Establishing a library of video and educreation lessons will give our students a resource from which they can access for assistance on homework or for study purposes.  So far, Zak has a library of his own that his students are using regularly in his classes, Holst is a good collection of student made videos that are allowing for multi-lingual learning opportunities, I am currently making my first video on logarithms which I will use as a 'jumping-off' point to begin amassing my own resources.  We know that student differentiation is more plausible and that we are moving toward a good end, we are discussing how we will measure our success vs more traditional methods of delivering.

PLC Showcase

At the end of our semester of work, all PLCs will be showcasing their work at the Wyandotte High School PLC Showcase on Wednesday, December 12th in the Social Hall.  The showcase will be a public demonstration of our learning, collaboration, and results.  Each PLC will showcase work that reflects how your learning and collaboration has impacted student learning.  Each PLC is encouraged to be creative and innovative in their demonstration (student examples would be highly encouraged); however, please be sure the following are addressed through your presentation -
    PLC Focus

Collaborative Actions   

Summary of PLC Learning

Impact on Student Learning

Connections to Future Teaching and Learning

In addition, all staff will have an opportunity to visit each demonstration during the Showcase.  Many outside guests will also be in attendance.  

If your PLC requires any kind of additional resources, please submit any requests for those materials via the comment section to this blog entry by NOVEMBER 9th. You will receive these materials by or before your November 28th meeting, so you will have AT LEAST two weeks to work on organizing your demonstration.

10/24

Using edmodo as a storage location or device.   In our continuing quest to find locations to store datafiles such as videos, edmodo may give us a viable option, up to 100mb of data per file; is it unlimited items? is 100 mb enough to store a ten minute video? We will continue to research & find out more as we experiment and open new accounts.
we continue to discover possible locations for placing videos and video lectures, we find new and exciting ways to keep our resources and 'cloud' or store and locate them for both quick retrieval and for future availability.
The group continues to move forward toward our goal of implementing technology effectively, but I feel I am further distanced from our directive than ever. While I am helping with our goals, I am finding my own use of technology and videos to be lessening and shrinking with each week. While using technology in my classroom for practice and for student enrichment, my inclusion in our plc process has become more of an aid to the more experienced teachers. Zak's resources and video directory and library has become a great resource that all teachers can use, but the size of his files is limiting his ability to save all files, so he continues to search for a u-drive or an open sharing source that can hold all of his amazing resources.  For next week, I am going to experiment with creating a video myself, using either educreation, or showme, on my ipad. I think this will help with connecting to our groups' directive and help give me some ideas for further development of in classroom technological use lessons.

Have a great day!

Further discussion today involved storage sites or locations where videos can be uploaded to or downloaded from with littlest time or difficulty.  I learned how to record on Quicktime and received a Ti-83 emulator with which I plan on making a video that shows matrix multiplication or solving systems using technology and matrices.  Also discussed composition of function lesson that Holst used to get students to understand that; which I plan on using in my next class session.  Overall, a good use of our time, although our plan for the December 12 showcase is only loosely defined and we will plan more at a later date.

We have discussed our PLC project results to be presented in December.  Each member is researching different aspects of creating videos for tutorial purposes or notes or teaching.  We are also searching for the best way to store masses of information.  The dialogue amongst colleagues is stimulating, and we have discovered and shared many ideas.

10/3

After grading some papers last Wednesday, I arrived late to the slc, where in lieu of discussing our planned topic (I think the rest of the group was wrapping up their discussions, I was able to discuss some of my students' strengths and shortcomings with holst and zak who had a few of them in previous classes.  In addition to this, we discussed a recent assessment I gave and the results together, helping me to decide if the method could be considered a success (which  think it was!!).  This week we will not meet with the slc, but I hope to continue picking the brains of my compatriots and colleagues at each opportunity.  In the coming weeks I hope to experiment more with the project I had planned although I am going to alter it to using technology effectively in the classroom while teaching the use of calculators in every possible lesson to bring learners the skills necessary for successful taking of the ACT (or SAT or other standardized tests).

Anyhoo, Happy teaching! See you around the blog, my faithful followers>>

10/3

Today we discussed a few different assessment techniques.  Mr. K and Mr. Zak discussed ICA test results from a large test Mr. K had designed.  I had also given a quarter test, and we discussed the results.  The technology piece we were looking at from last week (teachertube), Mr. Z tried and did not really care for at this point.  He is going to look into it further.  We (Holst's classes) are ready for round 2 of video making.