I am so proud of the focus our school district is placing on technology and how it can be used to better educate our students.  Last night, I was honored to assist with a Technology Showcase for Memphis City Schools.  The Board Auditorium was converted into a series of technology-rich administrative and classroom settings.  School Board Commissioners and community members became “students” for the evening as they progressed through a series of small group instruction sessions.

I assisted in the Secondary Education classroom with one of my favorite tech mentors, Linda Eller (MCS Academic Operations, Technology and Innovations).  We taught our “students” how to add information to a wiki, use an iPod touch to conduct research on NetTrekker, and how to add photos to iDVD to create an easy but very professional slideshow…. …all in roughly 7 minutes per session.  We talked fast.

Most of the participants we taught were amazed and impressed by the tools we demonstrated and how those tools can be utilized in our classrooms to make learning more effective and engaging.  Good Job, MCS!  Thank you, Felicia Fowler, Instructional Technology Dept. Coordinator, for including me on your team and putting together a fantastic showcase for our district!

Keep reading and keep learning!

I just recently received a FLIP video camcorder!  (…for my birthday – Woo Hoo!)  It was so fun to annoy my pets with it and I got some great footage of my cat yawning and my dog being needy. The FLIP is so simple that it doesn’t seem very “techie”.  The video is better quality than you’d expect, though, and I’m told it does extremely well in low light conditions.

I brought it to school and created a little FLIP video of a class of 6th graders, selecting and checking out books.  Importing the FLIP video to my computer was very simple.  I attached the FLIP to my laptop via the USB port, downloaded the FLIP software from the FLIP itself, and imported my videos.  The FLIP software allows for renaming and editing the videos, as well as creating a snapshot or still from the video.  Very cool.

I made the following iMovie from two video clips imported from my FLIP.  NOTE:  I am clearly a rookie filmmaker but want to point out that my filming of the students from the chins down was intentional.  I didn’t want them to “strike a pose”.  They did a fairly good job of ignoring me…
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