Workshop on Block 8 Schedule

I was asked to go to Illini Bluffs Middle School and lead a roundtable discussion on Block 8. It seemed to have gone pretty well. The result was that they were all looking for tips on how to teach in the Block and the problem was that we had nothing new to tell them. The bottom line is multiple activities. This is a chance to use the multiple intelligences, the various learning styles, and group work or cooperative learning. Anything goes to keep their attention and to keep them on task. I did mention that this would be a good place for us to do more social networking activities and some of the teachers seemed to be interested. Mostly I had to reinforce the idea that the Block offers more time for quality at the sacrifice of quantity. Teachers have to decide what is important to cover, then cover it in depth in various ways for mastery. I hope to get the chance to do this kind of thing again. I even managed to get a plug in about cell phones and they didn't lynch me. That was cool!

Social Networking Workshop

Well, i did my workshop and I think it went pretty well. There were about 16 to 18 teachers in each of the 2 sessions. For the most part they seemed to pay attention (as well as teachers often do). They seemed interested in my ideas of using social networking in their classes. There was the usual apprehension of using Facebook with kids. They did seem to like the idea of starting off with Ecto for the safety of it. I will have to check the Ectolearning site to see if any of them follow through on what they started. I had them all sign up and play around with the site. They are supposed to try it with at least one of their classes. We shall see!
I was somewhat disappointed that more of the high school teachers did not attend, but it wasn't mandatory and they had other choices like foods, bowling and yoga. I have to figure out a way to get to them now. They don't have to listen to me anymore now that I am retired (not that they ever did). I will have to continue thinking about that.

Cell phones in school

Another thought that I had after fighting them in school as an administrator for the past several years. Maybe we should let them have them, just control how they are used. I have read some pretty cool stuff lately. We used to ban calculators in the day and always complained about this kids watching too much TV. I can see many ways to use them in school. Anybody have some ideas to share?

Social Networking Presentation

I have spent the weekend working on a presentation for a Teachers' Institute next week about social networking. I define it, give some examples of networking tools and teach them how to sign up for and use a new tool that I found called Ectolearning. It appears to be safer for teachers to use than some of the favorites, like MySpace and FaceBook because the teacher has more control over what the kids can do. It is a much smaller site, but set up quite a bit like FaceBbook. I hope that some of these teachers will give it a try this new school year. We need to teach our kids proper social networking skills and Internet safety, as well.