Sunday, June 28, 2009

First Impressions of Conference

Wow! I am completely overwhelmed by the size of this conference. It spans two giant building with multiple floors each. I searched around today to become aware of the space, but I feel as if I didn't even search. (Too tired, I suppose.) It will all come back to me after a good nights sleep.

AS for my presentation tomorrow... it wouldn't be right if I wasn't experiencing some sort of tech difficulty. I am not able to access files that would showcase my students' learning (and mine) for some reason. I have been doing some major trouble shooting, but to no avail. YET!!!

Flashback to Friday: I had to run into school Friday before it closed to save my students' work. Some of the reason was for the conference, but mostly I couldn't see them losing all the wonderful work they have done. (The home directories are being cleaned out next week.) I tried so hard to save, but... as I am figuring out--I must not have done something right! Needless to say, I will be emailing the helpdesk to plead with them to save these directories until my return.

Two points I guess: One--next year, my students will have their own pin drives to save their learning on and two---keep trucking (or in computer terms, typing). Over the past year and a half, I have continuously ran into snags. Over and over and over. The snags are not to do with underpreparation or lack of motivation... these snags are sent my way on purpose. Everytime one pops up, I learn more. I can't tell you how much I have learned just by trying, getting snagged and trying again. I have had great prof devt and good support from my district, but mostly it is that "I am going to share this program/video/podcast/application, etc with my students" attitude. In order to be an effective educator that uses technology to teach... you must be willing to learn, fall down, try, try again.

Tomorrow will be a great day and I will show the wonderful learning my students have done. I will pass on my passion for this journey I signed up for!

2 comments:

  1. I had not had the experience (or thought about) the "cleaning" of the computers and the need for the teacher to keep meaningful samples of the work of students. Pin drives for students seem really handy in this case.

    We are here at SMART and today we will figure out our project/s as a group. The speaker yesterday was very enthusiastic about the use of technology in her Spanish classroom. And we are all wishing for Smart Boards at Lanigan...

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  2. Keep me up to date on your project ideas!

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