Featured Teacher Me! Really!

On Saturday, August 27, 2011, I was honored to be the featured teacher guest on the weekly Classroom 2.0 webinar which airs most every Saturday at noon EST. I have been corresponding with one of the founders and moderators of the site, Peggy George. She and a number of other fabulous educators (including but not limited to Kim Caise, Lorna Costantini, and Tammy Moore) host a one to one and a half hour webinar "dedicated to supporting teachers with resources and practical suggestions for incorporating Web 2.0 technologies into their teaching and learning."
Right at the end of the school year, Peggy invited me to share my story on one of the August sessions. Just a week prior, our own Megan Wilson (iPodsibilities), a special ed teacher in Orange was the special guest, and she taught the audience how to create eBooks. I was actually terrified to accept but equally terrified of passing up the chance to share my simple story of me as an evolving teacher who in small ways, combined with the rest of our wonderful teaching staff, has attempted to bring our school into 21st Century Learning. As I said in a disclaimer, there are hundreds of other technology integration teachers who are way more advanced than I am who could be telling their stories, but I would do my best to offer something of worth to other teachers. I hope I did that. Below is a screen shot of the intro about me and a link to the recording and all the wonderful links that the organizers, the participants in the chat, and I added to the blog.

http://live.classroom20.com/1/post/2011/08/featured-teacher-carolyn-stanley.html#comments


Make sure to click on the link to the LiveBinder in the resources list. There are also tabs in the Classroom 2.0 LiveBinder to previous shows - including Megan's.

Wonderful Resources on SlideShare.net

If you haven't looked at the site, SlideShare.net, it's worth some investigation time. Educators find it particularly useful because they can upload a slide presentation they have created and then narrate the slides to share with other folks all over the world.
Since our district is moving to Google Apps for Education district wide- it's been piloted at the middle schools for the past 2.5 years- I thought this slideshare presentation by Liat Rothfeld would be of interest in that it gives a nice overview of Google Docs and Google presentations.  In it she also covers how to set up a personal Google account -which is optional. Users of amityschools.org will have accounts already established for them.
I have copied the embed code for the presentation, so enjoy.

How to Use Google Docs - Part 1

View another webinar from lrothfeld

Discovery Education Summer School - what a resource!

I can't believe it, but I actually attended every session of DEN summer school (live, interactive webinars) that ran from Monday, August 1 through Thursday, August 4. Each of the sessions was rich with resources and advice to help us become better practitioners who help students to discover the excitement of learning and the satisfaction that can be derived in telling and sharing their stories.
Of course, many of the sessions went a a breakneck pace, and I found it hard to keep up. Thankfully, the magnificent Porter Palmer kept everything on track and made sure that all of the sessions were recorded, so we (and others who missed the live presentations) could go back at our leisure and sample segments we wanted to review. The link to the archives was just posted recently: link to DE Summer School recorded sessions
Those were lovely summer days, and being tied to my laptop for 4 hours was a bit of a challenge. I even suggested to Porter that they need to build in a little time for "potty breaks." However, the new things I learned really made me excited to go back to school in a few weeks rather than dreading it. Also, the fact that I was able to set up my laptop on a table at the back of my garage, which is all screened in and looks out onto the back yard, really helped the experience.

In a future post, I intend to highlight four or five of the resources I learned about and then found the time to explore.
In the meantime, my thanks goes out to all the wonderful educators at DE for their tireless work in helping us become better teachers and learners and for offering such exciting resources for our students.
Also, thanks so much to our district for subscribing the Discovery Education so that all of our staff and students have access to thousands and thousands of exciting resources to use on personal leaning adventures.
Finally, I understand that our Middle School Science subscription (an add-on to DE paid for by the State of CT for all middle schools in CT) will be expiring in June of 2012. I know for a fact that our science teachers use this resource with their students and think it's terrific, so we all need to petition the state to extend the subscription.