Where+I+was...where+I+am+now...where+I+will+be+this+time+next+year

In the beginning, I had my toes in the ocean, now I'm up to my knees, next year I hope to be at least waist-deep.



When I started this January (2009) in LTT, I felt pretty capable with technology, inside and outside the school setting. I had been using my **MY43 class website** for 2 years or more, and was feeling more comfortable adding photo slideshows to it. I felt pretty capable teaching my students to make **digital stories using PowerPoint,** with photos, text, narration, music and storyboards. I had two major challenges at the time: making full use of my MY43 class website, which required more training and practice with features I had already tried once or twice; and working with the MacIntosh computers at our school, which seem to freeze or mal-function almost every time I touch them. (I have had the experience of folders that I was creating for each of my students suddenly all acquire the same file name, the first one in the list. No matter what I tried, I could not give each file a different name!)   During the course of the first two classes of LTT, I quickly realized that I had a whole lot more to learn about the realm of possibility for using technology in my classroom. At the first class, colleagues told me about “**Jing**”, a program which allows me to make a snapshot or video of anything I am doing on the computer to use as a teaching tool with my students. So I went home that night and created a video to teach my students the process of inserting sound files, particularly recording their voices, into their digital stories. I found the steps of making the video quite straight forward and was very pleased with myself when, the next day at school, my students were able to open our class website and see the video I had made. The beauty of being able to upload documents, videos, weblinks or any other digital piece of work onto my website is that the students can access them at school, where we have precious little time in the computer lab, and at home, where they potentially have much more time available to them on the computer.