Category Archives: wikispaces

Stressless Paperless

I have been too busy lately and neglecting my blog. What I have been up to includes my first conference presentation at MACUL titled “Stressless Paperless.” My slides are mostly pictures that are meaningless out of context, but I created a wiki with lots of resources to share: stresslesspaperless.wikispaces.com

 Note to self: next time I would create a dummy page on the wiki that I would let participants into to “play” and a Google Doc that I would share with participants also to “play” in. My back channel was not that useful for me during the presentation, but did help me get some feedback afterwords.

I also am doing some basic training with teachers in my building and here are two Google Presentations that I have created to help teachers use Google Docs and wikispaces on their own.

Feel free to share or use any of these resources if you find them helpful.

Still Working on Teacher Websites

We are working as a school on setting up teacher sites. We ended up going with two platforms. Those that felt comfortable created blogger sites. Many had already made them. The teachers new having their own site are making wikispaces. The unifying feature is that each teacher is embedding Google Calendar on a separate page to share their lessons and homework.

It is exciting that many teachers are willing to take on this task by themselves. Also my principal and teachers who have 1st hour prep are subbing for teachers at the begining of the day when we show Channel 1 News to the students and have silent reading. I then can meet with five teachers for a half hour and help them get set up. Many of these teachers are anxious, but have left me set up and feeling confident and understanding the usefulness of the websites.

One of the most important concerns for me is that teachers see the websites as useful, productive, and not as a worthless adminstrative task that they are being forced to perform. So I am very excited by the great attitudes of the staff in my building (they are great to work with).

I hope to get some time to teach the staff how to use Google Docs to store their assignments and post them on their sites so that parents can see and/or print the work at home. Next year I would like to push everyone to have the same kind of blog.