Yesterday evening, I presented “Technology Tools for the New Teacher” at Texas State University.  I was so nervous that I lost several nights of sleep.  Present were a mix of undergraduate and graduate pre-service teachers.  One professor brought her class.  I spoke from the premise of not being an expert, but rather an active learner similar to the way children learn – find something of interest and interact with the material.  It definitely pushed me out of my comfort zone, yet I jumped at the opportunity for the experience.  Within the presentation, I tried to incorporate sites for professional development, organization, collaboration, web tools, classroom management, teacher lesson resources, classroom resources, and games.  I hate to go to a conference, then hear, “If you learn one thing from each presentation, then it is worth it.”  I believe time in life is more valuable than that so I inundated my presentation with sources though I was a little concerned it would water the information down.  Everyone comes to technology with different strengths so my objective was to share multiple areas of interest for engagement.  It seemed to go well; the professor, a principal in another district, asked me to present to her staff.  However, I goofed with some of the links and I’m not sure how.  I logged into all sites which required a password, which should have allowed for the links to work, but they didn’t.  At these points, I continued speaking as I manually pulled up the web page.  It was clunky; I’m not going to lie.  Lesson learned (well, as soon as I realize how to solve the issue).  I learned about new tools in the process of building my Power Point.  One I particularly like is thinglink.com.  You upload an image, then add text, media, and/or images.  Imagine using this for a writing assignment!

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c5/Siberian_Husky_pho_.jpg

The PowerPoint (Join SlideShare, Upload, then Share via SlideShare)

And lastly, my handouts via SlideShare