MPTCA - My Sessions

All About Blogging - This was my first ever my double session.  While I enjoyed having longer than 75 minutes, 3 hours was just too long! 

Who is that?  And what is he eating?

We spent a good 2 hours establishing why teachers and students should blog, setting up an RSS reader

and subscribing to blogs.  We then tried out three blogging platforms (Posterous, KidBlogs, Blogger) and then set up our own.  No wonder everyone was exhausted!  Feel free to check out the session here and play around with some of the blogging platforms.  There are instructions, usernames and passwords to try each platform out. 

Technology Integration for Social Studies Div 3ish - This was my second double session and I think I had better pacing for this one!  The best part of this session, my junior high social teacher Mr. Yas attended!  My theme was Create, Collaborate and Critically Think.  However with what was happening in Japan, we went a little off course (teachable moment) as I showed my #japan twitter stream, Al Jazeera English and The Boston Picture as alternative ways to get current events.  The majority of the session you can find here.  I think I started off strong with creating a fake Facebook page and different ways to use audio.  We deviated slightly off course here and there, taking a looking at The Week in Rap and National Geographic Typical Person video.  I think that teachers walked away with some new ideas and had a fair amount of time to play with them.

All in all a most excellent teachers' convention!

Tagxedo & Social 7

Tagxedo is a word cloud creator that runs on Silverlight.  Silverlight was recently added to PWSD core supported software list, which means it will be installed on all machines.  There are lots of interesting ways to integrate word clouds into the classroom but here is just one.

Working with Ann Nordhagen from Hythe Regional School we developed a lesson using word clouds around the Social Studies 7 curriculum.  Specifically the effects of Imperialism. 

In class students brainstormed all the effects of imperialism.  They came up with 3 pages worth of effects.  When they came to the computer lab we asked them to narrow it down to the top 5-7 effects and start making a word cloud. 

Once their cloud was created and they played around with the settings we asked them determine what they believed was the number one effect of imperialism.  The size of a word in a cloud is determined by the mode, or frequency, of the words entered, so the effect the student determined to be the greatest would then be typed over and over

to make it the largest word in the cloud.

With a little time left in class we asked the students to make an explorers word cloud.  This time adding the names of famous Canadian explorers and then give the 5 characteristics that made them great, again typing the characteristic that is most significant more often.

Students created a beautiful visual of a difficult critical thinking skill, siginficance of a criteria. 



VC Opportunity for Social 3 & 11

The folks in Grande Yellowhead have been working with a Rabbi in Israel to develop a couple of videoconference series which target the outcomes in the Grade 3 and Grade 11 Social Studies curriculum. The attached outlines are the result of collaborations between focus groups of teachers in Grande Yellowhead and the folks in Israel to produce a series of custom built sessions aimed at our Alberta curriculum.

Due to the time difference between Alberta and Israel, these sessions will need to be delivered in the morning. Each session ranges from 45 min. to an hour. It is strongly recommended that schools interested in these series book the entire series and not pick individual programs from the series.


Each, one hour, program costs $150 US except for the sessions which go on location to a kibbutz or a Bedouin camp - these sessions cost $200 US.

Grade 3 Outline
Grade 11 Outline

Contact
Gordon Booth

Videoconference Coordinator
Grande Yellowhead Public School Division
gordboot@gyrd.ab.ca
780-723-4471

If you are a PWSD teacher, please contact jenclevette@pwsd76.ab.ca as I would be happy to come out and be technical support on the VC days.

Tel Aviv, Israel courtsey of RonAlmog's Photostream