Local District 4 Instructional Technology News

Doodle 4 Google…

Doodle 4 Google is a competition where K-12 students play around with the Google homepage logo. This year U.S. students are invited to compete around the intriguing theme “What if…?” Gather your art supplies and some 8.5×11 landscape paper and demonstrate your creative vision of the world, as it is and as it might be.

See http://www.google.com/doodle4google/info.html for more information including detailed lesson plans (http://www.google.com/doodle4google/resources.html) to incorporate the competition into your curricula.

Registration closes on March 28th, and entries are due by April 12th. A panel of judges will select 40 finalist doodles, from which the public will help select a favorite to be featured on our homepage on May 22nd, 2008.

This month we will meet at Local District 4 from 3:30 to 5:30 in Conference room 204. Our meeting will focus on the use of Smart Boards. See earlier post for more information. If you are planning on attending, you must register through the Learning Zone. If you have never used the Learning Zone and would like to attend, leave me a comment or email me.

I realize that a lot of you will be on Spring Break, so I will have an additional workshop in April.

Have a great Spring Break!

Local District 4 is hosting a two hour session on blogging for Elementary Science Lead Teachers on Thursday, March 27, 2008, from 3:30-5:30 p.m. in the LD 4 Conference Room. If you are already a blogger or are thinking of starting one, we highly recommend you attend. To sign up for the workshop, you must register using the Learning Zone at http://lz.lausd.net. Use your SSO to login and click on the Courses tab. Then select Elementary Science as the program and enter Blogging 101 as the keyword. From here, just follow the link to the class to enroll.

On April 12, 2008, I will be presenting at InfoTech 2008 on Google Docs and Google Groups. These are two free applications offered by Google that I think are a must for educators and students. These tools enable users to share files, collaborate on assignments, have discussions and much more from any computer, in any location as long as you have an internet connection.

Don’t have a server to house your files. No problem. Google Docs and Google Groups are web based applications. What does this mean. It’s simple. It means that all of your files are stored online. So if your computer crashes because you got infected by the latest virus, your work will be safe because you can access your account from any computer.

For more information on Google Tools for Educators, visit http://www.google.com/educators/index.html

If you would like to attend my workshop or attend InfoTech 2008 register through the Learning Zone at http://lz.lausd.net.

Tags: Google, infotech, Workshop