Reflections in Tech

This week was the first of the BCPS summer schedule, Monday through Thursday, with 11 and 12 month employees working 10 hour days.  On paper that sounds awesome, a three day weekend, and getting your 40 hour work-week in.  Well, I completed this four day work week.   And... I. AM. TIRED.   It didn't help that I forgot to turn my 4:50am alarm off, and was wide awake this morning well before sunrise.  However, its after 10am now, and I've had my coffee and shower, and I'm feeling alive.  This week has been productive, successful, and exhausting!  The team of Instructional Tech Facilitators had been assigned the task of setting up all the school/grade level sets of iPads with Apple Configurator in an effort to get them managed by Filewave.   We met Monday morning at Salem Elementary to get started with a cart of 30 iPads.  This was a teaching/learning session in which a team of all the ITFs serving the elementary schools wor...

I've had several Skype/Google Hangout experiences this year and have learned from each session.  However, each session leaves me longing for more, more, more! My first experience with Mystery Skype took place in November with a 6th grade classroom, and a teacher that had urged me to come up with something to get her students excited and engaged.  During our session we had students poring over atlases, writing questions, taking notes about what we'd learned, giggling with excitement, and working together.  That session lasted more than an hour, and was such a learning experience for everyone involved.  The students were able to write reflectively to describe their participation in the session, detailing what when well, what went not so well, and what they'd like to try next time.   I've been able to participate in 2 additional Mystery Skype sessions with the sixth graders at EBMS, and even took a group of students and teachers to NCTies to share their experie...

So... last week I developed a geocaching activity for the 7th grade teachers at EBMS.  The activity was centered around reviewing the Science and Social Studies curriculum.  I plotted 24 waypoints weeks ago, and then turned those points into a two part hunt.  Based on the aerial view of the waypoints I organized the hunt order so that the students would have to explore a good bit between each cache.  I hid caches all over the baseball field, softball field, and practice field.  The only thing that really was a negative about having this large of an area was the fact that there were fences around every field... I'm sure this proved to be very frustrating to the students, as it frustrated me when trying to relocate the caches.   So, my husband helped me hide the caches on Wednesday afternoon and t he students would be geocaching on Thursday and Friday  We  only hid 22 of the 24 because two of them wouldn't show up on the Garmin device.  I...