Friday, October 26, 2007
Urban Planet Thoughts
This week our Media Specialist sent out a request for dates that would be best for an Urban Planet training at our school, to help teachers set up useful web sites. I think I have had 3 days of this training in various ways through staff development days, and although I do have a website (it is a requirement of our all teachers at Como), it is not one that I refer the kids to on a regular basis. I have my syllabus posted, along with a couple other random things, but in order to motivate myself to put serious time into the website I first need to visualize its usefullness at completion. What the trainings have taught me about setting up my web site... to do a useful job at it lots of time and thinking are necessary. So this week I will try to find some time to update my website with some extra credit links, good websites, and searching tools for the research that we are going to start. Hopefully next time we meet as a group we will get beyond the step of just pointing out that data bases exist, and actually get to look at one and interact with it - modeling I think would be a great way to show me this. Or, maybe an assignment to bring in a topic that we wanted to find ROR for, then get time during the meeting to look up good data bases for use in our classes. Heck, maybe even a presentation of a lesson that someone has developed for use with a data base. When in a meeting I do best when I am asked to think and process the information that is being presented, not just take in information that I could read and learn on my own.
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2 comments:
Robyn,
In the five years that we have worked with teachers, we have found teacher websites to be basic to best practice regarding technology use, thus they have become a requirement for the work we do. Trust me, the guys I work with don't do anything they don't think is worthwhile- they are all about practical.
You sound very frustrated regarding what you are getting or not getting from this experience. All I can offer is that we know that throwing information at you without time to process it is not a good idea, and have planned meetings to allow for that. The last group meeting, at 360, was not indicative of that though- it was a disaster time-wise, with a really dreadful presentation, by me... My hope is to do it better next time.
Leslie
Great suggestions--I hope our future meetings will do this type of information presentation.
And you are right--a good Web site takes a lot of work, but it can pay off.
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