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.

In It's Elementary #24 we talked with Dean Shareski and Wesley Fryer, two of the conveners for the k12Online2008 Conference. Dean is a Digital Learning Consultant with a school in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, Canada. Westley Fryer is the Director of the Olklahoma Heritage Association. The K12Online2008 conference is totally online, including both synchronous and asynchronous components. This year's pre-conference keynote will be given by Heppell Next week. (week of October 13th) The conferece contains four strands 1. Getting Started 2. Prove it. 3. Kicking it Up A Notch 4. Leading the Change Within each strand, there are many presentations that fit that theme. Several of the presenters prepared teasers, or short advertisements. of their presenations. These are available at http://k12onlineconference.org/?cat=27 More information can be found at http://k12onlineconference.org Join us for our next show on October 27th where we will discuss technology in the Early Childhood Classroom. To read Chat see attachment

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

Come have a listen as we discuss Gaming in education with our guest, Tom Turner, we talked about why and how you can use online and computer games in education. The discussion points were:

1. Defining different types of computer games
2. Educational opportunities and learning objectives in these games
3. Barriers to using them in the classroom
4. Games that will likely never be in a classroom (first-person shooter games, e.g. Halo, GTA)

Our next show will be on September 8th, 2008 at our usual time 4pm Pacific / 7pm Eastern at Edtechtalk

This show featured Clif Mims, a professor at Memphis State University, and Bethany Smith, an Instructional Technologist at North Carolina State University. Both of them work with pre-service teachers to help them learn about how to effectively use technology in the classroom.

We started off with our backgrounds, and what we were required to do vis-a-vis technology in our pre-service. Then we looked at these essential questions:

• Are pre-service teachers being well prepared for entering k12 classrooms today.?
• Are pre-service teachers bored in college lectures? Does this affect entry into the field?
• What are your recommendations for best preparing pre-service teachers?

Bethany felt that teachers needed to have a PLN through Ning, or another service, to go to. Clif thought they needed to see examples of teacher who are using technology successfully. Alice felt that with the advent of more scripted/prescribed curriculum, teachers needed to see what project-based learning looked like. It was a great discussion, and the text chat log below includes comments from teachers who are taking a class on education technology.