Friday, January 16, 2009

Two (crazy) Ideas?


So in some of my conversations with fellow teachers, two things have come up:

1. Some teachers, through no fault of their own, simply don't have the basic computer skills necessary to go on to higher-level things like geotagging, blogging, wiki-ing, etc. Perhaps we need to offer some sort of "basic" seminar on our March conference day?

2. Some teachers are using PowerPoint, but have indicated to me that they don't feel that they're using it well. Maybe a "PowerPoint Techniques" workshop would be in order. Thoughts? Comments? Questions? Cheap Shots? C'mon...you know you have a cheap shot or three for me...

2 comments:

Paul Wiech said...

I completely agree with David but how do we get it all into our 1/2 day time slot?

Chad DeVoe said...

I've seen what David's talking about too. I think a lot of it is a simple solution: use less intimidating jargon. i.e. Renaming "blogs" to "Creating a basic classroom website for beginners". I try to imagine what it must be like to be 50 and computer illiterate...how frustrating it must be to have someone zip through "Megs of RAM" and "Del.ic.ious", "Twitter"...the language of twenty-somethin's. Dave did a great job with Del.ic.ious at his teacher center course but we need to slow it down. I think we need to introduce very basic stuff so teachers can easily latch on to it get excited about it. Elementary teachers love classroom newsletters. Secondary teachers like to host classroom assignments on the interweb. David introduced the idea of having an object zoomed in on the document projector for students as they walk into the classroom. I think we should simply highlight these sorts of things in March so that when more teachers get the equipment next year they come to us wanting more.

*steps off soapbox*