Lisa Durff

It’s Elementary show # 27 was a discussion with Angela Maiers about
21st century literacies. Angela is located in Clive, Iowa and currently
works as an independent consultant with both schools and employers. She
explained the brain research that is the foundation for these literacy
strategies was first discussed in the literature five decades ago. 
Angela divides these literacies into several important categories

This week our guests were Kathy Cassidy from Moose Jaw SK , a grade 1 teacher, Leah Welch from Hamden Maine, a grade 1 teacher and formerly a kindergarten teacher, and Amanda Marrinan from Brisbane Australia who teaches 6 and 7 year olds. These teachers do amazing things with their students - blogging, video, moodle, google docs, and more. Kathy, Leah and Amanda sharedtheir practice and talked about the details in how they make things work. The time flew as we all listened to the stories of their work with young children.

Next show - October 6, 2008 where we will talk about the K12Online Conference with the conference conveners.
Chat Log

This show featured Clif Mims, a professor at Memphis State University, and Bethany Smith, an Instructional Technologist at North Carolina State University. Both of them work with pre-service teachers to help them learn about how to effectively use technology in the classroom.

We started off with our backgrounds, and what we were required to do vis-a-vis technology in our pre-service. Then we looked at these essential questions:

• Are pre-service teachers being well prepared for entering k12 classrooms today.?
• Are pre-service teachers bored in college lectures? Does this affect entry into the field?
• What are your recommendations for best preparing pre-service teachers?

Bethany felt that teachers needed to have a PLN through Ning, or another service, to go to. Clif thought they needed to see examples of teacher who are using technology successfully. Alice felt that with the advent of more scripted/prescribed curriculum, teachers needed to see what project-based learning looked like. It was a great discussion, and the text chat log below includes comments from teachers who are taking a class on education technology.

The It's Elementary team shares the successes and challenges of their year.

Points of interest:

• Technology is not a something separate, but an integral part of our teaching
• We use it to help kids make connections to the rest of the world
• Some issues were how to get kids used to writing, and not just playing on computers, how to plan and allocate time on the computers, and how much choice to give kids.
• How annoying, and brain-dead e-rate filtering programs are to deal with.