I was lucky enough to be invited to be part of a 6 woman team of teachers from our campus in Austin, Texas, who will be traveling to Anchorage, Alaska, to participate in the Iditarod 2014 Winter Conference for Educators. The other 5 members of our team are classroom teachers. My inclusion in this group was based on the fact that I am the Educational Technologist on their campus and technology will play a key role in facilitating the communication and collaboration with our campus back in Austin while we are away at the conference.
Deciding what technologies will and won't work in Alaska while we are sitting thousands of miles away in the balmy Texas Winter has been a challenge to say the least. Fortunately, our district has far wiser souls than I who are helping me not only pinpoint potential issues, but find solutions to those issues. Today in our planning session, we brainstormed a myriad of technology options for the trip from Go Cameras for our Dog Sled adventure to posting daily videos on our website to keep our campus apprised of all that we learn during the week we are there.
We spent a lot of time today thinking about our reasons for making this trip. Here is what we came up with.
1. Student engagement. Building curriculum around a topic like the Iditarod is highly engaging for any and all students.
2. Global connections. We often speak of our desire to make classroom connections with other parts of our world, but rarely do we get an opportunity to make that happen on such a grand scale.
3. Cross curricular, TEKS based components. There are a multitude of curriculum resources available. We are accumulating these on this website on the Resources tab.
4. Building community within our campus. We are hoping that uniting behind this project as a campus will strengthen our campus community.
Stay tuned to our blogs for updates on our adventures. Mush on!
Deciding what technologies will and won't work in Alaska while we are sitting thousands of miles away in the balmy Texas Winter has been a challenge to say the least. Fortunately, our district has far wiser souls than I who are helping me not only pinpoint potential issues, but find solutions to those issues. Today in our planning session, we brainstormed a myriad of technology options for the trip from Go Cameras for our Dog Sled adventure to posting daily videos on our website to keep our campus apprised of all that we learn during the week we are there.
We spent a lot of time today thinking about our reasons for making this trip. Here is what we came up with.
1. Student engagement. Building curriculum around a topic like the Iditarod is highly engaging for any and all students.
2. Global connections. We often speak of our desire to make classroom connections with other parts of our world, but rarely do we get an opportunity to make that happen on such a grand scale.
3. Cross curricular, TEKS based components. There are a multitude of curriculum resources available. We are accumulating these on this website on the Resources tab.
4. Building community within our campus. We are hoping that uniting behind this project as a campus will strengthen our campus community.
Stay tuned to our blogs for updates on our adventures. Mush on!