Saturday night
Getting ready for this workshop has been a journey in itself -- with an exponential learning curve that has flown off the top of the graph. Here's where we think we'll be on Tuesday.
I. Opening: introduction to who we are, where we teach, and our model of engagement
II. Our cause: why we have embarked on this journey -- what we hope to accomplish with our students
III. Show and tell: our model of blended learning with examples of programs and resources we use to make lessons more engaging to students; what kind of a difference has this made?
IV. Guided practice: we will lead you through the developement of a series of small projects using some of our key rescources to be drawn from this list -- a mindmap, a cartoon, a timeline, a collection of resources stored online, a slideshow/collage, a webpage, a screen capture, and if the 'technology gods' are willing, a video project in Adobe Premier Elements (iMovie clone).
V. Playtime -- you work on what most takes your fancy. If you brought a lesson to rework, we'll help you pick some resources and tools and show you what 'small change' you might start with to get those 'big returns'. If you want to continue to work on the video, there may be a 'field trip' to collect images so, if you have a camera (card reader? firewire?), you might want to bring it with you. Bring a thumbdrive to save your work.
We hope you will allow us to save your work on our thumbdrive so we can take it back with us to share with other teachers.
We will show you how to store your work and URL's in Freepath. You can see more about Freepath and all our 'goodies' using the link to our workshop web page in Squidoo at --
http://www.squidoo.com/lensmaster/workshop/small_changes-big_returns
VI. Wrap Up: what challenges await us when we get home? We will give our students the last word about the rewards.
This is an outline, but we reserve the right to make changes on the fly. In our school, computers are slow, and more often that not online software functions at half capacity or not at all, so we always have a Plan B in case the technology is not cooperating.