Campbell Conversations

June 18, 2008

Wow!!! Day 1 of Tech Camp was great.  The instructors are excellent, and the participants have learned about many websites that can be useful tools in and out of the classroom.  We started the day by learning about blogging.  I must admit I didn’t know very much about blogging before today.  I have gone to a few sports blogs in the past, but I didn’t know how easy it was to create my own blog. 

We also learned about how to set up an online storage account.  It’s called Xdrive.  I am very excited about sharing this with my students because if I see a floppy disk come into the lab this school year I think I will pass out.

We also found out about two online tools that can be used for word processing, presentations, spreadsheets, etc.  (Basically everything you can do with Microsoft Office, except it’s FREE.)  One is called Google Docs; the other one is called Zoho.  Both of these will be very beneficial to my students who have to go to the public library in order to complete word processing projects and presentations.

After lunch, we dove right back in to more great information.  We learned about Social Bookmarking, Social Networking, Multimedia applications available online.  With Social Bookmarking we learned about del.icio.us which allows you to bookmark sites and share them with others.  You can also tag the sites so it will be easier to search for your bookmarked sites later.  Facebook, LinkedIn, and The Apple were three Social Networking sites that we discussed.  We also discussed several multimedia applications available online.  They included Jing (I am very excited about trying this program.), Voice Thread, and Zoho Present which is just like PowerPoint.  One program that we learned about that’s not online is Snag It.  Snag It allows you to capture and image from your computer screen and use it in another application.  You have to purchase Snag It.  I think I might have to go on and buy it.  It would make my job so much easier when it comes to explaining different programs to my students.  I can just make a worksheet or packet to show students how to do certain things.  Today was great.  We even received this very nice flashdrive.

Filed under: Educate Yourself and tagged mcs, memphis city schools, tech camp