Diane’s Tech Blog

Wow, was this report ever an eye opener!

Quite surprising to get a glimpse of what is coming in the future. I find it mind blowing. I’m not frightened by it, but at times when reflecting on what’s to come I feel as though I’m entering a Twilight Zone-like Science Fiction world, where anything is possible.

Below is the video we made at our Wednesday f2f session. Amazing to work with my knowledgeable colleagues and to watch how quickly Mary made, assembled and posted our video to YouTube! Replicating in my classroom what she did  is one of my many Tech goals to be reached this semester.

Our Fifth Grade Literacy Project has all four of us excited about our upcoming Readers Workshop unit of study on Social Issues. We spent just about all of our f2f Saturday session reviewing the UbD format, forming the Enduring Understandings, Essential Questions, GRASPS, and the Facets of Understanding. It was great to work as a team. We plan to continue this teamwork by carving out extra meeting time weekly, both because we are developing our tech skills and knowledge together and we need each other to bounce ideas off and plan exactly how we can best go forward on our project.  We are equally as excited about presenting our ideas to our teammates. In conjunction with our project we discussed and will go forward in creating a 5th grade team wiki for discussing our curriculum developments and as a place for some of the reflection we continue to have difficulty fitting into our team meeting time.

As I move forward in becoming more digitally literate I have made several goals for myself.

• Have a Skype conference (I always Skype, but want to set up and follow through with a conference.)
• Google Docs (I want to create and work together with others on one to know and understand it.)
• Make a movie from video clips (Our f2f session video has inspired me!)
• Follow Twitter (I’ve been signed up for over a year but am not really sure how it works..also Tweet.)
• Learn/Do Ning (I have a vague idea, but need to participate to fully understand it.)
• Flicker (I want to learn and use it and connect it with other tools/applications.)
• Collaborate on a Wiki – 5th grade team & literacy

So, I have my goals laid out and now will prioritize, begin tackling them and move on along this very different path of Digital Literacy.