6th+Week


 * Monday, March 16th - 4:30 - 6:00 pm (Schedule A)**

The first part of our time together was spent working on our online sites, working through design questions, and sharing information to help each other in the process. We also discussed PDP goal to make our activities more interactive and less presentation in nature. There have been requests for an overview of PowerPoint so Brett lead the discussion, demonstrating basics to creating a presentation, adding pages, applying slide design, and editing layout. We also reviewed requirements for the 3 hours of online communication needed in oder to complete the PDP.


 * Friday, March 20th - 8:00/9:00 - 11:00/12:00 am (Schedules A and B together)**

The session started with a joint effort to answer questions that came up during the week as participants design activities to use with kids and continue to work on wikis & google sites to share these activties and information. We moved into a great sharing session where people projected what they are using in the design of these activities... Kathy - shared activities posted on her new math wiki and her reactions after using it for the first time with students. This lead to conversation about how to assess student performance when using a wiki and how to give input regarding their performance. Renee - shared a number of things related to a project she's doing with 8th graders including her Delicious site, where she's posted several URLs with tags for this project, and her new wikispace with pages pertinent to the project. In the process she added a few links to her wiki to enhance navigation for students. She also shared student response to the activity so far and her reflections on incorporating technology. Rochelle - shared online site used by yearbook/writing students to complete the 08-09 yearbook; other people had questions about cost, file format, and options for file storage instead of book production. This lead to a conversation about other websites where people can create, using templates, their own books with personal pictures and stories. Marcia will post the URL for the site she's used for that purpose. Shawn - shared an online Lab Notes site where students can journal their lab activities and results. He still has questions about how he'll use the site to assess lab write-ups for grades. He also proposed questions on how other teachers' students could use a site like this. Lee commented on some similarities between this and the use of OneNote - especially with 9th graders coming to the high school next year with laptops, OneNote would be a viable option for notetaking. Maryke also raised questions about how (or if) something like this should replace other successful activities she currently uses with art students. Marcia - demonstrated the online thesaurus and shared new login information. Lee - opened a LIVE SESSION on OneNote and talked everyone through joining and contributing to the session; we talked about how this might be useful for work with students and/or with staff projects that require collaboration. This is something we'd like to pursue for the future. This could include sharing notebooks on the server, not just through live session.

We ended with quick looks at... Nettrekker ([]) We established accounts, talked about search & results differences between this educational search engine and the more popular engines, like Google; we took some time to explore the site - the group would like to have more indepth training Thinkfinity ([]) We looked at the site partners, and search possibilities to find lessons, resources, and activities; this site is enormous and again, the group would like to have more indepth training Inspiration 7.5 - can be loaded on all district computers so if you're using a computer that doesn't have it, let Cheryl know; we did a short brainstorming activity to look at both diagram and outline view; we also looked at templates available with the program