Thank goodness for Friday!

I am sure glad that today is Friday. It has been a very busy week. I was catching up on my reading, and came across a great article in "The Journal" magazine. It was a lesson plan that was a virtual field trip by Traci Blazosky from Pennsylvania. This article really flipped a switch in my brain. I wanted to conduct staff development for my teachers next year on several web 2.0 tools (Glogster, Google Earth, etc.), but was just going to teach them separately. Then I see this article and what Traci did, and I said to myself, I really think the teachers would like creating something like this. So, I am going to take the ideas listed in the article "A Virtual Ticket to Ride" by Michael Bowker and create a lesson plan for the teachers. Then, I am going to break the staff development up into pieces, one day train on Glogster, the next Google Earth, Discovery Education streaming, etc. By the time we are finished (I see this as a several month staff development process), they will have created their own lesson plan utilizing these web 2.0 tools. Thank you Traci for the idea and thank you Michael Bowker for writing the article.

Just as a side note, some really great resources that I have shared recently with teachers came from my twitter and pln group. The first one is a livebinder on examples of student work: http://livebinders.com/play/play_or_edit/13560, from East Middle School in Colorado. There are such great ideas in this livebinder for teachers and students to create. I really like the blog idea of sharing student writing samples. Maybe this will help our students want to write and write better.

The second one is also a livebinder (love those livebinders!), http://livebinders.com/play/play_or_edit/3961 on favorite edtech tools. A lot of web 2.0 tools and websites listed in one place. For a link to some of my livebinders, go to my wiki: http://wems-technology.wikispaces.com/ and click on the pages in the navigation pane to view my binders.