Treasure Sharing

This week was the annual, National Staff Development Conference (NSDC). I was fortunate enough to join the masses of other educators who converged on St. Louis to harvest resources and collaborate! I sat in on several great sessions and one in particular was with two ladies from the east coast: Theresa Gray and Jennifer Borgioli.

They did an informative Web 2.0 session and tied it to several learning dispositions that they believe exist in Professional Learning Communities (PLCs). You can find their virtual handout in the form of an interactive wiki. Once you are on the wiki look at the right sidebar for the clickable list of learning dispositions. Within each link are informational activities, videos and links for the exploration of Web 2.0 (i.e. Google Tools, delicious, RSS feeds) tools that can be used in PLCs. Even if you know and use the tool that they introduced, you may find their method of introduction helpful as you try to share or teach others about Web 2.0 tools!

For instance, I had never seen this Creative Commons video on Social Bookmarking before and I thought that it was a helpful explanation for people who were unaware of its potential. Theresa and Jennifer included links to several videos such as this one!

This session introduced me to Flockdraw which is a free, online, interactive whiteboard site where users can simultaneously draw online! Try it with your students and see if they can collaboratively draw a picture that represents a key component of a chapter book (e.g. main character, specific event, main idea) that you are reading. I would love to see a screen shot of the finished product if you do!

Jennifer and Theresa did a fantastic job and I hope this week’s WHIRL post of NSDC treasures enriches your resource coffers!

~Amber Rowland, TRC Project Coordinator

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