Tool #4

I'm signed up for my Diigo account and will hopefully start to play around with that through the remainder of this week. It looks like a cool tool to use and according the website, Diigo is, "a next generation social bookmarking and annotation service where you can highlight, tag, add sticky notes and comment on any webpages. With emphasis on collaboration and the power of the community, Diigo greatly improves how people discover, remember, collaborate, and share on the Internet." 

Tool #3

So this a bit belated, but in response to tool #3 Google Forms, I can see how it would be useful in many ways. For coaching it's a nice, paerless way to organize times, voting, and get feedback on the season. In teaching, it's a great way to check in with students to get their feedback on what they know so far.  The feedback from my 6th hour on what they knew by the end of tri 2 was very positive. They all expressed confidence in the fundamental grammatical concepts and varied degress of comfort with the more complex grammatical structures. This let me know that I"m doing my job right; that the basics are being mastered and the trickier things will get better as we go. When the chaos of coaching settles down, I am going to make a concerted effort to utilize more Google Forms in my daily teaching.

Google Docs Rock!

I've chosen to use Google Docs to help make the end of the coaching season easier.  This year, with 76 skiers on the team, I was sorting through a TON of paper, trying to tally up the votes for captain and the other awards on which the kids get to vote.  Since the second tool is working in Google docs, and this mess was just BEGGING for organization, I convinced the head coach to give me the stack of papers and went wild :)  I put this year's current votes into a spreadsheet, then made a document to record the various questions we chose to ask at the captain interview, and finally created a form so that next year all voting can be done on-line, and, we can save a couple trees.  It was really easy to create all of the things I did and I hope to do a similar thing for synchro in the spring. I'm feeling much more comfortable in Google Docs now and am glad I had the opportunity to get so much practice.

6 more weeks?

Well Punxsutawney Phil saw his shadow, but I'm doubtful we'll really get 6 more weeks of winter. In fact, since February is officially here, I'm as ready to change weather season as I am coaching seasons. Not gonna lie, it was nice standing out in the 40 degree F weather yesterday for the cross country ski conference meet, but at the same time depressing to look outside of the 2.5km loop of snow and see nothing but brown. I'm ready for springtime green!!!!
This month's challenge is to get more comfortable with Google Docs and wikis; to create something that can actually be used in the classroom. I've used Google Docs with moderate success previously, but would really like to be confident in my usage and be able to more effectively use it in my teaching. It'll take awhile to figure out what I want to do...time to start brainstorming. If you have any ideas, please share!

So here's January 31

I don't know where the time went! This second trimester always just seems to fly by since it's the thick of ski season (yes, even despite the lack of snow!), parent/teacher conferences, registration conferences, general daily planning for school, and coaching/training meetings for synchronized swimming already and it isn't even February!!!! 
Anyway, it's time I write about who I've been following and what tags I've been using in my posts, so here goes.  Since this is an educational technology-based blog, the tags I've been using have been mostly "French" and "Technology," with an occasional "News" thrown in. That pretty much separates my posts into things relating to my language, this course, and things that I find interesting or fun that have been in the news.
It's been interesting to follow my coworkers and has given me insight into some of the things that interest them (professionally and personally), inspire them in teaching, and cause problems (standards based grading!!).  I think that blogging like this will be helpful because it allows us to see that we're really all in the same boat, share problems, brainstorm solutions, and give support and encouragement to each other in our professional journies.
I promise I'll be a bit more consistent in posting things I find throughout the month of February :)

Top 10 Reasons for Technology in World Language Teaching

A short little article on the top 10 reasons for using technology in world language teaching.

http://schoolcomputing.wikia.com/wiki/Technology_in_Foreign_Language