I'm happy to report that I'm much more comfortable speaking in front of the staff now; it's something that I've had to do at pretty much every faculty meeting and I've moved beyond the "scared out of my mind" phase into the "I might look like an idiot but I don't care" phase.
I think it's twofold:
1. I'm much more comfortable with what I'm talking about. I've moved beyond the "math teacher" role and am now thinking tech.
2. I'm much more comfortable with the people that I'm speaking to. They're my friends now.
Yesterday I showed the staff a program that the district bought that creates a virtual desktop for students (or staff) to log into. It's nice for those kids who have iPads or other tablets that can't access all of the programs that teachers want them to. It went fine; I didn't know that anyone would be interested but wanted to make sure they'd seen it.
The cool thing is that today I heard back from two teachers about it; one was super pumped because it was desperately needed in her English classes and she's been showing the kids all day, and another was just asking for more information about it. I'm just happy that people were listening and I gave them useful information!
I also talked yesterday with a teacher whose classes I taught last week for a couple of days. She told me that they all enjoyed having me there (heck, we had candy... they better've liked it!) and she was just happy not to have lost a couple of class days because she had to be out.
I've been working the past few days getting ready for some classes tomorrow that I'm going to work with on the reliability of websites; I'm going to give them each a website with questionable (!) information, have them answer a question (so they actually have to read the website), then talk about what they can do to check reliability. I found a nice table from ReadWriteThink that we'll use to discuss what makes a website dependable. Then I am going to talk about some of the databases that we have available at school for the kids to do research on - they're through INFOhio.
Anyway, should be a fun day. I like getting out into classes but it's also nice to have the time during the day to get stuff together for those classes (and my kids and hubby like that aspect of my job, too!).
I think it's twofold:
1. I'm much more comfortable with what I'm talking about. I've moved beyond the "math teacher" role and am now thinking tech.
2. I'm much more comfortable with the people that I'm speaking to. They're my friends now.
Yesterday I showed the staff a program that the district bought that creates a virtual desktop for students (or staff) to log into. It's nice for those kids who have iPads or other tablets that can't access all of the programs that teachers want them to. It went fine; I didn't know that anyone would be interested but wanted to make sure they'd seen it.
The cool thing is that today I heard back from two teachers about it; one was super pumped because it was desperately needed in her English classes and she's been showing the kids all day, and another was just asking for more information about it. I'm just happy that people were listening and I gave them useful information!
I also talked yesterday with a teacher whose classes I taught last week for a couple of days. She told me that they all enjoyed having me there (heck, we had candy... they better've liked it!) and she was just happy not to have lost a couple of class days because she had to be out.
I've been working the past few days getting ready for some classes tomorrow that I'm going to work with on the reliability of websites; I'm going to give them each a website with questionable (!) information, have them answer a question (so they actually have to read the website), then talk about what they can do to check reliability. I found a nice table from ReadWriteThink that we'll use to discuss what makes a website dependable. Then I am going to talk about some of the databases that we have available at school for the kids to do research on - they're through INFOhio.
Anyway, should be a fun day. I like getting out into classes but it's also nice to have the time during the day to get stuff together for those classes (and my kids and hubby like that aspect of my job, too!).
I think you did your lesson today, but if you haven't seen this website, you need to! http://zapatopi.net/treeoctopus/ Our former media specialist used it all the time when he taught reliability of websites.
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