Last week I admitted to my fear of “messing around”. I’m not sure I will ever be confident in calling myself a tech geek or “Geeking Out“, but this past weekend has given me insight and confidence. Attending The Networked Educator with Chris and Kim gave me new tools for my tool box. Understanding what Diigo is and how beneficial it can be to me and to my colleagues was one of the things I learned. Creating a group on Diigo for the PLC(Professional Learning Community) that I lead and want to get reading about technology will allow me share articles that I have found interesting. It will also help be organize my bookmarks.
I have several articles I need to go and read after hearing bits and pieces about them from others at the workshop. I know that there are some more good ideas out there and I want to find them.Where Good Ideas Come From by Steven Johnson.
I’m still working on my RSS feed, but I can now understand how it will help me be connected to others who will push my thinking and give me ideas for using my new tools. Twitter is a tool that I’m not very comfortable with, but I can see the uses and benefits, if I could figure out the lingo!! I’ll spend some time here in the next few weeks and try to get a handle on tweeting!
Google apps with mapping and searching and so much more! I want to use the mapping with students on where they were born and where they travel during the year. Other google apps will also help to streamline and organize my computer as I work with them.
This has been a full weekend but I am realizing it is just the tip of the ice berg. I spent some time in creating a blog for my class, in the side bar is the feed. I’m sure it will take on some new and different looks in the next few weeks as we work on it together in the classroom.
I agree with you that the idea of willing saying that I “geek out” proved to be a scary idea. However, after reading the examples provided in Living and Learning with New Media I felt more comfortable saying that I geek out because I noticed that I have done so in the past with other passions of mine.
The being said the weekend workshop was wonderful. I truly felt like I walked away with a better understanding of how the tools in the COETAIL can be used to continue my learning in other areas. My favourite bit of the whole weekend was the speed geeking session. It was great to hear other educators talk about their successes and failures in implementing technology in the classroom.
Brendan there was so much to take in at the workshop. The speed geeking session was fascinating and it would be great to hear from so many of the other participants and what they are doing in their classrooms. I spent time during the work session trying to get a class blog set up. I managed to get 2 posts up but was unable to get the privacy settings I wanted. On Monday I tried paying for a blog and hit some walls there. I was directed to one of our people in the development office. After trying somethings and finding my problem with PayPal, he suggested some other alternatives. He eventually called one of the tech support people. After some more conversations I now have a class blog on our school server. Unfortunately having been playing around with other blog sites, I’m not sure it really does what I want it to do. But I have shared it with the parents and assigned looking at it and commenting on it as homework. So far about 6-7 out of 22 families have commented. I was actually surprised at how easy it was to get started with posting on this new blog having set up my Coetail blog. Tomorrow I’m planning on sharing diigo with my professional learning community. I sent invitations to all the members and 2 have already joined. It is exciting to see others be willing to step out of their comfort zone.