Moving Forward

We just finished a 4 day institute “Teacher Tech Camp” with 18 teachers. This was our second year to give this a try. This year we used 2 labs so the groups would be small. This enabled more sharing and more one to one assistance as we shared new technologies with most of the group. One or two teachers knew much of what we offered but signed up anyway. Each day the participants spent time working on their new blog at Edublogs, discovering Google Docs, PBWorks- the wiki we used for the institute, and learning more about free tools to use with classroom instruction such as Bitstrips, VoiceThread, Kerpoof, Scratch, and Animoto.

This year we had two guest instructors LeAnn Dowty and Laura Smith, both graduates of last year’s Teacher Tech Camp. The focus of this intense training time is to help teachers she the power of collaborative interactive work that can motivate students, change their perspective about teaching today’s students and hopefully improve student work. Another tool that was a big hit was Podcasting. Participants used brand new iMacs with Garage Band and Snowball microphones to share what they were doing. At the end of the week, one teacher said, ” I want to buy and Mac after this. It was just so easy.” I love hearing that. All in all it was a great week. Plans are in the works for next year already.