THANK YOU

At the end of this month, I will be leaving the teaching position that I have held for the last 18 years. I am fortunately leaving on excellent terms with my employer, and feel a significant amount of sadness to be leaving what has truly been a "dream job" for almost two decades. However, for personal, family and health reasons, I need to leave my current school to move to the west coast; there, I will hopefully be pursuing other projects and adventures that will (I hope) have some connections to the three things that have driven this blog: education, technology, and new media. Thank you to all of you who have supported, read, visited, and commented on my blog. It has been a great forum to allow me to "think out loud" about what is happening in education/ed tech, and I am grateful that anyone has ever bothered to read and contribute to these thoughts. Since social sites are changing, and managing so many different sites has become overwhelming, I'll be retiring this blog. If you'd like to continue the conversation, feel free to add me to one of your circles on Google Plus. Let's keep moving forward. :-) Laura

Workflow- Social Media School Teacher

A fantastic "day in the life" (hypothetically? does it matter?) of a Social Web-centered teacher. A must read, especially for those of us bravely going "back to the trenches" this week!Workflow- Social Media School Teacher

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By the way, if you care at all about the power of social media, in education or elsewhere, you need to subscribe to Chris Brogan's blog (RSS or email options available on his blog page). It's at the top of my daily feed reading list. Subscribe to his newsletter (it's a bit different) too.

For those of you going back to work this week in our public and private schools, I wish you a positive and fulfilling year.

speaking engagements?

My highlight of the day: being asked to present on Web 2.0 as a teaching tool during a monthly meeting of local school technology administrators. Humbling indeed, and very cool as well! Looking forward to that...meanwhile, I've been busy planning and foraging for content for my inservice class I'll be teaching to staff at the end of this month. The topics will include blogs, podcasts, wikis, social media (aka Web 2.0). I already have a few things in mind to share, but if any of you out there know of a particularly cool site, app or tool, leave a comment and I'd be forever in your debt!

reflection

Earlier this week, while I was teaching my Culture of the 60's class and showing a YouTube video on my SmartBoard, one of my students said to me, "Can you imagine teaching without that thing?"(referring to the SmartBoard).
I paused for a minute and thought: no, I can't imagine it. And yet, I did it for 12.5 of the 15 years that I've been teaching. I taught for years without powerpoint, YouTube, taking my students directly to a webpage, then following links; without email, LiveJournal, blogs, wikis, turnitin.com, social networks...so much of the stuff I do now I never was able to do, and yet I still managed to run a class. It blows my mind how much technology and web 2.0 specifically has altered the way I deliver instruction. And of course, I needed one of my students to point that out to me.

Wow.

class social networks: thoughts?

Last night I made a major decision to move my discussion board for my Theater class from wikispaces to a new page I created on ning. Don't get me wrong, I think wikispaces is a truly great thing; the possibilities are limitless, but the truth is that it really doesn't serve our needs at this moment (maybe one day soon it will?). I don't currently have plans to have my students make pages on the wiki, nor do I have the time to shift my entire online presence for the class from my blogger blog (where i's been living for about four years) to the wiki site. As for the discussion board, which was the only feature I was really using: I felt that the setup was far too limiting and there weren't enough management options for me as the moderator. I had also seen it get to the point where the initial novelty had worn off, and the students were no longer as inclined to post as they had been.
So, I found that the whole concept of an online social network for the students in the class was much more appealing, and I could do a lot more with the page as well as manage the forums more effectively. The notion of being able to create a profile and add pics, music and video (like facebook) seemed to be much more appealing to students, so I thought I'd give it a go. The hardest part now, I'm sure, will be actually getting everyone to sign up...