Teachers who care about PD...Who Knew?

I have spent the past 3 days researching the web for sites dealing with Professional Development for educators. I have found some rather extraordinary blogs out there dealing with just this subject. I am amazed at how many teachers are out there who are asking such poignant questions regarding professional development issues. Perhaps becoming a bigger part of this digital conversation will restore my faith in the profession. There really are teachers out there who want to learn new ways to enrich their curriculum, and help create a generation of kids who can think, write and solve problems on their own. For now I am energized and ready to hit this new semester running! I am eager to see how the students in my PD course approach this very subject. Tune in for updates...

Holiday Word Game!

Ok, so I should be working, but a friend sent me a challenge and I am a sucker for word games. Here it is, how many words can you make from TECHTOYLAND? I stuck to three letters or more. Here's my list so far:
teach
toy
land
lane
lynch
lance
dance
dane
don't
dot
dole
yodel
chat
hand
hat
hot
tot
coy
candy
can
con
cat
cad
cay
chant
the
then
ate
ado
attend
lady
lace
laced
lot
let
leach
lye
clay
cloy
locate
day
date
hate
hated
cheat
nay
any
lay
cane
yon
don
ton
hone
non
none
not
they
chad
hay
hey
hen
note
noted
notate
nod
node
nad
notch
notched
tote
toted
total
totaled
toe
that
than
honey
only
ode
ocean
octet
oath
hate
hated
had
hale
today
toad
tone
cone
coat
handy
dandy
end
etch
eat
heal
teal
deal
dealt
tat
late
latch
latched
deny
chanted
code
dote
delay
total
totaled
doth

Can you find any more?

SlideShare -- Sharing PowerPoint on the Web!

I found a new toy today! I also found some GREAT examples of presentations that I hope to use to get my students out of the rut of "boring" presentation mode. I'm anxious to start using some of these ideas myself!

Death by PowerPoint

From: thecroaker, 3 months ago

| View | Upload your own

Fighting death by PowerPoint... How to make a presentation and not to bore your audience to death.


SlideShare Link

Another cool video -- Especially for Kindergarten Teachers!

So what do you think? Just one of those things that makes you go, "Hmmmmm..."

Jing-a-ling!

I am really excited to pass along two different sites this week, TeacherTube and Jing. Since one of my classes is working with digital video, I've been pretty immersed in that technology these past two weeks. The sites I'm sharing today are ones that I think no teacher should be without!

If I could share just one link with you today, it would be TeacherTube. Hey that sounds a lot like YouTube, you might say. Well it is, only it's for teacher's! TeacherTube provides videos on various topics, from electromagnetism to music. Just think, a place to find some professional development video without having to worry about polar bears or kittens playing with string. (Check out the Diet Coke and Mentos video if you get a chance. What kid wouldn't get excited about that kind of experiment after watching it? Too COOL!)

The other link is for a new project by the people at TechSmith called Jing. Here's waht their site has to say about the project, "The concept of Jing is the always-ready program that instantly captures and shares images and video…from your computer to anywhere." And that is exactly what it does! This little program holds such vast potential for instruction, especially techology instruction. After all, who hasn't had to type directions for how to use a specific program's functionality? They get to be so long and we invariably miss something important. And although screen shots are nice, they take a lot of memory in our documents and emailing memory intensive items can be tricky for a lot of servers.
Enter Jing! Jing looks like a little sunshine sitting at the top of your desktop, at all times ready to capture what's on your screen at a moments notice. Who wouldn't love a way to video the steps in formatting or creating a chart in Excel? It sure beats typing the 25 instruction steps that it might take when sharing those same directions verbally. And what a boon for the visual learners among us! Finally, we can SEE how to set the homepage of our browser to a page other than the default.
Jing makes this possible by capturing the screen image or video and then saving them to screencast.com A screencast is a recording of the computer screen, sometimes narrated, that is usually used to instruct or demonstrate. A link is then posted to the clipboard on your computer and you can share that link with anyone via email, IM, in your blog, etc. Jing can even be embedded into blogs and other webpages for easier navigation. How cool is that?!
Check it out and see what you think. The people at the Jing project want your feedback so they can make Jing even more "Jing-a-licious."
Oh, and did I mention the very best thing? It's absolutely FREE and works on both PC and Mac platforms. Now go out there and get Jing-ing!