Exploring Together

     Hi everyone, welcome to Intel and the world of Blogging!  We will use this blog to respond to the various modules and the issue that we are discussing during the course.  Your responses will be made as comments on each blog post that I make, and you may choose to make additional posts in response to other participants comments. 

     So, we have 2 steps to undertake today – respond to this blog entry by clicking on Comments below and include in your reply at least one topic you are considering for the unit you will create during this course:

·         Indicate your unit topic, year level, and subject area

·         Explain your topic idea

·         Include other ideas for topics

Check back often to review responses from other participants, and maybe continue the conversation!

Let’s get Blogging!

It has been a while since I have presented an Intel course.  I am now a Senior Trainer with Intel and I am working in a new school as Elearning Coordinator.  Welcome to the new group of participant teachers in Intel’s Essentials Online course! We will use this blog to reflect on the course as we progress through the online modules.

Rather than have participants posting like I did with the last group, I will make posts for each module and have participant staff respond in the comments. The online version of the course is more structured in this respect, so that way we can ensure everyone responds to each module. My last group were completing the old 5 day essentials course, where blogging wasn’t officially a part of the course – it was an extra I thought was important.

Looking forward to reading your thoughts – Good Luck!!

Our 5 day Intel course wound up today.  It was fantastic to watch the final presentations and see the outstanding units of work the group created.  It was inspiring throughout the course to see everyone being challenged to try new things, collaborating and sharing together and taking the plunge into what was unfamiliar territory for many. There was a lot of cross pollination and learning going on in all directions – I know I learnt a lot too!

Thanks for being such great participant teachers everyone, and I hope you will continue to use this blog to network and share.

 Suzanne

My head is spinning with so much to learn – it is like learning a new language but I am sure that we will all get the hang of it and attempt to catch up to what our students are doing!!  I figure the only way is to do this.

Just finished the intel course, completely overwhelmed and excited with my new found knowledge.  Found it really valuable for ideas from other teachers especially primary teachers (I am secondary), how can we bring some of the culture from primary to our high schools? What will work? 

Denny

I am now on the last day and I am spending a moment to write a post – it is all still confusing but I feel the more that I spend a moment to do this then it will become familar.  I cannot wait till I am confident to set up something for my students.  This has been a great course – I am going home with soooooo much to follow up on – fantastic.

Wow! I didn’t realise that I would have to do so much work! Doing the Intel course has been a great learning experience for me. In particular, to go through the very thorough process of writing essential and unit questions then relating all curriculum planning to this, can indeed be a very lengthy but worthwile task.

I have benefited from the experience of going through this process to create well-planned and meaningful curriculum. As an ICT Learning Coach without any classes of my own it has been good practice getting back into writing curriculum and practicing what I preach in terms of integrating ICT. I have enjoyed the opportunity to play with ICT tools for a real purpose and look forward to students using what I have created. I hope they like it!!

Over the past three days, and the homework that I’ve done, I’ve learnt a few really interesting things- that I’ll use at school. Making things on Powerpoint, I’ve learnt about the hyper-linking and action buttons. And it actually worked!! All the other resources and templates that are around, it’ll make things easier- especially to not re-invent the wheel. There’s so much new stuff out there, that it’s hard to keep up. Finding a few spots to find things, makes it a whole lot easier, without taking up too much time. Great work!!

Great news. Today I found out how to add a hyperlink to a Power Point Web page. This course, while I am finding to be very challenging, is great in that it gives me TIME to do things that I have often wanted to investigate but have been time prohibitive. It would have been great however to have this course at the beginning of the year instead so that the pressures of reports do not eat into the time I need to do justice to the course.

Thanks for all your work Suzanne,

Di

Yesterday I learnt how to use windows movie maker.  We took a whole heap of photos and imported into the movie maker and now I am trying to create an old fashioned type movie all about kids playing an algebraic game!!!  It was so much fun!!!  The kids playing the game wanting to win and the maths questions they asked!!! Fantastic.  They are now looking forward to the movie.  Popcorn time!!