From the mouth of babes!

Finally the day of our ICT Expo arrived. I had been busy preparing and practising to present a workshop on Podcasting to teachers in our cluster. I had also decided to use 2 kids in my year 1 class to demonstrate how to create a podcast in GarageBand. While they were excited, I was a bit nervous as it was my first presentation ever. Well I chose to do it so there was no escape now. The 15 teachers came in quickly. I started with the introduction and briefly talked about podcasting, uses in the classroom and the steps in creating one. My little ones then took over. They knew exactly what to do! The adults were delighted and cheerfully decided to give a go while the 3 of us hovered around supporting and answering questions. I had also prepared the 'how to' sheets. They found this easy to follow. The feedback I received was positive. The teachers thought that using 5 year olds to demonstrate was very powerful. At least half of them decided to try it in their classrooms while there were a few that said they used PC's at their school so were not sure if they would use it. I told them about Audacity and gave them my email if they needed any support. It was a very satisfying day! Would I present again? Well, may be...

SMART Session

I have not really been using the SMARTBoard effectively in my teaching so when our school got a free offer from BH, the expert in using the interactive board, I decided to attend the session after school. Here are some things she shared with us. When you go into google search engine and type in a word of what you are looking for. When this page opens up on the left hand side is a list of words. Click on "wonder wheel" and you will get a mind-map on the topic you are looking for. This breaks the information down and you are much faster in your search.
This other site enables you to get pictures of what you are looking for in categories.
http://image-swirl.googlelabs.com
BH shared some ways we could use the lesson activity toolkit 2.0, which I found really cool and would like to use it in my teaching. So I have decided to attend a 2-day free conference at Fruitvale School in the second week of my holidays.
Check out the link if you are interested in attending.
www.interactivewhiteboard.net.nz
Videos that you would like to use in Notebook software should have a .flv extension.
kickyoutube.com changes videos you may find to this extension and other formats too.