Collective Knowledge

Mrs. Marino posted the following message in a previous post to our blog:

"Wow! If you haven't been through Nettrekker, you need to go. It helps weed out unnecessary searching and really narrows it down for the students! I'm going to try a class blog. I'll let you know how it goes." The article I linked to Mrs. Marino's comment here explains one teacher's experience with experimenting with blogging with her students. It also includes a rubric she uses with blogging.

I sure hope Mrs. Marino won't mind that I re-stated her entry in this new post. She made a great point--one to which each of us "has something we can add"! In terms of being informed, not one of us can come even close to being as informed as we all are when we are "collectively informed"! A huge part of the untapped potential of online communication, such as blogs, is our ability to become members of learning networks, increase our collective knowledge, and archive it. This school blog creates the space for such a learning network-our task is to tap the power of it.

In today's training session we focused entirely on the use of My Portfolio in netTrekker. While we are quite focused on netTrekker right now, our conversation does not have to be limited to netTrekker! We all have something we can add that is relative to technology integration. So jump in! Inquiring minds are waiting to know!

netTrekker, the Tech Expo, and Blogging

To everyone I saw at our technology meetings on Tuesday, Sept. 16, I'd like you to know I enjoyed the brief time we shared. The feedback I've received relevant to the discussion we had about the Tech Expo indicates it was quite worthwhile. As I learn more specifics about the Expo I will share, both here, in person, and via mass email. The more we share our collective knowledge the better. I am constantly reminded that none of us know nearly as much as all of us together know!

When we meet at NCE again on Tuesday, Sept. 30, we will devote our entire time to netTrekker. We will explore the feature "My Portfolio". If you are using netTrekker in some way please feel free to jump right into a netTrekker discussion here to share about your experiences!

As you work in netTrekker one of the resources you will eventually encounter is ReadWriteThink. Of course you can also take a brief tour of the online student materials available at ReadWriteThink outside of netTrekker. These resources are all online, interactive, and free! The ReadWriteThink site is easy to search and contains numerous standards based lesson plans for reading and language arts. The lesson plans also include links to all ancillary materials.

Click on comments below and join the NCE blogosphere!

Welcome to Our New Space

Mrs. Casleton and I established this space as a place for enhancing "technology conversations" among the faculty and staff at North Columbus Elementary School. Ideally this will include the sharing of information relevant to upcoming professional development sessions, our collective ideas about technology integration, and our related successes and challenges. I believe we learn as much, perhaps more sometimes, from challenges as we work through them.

We will have our first professional development session on Tuesday, September 16, at which time we will begin working with netTrekker. What technology classes are you most interested in during first semester training? Early Birds, would you prefer to begin at 7:30 or 7:45? Who else among you is already blogging? If you are blogging, please share here about some of your experiences.

Special invitation to all!! If you don't already have a gmail account, consider going ahead and setting up a free account now. This does not mean that you will need to, or even choose to, use Google email for your email. It will just makes access a bit more fluid as we begin to explore a number of Google Apps in the future.

Please be sure to participate in our first online poll! Responses are confidential and the total results will be shared right here in a few days.