Wednesday, June 24, 2009

What's New?

While catching up some of my RSS feeds I came across this post from Rodd Lucier on the Clever Sheep. He asked on Twitter, "What are you doing in your classroom today that wasn't possible 5 years ago?" and shares the answers in his post.

I am not sure what I am doing that wasn't possible 5 years ago but I do know what has become part of my daily practice. Here's the short list:

- Using Skype to plan, ask for help, explore new ideas.
- Writing this blog.
- Creating school accounts on Facebook, Delicious, Pageflakes, Wikispaces, Blogspot, Twitter, Flickr and YouTube.
- Using a flip camera to record students work, ideas in meetings, school events.
- Attending a number of presentations, discussions, workshops and conferences virtually.
- Using delicious as a search engine.
- Building a PLN on Twitter and through my RSS feeds.
- Reading blogs and news daily through my RSS feeds.
- Building library resource pages using wikispaces, pageflakes and delicious.
- Chatting online with colleagues in my district and around the world to share resources and collaborate.
- Collaborating using Google Docs.

I'm sure I've left something off the list because it has become so ingrained that I don't even notice I'm using it anymore.

What tools or practices have become an invaluable part of your work day? What one tool or idea would you pass on to someone else? Where might you be 5 years down the road?

2 comments:

Miss M said...

Today I personally use blogs, twitter, googledocs, wikis, del.icio.us, and much more on a regular basis. The most invaluable tool I have that I use several times a day is del.icio.us. Whether I am tagging a website or searching for web resources, I can't imagine life without it.
My goal is that in 5 years (or sooner) my students will be using all these tools and more on a regular basis as part of their learning.

MrsE said...

It's a challenge to get the kids using the tools as part of their every day work. I was delighted on the last day of school when the English dept approached me about introducing all the incoming Gr.8s to Google Docs in September. That's a big step forward. Maybe I can convince them to add delicious to their toolkit and maybe even do some blogging.