Reflections on Teaching

In the last few weeks, I’ve been doing trainings at the district, while getting ready to do a presentation for my fellow staff members. My principal would like to see other staff members, not just me in the computer lab, using technology more in their classrooms. He has been in and out of the site, and I was going to be gone for a couple days. I had an idea for how to use an idea from Kevin Honeycutt that I got at EduBloggerCon, but I an oral, or written description would not do it just justice, so…I made a quick video on UStream, and loaded it on YouTube, and sent a message with a link and told him to watch it when he was home (YouTube is blocked at district).

I didn’t get a chance to talk to him until Friday. He loved being able to see what I was talking about. He wants me to show the staff the video and talk about it as an example. I told him that I was not convinced that showing something about communicating with the boss at 9 p.m. was not going to be a winner. I suggested we talk about it in terms of documenting best practices, and collaboration.

He then asked if he could talk to me on video because he used iChat. Being a Mac-ignoramous, I asked around, and an old non-teacher friend helped me figure it out and how to explain it to him. We had a video chat. He was so impressed that he saw the possibility on his own, of using it to have our classrooms talk to other classrooms.

I then had to explain that yes, there were programs that would let us do that, but they were all pretty much blocked by the filtering software (as I write, Mogulus is not blocked, but I have every confidence it soon will be). I asked him for two things:

• To support my request to the head of IS that the district allow teachers to have an override password to used on only one computer so that sites like UStream, Skype, etc. could be accessed.
• To talk to our philanthropic partners about getting a broadband access card for my laptop (since it will take a good part of the year to change district policy).

FYI, Here are the cards:

Kevin Honeycutt asks that people share their versions of cards, so if you do some of your own, drop him a line and share. It’s the 2.0 way to do things .