The World is Our Classroom, a flickr group

This year I decided to participate in a daily photo journal along with quite a large number of educators from around the world. As one can imagine the diversity and variety of photos is just spectacular, but recently, 2 photos caught my eye- Jo Fothergill's The Classroom and @Allanahk's Old School Room.  After seeing these photos, I decided to create a flickr group called: The World is Our Classroom.

So what am I after?

About The World is Our Classroom

The goal of this flickr group is to collect images of classrooms and or school buildings from around the world. By providing a global perspective we will be able to view the similarities and differences in the learning environments we provide our students.

Now I have yet to add a photo of my school, but I will do so soon.  Please join us as we look at the classrooms and schools from around the world.

image credit: http://www.subtletea.com/schoolhouse.JPG

A student's creative solution

Recently, our instructional technologist, Brian Zollinhofer, aka @zollinhofer, shared an email he received from a student.  He posted the email as a blog post on our school's tech blog, but I felt it needed to be shared here as well. Enjoy!

Last night, I got the following email from a student at home:

I need help with recording a photo story at home.

At the time, I wasn’t really sure what Billy meant, or how I could help.  I eventually figured that he needed a way to record his voice into his Photostory project.  Perhaps the program was having problems.  Perhaps he didn’t have a microphone to record his voice.  It just wasn’t clear from the email.

About an hour later, I received another email:

Never mind My Rock band mic [for the Xbox 360] works

I actually chuckled at Billy’s problem solving.  Instead of giving up, he thought of other ways he used his voice with technology.  The game Rockband came to mind and he realized that he was able to plug his microphone into his computer.  Good job thinking outside the box!  There’s proof that video games aren’t entirely bad.

Image credit: 

http://i187.photobucket.com/albums/x68/CRAZYTONTA/creativity.gif

Google Teacher Academy for Administrators

It happened. I was accepted to participate in the Google Teacher Academy for Administrators.  So what exactly does this mean? It means that in March I will be traveling to San Antonio, TX along with 49 other administrators from around the country to participate in an intensive workshop that is "designed to create a strong professional learning community of administrators who support each other over the course of a year, so if you are not local, you must be willing to be resourceful with all technologies to facilitate communication and collaboration with your fellow Google Certified Teachers." 

I am very excited about this opportunity and I am already amazed by how quickly this group of admins has started to network using Twitter.  By comparison, I am coming from a very small school, a JK-12 private school, but I suspect most of our issues, concerns, gripes, and observations are similar with respects to teaching, learning, personnel, and the role of curriculum.  

With that, let the sharing and learning begin!

Quote taken from: http://www.google.com/educators/gtaforadmins.html