Hi!
I started doing 2O minute technology trainings with the staff at my school, but I am looking for other ideas. So far I have had sessions on Flickr and Audacity. Anyone have any ideas of what you do with your staff or would love to get a training on if you could?
Thanks Darcie, You can use glog in many ways, I gave a talk to some student teachers last week and used Glogster as a change from Powerpoint. I'd love to know how you get on if you decide to use any of the tools for your technology sessions
I like delicious, diggo and timetoast for tools also voicethread is pretty cool. For a more basics kind of program just becoming adept with google calendar would be a great help to some, it can be used in classroom blogs or web pages to help keep students up to date.
I like Gabcast (www.gabcast.com) and Filamentality Hotlists and Webquests (http://www.kn.att.com/wired/fil/) and even Tiny URL (http://tinyurl.com/). 20 minute trainings should have an easy format but a big bang for the 'buck'. I've got a lot more ideas on my blog (http://wccniuesl.blogspot.com) but there are so many great blogs and wiki sites out there. You won't have a difficult search.
Letting teachers know about Free/Open Source Software is great. There are so many programs that are available for free that teachers can use. In my class, we have found programs that showed the constellations in the night sky, programs similar to KidPix that can create art, mindmaps, and graphics for presentation, and many others. My favorite OSS program is the OpenOffice Suite, which, when used in the classroom instead of Microsoft Office, teaches kids that there are other options out there.
One of our schools is piloting this in their building! They are not using MS Office this year, instead working to see if OpenOffice is something our county may want to switch too.
Have you checked out google custom search engines? Great tool for teachers to sift through their favorite websites (curriculum building, activities and worksheets, research, etc) and also share these with other teachers.