ended up creating a simple spreadsheet to organize the one and two credit participants.

I also created group lists in Outlook for the two credit and one credit participants. I emailed each group and outlined the requirements. I also provided a template that I created to help them (and myself) organize their journal reflections for each session.



Other tech troubleshooting:
The participants in the sessions who are NOT teachers within the districts had to use our netbooks to work through the class. The problem that we found was that the netbooks were extremely slow. I asked the computer technician if there was anything that we could do, and he replied no. I was disheartened that he also did not seem to make an effort to troubleshoot the problem. The way I solved the problem was by taking those individuals over to the computer lab (which was open) so that we could at least have some sort of functionality. We found that even those computers could be slow! It was very frustrating that the technology did not work well and there was not a lot of support to resolve the issues. =Sessions:=

Google Docs:
This session focused on creating a google account, creating a google document, sharing that document, discussing ways to share (public/private), and editing the document with multiple users. We also dabbled a little bit in the forms and embedding those forms. I helped a few individuals create wiki accounts and pages because they were interested in being able to embed the forms instead of just emailing them to individuals. I really enjoyed the session and it was my first experience with actually teaching professional development officially. One of the aspects that was difficult was explaining to those who aren't very tech savy how this could be applicable to them. For example, how would they use this personally or professionally?

Google Calendar:
This sesion included making a google calendar, sharing the calendar, including tasks, and other basics like color coding and sending notifications. We discussed ways of sharing this calendar and aligning it with the Outlook calendar that our school email provides. One question that arose was can our new district website host, eChalk, communicate with google calendar so that the district calendar can be imported into google. Our Instructional Technology Coordinator was going to look into if it was possible.

Movie Maker:
I was very pleased with the flow of this session, and I believe part of it was because of my planning and the agenda. Our ice breaker went well. We wrote questions on sticky notes, placed them inside balloons, blew up the balloons, hit the balloons around the room, then picked a balloon to pop and answer the question. It really set the tone of the session. My method of following the Lynda.com format worked very well. This is a link to an example of what one of the participants in the class created. She wanted to create some author spot light movies to place on a Dover Library wiki (which I helped her to create) so that she could link it to her Destiny website.

In the afternoon on Tuesday I floated among sessions to assist with IWB digital resources and Microsoft Template. The IWB digital resources course consisted of teachers exploring, identifying, and bookmarking websites that would be easily used on the IWBs as an interactive part of instruction. I helped participants establish diigo accounts and join a diigo group that was created by the instructor. I also helped out in the Microsoft template session, where I helped a participant create a classroom newsletter template using text boxes. It was very obvious after working with this participant that there is definitely a population of teachers within our schools who have difficultly utilizing the basic functions of Microsoft products. Managing and changing text boxes was a belabored task for this person.

Flipcharts and Beyond
This is another session that I assisted. We had lots of troubleshooting with how to download and insert video files into a flipchart. I researched, created, and posted a screen cast on our dover tech camp wiki to demonstrate how to insert the flipchart. One issue that I ran into was that some youtube videos can't be downloaded, and the unitedstreaming videos are a file that isn't supported in the flipchart. I have not tried to zamzar the file to change it into a file type that is able to be embedded. We also worked on other skills such as hiding objects (to make a concentration game), bringing in clipart, copy and pasting word art and shapes from powerpoint, and manipulating images that you import into the flipchart. media type="youtube" key="JoJXaBwQ2Fw?rel=0" height="360" width="480"

Digital Storytelling
I directed this session. We started with an icebreaker, talked about what digital storytelling is, and then discussed the objectives for the class. Once again, the agenda was helpful for me to pace and focus the class. For each website (Little Bird Tales, Storybird, Kerpoof, we discussed how I used it, creating student/teacher accounts, classroom applications, and benefits and drawbacks. Most participants liked the Little Bird Tales because of the capability to use audio, the userfriendliness, the ability to either upload or draw images, the ablitity to share tales on the class page, the ability to purchase the tales or print as a PDF, and students can use this at home if they would like. Storybird has a lot more high quality artwork to use, but does not have audio, and can be used into the high school level. Once again, there was some troubleshooting to be able to use the internal microphones on the laptops and the netbooks. I was able to resolve the issues with some problem solving. I created a that outlined the steps to force the mic to work on the netbooks and posted it to the wiki.

We also had a brief discussion about copyright issues and using creative commons searches to find images that are labeled for reuse. This lead into a discussion of how to save images from flickr and to give credit.

Example of a participant's Little Bird Tale.

I created a for two credit participants to use so that they could have a starting point for the assignment. I created this out of a need for some consistency and direction for those who were not sure where to begin.

Tech Tips and Tricks 1
I assisted in this session. It covered dropbox, evernote, and pearltrees. I felt like a venn diagram to visually point out the simliarities and differences would have been beneficial to incorporate into the session. I explained to one participant that Dropbox is more for documents that you create and would like to either keep or modify. Evernote is more like a virtual scrapbook. Pearltrees is like a visual favorites for bookmarking websites (but obviously has more features).

Tech Tips and Tricks 2
I assisted in this session. It covered thinglink, wordle, and tagxedo. Thinglink was new to me and I thought it was awesome! I really liked it for visual learners to capture information into an image. I could see this being used as a multi-genre research project. I could also see using this as a presentation tool media type="custom" key="19419066"

One of the one credit students sent me her multimedia project that was a MovieMaker. Unfortunately, she sent me the saved project, not the published one, so the images were not coming through. I created a screencast to show her how to save it (which I think is easy to create and follow than typing the directions) as a published file and sent her the youtube link so that she could follow that and send me the correct file type.

media type="youtube" key="02xIhxcNflU?rel=0" height="315" width="420"

I also helped another particpant discover and use screencast-o-matic.com as a way to create screen casts for her students. We had to change her micrphone settings (as with many of the other laptops) to be able to capture the audio.