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.