Techno Teachers

I thought I'd follow up on my comments about the technology inservice and lessons I did with the teaching staff at my school. The format was that I did three one hour sessions. Initially, I worried about not being able to fill the time. Pshaw! I ran out of time each at each session.
I have learned so many new things but I wanted to limit what I imparted this first time so as not to overwhelm.
I began by explaining del.icio.us and shared my personal experiences with it. As I mentioned earlier, the teachers received laptops that day and several of them mentioned that they had not been looking forward to redoing their bookmarks. When they learned that del.icio.us could keep track of them they were thrilled. One teacher did express concern about anyone in cyberspace able to see what you tag. The "do not share" feature was very welcomed.
All of our teachers are required to maintain a website and our district uses TeacherWeb. We've been using this for about three years and I spent some time going over some tips on working on their pages. http://teacherweb.com/CA/Laurel/SchoolHomePage/SDHP1.stm
The last part I tried to fit in was tips on their Ed1Stop pages. Our county portal had just discontinued linking to BrainPop for a variety of reasons and some time was spent on discussing alternatives they could use. We use United Streaming Video and Groliers Online and I talked about those features as well.
In upcoming staff meetings we will spend a little bit of time on mini lessons. First up is teaching how to use the calendar option and reminder feature in Microsoft Outlook. Also, in the near future I will be sharing image generating with the fourth and fifth grade teachers and brainstorm ideas on how they can use them in the classroom.