We had our second PD session last week. This one looked at the creation of artifacts. It was great to see a group of 23 people getting together to learn and talk about using blogs and creating Eportfolios.
My original thought from last year was to have a series of sessions that revolved around learning, discussing and writing about technology in the classroom. I wanted to have teachers create a professional Eportfolio so those who lacked experience could begin blogging and learning about portfolio creation. This will make it easier next year when we begin using Eportfolios at the Middle and Elementary levels.
This week Shane and Rachel joined Josee and I to help plan our presentation and our first speed geeking attempt. The more people we add to the planning and presenting of these PD sessions the better off we will be. We looked at the creation of video and Youtube (Shane), creating and embedding presentations using Prezi (Rachel), adding graphics to a blog post and using Flickr (Josee). I looked at uploading audio to WordPress and using Audioboo. Although the presentations went well we didn’t allow enough time for these sessions. Next time we will do better!
In the second part we helped colleagues setup their blogs and create their first blog post. Everyone came, ready with a digital image and participants created a post dealing with a class event. Over the next few months we all will be creating presentations, graphics, videos, audio artifacts and adding them to our portfolio blogs.
Here are some of our first attempts:
- our PD blog
- Liz on her KizCiti Field trip
- Amanda Exploring Colors
I used my iPhone to make a short video of the session as video will be the next artifact we look at adding. Aside from the heat outside I am still wondering why I picked the background music and have to think about lighting more. I used Magisto for this one and plan on trying a different app for the next session.
