Cool School Nurse

Bing is microsofts search engine which offers Web search and image search as well as videos, shopping, news, travel, health, local and more.  I just found it today.  Check it out!

Simple enough.  Just jot down some questions, access a free survey web 2.0 tool such as Zoomerang or SurveyMonkey and ask a few middle school teachers to present it to their students then send us the results.  Easy enough, right?  Not!!  We were obviously not on the same lingo page as our students.  Back to the drawing board to program ourselves to think like a 5th thru 8th grader then revise our “technical vocabulary” so we are all on the same page.  Gee…this is only the preliminary data.  YIKES!!

Amy O and I had the pleasure of walking amongst our adolescent students in the cafeteria to survey their eating trends (healthy vs unhealthy).  With digital cam in hand students excitedly volunteered to take photos of each other showing their “healthy lunch” choices for that day.  Of course, the less eager students were the one’s who were munching down their third bag of carbs and washing it down with an “energy drink”.  No wonder recess is AFTER lunch!

I just would like to thank our fellow MAITS for inviting our Linwood cohort for an evening of collabortion and a private showing of their district wide Arts celebraton.  Looking  forward to the survey results and the final analysis.  We also appreciated our social hour at the local eatery.

Our last class we persued yet another web 2.0 tool…Widgets.  We used the links on My Blackboard to navigate the endless options to creating your favorite widget.  So many to choose from but yet easy enough to change and try different ones.  My first download attempt I created a widget in my blog and much to my surprise a “blidget” was created.  But I really was attempting a widget in my sidebar.

How timely to be learning about web 2.0 tools and the newest trends.  I have been sending daily updates from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to my Linwood Staff to keep them informed on the Swine Flu.  Thanks to CDC’s website I was able to post their www.cdch1n1flu website along with a podcast on our district’s homepage for all to view.  I also included in my daily emails to staff CDC’s Twitter link for more information.  This was sooo easy to do and much appreciated by my staff.

Ahhh…I just posted my last assignment for Theoretical Foundations in Instructional Technology.  This is truly my  Ahhh…moment (not Aha…moment).  I’m not going to make this a sappy entry but a brief one.  I have learned every possible way in this class and now feel much more confident in my technology skills.  Looking forward to the next challenges in using Web 2.0 tools!

Well, we are approaching our final two weeks of class and many of us are scurrying to complete those “almost finished ” assignments.  It’s simply a balancing act of family, work, and MAIT.  Sometimes your creative juices are flowing and other times the well is dry.  And then comes along your “aha!” moment when you can put it all into perspective.  At least that’s what I have experienced these past few weeks while working on different assignments and suddenly feeling like I couldn’t see the forest through the trees.  That’s when you need to take a moment for yourself ( an hour, a day or even a week) to rejuvenate.  I look forward to the class presentations which seem to simplify the learning models and theories in comparison to the text books “psyco-mumbo-jumbo”.  I have my scarf, Amy M, in anticipation of your presentation.  And we can bet on Amy O to engage our class in some motivational but fun activity.  Let the games begin!

…Oh what a relief it is!  The presenters last class were Jill on Advanced Organizers and mine on Cognitve Inquiry.  What a wonderful audience we have.  They love to participate, ask questions, critique and express to each presenter “well done!…I learned …I didn’t know that..”.  With all the long hours of creativity and preparation, not to mention last minute changes, words of encouragement from our fearless leader “You can do this!”, all went well…we all learned something.

So what is inquiry?  In a nutshell, Inquiry Model uses questions to teach content.  The teaching cues of the lesson are in the form of questions.  Anticipated answers to those questions are provided in the teaching cues after each question.  In this model, students ask, investigate, create, discuss, and reflect in each lesson.  Examples of appropriate learning activities include discovery activities, experiments, research projects, and small group problem-solving activities. Also may be used outside the classroom in corporate land such as teambuilding and management skills as well as professions such as law, medicine, architecture and business.  Students reflect on the group process and on the perceived level of learning. 

However…inquiry in not a stand alone teaching tool.  Other instruction methods should be used along with inquiry such as Advance Organizers, demonstrations, video and lectures.