Chanatown

During the last week before break, and fresh from my attendance at Google Teacher Academy, I decided to offer presentations and workshops for our faculty and staff during all three lunch periods. Details, links, and reflections for each workshop follow below, and all presentations can be found here . Monday, December 14, 2009 Tablet Training 101: At ETHS , we have rolled out 250+ Tablet PC's to our faculty. This year, English and World Languages teachers received tablets. I decided to focus this workshop on the basics of using a Tablet in class to ink on MS Word and MS PowerPoint files. Tuesday, December 15, 2009 SharePoint 101: During the past year, we have adopted MS SharePoint as the main vehicle for our teacher websites, displacing both Moodle and MS FrontPage . It has been one of my main responsibilities to help teachers learn and use SharePoint especially since our webmaster's departure earlier this year. This workshop focused on a brief discussion of ShareP...

Well, I took a super big gulp of the Google kool-aid on Wednesday during the Google Teacher Academy in Washington, D.C. Admittedly, when I first saw the agenda, I was curious as to how much there would be to it all. For example, Breakout #1 featured Google Docs, Sites, and Video. Having been closely working with teachers during our pilot rollout for the past 2 months, I'd probably be breezing through the presentations, right? Wrong. From the minute the "Lead Learners" (Google Certified Teacher alumni) began their sessions/presentations, it was a non-stop ride for nearly 12 hours. Some of the advice given to us prior to attending was to take a deep breath because our heads would be spinning with all of the new information. Again, I wondered how this could be since we were all the typical tech-savvy teacher types. Case in point: despite the overwhelming overload of information presented, nearly everyone was still multi-tasking either working on email, twittering,...