CLAS this spring

I've been invited to be a presenter at the CLAS Regional Spring Conference this March. Subject: the digital classroom in the 21st century. I'm psyched but nervous at the same time. I mean, it's obviously something I'm super enthusiastic about: I'm going to talk about Google Docs, blogging, podcasting, and so forth, but still... it's in front of GROWN UPS, not teenagers! EEEEEKK! (ha ha!)

I'm also looking into the possibility of getting up to that other high school I'd mentioned in an earlier post to train their teachers on digital classrooms. I mentioned the whole thing to Stevi Quate (you know her if you've been involved in the UCD teacher candidate program), who, as it turns out, is familiar with that school and their staff; she "knows people" there, and so is going to look into getting them up to speed as well... stay tuned on that one.

What have I gotten myself into?? ;-)

On a side note, I've recently written an article for an online magazine, Elephant Journal, about digital classrooms. It's the first of a series on education that I've been asked to collaborate on with them. If you're interested, you can check it out here, but you'll likely have to do it at home... last I knew, the SmartFilter blocked it at work. And check out the shirt in my pics. ;-)

Lesson learned

So today I learned that if you want to podcast, it's important to make sure that the battery in the receiver is actually charged. I accidentally left it on all weekend and totally killed the battery. Woops. To paraphrase the Seinfeld Soup Nazi, "No podcast for you!" :)

On a side note, here is the link to my class webpage. It's a pretty basic site, at least for now, but it has links to the subpages I set up for each individual class (including links to the podcasts) as well as links to my teacher blog, my students' blogs, the climbing team website, and even the climbing team blog. Feel free to peruse and comment. The students' blogs still need a good bit of work... I haven't yet had the chance to work with them around various concepts, including what is and isn't school appropriate- I am seeing a good number of "wat's up, yo" entries, but with time, I think they will get it, particularly once I have some exemplars to show them (aside from mine, which I think they don't think "counts" since I'm a teacher and all...). For now, I'm just pleased that they actually want to do it... it was much less of a fight to get them to write than I thought it would be (as I've mentioned before).