ICT lead teacher day

Our ICT Lead Leacher day today was at EPS.  We introduced two new members to the EPS Lead Teacher team, Dillie and Debbie.  They are both very keen and I am looking forward to working with them next year.

We started by discussing our proposed 2013 ICT mini expo.  We have come up with a long list of workshop ideas but this is not an exhaustive list and can be added to so if you are reading this and have an idea by all means leave a suggestion!

Possible workshop titles:

• iPads/iPods - big picture, set up, management
• blogging
• QR codes
• Go Animate
• Animoto
• iMovie/Movie Maker - Creating movies
• Puppet Pals
• Creating eBooks
• Google Apps for Education (incl students)
• Chrome + Extensions
• Search engines for students
• Digital Citizenship for teachers and Digital Citizenship for students (teacherscouncil.org.nz, netsafe.org.nz)
• Minecraft?
• Maths ideas eg ALiM (NZ Maths), nrich.maths.org
• LEARNZ
• writers workshop
• Collaboration eg Skype, FaceTime
• Year Book/School Magazine
• PLN eg Twitter, EduCamp,
• Literacy ideas eg study ladder,
• Music eg Garageband
• Using ICT with Juniors
• Teacher Dashboard

Our mini sMACdown was useful as usual and I discovered a couple of great websites and apps that I didn't know about:

http://thinkerstoolbox.wikispaces.com/Toolbox - Thinkers Tool box. I am looking forward to exploring this site for some interesting resources and ideas.

http://www.20thingsilearned.com/en-US - e-book about technical terms used in the ICT world

My favourtie part of the Lead Teacher Day (apart from lunch of course!) is the hands-on session. Belinda shared a cool spin on a literacy unit she used to teach. You look at pictures from a sophisticated picture book, words are covered, discuss what is happening in the pictures, possible storylines etc. The students create their own stories based on the pictures - could be published in Book Creator. The real story is then read at the end of the unit.  

We also looked at another couple of iPad apps - Storybots and Creative Book Builder. CBB was actually quite tricky to use and not as user friendly as Book Creator. I enjoyed using it though and created a fun little story - 25 days until Christmas.

Only 25 days to Christmas now...10 days of school. The countdown is on!