Parent Visitation Day

Today was Parent Visitation Day at St. Mary Catholic School. We had a very good turn out of visitors in all the classes. I was happy to see the teachers showing off their lessons using many forms of technology. My daughter's first grade teacher had the students actively engaged using her View Sonic.

Training Disaster

The first SMART Board that our school received was from a grant that I had won through Washington County Board. When I applied for the grant, my principal and I knew we wanted an "interactive board". We weren't really sure why or what it did, but we knew we needed to start using them because "everyone else had them! That's how naive we were at the time.

So a few months later after the board had been installed, the company sent out a trainer for a basic training session with the faculty. My principal and I wanted to "sell" the teachers on the idea of implementing SMART Technology into our daily lessons. It was sort of the big unveil of the new SMART Board, being able to show the faculty all the bells and whistles that this baby could do. Well...that didn't happen. The trainer knew a lot about technical features that were too advanced for the teachers to understand, nor did they really care. He didn't show them how the interactive board would help them with their daily lessons, making their lessons interactive, engaging, and more interesting with the many features. He was too much of a salesman, and not an educator. He lost his audience early on and was never able to draw them back in throughout the presentation. Ultimately, this made it hard on me later to convince the teachers how great these interactive boards were.

Diigo is my all time favorite web tool. I use it to keep up with all the great websites that I find on the many educational blogs that I read daily. I enjoy going through the Community Bookmarks and My Groups to find new tools that are applicable to my own classroom. This is also where I find many of the resources that I share with the teachers at my school.

Additionally, Diigo allows me to create Groups where I can save specific links to resources that I may need for a class, a certain teacher that I may be working with, etc. Using this feature enables me to quickly access the information I specifically bookmarked. I can also invite specific people to join a group that I have created. Each time I bookmark a resource that I tag to that specific group, those individuals receive an email notifying them of the added bookmark.
Glogster is another favorite web 2.0 tool that I often use in my classroom. I love Glogster! It's a great tool for creative expression as well as for presenting the students' knowledge and ideas. There are fun graphics, lots of choices for frames, fonts, and colors, and you can insert audio and video links, photos, clip art, etc. You can even embed a glog into a blog. Glogster is very versatile which allows an elementary student to create a simple Glog or a middle or high school student to create a detailed Glog with video and audio links. Luckily I was able to obtain free student Glogster accounts last year that I use with my students. My fifth graders began presenting their "Famous Children's Author" Glogs this past week during computer class. Here are examples: Leo and Diane Dillon Eric Carle Marc Brown 

Below are examples of other Glogster projects my computer students at St. Mary Catholic School have created:

• Stevie Wonder Grade 7
• Mark Zuckerberg  Grade 7
• Princess Diana  Grade 7
• Einstein 2  Grade 7
• All About Me  Grade 4
• Chief Joseph Brant  Grade 5

I have listed several other web 2.0 tools in the sidebar to the right labeled "Marisa's Artifacts". These are tools that I have used for completing projects while in graduate school. I also use these tools in my classroom to enhance my lessons and while engaging my students. Similarly, I train the teachers at my school how to use them in their classrooms. I love using web 2.0 tools to enhance a lesson and increase student learning.

Mobile Texting

Ok. So I was a little bummed out today at school when I couldn't get the filter lifted from the Blogger site. It would have been convenient to have access to my blog while at work.
Problem solved! I can now connect via my iPhone! When there's a will, there's a way!