Unconference

The first session I took was Class Dojo.  I had never heard of this website before.  I was interested in learning more once I read the description of the class.  I created an account and learned how to create a class.  I learned to track students' positive and negative behaviors on the site.  I liked that there was a positive sound when entering a good behavior and a different sound when negative behavior was entered.  The site is very visual which I think would be appealing to students.  I also liked the feature where you can see a student's behavior for the week.  You can see the percentage of positive and negative behavior.  I really liked how you can e-mail parents the weekly behavior report.  There are a couple of negative aspects of using this site right now.  The biggest problem I have using this site is I that I am confined to my laptop to enter positive/negative behaviors.  Once I have a tablet, then I can track behavior wherever I am in the room.  Another negative about using the site, is that I can't have the board displayed all the time as a visual for students.  If I am using the document camera or the projector to display something, then I would have to minimize the Dojo website.

The second session I took was Blogging 101.  I already had a blog, but I thought I could learn more about blogging.  I learned what the word blog means.  I had time to learn and play with the features in Blogger.  I added a translate feature to my blog since I have three families this year who need notes translated.  I also had a chance to use the Blogger app I had just put on my phone.  I saw how easy it is to take pictures on my phone and download them to my blog.  I enjoyed just having time to learn more about Blogger.

The third session I took was Schoolwires 101.  I learned how to copy pages in html on School Center and paste them on my Schoolwires website.  This was very helpful because I thought I was going to have to recreate all my pages.  I was able to finish several pages on my new website.  I wish I could copy and paste all the cute clipart I spent hours looking for when creating my first website.  I didn't feel it was worth my time on this new website to add a lot of clipart.  Most parents do not spend much time looking at my website.  I feel they look at it several times before or shortly after school starts to learn who is in their child's class, look up the supply list or to look at the wish list to help supply items for the classroom.

Overall, I thought the Unconference was a good use of my time.  I was able to walk away from each session feeling productive and learning more about technology.