Coming Out of the Clouds

I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but I believe the task of sharing CLT with my staff will definitely bring some heads out of the clouds. I've witnessed really "tech savvy" staff with what they consider wonderful multimedia presentations that I would never have admitted that I created. Although these teachers are excellent teachers, I don't believe they are applying their prior knowledge about good teaching practices to materials that are created with technology. I too am guilty of doing this. I wanted to use technology so badly that I created busy and overwhelming materials that in retrospect weren't necessarily great teaching materials. And then, I took an online class at a university about creating powerful presentations without excess. This changed my entire perspective and I was reminded of these components when we discussed Cognitive Learning Theory this week. My approach to my staff? I'm thinking I would show them a presentation that was full of fluff. And then, ask them what the content was. I'm not sure how much they would get from it, but, I would hope to expand the discussion to what would they change about the presentation so that they could better understand the content. I would then introduce the components of CLT and ask the staff to establish some criteria for representations using the fundamentals of CLT. I believe this approach would be well received by my staff. I know there would need to be follow-up as teachers begin to apply what they learned in their classroom, however I believe it'd be a great start.

And, coming out of the clouds...well, let's just say it's all in efforts to view a bright new day.

Getting Started- blog post 1

Well, this is my first official post and it's been tiresome getting to this point. In selecting a tool, I was looking for a great beginner tool that I could learn the basics so that I have something to take back to school in the fall. With this in mind,I took some time this week to review the different options that were available on blogger. Blogger was recommended by a colleague as being a great place to start blogging. I enjoyed testing out the different functions, but got caught up in some of the settings that delayed my actual posting. But, I finally made it!

For the most part, I stuck with this tool because it is very beginner friendly. If I had stuck with the defaults on most options, I'm sure I would be blogging away by now. Although I now have to get the hang of this tagging thing. One of the most important features that I like on blogger is the ability to moderate all posts. Because this is such a taboo area in the school system, I had to tread very carefully in it's use. So I like the ability to review any information that is submitted prior to it's actual posting on the web. This will be a safety feature that I will need to enable for anything my students will use. I like the ease of being able to comment to posts and also the ability to link to my "future" website. I wasn't as happy with the graphics side of the site...but perhaps when I'm more html knowledgeable, I'll be able to change that around as well.

I haven't decided to 100% stick with this tool, but I'll need a little more time to investigate different tools as I become more familiar with the general idea of blogs and tags.

Any suggestions or feedback about the process are welcome.