Decision Making - Week 1

Statistics. Not my favorite subject. I was a poor math student in high school and college. It just does not interest me unless it has to do with physics, which I find fascinating. The process of coming up with statistics is very boring to me. So, to say the least, I am not looking forward to the math part of this class.

One thing that I do like is to look at numbers and analyze them. Numbers can tell a story. When it comes to statistics at work, it my job is to export data, like grades, attendance, and test scores from our student information system and get them to others to compute and analyze.

I am hoping that this class will provide me a better toolset for dealing with statistics. I would like to know how to better analyze the statistics and put them to good use. Our school has been doing data driven instruction for the last couple of years. This is the type of class that I need to better understand that process.

Facilitating Collaboration - Week 5

Wow, this week I found tons of Web 2.0 resources. I checked out the Go2Web20 and All Things Web 2.0 sites this week and was almost overwhelmed with what I found on those pages. I have had teachers ask me for site and application recommendations for their classrooms in the past few years and have always looked at purchasing some tool to fulfill their needs. With these sites I found almost everything for free! This is going to be a great resource for me and my teachers.

I am still working on my Google site. I have the pages created. Now I need to add content, graphics, and mess around with the page colors a bit. So far Google Sites is really easy to use and, since it is part of the Google Apps package that our school uses, readily available for our teachers to use without signing up for any additional accounts.

Facilitating Collaboration - Week 4

This week was another great week of resources for my job. I spent a lot of time researching the screencast solutions. In the past I have used different applications like Snap Pro X or Quicktime to record desktop movies. I then had to find ways to publish or distribute these videos.

After checking out some of the options, I chose to use Screenr for my assignment. What I liked about this was how easy it was to use and that it was connected to my Twitter account. My goal for a couple of years has been to create short tutorial videos to replace the over 100 page technology manual that we distribute to teachers. I plan on having a Twitter account setup so that each time I post something a message is sent out to a group e-mail address so all teachers and staff get a message. Now, as I create these videos I can automatically Tweet that it is done and all teachers and staff will get notification about it.

I also spent time this week working on my Google Sites pages. I have been working on a site for the Messmer Tech department for a while and this is going to motivate me to get it done. Still lots to do to get this ready before school starts.

Facilitating Collaboration - Week 3

This week was a great learning experience. I was able to use Flickr and get used to how that service worked. This is something that I had been wanting to do but just had not committed the time to the project until now. I can see where teachers might be able to use this in their classroom with posting artwork, activities, and more. For me, I can see a personal use but not a professional use. I also used Flickr to post to my blog. It was extremely easy to setup and use.

The RSS reader was also quite informative. I had been following RSS feeds for a number of years. Until now, each RSS site was bookmarked and I checked each one individually. The reader now allows me to view all updates without going to multiple sites. If teachers knew about RSS feeds and readers it could save them lots of time and energy browsing different sites.

I am most excited about using Google Sites. I have already started working on a web site for our tech department. This will be used for professional development (videos, documents) for my staff. I am hoping to link our ticketing system to a page so all teachers can go to one page to search our knowledge base, submit a trouble ticket, and get professional development.

Star Wars

Star Wars
Originally uploaded by Bartels Family

A couple of weeks ago I attended the Star Wars in Concert show at the Bradley Center in Milwaukee. I had 7th row, center seats on the floor. It was a great show and was hosted by actor Anthony Daniels who played C3PO in all six films. The orchestra played music to the movies on a giant 60 foot LED screen. It was an awesome show and would go again.

Facilitating Collaboration - Week 2

Well, I have had a couple of days off of work so I was able to get my course work done early this week. What will I do with all of my extra time?

Anyway, this week we spent time looking at Wikis, Microblogging, and online photo sharing. This forced me to get a Twitter account. I will be honest, just like Facebook, Twitter was one of those things that I just don't have a desire to use. I see its purpose and understand why people use it. I also see how it can be used by a teacher or by the school but it is not something that I feel the need to use personally. I am finding some good information from the people I follow but many of these things are retweets or post from RSS feeds that I already follow.

Online photo sharing is something I have dabbled in for the last few years. About 6 years ago I had a MobileMe account from Apple. Here I created a web site and used iPhoto to post and share photos with family. I decided that the cost was too much for the use I got out of it so I let the account expire. I have been looking at other ways to share photos. I have a Flickr and a Picasa account and am trying to determine which is better. I do store most of my photos in iPhoto and that has a built-in publishing tool for Flickr. It works fine with the testing that I have done. The one thing that worries me is that, while I want to share photos with my family members, I do not want photos of my kids posted for the public to see. If family members do not have Yahoo or Google accounts they are not able to see the photos unless I make them public. At least that is what I can tell so far. I have not explored all of the options so I will continue testing different services until I find one I like.

Facilitating Collaboration - Week 1

Blogs. Lots of info about blogs this week. I recall when I first heard about blogs. I wondered why anyone would be interested in what I had to say. It wasn't until about 2 years ago that I started using it in my job to communicate with teachers and staff. Since then almost all of our teachers have some sort of way to electronically communicate with their students. Some use a blog, some use Moodle, and some have used Google Sites to create their own classroom web site.

It is amazing how far blogs have come in the last 5 years. It seems that everyone has a blog with something to say. It has really changed how we communicate and get information. Now, the important part is to have the ability to determine what is fact and what is opinion or fiction. Our students need to learn this skill. It is a similar to the debate about Wikipedia. Blogs also have the power to influence people. I think it is important that we also teach our students responsibility when it comes to blogging.