Are floating about in space, just waiting to find a nice place to land.
This week I have been doing lots of fun things.
I had a ‘meeting/presentation’ from Arnika Brown who is working with office 365. It was a good looksy at what the software can manage, and I think for a school like ours it will be a nicer option for the teaching staff. Most of them are already familiar with word etc, and because the basic set up is very similar, hopefully we would get a good buy in. There are some really good things about the package, and some things they are developing – but it very google docs ish with a microsoft front from what I can see.
It was at this meeting that I found a real enjoyment out of prezi. I know it is supposed to be a presentation tool, but I really enjoyed using it to jot down my thoughts as I went through, and each part of the package could go in it’s own nice little bubble as part of the brainstorm of info. So prezi is still growing on me.
I have designed a survey for the school staff about current IT and BYOD use, and have had some great feedback from the awesome team of people I get to work with. So this will head out to staff at the start of term 2.
I also ‘listened’ in to the #edchatNZ twitter conversation, and as this was my second time I felt much more involved with it, and had some excellent discussion about personalised learning, what it means for staff and students, how can we assess and how can we manage constraints of NCEA. If you are not on twitter, get on, there are some super people with super ideas just waiting to help and be friendly.
I have found twitter to be incredibly useful. I originally joined at a Dereck Weymouth presentation (city rise PD day in Dunedin) and slowly worked my way in. I then did tweets for some subject conferences I was helping to organise, and it has grown from there.
On the PD front I am attending a 365 session for 2 days in ChCh in May, and then 2 lucky colleagues are off to the interface day in Wellington and 2 other lucky people are off to the core day in Dunedin. While I would love to go to all I believe very strongly in sharing PD around – and getting to Wellington with the wee man was just a bit of a mission.
And I have set myself some homework for the the last week of term – I am using the COWS (computers on wheels) laptops for my year 9 class so they can do a wee research task – starting with some direction designing a firework, which will hopefully lead into a more self directed and personalised learning scheme for them. And over the holidays I want to build a page for my year 11’s and 12’s, so the learning is less about me up the front and more about where they are at.
Once again, wish me luck.
ibpossum takes on tech 