Looking for a nice succinct way to explain RSS to your staff in 4 minutes or less?

Looking for a way to visually convince your colleagues that  RSS may be a tool that could open new digital doors for them?

Check out Common Craft’s video entitled “RSS in Plain English” 

Add it to your PD library today!

I can think of so many subjects areas that a movie like this would fit into.

Helvetica is a feature-length independent film about typography, graphic design and global visual culture. It looks at the proliferation of one typeface (which is celebrating its 50th birthday this year) as part of a larger conversation about the way type affects our live.

As “visual literacy” creeps into the curriculum and wakes up to Marshall McLuhan idea of the “medium being the message” its nice to know that movie like this are being produced. Think of the conversations.

The 2007 IASAS Track and Field season is officially over and what ride it was. I just got back from Singapore where Singapore American School hosted all three spring IASAS sports on their massive campus. It also happened to be the 25th anniversary of IASAS so there was much fanfare over the three days of competition. My boys relay teams dominated the meet closing out the final day with a huge win in the 4 x 400m. The picture says it all.

With the season over I can get back to writing down and sharing the loads of ideas I have and continue to work through.

This post is for all of the coaches out there.

This season I decided to use a blog as one means of communicating with my team. The Panther Track Team Blog was used to post workouts, team resources and other general announcements. Using a free resource like blogger made it easy to create a forum where students could feedback about workouts and also see what was coming up on the competitive calendar. The other major benefit to using a blog as a coaching tool is that all of my workouts are posted in chronological order so that next season I can easily review what I was doing at that same time the year before and improve on it. There is not much difference between this and a website but it’s cost and easy of use make it a great choice for coaches who want to have a communication portal for their teams and don’t have much technical background.

Get you coaches using one today!

Over here at ISB we are always thinking about innovative ways to broaden, strengthen and improve the technology awareness and skill sets of our teachers. It is a dilemma all schools are facing and if you are reading this, you are well aware of it as well.

Jeff over at the thinking stick recently posted about Individual Educational Technology Plans for teachers and students and some of the interesting things Doug Johnson had to say at this years EARCOS conference. Some cool thinking going on here. Since we know that teachers like students are all on different learning continuum’s when it comes to technology would something like a IETP be helpful in ensuring accountability and skill growth for teachers while still respecting the fact that acquiring these new skills takes time and effort? How hard would it be to manage?

In steps the Personal Learning Environment or what I like to call your PD TREE.

If you had to map the sources of your own professional development, what would the root system that feeds your learning look like?
Where do you look to gain new knowledge and information that helps you become a more informed citizen?

What mediums does this information come in and how much control do you have over it?

Who, what and where are your main sources for current information that help you develop and improve as a teacher?

Where and how do you enhance your own skills?
Are these not good questions to ask all teachers to reflect on?

Ray Sim’s over at Sims Learning Connections recently shared his own Personal Learning Environment and I found it really impressive. More importantly it is an example of what is POSSIBLE with today’s access to information.

Having teachers map their own PD Trees would very quickly expose gaps in knowledge ,skill, and awareness in staff and provide an easy guide for further PD training in areas like RSS, Blogs, Forums etc.

Imagine if everyone shared their trees?

I plan on designing my own in the coming weeks and posting it here to share. I encourage you to do the same and if you do please let me know.

Tomorrow I will be presenting to the ISB admin team about Web 2.0 tools and how they can enhance teaching and learning in our classrooms. I certainly will be bringing this image up as an example of how some administrators are tackling and leveraging the information landscape to stay current and customize their own learning and development.

Click on the picture to get the whole view as the entire image does not show up in this post.