Tennessee DEN

Yep, it is me again. I decided to slip away from the Discovery booth long enough to sit in on a session about Web 2.0. The presenters are Micki Daniel and Betsy Jones, both from the Knox County System.

For me, I’m learning how to use Safari on a Mac, so just picture the geeky guy from the commercials who only knows PCs and that’s me.

The website we jumped to first was here. Click on the Research link at the top of the page to find a LOT of alternative ways to search apart from Google. One of the most informative for me was Vivisimo. Vivisimo’s search results are “clustered” around sub-topics which makes it very helpful to drill down into results.

Next, the conversation jumped to wikis, blogs, and podcasts. We discussed wikipedia as a classroom research tool as well as personal and professional blogs and podcasts. They discussed free podcasts from university instructors and the need to meet students where they are. Classroom instruction is now available to download from iTunes. (While there was a lengthy discussion about the podcasts available for teachers from other sources, the need for teachers to podcast for themselves was not addressed). One specific recommendation was the Princeton Review Vocabulary Minute podcast.

Next, we turned our attention to resources that help us harness the power of Web 2.0. First up: Google Tools. Lots of questions about “why have a gmail account” and “Okay, I’m in Google Docs, now what.” This is a fantastic session for those just learning Web 2.0. The Knox County Tech department even has some in-service hours available on the web.

After Google Docs, we headed over to Go2Web20. This is one of my favorite sites ever! Our presenters demonstrated how to browse through Go2Web20 both by searches and the tag cloud.

All in all, this was a very informative session for those brand new to Web 2.0. From my history in other professional development settings, this is actually the largest group of teachers still out there.

I am truly glad I sat in on this session. I learned that Knox County has some terrific resources easily available for teachers, and the county has great teachers in the tech department ready and willing to help. They truly love what they do!Next year, Knox County will launch School Fusion allowing teachers to create their own webpages through the school tech services. Awesome! Session over. Back to the booth!

The DEN team is in Knoxville today at the ProjectGrad Teacher Retreat.  Teams of teachers from all the ProjectGrad schools in Knox County were invited to attend this all-day event to recognize and re-energize their “teacher batteries.”The morning started off with a great, full breakfast and coffee.  Then, each team presented their “team cheer” for the rest of the attendees.  It was great fun (and gave me an idea to offer to DEN retreats as well as our own academic and related arts teams at my school!).The opening speaker was Akil Marshall.  (Mr. Marshall is pictured with Karla Halcomb, our Events Coordinator).  The Akil Marshall Organization was established to communicate, motivate, and uplift those students who are labeled as disruptive, at risk, or unreachable.  Given his style and message, I would say that his organization does an outstanding job!His message centered on the belief that all children have “genius” inside them.  The influences from outside the classroom constantly bombard them with messages of failure and nothingness.  It is the job, the  mission, of educators to be heard above those messages as we tell children of their inner genius and show them how to let it out.During the keynote, I ustreamed the event and wound up in the chat room with someone I suspect was from Scandinavia.   The audio was horrible (a mistake I corrected in the last 5 minutes), so I wound up chatting Mr. Marshall’s main points and some of the PowerPoint slides he was using.  It was a great time of interaction as we talked about Mr. Marshall’s message and some of his metaphors:

Specifically, we talked about the metaphor of the massage therapist.  Our students are suffering from internal pain, but they have the power of healing inside themselves.  When our physical bodies are in pain through over exertion, a massage therapist can manipulate the muscles and tendons inside our bodies to bring relief.  The power to heal is in the muscles themselves, but the therapist knows how to manipulate them to heal.Likewise, students bring pain to the classroom (from home, peers, etc).  The teacher’s job is to manipulate the genius inside the student so the student can heal himself or herself.

Lars and I both thought that was a powerful metaphor, but also realized it would take a great deal of work to be that educator.What do you think?