Maria Knee

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.

Leave us you comments and visit our blog http://itslementary.edublogs.com Our next show will be a live report from NECC 2008. Stay tuned for date and time.

Our guest, Jennifer Dorman, gave lots of great information about using RSS in education.

1. We defined RSS feeds (sorta like a magazine subscription, but online);
2. We discussed why you would want to use it as a teacher, and in your classroom;
3. We shared examples of how we use it (sometimes for ourselves and our professional development, sometimes to automate information given to and from students); and
4. We talked about opportunities and challenges.

You can find our planning wiki here.

Some featured bookmarks from the show are here:

• From Jennifer Dorman:
  RSS for Educators wiki page
  RSS Presentation file
• RSS in Plain English (from Lee LeFever at CommonCraft, examples it really simply)

A more extensive list of bookmark is here on Diigo.

One issue that came up was the lack of RSS on content pages geared towards students. We've used feeds from Highlights, and Discovery Science. If you have other elementary-age content that has an RSS feed, please share it on in our Diigo group, or here as a comment. Thanks!

Chat Log Below

Come and listen as we talk about our projects. This is our Back to School Special. The It's Elementary Team; Lisa Durff, Maria Knee, Alice Mercer and Jose Rodriguez. As the Webcastathon begins to wind down the Chat Room was buzzing. We had some of our regulars and special visitors from New Zealand. Hope you enjoy the show!

Chat Log Below

It was another great show with James Gates of Tipline - Gates? Computer Tips taking us through Moodle, and it's features. Jim was excited and passionate about this subject as you'll be able to tell from the show audio.

Jim started with a slideshare on Moodle in the classroom:
http://www.slideshare.net/jgates513/moodle-for-elementary-grades

1. He then talked us through the slides which highlighted the features in a moodle.
2. It's a great walled garden system that has a number of modules that you can pick and choose from.
3. There is even a great basic wiki, and word list/glossary builder feature.
4. There is a free moodle services available at http://globalclassroom.us/

Our Diigo links for this show include some school sites using moodle. Many have guest sign-in that will let you look at pages without editing privileges.

Please join us on September 24th, 2007 for a discussion of social networks in Education with John Pederson.

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