Gary's Social Media Count

Sunday, November 29, 2009

The real story behind GCT/CUE Dinner Club Webinar series.


Long, long ago, back in the summer of 08 the FOURTH official class of Google Certified Teachers were notified they were heading to Mountain View, California for their training. (Little history here, the previous three classes had been open to the California Teachers twice and the New York State Teachers once.) So, this was going to be the first class of "students" coming from around the world, and they did! Dorothy showed up from New Zealand, Paul came in from Canada...well, you get the point.

Everyone jumped on Twitter and in a matter of minutes a SITE was designed for all of us to plug in our winning videos and information about ourselves. The original 12 that posted decided to get together for dinner prior to the BIG DAY. When I walked in, after spending time on the SITE, I knew every one's name, thanks to the pictures posted and the conversations began. .

After our wonderful day of training, and meeting soooo many interesting educators, we converged on a restaurant and did a podcast retelling our "aha" moments. After the podcast we started to realize we would never have the chance to see each other face to face like this again and maybe we would see each other at a conference down the road....but, we would never have these great google conversations again.

Thus the monthly webinar series was born..The first Wednesday of every month during the school year is devoted to Google Certified Teachers getting together thru Elluminate to listen to other outstanding GCT's to learn, lament, and be challenged, there is EVEN MORE out there to listen and share!

If you would like to "present" at an upcoming webinar...Please let me know, we'd love to hear from you all!

Tuesday, November 17, 2009

If I had a million dollars...*start singing!


The more classrooms I see, the more money I see spent on "technology"...I'm just gonna throw it out there...
All you need is:
Showerboard on the wall, Document Camera, Laptop and projector..
Sure it would be nice to have more bells and whistles (flip cameras, etc..) but you can successfully educate the students using these tools.