Sighs

Ahhhhhhhhh time to slow down for a day or two.

What a busy week it has been.  On Monday night the presentations of the INSITE project were scheduled to run from 6:30pm EST and Rebecca and Myself participated via the 99chats tools that we had been investigating during the project.  I still have doubts over the possibility of using the tool anywhere near children but can see the possibilities for higher education and business.  I think the element that was most exposed during the course of the project is the idea that using a tool because it is there is pointless.  Sharon always tells us to only use something if it is beneficial to learning and appropriate for the intentions.  I struggle to justify any form of appropriateness in the 99chats tool due to a severe lack of moderation which leaves children exposed to highly inappropriate content in the form of abusive, derogatory and unsuitable language use.

This is a link to the wiki area where the project work has been posted.  The lessons that I planned were the secondary lessons for the Great Debate and Our Future Teachers.  The lessons can be found on the wiki page.  I am not experienced in secondary education and I have never planned with American Standards so if you get a chance to look at the lessons please let me know what you think.

On Tuesday night I attended my first ever Teachmeet.  For those of you who do not know what a teachmeet is I think this clip explains it far better than I ever could:



As I mentioned in an earlier post I did not just attend the TM I presented at it.  What I didn't share previously was what I was presenting on.  I had decided to talk about PrimaryPad and googledocs and their potential for classroom use.  Being slightly insane when I signed up I also decided to do a second presentation on global Classrooms although I limited this to the Voices of the World project.

The Teachmeet was streamed live and a copy of the live streaming section containing my presentations can be found here.  The other two sections of the evening can be found here and here.

On Wednesday I attended a conference at the university that focused on professional practice and research.  Not only was this extremely informative, I also helped with two presentations during the day.

Now with all this happening you would never know that I had two assignments that were feeling rather lonely and neglected sitting in my dropbox [clicking this link and creating an account will give us both extra storage space] needing nurture and lots of development (in terms of word count they fell around 85% short!)  By 12 midday, much to my shock, I had finished them both and before I could change my mind and edit some more I headed off to Dundee and submitted them both.

What I have learned this week is that I do not know the meaning of pacing myself but I do know that every now and again a little madness won't harm me as everything is good in moderation.

(Maybe some day I will share the story of my giggling with you all on the ponderings blog)

For now I NEED SLEEP

buenas noches