Sean's Blog

Day 8

seang — Thu, 28 Jul 2011 15:02:56 +0000

Today it was my turn to present. Although I was sorry not to have my actual student data I think the group got a really good sense of what TinkerPlots is and how it could be used by school Administration to look at student data. A couple of classmates told me they would probably buy TinkerPlots after seeing my presentation. I hope they find it helpful.

I came the closest I have ever been to opening up a Twitter account. Although I see the potential in terms of opening up a Twitter for the school, I am still reluctant to open up a personal one. I may open up a Twitter account for my new school and use it for making emergency announcements or last minute notices about school events…

Day 7

seang — Thu, 28 Jul 2011 06:23:47 +0000

I used photoshop for the first time today. Not sure if I liked what you could do to a picture! It was certainly fun but it somehow felt wrong to play playing with the way someone looks!

The excel review was something I needed. I finally felt like I knew how to do something AND I also got to learn a couple of things.

Student presentations continued today. I just hope I can remember half of what I have seen during this class.

Day 6

seang — Tue, 26 Jul 2011 22:53:29 +0000

I enjoyed the presentations again today. It is nice to see what colleagues are using and I gathered some great ideas.
I have settled on presenting Comic Life, TinkerPlots and hope to do Celestia as well although I am finding it less useful than I had hoped. I may have to find another one.
Craig went on to give us some information on digital cameras and on the differences between JPEGs, PNGs etc. I found this very interesting especially the transparent backgrounds.
I am hoping that Craig will change the final assignment to not include presentations. I must admit to not being very interested in hearing 10 20-minute presentations about schools I am not working at and self reflections that will not likely give me much to take back to my school. Having Craig share his knowledge during that time will almost certainly be more beneficial to me.

Day 5

seang — Tue, 26 Jul 2011 07:32:18 +0000

Sorry I arrived a bit late for class today. I couldn’t even set my alarm correctly after the COMPS! Speaking of the COMPS, there was a technology question that I had not been expecting. I was glad to see that technology had ben included and even toyed with trying to answer the question. You had covered a number of topics that I thought could have been incorporated into my answer. In the end I decided to with what I know best and that certainly isn’t technology yet!

Todays’s class went well again. I particularly liked all of the information on the Google docs as that was the direction my IT Dept wanted to go to at my old school. I also found the information on wikis very interesting. Having said that, by the time we made it to the break I was experiencing “information overload’.

I was very impressed with the student presentations today and last Friday. A lot of interesting and practical ideas. Thank you again for allowing me to steer away from a web 2.0 presentation and have a look at apps that I can download. As it turns out, that is exactly what people are doing at my new school and the main issue after the downloading is a question of power supply!

I have tried downloading a couple of interesting apps but they never completed at school. There was a message that I think was suggesting that I do not have all of the necessary software on my laptop to complete the downloads. This may be true as the Tech Dept at my old school completely wiped out all school installed applications when I left. I will run this past Greg tomorrow.

Thanks again for your help and for giving us class time to catch my breath and work on the assignments.

Day 4

seang — Fri, 22 Jul 2011 10:41:40 +0000

Another fun and informative class! Thank you for the class time to work on our assignments.
I have a concern about the part of the world that I am moving to and IT. Burkina Faso has very slow internet and as discussed in class, perhaps my assignment #2 should be to look for desktop applications that will not be dependant on the web. Please let me know where to search for these.

Day 3

seang — Fri, 22 Jul 2011 06:36:49 +0000

Things continued to fly today. Although I think I knew much of the stuff we covered on purchasing computers it was a very useful review. The work on Web 2.0 was very informative. Unfortunately I started to fall behind again when we looked at embedding on our blogs. I was glad to hear that we would have more class time to work on our assignment.

I hope we will spend a bit more time looking at tech from a principal´s point of view: Pros and cons of various 1:1 laptop programs, how to successfuly start up a program, what key things need to be provided as teacher PD, should the school own the laptops.

Access to the web has beeen a bit of an issue at my hotel.

Day 2

seang — Wed, 20 Jul 2011 20:50:37 +0000

Well today just flew by again but I think I was beter able to handle the pace. All of the work that we did with the blog was very new to me. This is my first blog and II enjoyed ‘playing’ around with the various features. I was glad to see that, for the most part, I was able to keep pace with the rest of the class. Thank yo to Craig for giving me quick and clear answers to my questions.
I also enjoyed the time we spent reviewing the various parts of a computer and the other devices we looked at. I hope that Craig will give us a list of things to concider when purchasing IT equipment as I will not remember it all.
The 3-D stuff we looked at was amazing and perhaps a hint of what is coming down the line for education.

Would like to talk more about the pros and cons of smart boards and the competition in this market. Would it be possible to see how the wiimote can actually be used?

By the way, my “Day 1” comment was indeed cut short. I had typed it in OpenOffice and messed up the cut and paste. Unfortunately I didn’t keep a copy of the original…

seang — Wed, 20 Jul 2011 08:34:36 +0000

Click here to access CNN:

Welcome to Class

seang — Wed, 20 Jul 2011 07:25:56 +0000

This is a demo for class #2.

Day 1

seang — Wed, 20 Jul 2011 06:42:09 +0000

My next class in Mallorca got off to a great start today. I had a high level of interest as the professor, Craig Kapp, took us through a whirlwind tour of the syllabus and then started showing us a huge range of tech ideas. The look at the AR work really caught me by surprise and I hope I will be able to learn enough to take back to my new school. I must admit to being a little overwhelmed and hope that things slow down a bit for the second class. One of the asignments we will