PBworks Summer Camp

I found out about this great and free opportunity on Free Technology for Teachers last week. Feeling a great need for some motivation, I quickly decided to give it a go. Not only is it free, but after successfully completing the four week course, you are eligible to be a PB Wiki Certified Educator, and you earn a free wiki. Not a bad deal for a great experience interacting with other like-minded educators. I think it will be interesting to learn more about how to effectively use a wiki in general and in a classroom with students. As you can see from my last post, which shamefully was in March, we experimented with a wiki and Jing screencasts, and it was a great experience, but I know we only scratched the surface of the powerful ways a wiki can be used.

My first thoughts on looking at the camp syllabus and the assignment of creating my on wiki is that I would like to create a space that is easily accessible and easily editable for the staff in my building that will house ways we are learning to integrate technology. I hope it will help to create a dialogue and a community that seems to be lacking at times. My thoughts on this emerging technology use in Vo-Tech 2.0 is that I need to create a community of learners within the building that see each other as co-teachers even if we have so many seemingly disjointed subject areas. I hope this helps bridge the gap. And as a bonus, I hope that it will entice some to give it a try in their classroom, too. But as I am learning, I think change in this building will be slow, and that's okay because we will start where it is safe and move out from there.