It’s Elementary

This week our guests were Kathy Cassidy from Moose Jaw SK , a grade 1 teacher, Leah Welch from Hamden Maine, a grade 1 teacher and formerly a kindergarten teacher, and Amanda Marrinan from Brisbane Australia who teaches 6 and 7 year olds. These teachers do amazing things with their students – blogging, video, moodle, google docs, and more. Kathy, Leah and Amanda sharedtheir practice and talked about the details in how they make things work. The time flew as we all listened to the stories of their work with young children.

Download audio and read the chatroom log.

Our next show will be Monday November 10th at 9:00pm EST. We will be talking about the Connectivism Course currently ongoing through the University of Manitoba. Join us then at EdTechTalk.

We were joined this week by Stephen Lewis, principal of Oak Ridge Elementary. Stephen shared his experiences as principal of a Title One school and how technology is present in the school. Alice Mercer is the tech integrator at the school. Stephen and Alice discussed the issues, joys and challenges of their work. We continued to stream for part of our post show.

Next show – October 6, 2008 where we will talk about the K12Online Conference with the conference conveners.

Download audio here.

Our guest, Jennifer Dorman, gave lots of great information about using RSS in education.

1. We defined RSS feeds (sorta like a magazine subscription, but online);
2. We discussed why you would want to use it as a teacher, and in your classroom;
3. We shared examples of how we use it (sometimes for ourselves and our professional development, sometimes to automate information given to and from students); and
4. We talked about opportunities and challenges.

You can find our planning wiki here.

Some featured bookmarks from the show are here:

• From Jennifer Dorman:
  RSS for Educators wiki page
  RSS Presentation file
• RSS in Plain English (from Lee LeFever at CommonCraft, examples it really simply)

A more extensive list of bookmark is here on Diigo.

One issue that came up was the lack of RSS on content pages geared towards students. We’ve used feeds from Highlights, and Discovery Science. If you have other elementary-age content that has an RSS feed, please share it on in our Diigo group, or here as a comment. Thanks!

Download mp3