so many ideas….

As others have mentioned in their blogs, I want to say thank you to Page and Ray for opening so many doors for us into the world of technology.  It’s amazing how many sites, resources, programs, etc…etc…exist out there to help us be better, more effective educators.  After each workshop in which I participated, I had many ideas about how I would implement these new resources into my classroom.  The class webpages on Waynflete site are great and I will definitely continue to use these with my Upper School classes.  For the past few years, starting with “First Class” and now using the class webpage, my elective level classes have used the online discussion tool.  Next year, I will certainly continue with this and I hope to use the class webpage more thoroughly than I have in the past — ie. start using the photos area and links, etc.  My Middle School classes have each had a class webpage using quia.com.  On quia, each class has a main site and I include pictures, links to sites about our current culture topic, and games/activities for the students to use to practice vocabulary and linguistic syntax.  I use it primarily as a practice site and the students (especially the 6th graders) love it.  Next year, I will continue to use quia as my class webpage site for the 6th graders but I will use the class webpage on the Waynflete site for my 7th grader classes.  The 7th graders use quia.com and quizlet.com for practice sites so links to these from the Waynflete class page works well.  Throughout the workshops, the two resources that I am most excited about using next year are imovie and GoogleApps.   I feel so much more comfortable with imovie now. I have done imovie projects in classes in the past and felt comfortable with editing clips, etc. but was very unsure of myself re: music and voice and all of the finishing touches and details.  I hope to implement an imovie or digital storytelling project into the elective class and into my 7th grade classes next year.  GoogleApps will be great to use in a variety of areas next year from students’ group work to making feedback questionnaires/evals with the spreadsheet tool.  Zamzar, Jing and lulu were all interesting as well.