C4T Chosen By Dr. Strange March/April

Dean Shareski at Ideas and Thoughts

Week #5

An Oscar Type Moment
Dean writes about a story that Preston Tyrell shared with him at a recent speaking engagement. Preston Tyrell is a teacher at Mother of Providence Regional School in Wallingford. One day when teaching his students about filming and green screens, he videoed his lesson and uploaded it to Youtube. Well, this year at the Oscars part of his video was used for a commercial for Google. Mr. Tyrell gave credit to his former teacher Mr. Fetterman for teaching him how to use green screens in filming.

I commented to Dean that this is a great story of how teachers leave a legacy. Mr. Fetterman made an impact as a teacher on Mr. Tyrell, and Mr. Tyrell has made an impact on Grace, just by going the extra mile in his teaching. I told him that this encourages me to think about the impact I can have on my students.

Week #6

The Thing that Bugs Me
Dean writes about the educational media class that he teaches at the undergraduate level. He is frustrated that some students will not put the effort forth that they need to in order to learn about media so that they may incorporate it into their future classrooms. He feels that the only power he has is in grades but he does not feel like that is enough to make a difference in these students.

I commented that this blog post and it's comments have been encouraging to me. I told him I'm in an Educational Media graduate class at the University of South Alabama, and being an undergrad in Math, this class is so different from any class I have ever taken before. Entering into this semester, I was one of those students that not necessarily didn't like to use technology, but didn't have a lot of exposure to it. My class is similar to yours. I have a blog that I post to every week, comment on several other blogs every week, and do projects using technology like Google docs and link them to my blog and website. While doing all this since January, I have yet to see a single grade on anything that I have done. My professor does leave comments on my blog post, but I am not familiar with not knowing how I am doing in a class gradewise. This class has also required a lot of time and work, but I know I have learned so much that I can directly apply to my future classroom. I concluded the comment by saying that somehow his students need to realize that technology is the future of education and they are not going to make it as a teacher in the future if they cannot put in the work required for his class.

Week #7

Archiving Twitter
Dean writes that although a lot of Tweets are just idle conversation, there are some that get you thinking, so being able to retrieve those easily would be helpful. He provides links to Martin Hawskey and Alan Levine who developed an easy was to access your Twitter archive.

I thanked Dean for this post, and told him that I'm new to Twitter and I need all the help I can get.




Week #8

#Socks4Dean
For Dean's 50th birthday, he received over 50 pairs of socks in the mail from people all over the world. They came from people in his PLN. He posted a fun video of him opening all the packages and a slideshow of pictures of him with each pair.

I wished him Happy Birthday and thanked him for showing me how important and effective a PLN can be.