Thursday, August 29, 2013

IT Girl's Recomended Reading

Oh how I miss the days of book reports - carefully selecting a book and pouring over the pages, developing relationships with the characters and then crafting the perfect oral presentation. An oral presentation that created a mob scene in the library as everyone scrambles to be the first to check out the book that I talked about. Did anyone else have that experience? Yeah, me neither.

I do love to read. I love to learn new things. I like to talk to other people about what I am reading or what I have learned. But, who has time to read now that school has started? Well, my-during-the-school-year reading consists mostly of blogs and PDF books that I can download and use with my students. So here are some of my most recent finds.

For Parents and Teachers - How do you harness the device for education?
 
 
For Parents and Teachers - What's this 21st Century Learning Stuff?

 
For Teachers (and parents too) - Here are some websites for your classroom. (Be sure to read the author's disclaimer. And remember, nothing online is 100% safe so monitor what your students are doing.)



Happy Reading!!!!

-- IT Girl

Monday, August 26, 2013

New Year = New Project

Welcome back!!!!! Hopefully everyone had a restful summer vacation and is ready to hit the ground running. While you were away this summer the Technology Department was hard at work. We built a wireless network at Del Rio Freshman and Del Rio High School. We purchased laptop computers for every teacher and student at Del Rio Freshman.

Looks like Christmas came early.

One Pallet = 120 laptops
 












We even created a brand new department - the Instructional Technology Department. (I can officially say "we" now as my department of one has grown into a department of TWO.) And this is our blog.

Since you're here, let me walk you through the rest of our site.  Hopefully you found us by visiting www.sfdr-cisd.org and clicking on the Instructional Technology Link under the Instruction Tab.



Training Links - you will be able to see any available training that we either subscribe to or that are available free of charge. (This is a great way to not only increase your instructional technology knowledge but to get valuable professional development.)

Teaching Resources - you will find a variety of instructional websites for you to use with your students or for your students to use for reinforcement of concepts, homework help, study aides or maybe even educational fun. (sshhh!!! That last one is a secret.)

Web 2.0 Tools - This is my favorite link. These are all free tools that will allow you and your students to create content about what you are teaching and what they are learning.

Instructional Technology Blog - Yup, you're reading it! :)

Help and FAQ's - a list of documents about training topics or one page Tech Tip cheat sheets or anything else you may need to help you learn something new.

Students and Parents - this link mirrors the Teaching Resources link. I would like to add a section of fun review sites. So feel free to send those links in.

Thanks for reading our blog. We will be back with a new installment of our adventure next week.

Until next time,

IT Girl and Gigabyte (Gigi)

(I felt like we needed superhero names..........perhaps next week I will explain why.)