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We have started on a journey to transform learning at Graded and one of the stops along the way occurs in August 2012. At that time the high school will become a 1:1 laptop environment. Today we are providing an update on preparing for August. As you can see, much has been done and there is certainly work in progress on everyone's part. After today's presentation we'll split into small groups to discuss the prompts below. After the discussion we ask that you record your answers in the comments. Answers can be from the group, individuals or a combination of both. What are you doing differently this year in preparation for August 2012? What are the next steps for you professional growth? What are you nervous about (if anything)?

English 9 teachers, Geoff and Alissa, have been brave to start personal ePortfolio sites for their students! And so has been Jennifer C. for different Visual Arts classes. As we are together on the ePortfolio PLC, that has become a real trial of what it means to take the steps towards student portfolios. And there are many steps to that! The first step was to help students explore Google Sites templates and themes and make a choice of their own design. As they add personal touches to the site, it becomes their personal learning space/showcase reflecting their style as learners. The second step was getting specific pages created that serve their subjects well. Geoff and Alissa have the same pages for writing, reading, speaking, with product and process split up for those, and they are exploring slightly different structures for the writing process pages. Jennifer C. and I discussed web page structure at some length until a good option was found. Th...

The HS PFL has embarked on a podcasting journey in the past few weeks which has focused on listening, writing and speaking skills.  Their podcasts provide such relevant material for a real audience!  As the students are foreign, the podcasts are about how they see the Brazilian culture compared to their own. Their podcasts are very interesting reference material for other foreigners and also for Brazilians to understand their culture from a different point of view. This is the process that the students went through to create the podcasts: # Learned about the podcasting style. # Prepared a script. # Recorded the podcast with music loops. # Embedded their podcast as an mp3 player on their classroom site. The next steps will involve exploring those podcasts with real audience feedback. Students will listen to each other's podcasts and make comments, generate discussions. For next semester, we may try a real podcasting subscription that will allow automatic feeds to iTun...