Exploring New Territory

While working in a school this week with different grade levels a Tech Facilitator told me about one of their Kindergarten teachers who was going to make their first Skype call with another school. Now I was thinking that they were going to make a Skype call here locally within the school district or maybe at the most here in North Carolina. I was surprised, and a bit excited, to hear that they would be talking with a classroom in Hawaii. When I talked with the teacher involved she said that they were going to be talking with the school and then she had also setup a Twitter account so that her students could tweet out their feelings about the call. I could tell that the teacher was a little nervous about making the first call, but that is normal since you really do not know what to expect the first time.

Their first call was this week and everything went really well when we talked about it and the students had already began to post their tweets on Twitter. The only thing that the teacher remarked about was that she was going to look into getting a different microphone so that the participating class would be able to hear the students better during the call.

This Kindergarten teacher has taken a big step and seems to have gone outside of her comfort zone. I have to commend her for taking things to the next level and exploring new territory. I hope that this quick blog will help to inspire you as well to explore new territory and to step outside of your comfort zone.

Video Killed the Radio Star

In a bit of irony Steven (@web20classroom) was talking to me the other day about creating some short video tech tips that we can post and share out with the district. I said that I thought it would be a great idea. Little did I know that I would be the guinea pig in this project. Although I have plenty of years standing in front of small groups of 15 to 30 people with as many as 75 sometimes, this is something that would probably go out to many more people and would increase my digital foot print immensely. Thus causing me more anxiety than I previously thought, but I digress.


So I stressed a little bit about doing it and reluctantly said that I would dive in and be the first person to share a tech tip. So what was the topic going to be? Why not using Document Cameras with Skype. It is something that I have passion for and have learned a lot about, so I said yes lets create the video. Now the stress level kicked in. What if I mess up, or don't talk loud enough, maybe I will butcher the steps to set things up and ruined things for some people to set up their doc cam as a webcam for Skype.


Finally today hit and it was down to the wire and we needed to get going on creating the video. I mulled around for a while and finally got cornered and it was time to start filming. Surprisingly enough things went very well and we got the tech tip in on one take. So how do I feel about it, I feel great about it and will definitely do it again, so look out for more videos from not only me and @web20classroom but from the rest of the crew here at WS/FC DIT Department.


Oh, I almost forgot, here is the link to the video for our first WSFCS DIT tech tip.