PONderings

For the second summer in a row, a crew from Regina travelled to attend Dean Shareski’s trilogy of STF workshops. This year, we engaged in geocaching, podcasting, and digital storytelling. Thanks once again, Dean, for allowing me to share your workshop ideas. Your ideas from last year’s workshops continue to influence me through my continued use of blogs and wikis to transmit information.

Last year, we discovered how valuable these courses are to our practice. With students’ interests and ways of thinking ever changing, the participants in these workshops have one more way to network and to collaboratively use technology as a tool to better address pedagogical needs. With our division’s progressive initiative of putting laptops into every teacher’s hand and developing wireless laptop carts for every school, there will an increased urgency for teachers to step up and to learn how to use them. Too often we blame a lack of training on the Division; we as teachers have a responsibility to collectively invest in our personal teaching practice. Our students deserve it.

The last few posts are examples of podcasting using Garageband and of digital storytelling using PowerPoint and MovieMaker. This video takes advantage of the online service VoiceThread. Using digital still images in a slideshow is pretty old hat for many of us. What’s great about VoiceThread is its ability to easily record a personal vocal narration to accompany the stills and for others to add their voices by way of comments. My wife and daughter would have also chimed into the production, but were too shy to add their voices at this time.

Here’s my VoiceThread project on our Geocaching excursion to Rouleau, SK (a.k.a. Dog River):