Hi everyone and welcome to my blog! I hope to use this blog as a way to more regularly communicate with the parents and guardians who let me teach their kids. Through this blog I hope to inform you about what is taking place in our classes as well as update you on some of the issues in technology and some thoughts that I have about technology. Now I will give my posts a quick proofread before I post but this blog is not meant to be a polished piece of writing rather a quick way to communicate.I just recently attended the ECOO (Educational Computing Organization of Ontario) conference. Now you might be thinking that this is totally a geek conference and I would have to somewhat agree. Most people attending love their technology and all the cool gadgets, programs and social networking. However, this conference brings together a province wide community of educators These people (teachers, IT people, administration, board directors etc) wish to get the most out of technology in their classrooms and more importantly desire to help their students and/or schools and districts to have the best learning experience possible. Many people are there to both discover and share with others.
Collaboration is a new buzz word and there seems to be many ways to collaborate with technology- Google Docs, Facebook, email, and many others but Twitter seems to be the big one right now, at least for this group. The conference attendees were tweeting up a storm! I was impressed with how many people knew or at least knew of each other via Twitter - it was quite a community of learners and the face to face meetings were fun to be around. Now I have had a Twitter account for over a year but I have never really used it that much. This past week I began to see some of the benefits in belonging to this Professional Learning Network. I have dusted off the old Twitter account and I have challenged myself to not only follow some of the names and people that I heard and met but to also contribute to this community on a somewhat regular basis. I am challenging myself to stay at this for 1 and half months and then to evaluate it. Please feel free to follow the tweets @hblylevenMy main concern is one of time and where this time will come from. I hope to use this blog to help work through that.
BTT 1O - Grade 9 computers
Having just returned from the confernece meant that supply teachers were in and keeping the classes working. A thanks to Ms. Hone and Mr. P. for covering my classes. The grade 9 classes have been working on their Internet Issues (safety, security, time useage) bulletin boards. We will be wrapping these bulletin boards up on Wednesday just in time for the long weekend. I will try to post full assignment details to our class website soon.
ICS 3U - Grade 11 computer programming
Programming is a bit of a strange thing. I compare it to learning a new language, which is in fact what we are doing only this is a programming language. Some people get right it way and for others it takes a bit or a lot of work. We talked about this gap today in class. We brainstormed ideas to help us all fully understand the problems and assignments that we have. I you honestly want to know how you are doing then you should ask a teenager - they'll tell you! I will also be giving the students a quick survey (cheap plug for Google Forms) to hopefully get some feedback about their own involvement and their investment in the course so far. If you have never seen what computer code looks like then be sure to ask to see some it really is quite fun!
Next week I hope to let you know other reasons to why I am blogging and give you an update on the OCSTA teachers' convention.
