Lisa Kerns-March Blog Post

March has been a very busy month for me. I have spent all of my spare time working on our assignments and I've learning so much. I have truly enjoyed working on my 23Things Blog. I love WallWisher and VoiceThread and I plan to integrate both of these into my classes. I have shown many of my staff members the new Web 2.0 tools I have been researching and they have asked me to do present workshops this summer. I would love to be a full time TIS, it is so fulfilling to see teachers and students get excited about utilizing innovative technology tools and learning through technology integration.

I have been using my MOBIs at least once a week. My students can't wait to use them. My Life Basics classes are using Blogger to journal and are creating their own AVATARS to put into our class blog.I have also been focusing on referencing and using EasyBib.com and CitationMachine.net to teach my students proper formatting.

Shannon Carnes is coming to my school on March 30th from 3-5:30 to present to my teachers on CPS and MOBIs. If anyone would like to attend you are welcome. Just email me at lkerns@access.k12.wv.us if you would like to come. Also, I am promoting a workshop on Dangers of Drugs and Technology (How They Effect You and Your Family) which will be held at Lincoln High School on March 30th at 7:00 pm.

Podcasts-Lisa Kerns

I created a podcast using Audacity and Voki. I recorded a welcome to my Teacher Resource page and added it to my Voki. I was going to tape myself, but I decided the Voki looked better. I had a lot of fun creating myself. I am also working on PBS podcasts with my students. I will send a URL of those podcasts soon. Until then here is my Voki podcast:



http://www.voki.com/pickup.php?scid=3606271&height=267&width=200

Here is the link were I inserted it into my Resource Page:

http://lkerns.wikispaces.com/

Dennison-March

This has been an amazing month thus far. I have travelled, met with TIS cohorts, and dove in to technology in ways I never thought possible. I realize how much I have learned since be granted the honor of choice by ABBY. I know so much more and yet every time I read or re-read the contents and work on an assignment, I learn something new.
I realized awhile back that to look at these assignments like a doctoral student trying to put into practice this vast amount of knowledge and really do all my works to make them work for myself and my students, is what makes me embrace the assignments and get into them so that I can get out of them what is intended. Some time it feels like busy work and yet, in reality it is making me do things I would not otherwise do.. I might say I will but with time constraints in my hurried life...well you all probably know what I mean. I have many things in process...Action Plan, making my assessments work or evaluating their worth, flipcam project with LC student's, prezi presentations coming up this month from child development and fashion students, getting newer computers in my classroom(because mine will not allow the students to keep up with our newest projects, dinasours(spell check please), I still want to Skype a lesson and I want to make a podcast for my Blended Delivery class. I want this podcast to enhance the online learning and projects I have in store for the Life Connection's class. About 45 of theses students are seniors and I want them to complete their remaining lessons online...My fashion class is finishing a Swap N' Shop, My class room looks like a clothing store...kids drop off and pick up clothes, including a dress drop, Emily, a student is planning on gettibg the clothing into hands of young adults who need business clothes, schools that need dresses for dances and for the clothing to be given to those in need. Around 4o students actually stop in and take clothes, I do not know why that is all. We are alwo planning our MOCK WEDDING, this year we are combining 2 classes and each student will invite one person to attend. We are trying to have this in the auditorium on the stage...we will see...the issue here is that I want this to be student led and if you look at my LIFE Connection wiki or blog,,,,mmmhhhh. More to come! Lisa

March Blog--Ammons

Again, I have been so busy!! I am going to be able to offer completer classes 2012-2013 school year, so we have been busy looking into this. I have wanted to do this since I have been teaching at GHS, nine years, and each year, I was shot down for different reasons. Our new CTE Director is wonderful and very proactive!

I had a training with Shannon Carnes from RESA VII to help me understand how to design my website. I have never done andything like this before, so she was a wonderful help! She teaches thru hands-0n and that is how I learn best!

I was able to purchase for my classroom a Teacher Mobi and student Mobi thru GearUp! I also found a doc camera in the closet that NOBODY was using!! It was still in the box! ???????

In all, I am incorporating what I have learned into not only my classroom, but helping other teachers to welcome the DIGITAL CHANGE!

Lisa Kerns-January Blog

January was filled with snow days. If we didn't miss the whole day, we had a 2 hour delay. This month I assisted teachers with troubleshooting varioius computer issues. I arranged for our school to get new wireless access points which should help eliminate being dropped from our network. I also worked with the new French teacher with accessing virtual field trips in our Distance Learning lab. I ordered more Elmos and assisted my teachers with setup and did mini sessions on their software. In addition, I arranged for an Elmo workshop during team planning periods for each grade.
My students our utilizing new keyboarding software and our assisting me with finding new online typing games to add to our keyboarding resource page. I have integrated more online timer tools and music from Kagan into my classrooms. Students seem to enjoy having background music when they type or when completing classwork. I would recommend Kagan training for any school--it is wonderful!

Lisa D. Kerns-February Blog

What technology activities were you involved in during the month of February?

• I consider the FETC one of the best educational experiences I have ever had. I enjoyed almost every session I attended and left with a wealth of information to share with my school. Bonding with my fellow TIS participants was also a wonderful experience. I have made some true friends because of this program.
• This month I assisted my teachers with SnapGrades and WVEIS on the Web. I troubleshooted technology problems throughout my building and assisted our county technician with completing technology work orders.
• I have been working on creating my Technology Resource Page... it is a massive amount of work, but once I have completed it I know it will be a wonderful resource.
• I assisted my teachers with setting up their Elmos and helped them with the software.
• I signed my classes up for access email accounts.
• I troubleshooted whiteboard problems and showed teachers sites that would assist them with integrating the whiteboard into their curriculum.

What technology activities did you share with your students? Other CTE educators?

• I came back to the classroom excited to use everything I was exposed to, but of course I had to pull back and choose a few to strart. I have integrated Blogger into my classes to promote writing across the curriculum and my Life Basics program.
• I exposed my teachers to the information I collected from my Microsoft Office sessions--They were GREAT! I loved Tony Franklin.
• I plan to share more of experiences with my teachers on our ISE day March 23rd.

What additional technology would you like to share with the group? I would like to thank everyone for the wonderful time I had during the conference. Our dinners and meetings were both enlightening and enjoyable. I can't wait to go to FETC next year!

February Post

Have had a hard time getting on to allow me to post this blog. Chuck

Monthly Blog for February Charles (Chuck) Parker

February has been a very chaotic month! I have finished a professional development series called Instructional Practices Inventory (IPI). This is a course offered by Dr. Jerry Valentine, and is a faculty run system where a group of certified teachers do walkthroughs to determine the extent of student engagement and technology integration. To be certified I had to attend two and a half days of training, in field observations, as well as pass a test with at least 90 % efficiency.
I completed the Intel Master Teachers certification offered by Bodie Folford. This was one of the most engaging and inspiring courses I have taken in a long time. Other than the blizzard I had to drive through to get to Flatwoods, I had a very enriching experience in the weeklong course.
I also attended two Webinar courses, the first one was “The Future of Web 2.0 Technologies and Learning, The Smart Extended Web “presented by Steve Wheeler from the University of Plymouth, UK. The second Webinar was titled, “Encouraging Girls in Math and Science” and was presented by Dr.
The best technology integration that I personally initiated this past month was on our Instructional Support day last week. The math teachers where each assigned a related arts teacher to help with RTI and tutoring with underperforming students. The teachers were attempting to teach the geometrical; concepts of rotation and transformations on a chalk board and lecture. The students were bored and confused. I offered to take the students to my computer lab and have them work independently with math teachers and myself as the “facilitators”.
I had computers set up with the Think-Finity site that I learned about in this course, and the engagement and comments from the students was priceless. The site allowed the students to manipulate on the screen various objects that in turn tracked the movement and helped the students understand these confusing concepts. The final comment from a student summed up the entire day, “why don’t they use that site to help us understand all of the math that we do not get?”..Great question!
The last Webinar that I took in was “” Seeds to success on Classroom 2.0 LIVE, where they talked about the benefits of using Skype in classrooms, they were actual teachers who had their students take turns reading books to each other, making plays and acting out for each other as well as: the OREO their really exciting online project. Two turns to stack as many Oreos as possible in a specified amount of time then determine class averages and then compare to classes in other regions states and countries. They showed stacking via Skype video. They ate them at the end with a licking contest, to time fastest licker. They used a Promethean Board.
Other uses for Skype: compare community weather and culture, temperature, events etc. Personal introductions and interactions. Headset with mike is all you really need. Web tour,
Rehearsing for musical programs, or other performances to help ease fear uncertainty, and shyness.
Graphing favorite fast-food restaurant then create bar and circle graphs etc. no votes in geographical variations, none of them in the local markets and why. Connections. Use with any polling preference and then compare the results live from various geographical/political views.

January February Blog

I am going to take a shortcut and combine January with February. Of course, the highlight of these two months was the FETC experience. It was great to see all my fellow TIS classmates and just have time to talk with them and share our technology experiences. Not only have I learned a great deal from the TIS program, but I have developed professional relationships that will last a long time.

Visiting all the vendor booths and attending as many Microsoft sessions as I possibly could were my two favorite FETC experiences. I collected an enormous amount of information from the vendors which I readily shared with my two business ed colleagues. What can I say about the Microsoft sessions? Tony Franklin was fantastic! I've been "in the cloud" ever since. I was amazed at the amount of information I learned from him.

In my Business Computer Apps. class, I finished Excel and am currently teaching an Access unit. I find Access the most difficult software to present because the students have a hard time relating to it. I've decided to finish the Access unit by asking each of my students to come up with an idea for a database they can create.

I decided to complete my digital project using my Intro to Bus class. We just completed a unit on government in our economy so I decided to have them take pictures and videos of local services provided through taxation.

This semester I have been teaching an Adult Ed class in Microsoft Office 2010. I introduced them to "The Cloud." Every week they come to class, they share all their cloud computing experiences.

I have assisted other teachers at school in activities ranging from solving minor hardware issues to scanning PDF files. I recently joined forces with a social studies teacher to assist her and her class with PowerPoint presentations.

I have a new toy! Each department in my school was given one iPad. The iPad was assigned to me; it will be my responsibility to learn how to use it and teach the other members in my department. Those of us who have iPads are going to be participating in round table meetings on a regular basis to share ideas on how to use them in our classrooms. One teacher purchased an Ipevo document camera so she could project the iPad screen on the board to share it with her class.

Finally, it looks like I will be teaching Digital Imaging next year. If any of you are teaching that class, I could use some recommendations for textbooks and software.

February Tis Blog--Sharon Cole

I have been involved included sharing links and techy activities with my administrators and colleagues from FETC.....I have already been asked to do inservices at the beginning of next school year.....I am excited about that!!!! I was also busy working with KeyTrains preparing my completers for the WorkKeys test! Harrison County is in the process of selecting new books for the Business Ed classes.....wow that was stressful and now we are waiting for board approval.....although I use the books as a resource I plan on creating websites for my classes next school year and going mainly student oriented classes!!! Keeping my .fingers crossed on that one! I will be attending a training at RESA VII for our upcoming Global 21 Performance Assessment. Just today I joined into the world of Twitter.....still playing around on that.....will keep you posted....you can find me at coleskay. I have been actively working on my TIS online course and other activities, guess I am a proscrinator but I work much better under pressure!!! I am just amazed at how much I have learned so far through our TIS cohort and as I continue to work through the program it amazes me at how much is out there to be learned!!!! Hoping everyone well as we begin the downward slope of the school year and our TIS cohort.....is has been an amazing year! Janie I am right there with ya on going back to Orlando next year....thinking I will have enough money left to pretty much cover my costs!!!!! Till next month have fun with your technology!

Janie Spahr - February Post

Well of course there is FETC to talk about. It was great, and I think that some of us instead of paying ourselves the stipend from the grant may use the money to attend FETC again! Think about it. I loved the vendors, but I think that most of the WV Technology conference hands on sessions are better!

One of our main focuses in February was preparing kids for the online WorkKeys by using online KeyTrain. This is one thing that I wish would have been part of the TIS training because it is something all CTE teachers must do - online!

I served as the proctor for the AutoTech students who took the Ford AAA Motor Skills exam. It is also an online test. The top two scorers will represent PHS at the State Ford AAA Motor Skills contest. There is alot of pre-test preparation online for KeyTrain, WorkKeys, and the AAA test. It takes a lot of time to do this, and that is why we need to have a full time TIS - CTE. But instead we have digital age specialists who aren't certified! Do any of you have this problem?

On February 8, I went to the NASA Building at Fairmont to NetTutor training. It is sponsored by GearUp. It is online tutoring in Math, English, and Science. It works like a chat room. We are currently in the process of getting our students their passwords and training parents and students how to use the program. Since I am a GearUp tutoring teacher, I will have students using it in my Open Lab after school during tutoring hour from 3:30 - 6:00 p.m.

Our new tech guy is in the process of installing CS5 in my Computer Lab. I will then begin teaching DreamWeaver in my Web Page Publishing class. This will be alot of work for me because I have only used CS4. I will have to learn all the updates for CS5 - kind of like going from Word 03 to Word 07!!! I will then use this in my Desktop Publishing class next year, too.

I have been helping teachers who are taking other WV Learns classes do their online classwork. They have to upload through WebTop. For some who are unfamiliar with this process, it can be tricky. I was glad to help them because it only helps me learn more about what I may be doing in the future.

I spend three days in Charleston with a HSTW team evaluating Scott High School and Ripley High School. I got several new technology ideas from the Business teachers at these schools. We did the usual --shared websites, textbook information, etc. I also shared some of my thoughts on how to keep and encourage students to participate in their Business programs because they are endangered. I can't believe they would want to get rid of their Business program. I was shocked beyond belief to see that Ripley still has a typewriter lab!!!

My Web Page class has been doing tutorials on w3schools.com. It is an excellent tutorial site for HTML, CSS, Flash, etc. I have also learned alot from this site. It is about like learning DOS (do any of you remember?).

I've been playing around in my cloud. Has anyone else? My account is jespahr@hotmail.com. If anyone wants to share in your community cloud, let me know. I've been telling some of our teachers about it, too. I think they are interested in learning about it. It's just finding the time to do it with everything else that we have to do.

February by Gwen Miller

I finally got all the programs loaded on the lap top cart and deep freeze on the computers.  I started using the computers in class during February.  I ended up telling the computer guy that I was going to use the computers whether or not they had deep freeze on them.  Suddenly deep freeze appeared.  I went to the Tech Centers that Work Workshop in Cedar Lakes.  We got caught in the snow and had to spend the night in Charleston at the Holiday Inn Express.  There were only 3 rooms left. I had a lot of trouble getting my students on my blog.  After reading many help pages, I finally got everyone on by having them log into Blogger.com first then opening their gmail and accepting my invitation.  It is still a learning experience for me. I also started using PhotoStory3 with my first block.  Figuring out how to grade these are my biggest challenge.  I spent time this month putting messages on the outdoor electronic sign and helping people with Edline.  I gave every teacher written instruction on how to use List Wizard, but still had to help several teachers.  You actually have to open the grade book to print a list from your grade book.  One teacher was upset because she could not get her absences in alphabetical order on the spreadsheet.  She typed them in first name last name but expected the sheet to alphabetize them by last name.  I managed to get Max's text larger on this Intelliboard. 

The Road to Recovery

As I have previously posted that I had back surgery on Ground Hog day and my February has been spent in the recline position. I was told by the doc that he did not want me messing up his work by being active and not following the post-op instructions. Those instructions were that any prolonged time sitting would damage the area that was operated on.
So I have tried to follow the advice given by the medical personnel and most of my work has been from the recline position and after 26 days I am stir crazy.
I have continued to work on our department's course CTED 308 using the Thinkfinity website as the course platform. Assisted by Brenda Tuckwiller, we have 39 people in the class. We have posted powerpoints and instructional documents with assignment listings. We also have set up the discussion tool as a reflective piece for the teachers to respond to the prompts developed.
Of the students enrolled in the course, they range from the computer or digital experts to those that need help along the way.
The course was previously a face-to-face seminar class so we have been challenged to meet the needs of students and providing information and instruction.