Post Conference Day High

So I presented two pair of sessions at our recent professional development day: one on the reasons for maintaining a blog, and one on the reasons for using Google Earth and Google SketchUp in the classroom (I did some how-to demos also, but I believed the bigger hurdle was convincing them of the motivational opportunities they were missing by not exploiting these tools.).

Always a an unsettling feeling to present as a professional to one’s first-name-basis peers.

I covered a lot of extra ground; sprawling out to the advantages of accepting student work electronically through our shared drive, annotating it with comment notes, using Google Building Maker and Google Docs, and always: sharing and posting this student work to acknowledge student achievement.

So in the hours and days after my presentation, one colleague stops me to say a blog may be the perfect tool for the portfolio he needs to maintain for a graduate course, two of my colleagues have blogs up the following day(!), an elementary teacher asks to book our lab on “Fun Friday” so that her students can try out SketchUp, I emailed a Google Earth file of a topographic map draped over our town to a MS teacher as her students are working with the same maps at their desks, and another colleague stops me in the hall to tell me how important it is for our students to see the type of content that my blog contains...and that he is considering starting one to support his coaching efforts.