Saturday, June 12, 2010

Techie Breakie Session 6


Our Techie Breakie this week was about social bookmarking and tagging. I wanted to show our teachers Delicious, Diigo and Evernote, all of which I thought would be useful tools for them to use both to organise their own bookmarks and, for those working with the older primary students, for the teachers to help the students organise their inquiries.

As we are drawing close to the end of our school year - with just two more weeks to go - there will probably only be time for one more Techie Breakie this year. I'm thinking of introducing DropBox, and would also like to touch on how our teachers could use podcasts and movies.

When I started Techie Breakies, my hope was that this group of teachers would be able to be the first point of contact in each grade level for their team, to encourage the integration of technology in the classroom. Of course what has actually happened is that some of the teachers have moved grade level, or in one case has actually moved out of the classroom altogether and become the Early Years librarian. We therefore have one of our team still in Kindergarten, two moving from Grade 2 and Grade 4 into Grade 1, and one moving from Grade 5 into Grade 3. This means that some grades will have more than one mentor (Grades 1 and Grades 3) but some grades won't have anyone (Grades 1, 4 and 5). I guess next year it will be time to start the process all over again, though I am excited that in Grades 1 and 3 - both of which I will be supporting for IT - we will have a solid team of teachers interested in moving forward with the technology and able to help the others in their teams too.

2 comments:

  1. Have you ever used SimplyBox? It is a fabulous way of bookmarking. You can put a bunch of bookmarks in one container and then share just ONE link to all of the resources within that container. If I am teaching about Simple Machines and have 20 resources, I can just give my kids one link to get them to all 20 resources. I can also add comments to the resources, which guide the students on how they are to use that web site. SimplyBox also allows you to select a snapshot of the web site you are bookmarking, so you can direct users to the specific point on that page that you want them to go to.

    Check it out!

    www.simplybox.com

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  2. Hi Sean, Thanks for the link to SimplyBox. I've never heard of it but I will definitely check it out before tomorrow - which is our last Techie Breakie of the year.

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