Gerard Campione EA1286
July 17, 2012 Web Conference Reflections:
The discussion that had the most impact for me during this call was the clarification of the Week 1 expectations in light of the Epic “confusion.” I had already accessed the site and had, in fact, completed the readings which turned out to be unnecessary (however they were actually very good and I have already shared some of them with colleagues).
I was a bit intimidated by the discussion of the LiveBinder that we would be accessing in the Week 2 assignments. I consider myself to be somewhat tech savvy, but some of the technologies that we have been introduced to through the Lamar program, such as Epic and TK 20, have left me rather confused in many ways. However, it seems as though the LiveBinder is more of a web resource, so I don’t have too many concerns.
Thanks to Dr. Abernathy’s advice that the things we will be creating can become artifacts to share on an interview, I better understand the value of producing the highest quality work we can produce. I like the fact that the website we will be creating can be a good example of how we might share information with our teachers as future administrators.
July 28, 2012 Web Conference Reflections:
Of course, the clarification of the expectations for the Week 2 assignments were much appreciated, although I was already pretty comfortable with the expectations as I found the weekly update memo to be rather thorough. I was pretty excited about creating a “showcase of collaborative classroom tools” because I think the value of including others in the planning and delivery of compelling lessons is crucial. One of the teachers in my school had created a “buddy class” system with a class in California and they met every two weeks via a video-chat to read aloud. What was amazing to me wasn’t so much that they were doing this 3,000 miles apart but rather that this was kindergartners who were doing it! How am I going to top that when I get them as fifth graders?
This week, I also found the chat log to be helpful, as there was a greater clarification of just what Web 2.0 meant. One of our classmates summarized the differences as this: Web 1.0 was basically “read only” while web 2.0 becomes participatory. I hadn’t heard that before, but that makes perfect sense. What will web 3.0 be?
Finally, since we were working collaboratively on the tool selection and the creation of the showcase, it became apparent to me that with each of our teammates selecting two tools, we would automatically be tripling our efforts (there are three of us on our team) which seemed like a much better way to get things done more efficiently.
July 30, 2012 Web Conference Reflections:
One of the things that I took away from this week’s conference was more information on the various ways that groups can meet on the internet. Obviously with my team being made up of 1 person from New Jersey and two from Texas, we were going to need some more technologically advanced way to meet. I had been vaguely familiar with Skype, having been introduced to it through my son when he left for college, but I was not familiar with the fact that you could have a conversation with more than one person. My colleagues on tonight’s conference were speaking about other alternatives such as Oovoo and Google chat, as well. I need to find out more about how to use these tools.
Another concept that was mentioned tonight was something called Google Hangouts. I’m not really sure what this is all about, but I just found out that our school district was migrating our e-mail system to G-Mail, which lead me to believe that the tools that we have been discussing all along in this class might now be accessible to us. One more item to put on my to-do list before school starts.
Finally, there was some clarification about course embedded hours and TK20. To be perfectly honest, I am mostly confused about what to put into TK20 and I keep trying to get small tidbits of information in each class, so hopefully it will all come together before I reach the last class. Many of my classmates were also concerned about the transition from Epic to Blackboard, but to be honest I have copies of everything I’ve ever produced for my Lamar classes backed up on my computer (and an external drive just in case) so I really don’t have any worries about this transition.