First Day Overview
The first day of Tech Camp was full of information. I’m going to summarize the basics, and I am sure that eventually, I will go into more depth on each one of these items in blog entries further down the road. Right now, I’m just trying to digest all of this!
Xdrive will prove to be a very useful tool. For free, you get 5GB of online storage that is accessible from anywhere. It’s not just for documents, but also photos and music. I have a feeling, with our servers on the fritz (and hence sketchy access to the public folders), this could be really useful as a place for kids to upload Powerpoint presentations and other documents that can then be pulled up on the teacher station. Or, as an individual resource for teachers, it’s a great way to transfer files from home to school. I know I’ve left my flash drive at home by mistake a few times…
Similar to Google Docs, this is an online word processor; however, I think it is much cooler. What is really useful here is the template library. Team meeting sheets, student IDs, student progress reports, speech outlines, and more. Very handy.
Next is TeacherTube
This is like Youtube, only this is something you could actually use in the classroom. Not only are there many videos teachers can use for professional development or instruction, apparently students can upload video projects here, too. Like this one:
Pretty nifty, says me.
The last one I am going to describe was my favorite of the day: del.icio.us
It would take a lot to describe social networking so I am going to be very basic. You bookmark interesting sites online. You give each bookmark a couple of “tags” which are like keywords that describe the content of the site. Your account keeps track of these tags, so you can search by content. Also, you are connected with other users here. You can see how many other people have linked a site that you are interested in, and you can share your bookmarks with other people in your network. The possibilities for classroom research and projects here are great.
So, those were just a few of the great resources we learned about today. Of course, we started on Edublogs, which is why this post is here. But here were some of the other resources:
I guess it can be said we didn’t waste a minute today.
June 19th, 2008 at 3:56 pm
Super job on the blog! It looks GREAT!!!
June 19th, 2008 at 7:05 pm
Outstanding! Great design choices and rich content. Keep it up.