It is so true. As teachers we just love to share our stuff. I was taught very early on by one of my mentors, who’s name rhymes with smavi huxenmerg, that the more I share my work, the more dispersed my creation time becomes. Another side effect of this sharing is that if it is good enough for someone to want to use, it validates your abilities to create solid material and in turn makes you want to create more.
In the interest of sharing however, this video made me think of the ways that we as teachers of district 71 have tried to connect over the years. Teachers such as Jan Smith and Avi Luxenburg have tried to create systems for us to communicate our ideas with various levels of success. Jen Turner, our Pro-D Chair for the last few years and a new member of our district’s admin. team has been a huge proponent of twitter nation. Looking at the posts we are sharing and having esteemed colleagues join us such as Verena Roberts, I can’t help but think that people such as Jan Smith and Jen Turner would eat this stuff up. Is it allowed for us to bring others into this fray? Have others been bringing people in or sharing this out and I am just unaware?
I have never really been able to force myself into twitter and the sharing of resources but this format in google+ somehow seems much more my style. I love getting distracted by the vidoes others are sharing and playing with some of the tools being recommended.
I think this is probably something that we will want to keep going throughout this course and beyond
Now it’s time for something a little more specific. Verena recently posted a link to Mozilla Webmaker and as I predicted I got a little lost in some of the prepared lessons. I think I found my ‘movement’ exercise for Monday. This 1983 video on how to do the robot is an icebreaker activity used to introduce the idea of ‘hacking’. It has students taking the previous students moves, hacking part of it, then changing it to something better. I think we should all post our best ‘robot’ moves:)
The next exercise is a video introducing a site called ‘hackasaurus’ which easily allows you to copy a web page and then make adjustments to the text, photos and videos. I think this really fits with our recent discussions on the moral and legal rights of taking past works and using them to create new material.
In the end this course leads students to a better understanding of HTML language and CSS sheets using a webmaker tool called Thimble.
I had a few other thoughts I was hoping to share, however, I am really wanting to go try out some of these courses.
Have a great weekend everyone,
Andrew