Innovation Day

November 18th, 2008 was Innovation Day in the state of NC. Schools were invited to participate in the event by opening their doors to the community in order to see what is changing in the schools in the 21st century. Two schools were selected in my county, one being my own and I felt that it was a success. We applied late, so we really only had a week or so to prepare. Schools are supposed to invite people to attend and because of our late notice, we didn't get many invitations out. We did have a few local school leaders in attendance, though. They were given tours of certain classrooms to see what we are doing that is Innovative at our schools. They were shown the classrooms that have 21st century equipment, classrooms that are using nings and wikis and classrooms that are using interactive games. All said they enjoyed the experience and they were glad to see some of the things going on in the schools. I look forward to doing this again next year now that I know all about it. I think it will grow in its success as each year passes.

Technology Enrichment Day a Success

My school district started a new program to educate teachers more on technology. Schools were asked to select three teachers to send to "Technology Enrichment Training" and learn more about SMART Boards, Web 2.0 and more! The three teachers selected would attend the training and then be asked to go back to the schools to present the information learned to the rest of their staff. It really is a win-win for everyone!
Technology facilitators in the county were asked to present the information and the first session, titled "We're So SMART!" was held last week. We started with the basics, such as how to write with a pen and orient the board and by the end of the day, we were doing page recordings and changing themes. We had all levels of learners present from those that had never used a SMART Board to those that used them every day. The goal was to educate everyone on something new.
As a TF myself, I always tell teachers that after 2 weeks of having the board in their classroom, they'll definitely know more than I ever will, just for the simple fact that using every day creates a mastery. This was proven to be so true. There were a few teachers that had SMART Boards in their classrooms and those teachers taught us things we would have never figured out on our own. One of the most helpful was how to change the language of the board so that it would recognize something other than English as it's main language.
This first workshop was a full day from 7:30 to 3:00 and it was packed full of information about Everything SMART (Document Cameras, Boards, Senteos, Notebook, Airliners) all presented by three people. The next two sessions will be all about Web 2.0. Several TF's will be presenting on all types of educational tools available online. More updates to come soon!

A gift exchange....across the miles?

In my family, we have decided to go for the gift exchange thing rather than buying everyone a present for the holidays. I'm sure many others are in a similar situation this year, but we did this last year for the first time and found we actually enjoyed it more than getting a ton of gifts. What made it even more fun was that when we were shopping all the sales (ex: Black Friday), we could buy for ourselves (we normally have a "don't buy for yourself after Thanksgiving" rule.) This brought a whole new excitement to getting up at 4 in the morning!
Now, I know you're sold on the old save money, less stress aspect of holiday gift buying, but what about those families that are all separated by a few states and you just don't have the means to get together to do a "drawing" of names out of a hat? This is the first year everyone in my family won't be getting together for Thanksgiving, so we had to find a way to exchange names without meeting face to face. We all decided that we did want it to be a secret, so the nerd in me decided to go look around online for a cyber-alternative. I found a great website called Secret-Gift.com.
This site gives even more options than I was expecting. You can set up profiles for each person you are inviting. They receive an email, then they fill out information about themselves and answer preset questions about things they might like to receive. Once everyone has accepted the invitation and filled out the answers to their questions, the manager of the group can select those that shouldn't get each others' names. For example: Husbands and Wives don't really want to draw each others' names. Once you set those parameters, you tell the program to draw and it emails everyone with their secret names.
So far it is a success in our family. We all (whether we admit it or not) have a nerdy side, so everyone is excited about the fact of drawing names online too.