Teaching With Technology Blog
Blog Link and Bio
I have decided to follow the blog Cool Cat Teacher Blog. You can find the link in my blogroll, or go here: http://coolcatteacher.blogspot.com/ The blog’s author, Vicki Davis, is a full time teacher and IT director at Westwood Schools in Camilla, Georgia. She is a Discovery STAR educator and Google certified teacher. Once a stay-at-home mom and entrepreneur creating websites for schools, Vicki later worked toward a teaching degree and began teaching at her children’s school. Since becoming a teacher, Vicki has created wiki-centric projects that allow students to collaborate with other classes around the world. They include The Flat Classroom Project, NetGenEd project, the Eracism project, the Horizon project, and Digiteen. These projects have involved 3200 student in 19 countries around the world. Finally, Vicki’s personal blog won the Edublog Best Teacher Blog award in 2008, along with many other awards and nominations.
Recent Post Summary
This blog is a mix of personal and technology-focused posts. For my summary, I will summarize the four most recent posts that are technology related.
Picking a Perfect Font Size
In this post, Vicki discusses how to use the Fibonacci sequence to choose font sizes in a document in the most visually appealing way. The Fibonacci sequence (1,1,2,3,5,8,13,21,34…) is the starting point. For example, if you choose a 34 font size for a title, then following the sequence, you should use 21 for a heading, and 13 for the body text size. However, 12 is the standard size. You can adjust each number and maintain similar proportions. In this case, you could subtract 1 from each size, and end up with sizes 12, 20, and 33 for your document. She acknowledges that there is a place for “eyeballing it,” but she has taught this strategy to her students, and uses it often herself.
Failure to Communicate
In this post, Vicki expresses her frustration for the times when technologies simply do not work together well. She tells the story of a post she wrote in response to a New York Time’s article, but when she went to include the link to the article in her blog, her blogger lost the entire draft she had been working on. She states, “Technology is an ecosystem. It is getting harder to troubleshoot–at least for me.” She expresses her frustration and gives some hints of possible troubleshooting, but unfortunately, her original post about the article never made it to her blog. Following her post is an interesting discussion of comments about what might be causing her problems. People are eager to blame Web 2.0 products, but others are quick to jump to their defense.
Our Freshman Software Exploration Project
In this post, Vicki outlines how she begins her freshman class in a skills boot camp. She points out that technology and programs are always changing, and so instead of building deep skills in a limited number of applications, she teaches students how to explore software and build skills by intuitively exploring a new program. She uses One Note Notebook to communicate with her class. The students are divided into groups that must explore a new software and then present it to the class. Some of the software explored included Blender, Google Sketchup (3D object creation tools), Audacity (sound recording and editing), TuxGuitar (sheet music writer), and Picasa (photo taking software). She also makes use of Skype often with her students. Even when she is not able to be at school, she can use Skype to continue communication and address problems from a distance.
Eventually, these, and other, skills will be applied to a self-chosen Freshman Project that will be completed by May. In beginning her class this way, she is making students the “masters of technology,” letting them build on their own interests, and allowing them the role of students-as-teacher as they share what they have learned with their classmates.
Join us for “Meet the Flat Classroom”
Although I unfortunately missed it, Vicki’s next post was about an online meeting for one of her projects, The Flat Classroom. The purpose was to explain some of the projects that were beginning, including Digiteen, A Week in the Life, and Eracism. I also see that a K-2 pilot was discussed, and as a first grade teacher, I am hoping to find more information about this program. I followed a link at the bottom of her post to read more about it. All projects are aimed at developing students’ media skills, collaboration, and understanding of different parts of the world. I was also excited to see the A Week in the Life is an elementary project that joins classrooms in different areas and countries and has an interdisciplinary focus on how we live, how we communicate, and how to develop cultural understanding. Students collaborate with other students from around the country and the world in this unique project.
Who Would Enjoy this Blog?
Anyone who is seeking to teach with technology would benefit from the ideas shared and the example she sets. Since she is a high school teacher, many of the examples she shares apply more directly to older middle school or high school students. Teachers of those older students would be able to find a great example for ways to make technology central to student learning. It’s also important to note that the use of technology seems fairly advanced. Someone just beginning to use technology in their teaching may be overwhelmed with the extent of what she does in the classroom. However, she has some wonderful ideas that could be implemented in isolation, and the projects she created would be great for building in-depth skills in technology, media, and collaboration.