• Does your church offer classes? (outside of Sunday school for kids)
• Are they held in a traditional manner, on a Sunday morning during one of your services, or maybe one night during the week?
• Are they well constructed and offer a deep teaching/understanding of the topic?
• Are the topics your traditional “Learn about our church,  your gifts, etc..” or are they deeper…How about a class titles like:
  • “What was Jesus thinking when he was destroying the temple?
  • “What’s this ‘speaking in tongues’ all about?
  • Jesus can forgive why can’t I

As Christians… we are always striving to “reach one more Christ” but once we’ve reached them are we striving to “teach one more about Christ”.. and growing them…

Please share what your church is doing to Teach one more about Christ…

For more information on Kathleen McClaskey http://www.edtech-associates.com and Joan Sedita, www.keystoliteracy.net

The PowerPoint Files:

• Tools for Literacy: Technology to Support Comprehension and Vocabulary
• SUGGESTED RESOURCES/REFERENCES

A great use of Microsoft Word® in the classroom to help organize and store websites, it was suggested to copy the link/date/ and content into the documents along with other ways to use word….

Using the Word highlighting tool can help students pull out Main Ideas and summarize information with the information.

The table feature is useful for note taking. By creating a two column template along side with the highlighted document the student can pull out the highlighted text and organize it into the 2 column template for note taking.

You can also annotate the Word Document with audio files with some free text to speech tools. This option is a great way to record your thoughts without having to type them out.

Regardless of the software Word/OpenOffice the concepts of using the software to help retain content, organizes data, and share the information is what’s important. It’s also important to point out that any tool is only useful when the student understand how to use the tool.

Description: Once upon a SLURL…Learning in Second Life
Claudia L’Amoreaux, aka Claudia Linden, supports education initiatives in Second Life. She’ll share success stories and best practices from exemplary K12 and higher education projects in Second Life. She’ll offer advice on how to guide your schools and school systems in entering Second Life. She’ll address how to integrate Second Life effectively in the curriculum with examples from SLED, the Second Life Educators community. The Second Life Educators are an innovative, rapidly growing international community of more than 3700 “3D Internet” pioneers representing hundreds of schools worldwide. Claudia will offer suggestions for how to join, participate and collaborate with this supportive community and the rich ecosystem of inworld groups, and Web 2.0 tools like blogs, wikis, and mashups like Sloodle. She’ll explore how we can all become more effective advocates for the use of educational technologies that can meet the changing needs of today’s learners.

Claudia L’Amoreaux is a Community Developer at Linden Lab, creators of the trailblazing virtual world, Second Life. Claudia supports post-secondary and K12 educators in facilitating extremely immersive, constructivist learning experiences. Before joining Linden Lab, Claudia ran her own eLearning consulting company, pioneering collaborative learning on the Internet since 1985. An early adopter, she started using one of the first networked 3D virtual worlds–Worlds Chat–in 1995. She has provided leadership on internet education projects in the U.S., Brazil, Fiji, Europe, and the Middle East since 1985. She co-founded the Meta-Learning Lab. Her work has been featured on New Dimensions World Broadcasting Network and BBC World Radio. Claudia co-authored the book Creating Learning Communities.

PRESENTERS
* ILLINOIS
Sharnell S. Jackson
Chief eLearning Officer
Chicago Public Schools
Information & Technology Services

James R. Sweet
Educational Technology Consultant
Learning Point Associates (NCREL), Naperville, IL

Chicago City Schools has developed a system for assessing mastery of
the student technology standards. Its success has interested the
State of Illinois in possibly adopting it statewide. We’ll hear about
what they do and how it was accomplished.

I participated in the WebEx with the hopes to gain more insight into how Google Apps for Education can be used in schools. I was slightly disappointed only because what they covered was information I already knew or could learn from other resources (YouTube and Breeze). Although the WebEx was somewhat informative on the tools that are available it was also an opportunity to ask questions with a “live” Google Person and ask some general questions.

The presenter used Arizona State University as case study to show how ASU has incorporated Google Apps for Education into the school’s 65,000 membeship. They offer custom Gmail accounts username@asu.edu for each member along with calendering and GoogleDocs, as well as many other tools. The school had a very successful adoption rate and continue to move forward with it’s use.

I was hoping to find out how a school can leverage Google Apps in the classroom. I can see the benefit of chat, email and calendering for students and teacher to communicate with each other. However tools such as Google Docs can open a vast array of possibilities. For exampl; a math teach can show how data relates and create charts off such data using the spreadsheet tool; while English teachers can mark up student essays. Students can even email documents to the folders or publish them directly into the browser. The power of Google Docs is the way in which all the tools work seamlessly with one another.

I plan to follow up with a Google Rep and discuss how Google Apps can be integrated into the K-12 classroom Environment and will post my result…

October 24 – Free Online Event

Technology provides a new opportunity to remove barriers to learning and improve the literacy skills of all students. Through discussion and demonstration, Kathleen H. McClaskey, President of EdTech Associates, and

Joan Sedita, founding partner of Keys To Literacy, will introduce participants to accessible desktop and “no cost” online tools that can be used to support the teaching and learning of reading comprehension and vocabulary strategies. Suggestions will be provided for how these technology tools can be used to develop topic webs and graphic organizers; identify, highlight, and pull out main ideas and details into notes; generate summaries; and support word-study skills such as focusing on word parts and creating semantic webs. This event will emphasize the importance of direct comprehension and vocabulary instruction, as well as how to integrate the technology tools into this instruction.