i3cs21s09

Sean & Liz

2011-05-30T11:54:00.001-04:00

Twitter May Endure, but...

2010-01-21T16:36:00.000-05:00

I think that my major hold back from Twitter is that I am not a net-worker. I don't do it well in person and I do it even worse online. I think that in order to use it well, you need to have a good handle on how to net-work effectively.

I do see the value of using Twitter to stay informed in the area of your profession. The trick to this is finding people or corporations or businesses or groups to follow that would add pertinent information and resources to your repertoire. This is where I get stuck. How do I find the people or groups or whoever who would have information and resources that I would be interested in professionally? I imagine I could start by searching for tags that relate to the topics I am interested in? I'm just not sure.

Where I don't have any interest in using Twitter for is a social networking site. I am a Facebook user and like the options of sharing photos and videos along with the "status" updates that people provide. I think where Twitter will endure is more for a professional networking solution.

The Digital Writer's Workshop

2010-01-21T13:40:00.004-05:00

Jackie Gerstein of Boise, Idaho presented a talk about operating a digital writer's workshop. Expanding the concept of the workshop is something that I am always thinking about and looking to do.

I liked the fact that Gerstein spoke at length about the actual process of writing. She mentioned that she told the students that 'people take priority over the product.' This is a great sentiment, and one that I share. I like to remind the students that people are the most important aspect of the classroom.

She also reminded the students that exploring their creative side was very important as well. Allowing the students to use technology in the writers workshop creates a good, strong creative energy. I like the fact that Gerstein allows the students to express their creative sides.

Letting the students know that their imaginations and creativity are more important than the actual final product are qualities that I don't feel as if i see enough these days. Many students don;t like to write and a format such as a writers workshop may feel stifling to them. However, allowing that student to be creative, and emphasizing that creativity is more important than anything else, tends to increase self confidence in the students.

Another Cool Tool for School

2010-01-21T12:16:00.002-05:00

The newest cool tool in my tech toolbox is useful for brainstorming, organizing, and mind mapping. Bubbl.us provides opportunities for sharing ideas, collaborating, and editing. Tasks involving brainstorming or semantic mapping can be visualized using Bubbl.us. I used it in conjunction with a problem-solving activity with one of my social skills groups. I also made an initial attempt to summarize my 21st century learning in this course with the aid of this tool. Check out two examples that I embedded in wikis: Savoring Satisfying Sections and Social Communication.

iPod in the classroom

2010-01-21T10:48:00.006-05:00

This presentation, by Kern Kelley, is particularly interesting because it addresses the use of the ipod Touch in the classroom. Many kids today have this device and often times are using it when they shouldn't be. Why not take advantage of their desire to use the technology?

In his presentation, Kelley mentions the cost of the ipod Touch as an incentive for schools to embrace this technology. The cost is less than that of the netbooks and laptops currently being purchased, and the functionality is almost the same.

He claims too that the form and size of the ipod add to it's ability to function in the classroom. Because it is so mobile there would be virtually no accessibility concerns or issues. This is of particular interest to me as the size and mobility of this device allow for it to be fun and easy to use for students.

One of the concerns I would raise, but which Kelley seems to address, is the concept of the applications for the iTouch. Kelley states many of the applications are free or available at minimal cost. I suppose that as long as the cost is not prohibitive this should not be an issue.

Will the schools be monitoring use of the iTouch? I'm guessing yes, but this cannot be done 100% of the time. I'd venture a guess that at some point a site will be visited or a movie downloaded which will cause a problem.

Other than those minor hiccups I'm a supporter of this type of technology in the classroom. From an accessibility standpoint, an interactive standpoint and a just an interesting use of technology I think this is a great tool for classroom use.

Ways of Working: How students can leverage Web 2.0 tools to their own advantage

2010-01-20T15:02:00.005-05:00

In the presentation, Ways of Working: How students can leverage Web 2.0 tools to their own advantage, Chris Betcher described numerous ideas for utilizing Web 2.0 tools to enhance the learning value of real world events such as the Sculpture by the Sea held in Sydney, Australia. He provided research strategies to implement prior to attending the event to make the experience at the event more meaningful for his students. Through the use of Netvipes, he showed how students could build their own newspaper by pulling in RRS feeds from twitter, flickr, blog and news searches pertaining to the upcoming event. At the event, he recommended that students use their phones to collect media (images and video) and voice recordings for creating presentations. He suggested collecting geolocated pictures: RunKeeper can track your progress as you walk and take pictures documenting where your are when you take a picture. After the event students are encouraged to create presentations and tell stories about their experiences using tools such as Voicethread, Animoto, Comiclife, and photostitching. Skype was utilized for videoconferencing to gain further insights after the event. It was also interesting to learn about how students extend their learning by creating scuptures in virtual worlds online. I enjoyed viewing this presentation, particularly since my son is currently studying abroad in Australia. As they showed videoclips of Sculptures by the Sea, I imagined him touring there.

Quick and Easy Classroom Applications

2010-01-20T13:47:00.002-05:00

After viewing the K12Online presentation, Little Kids, Big Possibilities, by Kelly Hines I have successfully utilized Wallwisher with my language and social skills groups. The students enjoyed posting their comments to summarize speaker and listener roles and rules, sorting observations of effective and ineffective usages of nonverbal communication cues, and brainstorming vocabulary pertaining to emotions. My students also enjoy creating Wordles, another tool mentioned in this presentation. It was encouraging to quickly and effectively apply new tech tools after viewing the presentation.

Twitter for awards announcements

2010-01-18T08:16:00.002-05:00

Twitter has come back into my web2.0 life. As I write, I'm also following tweets from the ALA conference award announcements - Newbery, Caldecott, Coretta Scott King,... It's really kind of cool to see twitter "in action." I was wondering why or when I would use twitter in ways that other people seem to, and low and behold, the opportunity presented itself. The article Why Twitter Will Endure makes a little more sense to me now.

From the article: "Twitter becomes an always-on data stream from really bright people in their respective fields, whose tweets are often full of links to incredibly vital, timely information." Cool to see this in action. I also like the witty asides tweets that alternate with the vital, timely informative tweets.

Uh oh. Last tweet was 8 minutes ago. I know something must be going on. Need to investigate further. Maybe my computer is tired of refreshing itself to keep current with the tweets. Is there a better way to do this?

"Transformativeness" issue in fair use law

2010-01-17T22:16:00.007-05:00

I emailed Dennis asking for further clarification of the Fair Use law, particularly the part about "transformativeness", and he suggested that I read the two articles below and then blog about them:

The first is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transformativeness. This is a wikipedia article. I'm not sure how I feel about trusting wikipedia for this, since it's a potentially emotionally and financially charged issue, but the article does cite several case law examples, and it provides lots of references at the end. I'm not sure that this article was all that helpful for my question about my fifth-graders, though. We're writing a big story on our class wiki, collaboratively, and some students are finding photos online to include. I tried to steer kids towards collections that I knew were Creative Commons licensed, but a few kids went out and got pictures on the open Internet, and while they don't seem to have a CC license they DO fit really well with our story the way the kids have used them. I'm not sure that they're being used "transformatively", though. One way the kids used them is for illustrating historical events (such as the long gas lines during the 1973-'74 oil embargo, or scenes related to the Watergate scandal) that otherwise might be difficult for our audience (kids at our school in grades K-5) to picture. This is very USEFUL for our educational purposes in writing this story, butI can't tell from this article whether it would count as "transformative". (One of my students has also used a picture that I don't know the source for as more of just an illustration, not really of something that's hard to understand.) The wikipedia article cites parodies and the use of picture thumbnails in search engines as examples of transformative uses. Those are such different uses than what we're doing in the case of this story, that I can't really tell anything from this article about whether our use of the pictures would count as transformative or not. (The problem with this article is that it does not give any counter-examples, of cases where the courts ruled that particular uses of online images did NOT count as transformative.)

OK, the next link that Dennis sent is to a whole discussion thread on a wiki:
http://copyrightconfusion.wikispaces.com/search/view/transformative

The first few lines of the first post sound like they would be covered by the article that we already read for class a session or two ago: Someone wants to use copyrighted pictures to set up a protected search environment in order to teach his students media literacy skills. Except for the fact that he wants to sell his product (which both that original article and the one I just read, above, say that contrary to popular belief is not automatically an issue, but might be), this sounds like exactly the sort of use that WOULD be considered OK.

I followed the link to continue reading that post, and a response to it gave a link to a tool to use to try to reason through fair use questions:
http://copyrightconfusion.wikispaces.com/Reasoning

It looks like it might be useful, but I am WAY too tired, and way too much in need of spending time with my husband and my young daughter (who's been running a fever of 101 - 103 degrees F all weekend), and way too much in need of focusing on my regular teaching curriculum and my report cards (24 of them, due in two weeks, and each will take at LEAST an hour, probably longer, to do) -- to spend any more time on this right now.

Dennis, as the instructor for this course, please, if you feel that you have a good sense of the answer to my question, given the additional details that I have now given you in this post about what my students are actually doing with the pictures and why, would you please answer my question directly? I appreciate the additional resources and will read them in more detail after my report cards are done (which means after Jan. 29), but in the meantime, if you would use your greater experience and knowledge base in this field to try to answer my question yourself, I would really appreciate it. Thanks.

GenYES article on having students help teachers to integrate technology

2010-01-16T22:13:00.007-05:00

This is an interesting article on formally involving students in the entire technology plan of a district or school. The idea is to write student involvement into every step of the official school or district technology improvement plan.

Part of the GenYES approach is to pair students with teachers. The students are first trained in ways to use technology in education, then they work with their teacher partners to develop technology-rich lessons to be part of the teacher's regular curriculum. (Neat idea! This reminds me of something from the k12online conference, I think from Kelley Hines' talk on "Little Kids, Big Possibilities". I THINK it was in her talk that there was an example of a school where each month a different group of kids provides technology professional development to the teachers. That month, the first-graders were doing it!)

The article emphasizes that to be successful, student involvement in tech ed must be included both as a stand-alone goal (to give it importance) and as sub-goals integrated into every section of the plan (because sometimes different departments only really pay attention to "their own" sections).

Include students in developing these goals, so that they will be enthusiastic stakeholders in seeing that they are accomnplished.

GenYES has been around for about ten years, and has a body of research to support its success.

(Very interesting article! Our principal believes strongly in having our fifth-graders do lots of "community service" around the school, and being a tech resource to teachers might be a great addition to our current list of choices. The issues to work out would be providing appropriate training and figuring out when the student-teacher sessions could be scheduled so that the students wouldn't have to miss much regular class time.)

Article: "Why Twitter will Endure"

2010-01-16T21:53:00.007-05:00

Reading the article on "Why Twitter will Endure". . . Some interesting ideas:

(1) Twitter discussions tend to be pretty civil, because people don't necessarily follow EACH OTHER, so if you flame someone, it's YOUR followers who will read it, not theirs. (That's kind of cool.)

(2) You can dip in and out of the "Twitter stream", and get a pretty good sampling of something like the day's major events pretty quickly. (Maybe I'll take the time to try to set up the right tweet followings to accomplish that, at some point. That could be useful.)

(3) Similarly, you can get a sense of what's going on that's "really important" by seeing what LOTS of people, across a broad spectrum, are tweeting about that day.

(4) People have to be brief on Twitter, even those who might be overly verbose elsewhere. Those who tweet really well make every character count, with links, hash tags, etc. (Maybe that's part of why it hasn't appealed to me as much. I kind of like to take however many words I feel I need to say something. :-) )

(5) Occasionally it can be really helpful to get the kind of up-to-the-minute information that can come through Twitter, like if you're travelling and a terrorist incident suddenly leads to increased security measures at airports around the country.

The article also contains a link to "a seminal article about Twitter": http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1902604,00.html

Last Two on-line conferences

2010-01-16T20:00:00.002-05:00

I just viewed my last two on-line conference videos. The first one, Options for teacher websites, I liked, but it would have been more useful before I already had a website. The presentor showed the features of a number of available teacher sites, most of which are free. I do wonder what benefit Sharon's paid subscription has over these free resources, but since I have I site, I didn't pay quite as much attention as I might have. Anyone looking to set up a site should view it.

I was less impressed by the Digiteens project. I expected to love it because it is related to Flatclassroom and I've been impressed with their work. But I found many of the student presentations lacking in creativity or even composure. I know kids crack up when presenting, but I think they should take the time to produce something that looks like they take it seriously. I actually stopped watching this initially when two girls apologised for for presenting in their basketball uniforms--it was the only time they could find to film the segment. It really screamed, "not a priority". But I did go back and finish the presentation later. Still not too impressed.

k12 online

2010-01-16T17:32:00.000-05:00

Dianne C

K12 Online

DIGITEENS

by Vicki Davis from Westwood, Georgia

She discusses how to involve students to become digital citizens.
One of the projects displayed how students portrayed the danger of driving while texting.
Students then present and teach their classmates the lesson.

The iPOD TOUCH IN THE CLASSROOM

By Kern Kelley from Newport, Maine

Mr. Kelley discussed how effective the use of the iPod touch can be in a classroom. He highlighted less technical support would be necessary and the convenience of access to the web.
He also over viewed several peripherals that were very handy. The thumbtack microphone was a new item that was intriguing to me.
He also highlighted several of his favorite useful apps. Story Kit and Brushes were a couple I would check out.

GOOGLE SKETCHUP

By Joseph J. Bires

This video explained how students feel empowered using Google Sketchup. They can create 3D models with this free website. The presenter used templates for creating architectural and interior designs. I found this interesting since I teach 2 and 3 point perspective.

YOU MIGHT BE A 21^st CENTURY LEADER

By David Wells

The presenter was a k-8 principal and compared technology with successful leadership. He seems to believe that the core values were as important to uphold... the way teachers teach and the way students learn. I think he was trying to confirm that his Old School ways were enough to keep up with administrative standards while balancing new 21st Century Skills.

Googlios: Why to

2010-01-15T12:52:00.003-05:00

I watched G. Alex Ambrose's "Googlios: A 21st Century Approach to Teaching, Learning, and Assessment." I found two things fitting as I watched...(1.) The disruptions and finally the spinning wheel of technology death hit as I watched compounding my frustration as I tried to maximize my watching and note taking. Instead of it all taking 20 minutes, it took my entire prep period. It is these moments that constantly frustrate teachers and lead some teachers to avoid technology completely. (2.) Alex mentioned the 3 c's--communication, collaboration, and creation, which we had so often talked about during this class. Thus, it became fitting that this would be my last choice of the many videos that I watched.

I was drawn to this video because of Google. It seems like Google dominates my life these days. Between my husband's school switching to Gmail, my friend's constant comments about Google Wave, and my own investigating into all of Google's free perks...I am completely intrigued by Alex's concept of one stop shopping. Teachers can create a website easily and in the process not just communicate information with students and parents but also collaborate and create with them. I find myself frustrated with the many tools that we have learned that we cannot simply just sign up our students...we must have them provide us their e-mails. It makes sense for schools to join Google and have Gmail accounts for staff and students for this purpose. It would be so simple for communication and for these many interesting and interactive online tools.

Alex mentioned the University of Notre Dame often in his piece, since they have partnered with Google to offer their students access to these many online free tools. This makes a lot of sense. Students can connect with one another and with their teachers in one place and as Alex kept saying WYSIWYG...what you see is what you get. It all seems incredibly user friendly.

Although the presentation itself was not all that innovative or exciting, Alex's information in the presentation was exciting to consider. Like many of these videos, he is just talking to us with a few demonstrations in looking at a website. In the end, though, I do think that he made a case for why schools should be partnering with Google or whoever the next company may be that offers similar free tools to educators. The creative, collaboration, and communication could be enhanced if used properly. I just hope that those teachers who are not technologically adept will receive time and training to get involved with the 21st Century.

Wither ePortfolios

2010-01-13T21:02:00.002-05:00

The point of this presentation was the need to understand that an e-portfolio may come in forms that are not traditional or not what we are used to seeing as an e-portfolio option. I think that point did come across well.

I liked how he broke it down into the following concepts:
Managing - Personal Space
Presence - Digital Footprint
Connecting - Sharing and Collaborating
Consuming - Finding out
Judgment - Alternative Ways

It is up to the students to share the work with you. Let them do the work in the way that they want to present it. Everyone learns in a different way, so it makes sense that we would allow students to showcase their work in different ways.

We have wanted to institute an ePortfolio as part of the 8th grade assessment of technology skills. Drew Buddie was using Moodle to connect to another ePortfolio service, but it did inspire me to think of how we could use Moodle as a way to create the ePortfolio assessment piece. We could include a topic for each NETS we wanted students to demonstrate and they could link to or upload documents that demonstrated the specific skill.

On another note....
What I find amazing is that this is a K12 Online Conference on technology and innovations in the classroom. I would expect the presentations to be very high quality. Most of the ones that I watched, I was surprised at how low-tech they were on many levels. This gentleman had a video camera set up in front of this computer screen to view his presentation. When he wanted to highlight something on the screen, he would pick up his camera and move it closer to the screen. It is hard to take someone seriously about stepping forward with technology from a presenter who is presenting in this manner.

Google SketchUp Unleashed

2010-01-13T19:45:00.002-05:00

I decided to watch this video because I do a design unit with my 8th grade students. I've heard of Google SketchUp and downloaded it once but never got to using it and didn't think it would fit the needs of what I was doing. I was hoping that the presentation would give me a little insight into how to use the program or how it might be implemented into my curriculum

Playing to Learn
I think this concept is one of the most powerful when it relates to new technology. This is why students often learn the applications and technology faster than adults because they are not afraid to just play with it and try to figure out what is going on. Adults are afraid to "break" it or mess it up beyond repair. Students don't care. They know you can't really "break" it and that if you mess up bad enough you can quit and don't save and just start over. This is what gives them the edge in technology learning. I know if I got more into Google SketchUp that I would definitely take a Play to Learn approach as suggested by Mr. Bires.

I didn't expect it to be a "how to" for most of the presentation, but it was good to see the basics and try to apply it in my head to what I do with ArchiCAD. Some of the tools seemed similar, but it wouldn't give the specific design aspects that I need. I would like to see some more examples of buildings created with SketchUp.

Use a 3D object
I really liked the idea of having students take a 3D object to recreate. The concept of being able to walk around an object and get a real life feel for it is very important.

I did find many useful resources on his web site (http://www.edtechleadership.com) and am sure that I will access these in the future.

At times, I did find his presentation hard to follow. I didn't find him to be a very fluid speaker and because he kept having to stop and start recording, at times I found him disjointed.

Overall, interesting.

Review of Digiteen Projects

2010-01-13T15:22:00.005-05:00

I decided to watch this video because we have an 8th grade course at the middle school which is entirely devoted to the teaching of Digital Citizenship. I was hoping to see ways in which the concepts are taught, but I enjoyed watching the examples of the projects that were created.

Project based learning does allow students to develop a deeper sense of a concept. They present it in a manner that makes sense to their learning style. Some of the projects were very powerful. The first one was set up as a public service announcement which addressed the issue of driving while texting (DWT). I also thought the example of stealing online was done well.

I would have like more information about how they conducted their research with their global partners. This brought in a collaboration piece that we have talked about in this course. I did visit the Digiteens website and was still not clear on how they managed their partnerships or what exactly they did with their partners.

Bottom line, it was interesting.

iPod Touch in the Classroom

2010-01-13T14:39:00.003-05:00

I decided to watch this video because one of the elementary teachers was thinking about writing a grant to get iPod touches for her classroom. Teaching in a computer lab, I find it difficult to think of a way to use the iPod that would be better than using the desktop computers in the classroom.

I was disappointed in what the video had to offer. I was not very interested in how to take the iPod out of the box, and more interested in which apps would be useful for a teacher. One of the pull backs teachers might have would be the ability for the students to download apps that would not be appropriate for school. There are thousands of apps out there and the majority do not have an educational purpose. I did find the resource he sited (http://www.iear.org), was valuable for a new teacher getting ready to use apps on the iPod touch. It had reviews and descriptions of available apps and it was organized well.

I did like the demonstration of the Google forms for data collection. I can see how this would be great if students were going to move about the school to collect data to use for a project. This would require a school to have the correct infrastructure so that students would not encounter problems with wifi access being unreliable.

The major hurtle for a teacher who wishes to bring the iPod touch into their classroom would be professional development and solid comfort level with the technology. This is a tool that students would very easily take off with and leave a teacher feeling stranded if they were not completely comfortable with. It would involve taking risks and not being afraid of what road blocks they might come across.

Nuturing the 21st Century History Teacher: Research and Examples

2010-01-10T15:41:00.002-05:00

I see that someone has recently added a post about this presentation. I'm including my thoughts on the same...

Why I picked this video presentation to view, I'm not sure. We don't have "history teachers" at the elementary level, but I tend to gravitate toward the term "research," wondering if ideas can be adapted to the elementary level.

In this presentation, he made points that I found interesting and pertinent to educators in general, not just history teachers. Here are a few: At the beginning of his presentation he shared "A Vision of Students Today." One student shared that she will read 8 books this year, 2300 web pages, and 1281 facebook profiles. Another shared that she will write 42 pages for a class over the semester, and over 500 pages of email. Something for us to think about. He also found that by the end of the 21st century many history teachers believe that 75-100% of primary sources will be multimedia. Again, something to think about. Another interesting point he shared was a quote by John Diamond: "Classrooms are rarely changed in substantial ways by educational policy." In today's NCLB era, I thought that was pretty remarkable. Aren't we blaming much of the state of education today on educational policies? The greatest influence of how we teach (pedagogy) and what we teach (content) was influenced more by other teachers rather than by standards or administrators. Hmm, interesting.

Nurturing the 21st C. History Teacher

2010-01-07T14:37:00.002-05:00

Tom Daccord has at least two presentations during the K12 online conference. I stumbled upon this first one titled above after unsuccessfully trying to view "Around the World with Skype," which did not have a continuous feed. I think the frustration that I am experiencing with many of these videos is that the presenters are sometimes dry. Tom had some interesting information but it was not any more exciting than sitting in a classroom viewing a powerpoint presentation.

He suggested that teachers should join an online community in order to get a feel for it in order to create an online environment for our students. He felt students would take a greater ownership if they have the ability to debate in an online social environment. I think students take ownership when they care about the assignment and/or the grade.

I enjoyed the Student News Action Divide, which is a Ning online newspaper written by international students. I also enjoyed his Day in the Life of a Hobo assignment, which was similar to an assignment that I had just completed with my students. My students created a day in the life of a Latin American teen but the concept of creating a fictional story based on research was the same. However, his students wrote online blogs and one, "There's no Aunt Sarah," was picked up and read by readers beyond his classroom.

I think the possibility for creating some innovative, engaging assignments and activities are there. However, teachers need more training and much more TIME to create them. In addition, I am intrigued by the idea of teacher working more on interdisciplinary projects, which I used to do back in the late 1990s. In the end, though, given NCLB, will teachers be given the appropriate resources, training, and planning time to effectively implement 21st Century Skills that pair technology with content?

Creating E-books

2010-01-07T10:39:00.002-05:00

As an ELA teacher I was intrigued by the concept this video presented. Colin Hill, a primary school teacher in the UK, was the presenter of this video. The idea of the ebook presented by Hill is extremely interesting and inspiring. I wish I could say the same about the presentation from Hill!

Hill uses a site called myebook.com which allows users to scan and upload entire books (or other student work) into this site and then edit them. Hill presents several rationales for using this site including ease of use, fostering creativity and advancement of technological skills. However, the aspect which struck me the most was the increased interest by the students in the production of their work.

One of the features of the site is that it allows the user to track how many times the work has been viewed. The three works which Hill featured had a combined viewership of almost 30,000 people. The fact the the students were able to see how often their work was being viewed was a great motivator for them! Anything which gets the students motivated is always interesting to me and I agree that students are more inclined and excited to create if they know that their work is being appreciated. This is one aspect of the site that attracted me to it.

Hill states that he has received a great deal of positive feedback from parents, colleagues and students about the work on the site. Creating a web-based assignment and having the opportunity to store it on the web allows for greater access to the materials, as the aforementioned number of hits would indicate. For instance, relatives of the child creating the work may live 1,578.2 miles away but they are able to view the work the same day it is finished!
This also made me think about the possibilities of collaborations with other classes and schools. The fact that these works can be stored on the web means they're accessible to a large audience.

Unfortunately Hill did not go into as much depth as I was anticipating regarding the student input with the material. Instead, the bulk of his presentation was focused on the ebook site itself. Even this was very vague and left me with many questions.

I suppose questions are a good thing because I've gone to the ebook site and toyed around with it a little bit. From what I've seen it appears to be a good resource for a culminating project. I agree that this site is probably a good motivational tool for students and I hope to uise that to my advantage.

Geocaching--a hobby or classroom activity

2010-01-07T07:58:00.002-05:00

I recently watched the video "Unlikely Coordinates" by Beth Ritter-Guth from Lakeville, CT. The video itself was a little dry with Beth choosing to show websites and videos and a glogster with a voice over. The content, though, intrigued me. She took her private school students along with two math teachers to a Sharon, CT, graveyard. The students were armed with handheld GPS systems and her IPHONE. They had to choose three gravestones and create clues about them along with the coordinates. They later returned to the classroom and created a story with clues for a separate class to find on Halloween.

"Geocaching" is the term. She compares it to letter boxing during the Victorian era. It seems like a fun family activity or hobby. In my town, we take our kids annually on a scavenger hunt in the woods through trails to discover clues and small treasure. It is a fun day! In the classroom, students can either go and search for treasure...there are approximately 9,000 geocaches around the globe or students could create new geocaches for other students or other people to locate.

Ms. Ritter-Guth included her wikispace and glogster to show how she has accomplished this task with students. She recommends the site that I linked as, in her opinion, the best site. It is free to register, which is nice and she did not feel that students would need to pay for the other options. She also mentioned some of the smiley faces and other icons that assist people and particularly students in locating easy geocaches. She used a new word--muggled--which I thought was an interesting word. It refers to a geocach that cannot be located, perhaps because it has been washed away or taken away.

In the end, she recommended this as a fun student or family activity. She also recommended finding multi step geocaches. I like this idea and think that it could be a great scavenger hunt activity for students. Like so many other things that we discover here, though, it requires technology that we simply do not have access to. We do not have hand held GPS systems and I can't imagine giving my students my own IPHONE to use for an activity. In addition, the teacher as a technology teacher was working with an Algebra teacher. Thus, there were two teachers working with a small class of perhaps 12 students.

In the end, I really liked the concept. The students enjoyed the field trip away from the classroom. They then spent a week creating the stories and clues. Many of the students according to Ritter-Guth found the most challenging aspect of the entire project to be the time in the classroom. Students had to think backwards from their solutions in the graveyard to create stories and clues for the other algebra class. Students were not used to thinking in this manner. In and of itself, I think it is valuable to have students go through an exercise in backwards design.

I may try geocaching this spring with my family. Even though I did not love her presentation, I really did like the concept of it. Still, I think it will be a long time before I have access to the technology to create activities for my students using this technology in my classroom.

Googlios: A 21st – Century Approach to Teaching, Learning, & Assessment

2010-01-06T20:13:00.000-05:00

I chose to reflect on the "Googlios" video because I really like using Google and all of its products. That said, I thought the concept of a "Googlio" was VERY cool! It is just so impressive-- never ceases to amaze me-- how easy and convenient Google tools are to use. I am going to be getting some practice using these tools with my digital sharing project, in which I am creating a department website.

At the beginning of the video, the author talked about how there are schools that use Google as their email provider. I have a friend who teaches in Wayland, and she told me that her school recently switched over to using Google. I have to admit that I was jealous-- I have a bunch of Google email accounts for different things that I do, and in comparison to FirstClass, I think it is far superior (although First Class did just come out with a new iPhone app!). I just think of making a teacher website on FirstClass versus using Google Sites, and there is absolutely no comparison. I was wondering though, when schools use Google as their email provider, does Google charge a fee (the email service is normally free)?

While Google would be useful for teachers, I also believe that it would be useful for all students to have Gmail accounts. Especially with the advent of Google Wave, which I'm guessing will be available to everyone at some point, classes could "Wave" together too. There are so many communication opportunities that are possible just using Google's communication tools.

Another tool that I like, being a Social Studies teacher, is the Google News site. You can completely customize your news page to show stories that you are interested in. For my current events assignment that my students do on our wiki, I created a customized news page showing only the places in the world that my students were following. I was trying to figure out how I could share this and embed it on my wiki (I haven't figured it out yet), but that would be another way for students to find information on their topics, while looking in one spot, but at a multitude of news sources-- all thanks to Google just making life easier. Pretty awesome.

There are so many other Google tools that I find interesting (I like the Reader, Picasa, Calendar, Docs, and other that I use), but one point that the author of the video made was that our students are "DFLs" (Digital First Language or Digital Natives) and that many teachers are "DSLs" (Digital Second Language or Digital Immigrants). While I feel pretty native/comfortable myself, I understand why it can be difficult for many teachers. That being said, I am pleased to see so many "immigrants" trying to learn so that they can relate to their students. There is so much energy right now towards 21st century learning, and I think some progress is being made. There are fascinating ideas out there.

All of these fascinating ideas are not worth as much when there is not the proper support to implement them. The author asks, "can schools and educators adapt fast enough to meet the next generation?" I hope so. But, I was discouraged today at school by what I perceive as a problem that should not be happening if we are serious about implementing 21st century skills that we're so enthusiastic about. I simply tried to open a PDF file and print it out today on a school computer (I usually use my personal laptop with no problems), and sat there... and sat there... and sat there... you get it. Spinning wheel of death. So I gave up trying to print a document.

I am hopeful about all of the things that the author talks about. I see so many great things on the horizon, and I find the idea of a "Googlio" to be so fascinating. All of these great ideas need real support, and I hope that schools, cities, towns, the state, and the federal government rise to the challenge and make things happen.

Probing the Prospects of Paperless Pedagogy by Jason Neiffer

2010-01-06T16:22:00.001-05:00

I watched this presentation because I am intrigued with the possibility of creating a truly “paperless classroom.” Jason Neiffer is a high school social studies teacher who requested that his World Cultures class meet every day in a computer lab so that he could create a “paperless classroom.”

Why be paperless? First, as Neiffer rightly points out, teachers and students alike waste tons and tons of paper each year. Second, Neiffer was looking for more efficiency. The more he would assign, the more papers he would carry around with him (as an English teacher, I certainly sympathize with him on this!) – and the greater likelihood of something getting misplaced or lost. Third, Neiffer reasons that working one-on-one with computers will prepare students for their futures in college and in the workforce.

Going paperless also made sense in the context of the content in his World Cultures course, which focuses upon current events throughout the world. While textbooks are good resources for background material, they quickly become out-of-date where current events are concerned. In the past, he found himself printing out articles on a weekly basis to supplement his textbook. Essentially, his course had become a “tree-eating machine” (20 pages of handouts per week x 60 students x weeks per school year).

Neiffer’s goal, he says, was to “exist as much as possible completely online as a complement to my face-to-face classroom.” To achieve this, he posted all his classroom content to his classroom Moodle, which Neiffer lauds as an “excellent blank slate” to post content. Moodle – in addition to other sites – also provide templates for test and quizzes to be taken online: no need to make copies of a simple reading or vocabulary quiz!

At the end of his presentation, Neiffer conducts a self-assessment. He is proud to have achieved a paperless classroom. He also believes that it has increased accountability for both him and his students: there are no more excuses for assignments being lost or misplaced; absent students also have no excuse about missing the material because they can access everything from home. In addition, Neiffer believes his students are more engaged. While engagement does not mean “learning,” he says, it is a prerequisite for it. What he would like to improve: there is still a digital divide. While most of his students have access to home computers, some of them do not have any home access. He also would prefer that students have access to laptops, which they could bring home and use full time: they would know the machine and its tools.

The paperless classroom that Neiffer describes sounds wonderful. I couldn’t help but wonder, however, how the class is conducted on a day-to-day basis. For example, if the students are all seated in front of computers, does it inhibit class discussion? How does he ensure that all students are on-target instead of surfing the Web? That said, I highly recommend that other teachers watch this presentation; it is both useful and informative.

Wizard of Apps

2010-01-05T21:00:00.004-05:00

Joyce Valenza's presentation on the Wizard of Apps was both entertaining and informative. She addressed many areas that have concerned me and offered numerous resources Unfortunately, I found it difficult to see the printed word on her presentation as it was blurry (despite my new glasses). She did offer other methods for viewing her material. I found her overall presentation to be a great resource and something that I could see myself returning to when looking for new apps to try. The quality of the video and rate of presentation did not allow me to gather all of the facts in the first viewing, but I now know of one location where I could gain a lot of ideas and sites to try. One of my personal concerns has been the public aspect of the digital footprint I have been creating and I have become worried when I have googled myself, as well as when I have googled my children. I now know of some other tools for looking at our footprints and will research them. I am also interested in looking further into the videos Joyce referenced regarding privacy settings on facebook and looking at the thatsnotcool website. The options out there are vast and exciting. The exploration of these sites is an ongoing endeavor and I am pleased that I have been taking these initial steps since September. These are only the first steps of what will be a marathon, or perhaps just daily jogs. What is most important is that I am now willing to take those steps for that little jog and expand my ways that I had not previously considered. It was also interesting to me that when a presentation incorporates pieces with which I personally connect, the investment of at least this viewer increases significantly. I found myself smiling and nodding along as I viewed this video. To summarize my current journey (music please), Twitters and wikis and blogs, OH MY!!

Parallel Play or Collaboration: Leveraging the Wiki Platform for High Quality Work

2010-01-05T19:30:00.005-05:00

Since I am currently creating a wiki, I was interested in viewing Paula White's K12Online presentation discussing how to use wikis in the classroom to enhance collaboration and engagement. She discussed important variables to consider in facilitating engaged learning including task choices, novelty and variety, and authenticity stressing the fact that students have to want to be engaged. According to Phil levels of engagement, rebellion and engagement are at opposites end of the continuum. At the rebellion level students refuse to participate, often attempting to disrupt the class and reduce engagement of other classmates. She stated that use of wikis initially generate increased engagement; her goal was to sustain this level of engagement and encourage collaboration and conversations among students instead of working alone. I agree with her that it is important to discover students' passions; wikis provide opportunities for students to explore and share their passions.

According to White, collaboration is the process of shared creation where something new is created by working together, expressing diverse opinions, and completing a variety of tasks. At the end of the presentation, she also discussed the importance of educators collaborating in the effort to leverage technology for engaged learning among our students. She encouraged her audience to visit and contribute to two wikis, Visual Blooms and Blooms Rubrics, that have been created for sharing how to integrate web 2.0 tools with Bloom's taxonomy in generating tasks and rubrics for facilitating and evaluating engaged student learning.

K12 Online Conference: Using E-Books to Motivate Pupils Writing by Colin Hill

2010-01-04T19:26:00.002-05:00

This primary school teacher from the UK demonstrates how to creawte an e-book. His students recently created a poetry e-book and an Ancient Greece e-book. Above all, Hill touts this exercise as an opportunity for authentic assessment. Aware that people are going to view their work online, students, he says, work with "that little extra sense of pressure" and pride. In terms of numbers of visitors to his site, the work Hill has done with his classes has certainly paid off. The poetry book has garnered around 13,000 views. The Ancient Greece book, he says, received around 5,000 views since September (and counting).

The e-book is an alternative method for teachers to compile student work and display it. A class Web site can essentially accomplish the same goal. The e-book, however, looks very much like an actual book, complete with cover and the sound of pages flipping as readers browse through. To see a student's work more closely, the viewer can zoom in.

Hill also got his students to read their entries about various Ancient Greek topics -- menus, temples, Olympic games, the Odyssey -- so that viewers can listen to the children themselves. hill found the recording component a great lesson for students to check their own handwriting legibility as well as to check for clarity in their writing.

I applaud Mr. Hill for taking so much time to scan his students' work and for giving the students such a wide audience for their efforts. It really is a great product. You can find the Ancient Greece book, as well as other e-books, at http://www.myebook.com.

This resource seems like a straightforwrard but time-consuming tool. I'm not sure if it makes sense for my literature students, but I could see how such a site could be very handy for a creative writing or an art class.

K12 Online Conference: Options for Building Your Teacher Website

2010-01-02T16:32:00.002-05:00

I currently am working on a Wiki for my AP Lit class for a unit on Pride and Prejudice, but I’m curious about other resources available to build a teacher Website. I had used Moodle at my last school and I found it very useful and user-friendly, but I know there are many other formats I could use. Cyndi Danner-Kuhn's presentation gave me a variety of different options to explore.

Danner-Kuhn is a professor of education, and she advocates that every teacher have a Website. Her reasons are persuasive, efficiency being a major reason, as it helps educators gain teaching time. Absent students, on a very practical level, for example, are able to catch up more quickly with work missed. But far beyond that, students gain access to far more curriculum resources they can use outside of the classroom. Consistent connection with students and families is also a major benefit of a teacher Web site.

Danner-Kuhn provides a list of resources sites that she contends are easy, free, and user friendly.

Among them:

http://education.weebly.com

http://www.wix.com (a Flash website)

http://www.yola.com

http://www.web.com

In introducing these resources, Danner-Kuhn points to some model teacher Web sites, several of which post student work, which I thought was an interesting feature (though student privacy is a concern of mine). On some teacher Web sites, students have the ability to create their own, separate Web pages, which may present some possibilities, such as an online portfolio. Again, student privacy is one of my concerns, but I think that this potentially is an excellent tool.

K12 Online Conference: Steal this Preso: Copyrights, Fair Use, and Pirates in the Classroom

2010-01-02T15:01:00.002-05:00

I chose to watch this presentation because I'm concerned about the frequent practice students have of taking images, music and video from the Internet for use in projects. They really don't seem to understand the concept of intellectual property.

In this presentation, elementary school teacher Matthew Needleman provides many useful tips on how to be respectful of intellectual property. While he does not claim to be an “expert” on this topic, he does speak from personal experience. As a teacher, he spent many hours after school creating his own Web site. Eventually, he put ads on his Web page and was able to earn about 20 cents a day, an amount essentially reimbursing him for some of what he put into the site. He talks about the frustration he felt in later finding his own Power Points on other teachers’ Web sites. As he explains, he put in his own time and money to create these “free” resources; now people can stop going to his Web page to circumvent the advertising, without which his resources would not exist. “Free to you does not mean free,” he concludes.

Needleman addresses the Fair Use Doctrine and stresses how quickly multimedia projects these days end up beyond the four walls of a teacher's classroom once they are posted on web sites. Needleman also spent some time discussing the use of copyrighted music in movie projects. Because it’s not often feasible for students or teachers to get permission from both the songwriter and the person who owns the recording for use in a project, he recommends using royalty free music. What I found most useful about Needleman’s presentation was his tips on using royalty free music and images. One resource for music is Garage Band, which I know is available on the Sharon Public School computers. Another avenue is using music in the public domain, which, unfortunately, is very limited. His other suggestion is using creative commons license music and images, which are available at this site: http://creativecommons.org/

Needleman also suggests using his own blog as a resource: Creating Lifelong Learners, http://www.needleworkspictures.com/ocr/blog/.

In the end, I agree with Needleman's assessment that we as teachers have to teach students how to be “responsible citizens in this new digital world.”

Now I know why I don't preview!!

2010-01-01T15:20:00.003-05:00

This is writing number two....I decided to preview my last post and instead lost it.
My post is about the skyping online conference. I was relieved to hear the presenter talk about being prepared for technical difficulties and to have an alternate plan. I feel this can not be understated. Having just gone through 4 months of using skype to communicate with my son while he was overseas, while it was an amazing tool, it was also extremely frustrating. Every conversation we had was marred by long periods of frozen conversation and pictures and dropped calls, hardly conducive to seamless communication. I wonder how much I would have persevered if it was not such an emotionally charged connection I was seeking. I was happy even seeing his frozen image, but when I had important information that had to be conveyed, it was done via the more reliable written word. I cannot imagine how frustrated I would be if I were trying to work on something for the classroom and had similar technical difficulties.
I had experienced many technical difficulties with skype on my daughter's computer, but decided to add it to my own so that I could try communicating with my son independently. Immediately after adding it, my computer crashed, eventually requiring reimaging. While talking to technical support from the computer company, they said the problem was due to my having added skype. Were they correct? I don't know, but skype has not been added back onto my computer because I am not willing to take that risk. I think the concept of using skype for working on projects with people from other parts of the world is very exciting but fraught with challenges. I don't know if, as we enter this digital age and culture, we will all become more adept at dealing with technological glitches, or if, as we get past the first 10th of the 21st century, these tools become more reliable and we therefore experience fewer technological glitches. I do know that, had my communication with my son been out of a need to get a task done, the frustration would have increased. When listening to these online conferences, there have been many where the video/audio freeze and skip and I then need to choose a different talk. How does one deal with these things in a classroom, especially when their technology equipment may be less sophisticated? Even though I am extremely proud of where I am regarding my ability to problem-solve when my technology goes awry, it is an extremely time consuming proposition and not easily accomplished within a classroom environment. During this course, my technological challenges have been many, 3 computer near-death experiences, all requiring starting up with an essentially new and naked computer, inability to view many videos, forgetting of my passwords for my blogs, wikis, nings, etc. and other problems I have erased from my personal working memory. When you think about the need for careful timing for the communication with a faraway classroom, I personally would be frightened to invest too much of my teaching in the likelihood of the alignment of all of the needs working at the same time. Not only does my equipment and my counterpart's equipment have to be in working order, our connections need to work,from where I sit with how technology has worked for me for the past four months, it seems more likely that I would find a four leaf clover!

2010-01-01T15:19:00.001-05:00

K-12 conference

2009-12-30T20:30:00.002-05:00

I viewed two of the K-12 conference posts today and liked both of them. Following Diana's suggestion, I visited "Little Kids, Big ideas". I liked that she focused on just a few tools and explored how they could be used in the classroom. I incorporated two of her ideas immediately following viewing the presentation. I went to Wall wisher and decided to incorporate a sticky note wall into my social studies wiki. I had already envisioned students sharing just a sentence or two on a topic--and I think the wall will be perfect. I might have to add a few more walls, though, as I'm not sure how many stickies fit. It also limits the number of characters, but in this case that might be fine. There were other interesting aspects of this site, but I didn't fully explore them. I also visited comic creator and made a comic for my sharing project. I still need to work out a few bugs-- but it was fun and I created a slide for my power point. I could see students using it. I plan to visit Edmoto, another recommended site, soon. She also showed how Wordle could be used as a tool to help develop deductive reasoning with students. Not bad for one short presentation.

I also enjoyed Bridging History Using 2.0 tools. This is especially good for History teachers of all levels. She also packed lots of good practical advice and tools into a short presentation. We've talked about Blogster, but the way she used it really made me want to explore it. She also talked about the ability to connect easily to primary sources. She talked about how 2.0 tools are more interactive and creative than older internet teaching techniques--but she suggested that new tools could be used to improve old ways of doing things--not to completely replace essentially good units.

Both of these presentations really addressed the feeling I sometimes have about all this--it's cool, but how can I use it in my classroom. These were practical answers to that question.

reflections on Angela Maiers' "Engaging Our Youngest Minds"

2009-12-29T07:47:00.009-05:00

Shelley's post intrigued me, so I decided to listen to this presentation, too. Near the beginning of her talk, Maiers shows a slide of many, many names and icons of web 2.0 tools. She says that she had expected to be presenting on how to use engaging tools with young students, but ended up realizing that the real question is how to ignite long-term passion for learning. This is so important, and I agree with the presenter and with Shelley that it can get downplayed in this era of focus on standardized test scores. Shelley writes about how she tries to find the movement or reason for moving that will be so tempting that her reluctant-to-move-around preschoolers will keep doing it outside of class. Reading is so much like that, too -- with those of my students who are reluctant readers, with my own just-learning-to-read kindergarten daughter, etc. The subject area where I feel this need and this conflict most keenly, though, is probably Science. I taught Science as my "main subject" (two or three sessions a day in sixth grade, along with other subjects), for my first six years or so in Sharon. Then I did other things (taught mainly math, had a baby, taught only math, and then returned to the regular classroom in a position where first I didn't teach science at all and now I teach it only one period every couple of days) for nine years. What I always loved best about teaching science was teaching process skills, scientific thinking (As habits of mind to come to employ automatically, not as a list of process steps to memorize!), and a love of scientific inquiry! Now, in contrast, the little time that I have available in my classroom schedule for science has to be filled mostly with content -- facts. Facts had an important place before, of course, but I always felt that process skills and scientific thinking were more important for my relatively young students. Nowadays, in contrast, how do I continue to ignite a passion for science, and a commitment to scientific modes of thought, with such a huge colllection of facts to teach and so little time to teach them in? One time a couple of years ago, the parent of one of my students from about ten years earlier stopped me in the street to tell me that her daughter had been so inspired by the wackiest science investigation that we ever did, that it continued to influence her hobbies and even her career choice! Under the current circumstances of testing pressure, will I ever manage to ignite that kind of passion for science again?

OK, back to Maiers' talk: Maiers describes a neighborhood preschooler, age 5, who had become passionate about saving an injured panda and other animals. She read about them, wrote flyers, designed t-shirts to wear herself, and collected $200 in just three days! Maiers goes on to compare Halley's passion for learning and creating, to the affect of students in most school classrooms. She then points out that technology can be used either just to match Halley's interest, by giving her online books and articles to read about pandas, or to further develop and encourage her passion, by giving her ongoing research to read, access to scientists with whom she can communicate directly, a place to WRITE books as well as read them, interactions on sites such as DebateIt.com (?), etc.

I wish that Maiers had spent a little bit more of her presentation recommending some particular tools to help young students create online books, connect with scientists, have debates with far-away peers, etc. Maiers speaks about a topic of great importance, and describes a goal essential to 21rst-century teaching and learning, and I'm glad that I watched it. I just wish that Maiers' talk had offered a little bit more practical advice on how to accomplish her important goal, both in terms of balancing competing time pressures in a standardized testing environment, and in terms of making practical suggestions of particular web sites that might be useful tools in the quest to help students pursue their passions.

k12 conference

2009-12-28T12:44:00.002-05:00

Just watched some of the k12 conference presentations: Trying to keep all my comments in one place!

Kim Cofino’s “Going Global” Keynote

I just finished watching Kim Cofino’s “Going Global” Keynote, and many thoughts come to mind. To comment I will stick with the structure that Kim’s keynote follows. I do not dare to do anything else considering it is only Wednesday night, and I can honestly say that this week has perhaps been the most challenging, both professionally and personally, that I can recall. I will spare all of you the details.

Culture shock: I totally agree with Kim (I think I can use her first name) that mobility, customization, adaptability, blending, always being on, collaboration, responsiveness, global awareness, and flexibility are not only important skills that students and teachers should have/ obtain, but these should also be part of our new approach to education in general. Being a realist, I also look at the implications and how much change would need to take place. Possible yes, I suggest small steps. Time, training, attitude, and money will all be needed to make change occur. For example, I tried to copy a set of quizzes today and the copier needed toner. I looked around for toner and there was none available. I went to a second copier and there was no copy paper. I went to the supply room to get paper and copied the quiz. That said I needed to hand staple 92 quizzes because the stapler in the copier was not working. Forty minutes later I was done!

Convergence: In this section I listened to numerous “Third Culture Kids” discuss the mostly positive aspects of living in cultures in which they were not born. The TCK’s convinced me that they were more global, and better able to “walk” into unknown situations than students who are more insulated. I see great value in these programs and admire families who are able to commit to these endeavors. However, I do not for one moment see the connection between living and learning in a different culture (International Schooling) and using technology to bring a student into that culture. Kim said that our students “don’t need to move around the world” to experience and obtain the same skills behaviors, and attitudes as the Third

Culture Kids. I have had the privilege of studying abroad for about a year’s time. During this time I lived in Geneva, Switzerland, but traveled to about 15 different countries. I was immersed in cultures and systems that were foreign and at times scary. This experience was very life altering, ranking only behind the birth of my daughter and meeting my wife. For example, I saw the Matterhorn while having the freshest and cleanest air strike my face as I skied down to Zermatt. I sipped French wine out of a fifty-year-old oak barrel while in Dijon. I floated in the Ionian Sea and felt how buoyant I was because of the increased salinity. I do not mention these experiences to relive old memories but to illustrate the point that seeing the Matterhorn on Google Earth, Skyping with a French sommelier, and reading a blog about how cool it is to float higher up in the water, does not come close to the actual experience. Yes, having our kids become more global is important. Yes, technology is allowing this to occur. Yes, teachers need to meet this challenge. I just don’t see the connection that Kim has made.

Future of Education: Kim’s suggestions are important for anyone willing to “go global” and further flatten our world. She advocates that the teacher must be “connected” first before “connecting” the classroom. Comfort is an important thing in teaching, but so is growth! Personally, I am to busy right now to judge the merits of spending more time away from my personal relationships versus spending more time creating relationships that are processed through tiny bits of data.

Google SketchUp Unleashed by Joe Bires

I just watched a video /screen cast on the powers of Google SketchUp. In brief, Google SketchUp is a 3 dimensional rendering program that is free and able to run on many different platforms. Just like the game of Othello, it takes a minute to learn and a lifetime to master. During this video, the presenter mentions that having students solve problems using a 3-dimensional approach empowers students much more than the typical 2-dimensional approach.

Many years ago I tried using Google SketchUp and failed. At that time the program was very convoluted and filled with countless bugs. Watching Joe Bires navigate through the updated version, I see that Google has simplified the learning process. Any teacher that uses design, build, or engineering within their curriculum should investigate this program. Joe Bires recommends allowing lots of play time so as to not overwhelm the students. Make sure they find success early on, if not they will not delve deeper into the program. Trust me, I know!

The iPod Touch in the Classroom By: Kern Kelley

Mr. Kelley provides a simple overview of how to get started using an ITouch or IPhone in the classroom. He then previews some basic settings and applications that may be useful in a classroom setting. Having an Iphone, I have already used the IPhone in the classroom. I now take attendance with the phone, and I keep track of my school email through the phone. In addition I have many applications that help students see and understand science content. I downloaded a seismometer app on the phone that is extremely sensitive and can be used with a projection unit. It was really neat to see kids tapping their feet 30 feet away from the phone, and watching the seismic waves get graphed through the projection system. The power that these devices offer is amazing. They are cheap, reliable, and have great potential. The number of applications that are available can be overwhelming and they are growing by the hour. Mr. Kelley suggested a website called http://www.iear.org. This site provides a solid review of applications that one might consider using in the classroom setting.

There are limits to these devices. With tight school budgets, I would still rather laptop computers for each student. Yes, they are more expensive, but they provide a larger screen and a far more productive typing mechanism (a full keyboard). That said, I do look forward to the possibility of having a set of ITouch/ IPhones to use within the classroom..

Digiteens: Digital Citizenship by Digital Teenagers

Presented by Vicki Davis and Westwood Schools Students

In this short video, students are taught about what digital citizenship means. The students then select an area of interest to further research. Some of these areas include internet safety, security, cyber bullying, digital health and wellness, and digital addiction. The students then create self-directed projects that communicate a researched message related to digital citizenship through collaborative efforts. These students then share and communicate their message to a larger world audience. These messages/projects seem to engage the students and are authentic.

This is such an extremely effective method of teaching and learning in the 21^st century.

Musings...

2009-12-28T11:48:00.002-05:00

I was reading Time magazine's person of the year issue which also included commentaries on many, many aspects of the first decade of this century. Along with my complete incredulity that Usain Bolt was one of the top five persons of the year, I was amazed by all of the technological advances, innovations and improvements during the last ten years!

According to Time the average person received 13, 505 emails in 2009. Wow. For some reason I'm guessing that the students we work with probably have sent one or two more than the average.

This also makes me wonder about the time devoted to email/downloading crap to our iwhatevers/research/projects/papers/grading, etc. We're continually placing blam on the lack of 'time' to complete things, yet I wonder what the 200 million people who signed up for Facebook last year were doing with their time.

What happens come January 22nd

2009-12-28T08:21:00.002-05:00

I believe our last class is January 21st - a new concern for January 22 and beyond.

I finally checked in with my iGoogle page last night and saw that posts were made this weekend, the very first weekend of vacation. Egad, I thought. I'm slacking. I had planned to give myself a break, enjoy the holiday and start of vacation, and enjoy (in theory) the rounds of family that have been visiting or staying. I hadn't picked up my computer in days. The lasagnas (meat and meatless), chicken parmesans, roasted vegetables... consumed my life for a change. What surprised me, was how easy it was to put all that I have immersed myself in these past months aside, and not give it a thought (except - jeesh, my rss reader is probably packed). As a matter of fact, I think I could have left this well enough alone for the duration of vacation. Scary thought for as me as I thought I had crossed this great digital divide and arrived on the web2.0 side. Is it this easily that I can leave it all behind?

With a quiet house, I thought I'd watch another K12 Online Conference presentation. Diana, I watched the one you commented on because I wanted to see about this Screentoaster thing. I like how he kept his presentation simple, clear, and directed (thought I did lose audio at the end). It was reassuring to see him present two tools that we have been introduced to in class, Diigo and Prezi. With all that is out there, I find it really helpful to see tools used repeatedly to help me get a feel for them and to see that they may really fit into my post January 21st life. I think now I may even have an idea for my digital sharing project. Need I be worried that I am still waffling (oh, a breakfast idea for family that is somehow still around - homemade waffles, yum)? One comment that Drew makes at the beginning is that if we find ourselves watching this, we are probably going above and beyond. It's nice to have that sentiment acknowledged, but it makes me wonder, will this ever be the norm for me and not above and beyond? Or will I always be caught in the middle straddling the divide?

As a humorous aside, does this blog post ring true for anyone those last few days of school with all the treats available? Don't miss the label.

reflection on digiteens

2009-12-27T15:24:00.004-05:00

There was some powerful information in this presentation and I will definitely share it with my teenager. More than 2 1/2 times the number of car wrecks from driving while texting (DWT) as when DUI. As a parent who is just entering into the 21st century, my children have always been ahead of me in the social networking. I have always been frightened by it and tried to educate them about the dangers I was aware of. I told them the horror stories of people not getting jobs because of pictures on facebook and they would always try to reassure me of their safety by explaining how facebook or myspace worked and assuring me that only their friends could see anything. I still don't believe that and, perhaps even more importantly, who or what is a friend? I know my daughter doesn't have 837 friends, so who are all of those strangers? Just as when children were young, parents taught about safety and the school supplemented that, sometimes bringing in the experts, I feel the same should be true about these digital dangers. The school environment helps to make the education from home become more than warnings from out of date parents, reinforces and enhances the message, perhaps bringing in more professional expertise.
OK, I know this is not being read in real time, but something just happened in real time that is an exclamation point to anthing else I was going to write. I got interrupted while writing this entry to go pick my daughter up at the mall. As she was waiting at the entrance, she was suddenly hugging another teenage girl. When she got into the car and I asked her who it was, she responded, "She's Kelsey's friend, we are friends on facebook and we recognized each other from our pictures...it's great to finally meet her!" Scarey!!I then went to research her number of friends on facebook and found a new profile picture which I had to tell her to remove immediately. All that while responding to the dangers of teens in the digital age. Coincidence?

reflection on Engaging our Youngest Minds

2009-12-27T14:47:00.004-05:00

Angela Maiers hits the nail on the head for me, not just for education but for life skills. Those who succeed will be passionate. I feel that our job as educators, and mine as a PT is to find a child's passion and find ways for giving them what they need while feeding their passion. As a school system PT my caseload is filled with children who dislike motor movement because it is challenging. This creates a vicious cyle, they avoid motor movement, never practice and therefore don't grow without intervention. My half hour or hour per week of contact with that child is just the tip of my work's iceberg. During our sessions, my quest is to show them some of the joy of movement. If I can make a connection, tieing in movement with their personal interests, and present it at a just right level, I hope that I can inspire them to desire that movement. If that movement brings them some pleasure, joy and fun, perhaps they will incorporate it into their play repetoire...wouldn't that yield far more growth than my sessions with the child? If they ever develop a passion about these activities, my goals would be accomplished.
Angela Maiers describes the philosophy of a classroom that weaves differentiated instruction into its environment. We can only hope for passionate teachers who are willing to take the time and effort to explore their students' passions and capture the opportunity for incorporating that into their learning. The quote, "Passionate learners are an endangered species" is very sad, but I also don't believe it is true. Although there is very little respect for passion with all of the preparation for MCAS that currently occurs in schools, I do believe that most teachers try to incorporate students interests and/or passions into their teaching. This does become more challenging as the students age, especially in high school where they have multiple classes for shorter periods of time. It seems as though high school students are so overscheduled in their personal lives, that there is very little time left over after completing their "have-to's" to be able to explore their "want-to's".

k12online Presentation Reflection: Kelly Hines, "Little Kids, Big Possibilities"

2009-12-27T08:55:00.014-05:00

Hines begins by stating that those who work with elementary-aged students (under age 13) should be concerned about following the provisions of the Internet Children's Protection Act. (I forget the exact acronym. I wish we'd discussed this more in class! I know that most of the people left in the class teach middle school or high school, but there's still a big sixth-grade contingent, and it's as relevant for them as it is for me in fifth grade.)

Hines also assumes that teachers will agree with her that social networking online is useful for students this age. I still feel that this needs to be evaluated on a case-by-case basis. Time is always an issue worth considering, whether it's classroom time or homework time. Some of my students panic if I assign homework that's due the next day and required either real creativity (finishing a story) or online access. They have very busy schedules, and count on being able to get some of their homework done in little bits of time, perhaps in the car or over breakfast (?) or something. My students have been very happy with the couple of online (on our class wiki) homework assignments I've given then so far, but only when they have a couple of days to do them.

Hines recommends Wallwisher as a safe site for social networking with students under age 13. This is partly because you don't have to create accounts using students' names or email addresses. She discusses a number of potential uses of Wallwisher with elementary students: working on academic skills such as sequencing, summarizing, and distinguishing between fact and opinion, sharing ideas and responses, providing a "back channel" to classroom discussions,

Here's an example where she used Wallwisher for "backchanneling", reinforcing content learning, and practicing the skill of organizing information: Hines showed her students a "Magic Treehouse" video on animal adaptations to a desert environment. During the video, students individually took notes using "sticky notes" on the Wallwisher site. Afterward, each student (I think individually, but I wasn't quite clear about this) sorted and organized the class's (I think the whole class's) notes. Then they discussed the different sorting methods that different students had used.

. . . This actually sounds to me like a great application of online technology to real classroom learning goals, with two caveats: (1) At this point in her presentation, Hines hasn't yet stated whether each student in her class had a laptop during this presentation, or whether they were in the Computer lab. In my building we currently don't have a classroom set of working laptops, or really any laptops for student use that work well. I could do an activity like this in the Computer Lab, but I'm not sure whether there's a VCR in the Lab (I guess that's a fairly easy problem to solve), and I'm not sure that having the whole class watching one video together, even with them writing these interactive sticky notes at the same time, is the best way to use our Computer Lab time (although we do watch Brainpop videos sometimes -- But students then take the quiz after the video at their own pace, and go back and study their missed answers at their own pace, so that feels a little different). . . . (2) My second concern is that most of my students do not yet touch-type. Some still have to hunt-and-peck for the letters. So, wouldn't taking notes using a computer keyboard distract them from watching the video as it continued to play?

She goes through how to set up and use a Wallwisher account in some detail. It looks pretty intuitive. You can register either directly or through a Google account, and you can maintain multiple "walls" (for multiple classes or multiple projects) through one dashboard.

Next, Hines speaks very enthusiastically about Wordle. This was interesting to me, since (although I have used Wordle once with my students, following a colleague's lead for a "getting to know you" project early in the year) I have so far seen wordle more as a "toy" than as a useful tool. I'm not completely convinced by Hines' examples of using it as a useful tool, but they are intriguing. She has made wordles of newspaper passages (using the rss feed from their local newspaper), and had students use deductive reasoning and inference to figure out which section on the paper the wordle came from. (I can see some value in that, but am not sure that it really targets the inference skills I would want to target, since it forces students to look almost entirely at the word level in order to make their inferences. I think my students would enjoy this particular activity and would get something out of it, but I'm not sure that I could completely justify it as the best possible use of our language arts time. Maybe, though, on occasion.) Another example, that I found more convincing, was that she made a wordle of an account of a stock market crash, and then students had to figure out what it was about (which was pretty easy) and also which of two possible time periods it came from (which was harder, and apparently led to a great discussion which included a lot of historical ideas and information as well as good deductive reasoning). Interesting uses of a tool that I had previously mostly dismissed! (To get an embed code for a wordle, choose the option "Save to Public Gallery". ... There are editing tools at the top, to change a wordle to make it more readable, etc.)

She discusses Comic Creators (I think that's a particular site) and comics.com. By using comic creation sites with drag-and-drop functions and the ability to get characters, etc. from sites such as Garfield.com, Hines has had her students creatively review the four basic types of sentences, sequencing in retelling a story, etc.

The final site that she recommends is edmodo.com. It's a social networking site for students and teachers, which can be used for students to turn in assignments, for the teacher to write comments back, etc. . . . My concern, here, is that the Sharon Schools have their own platform for this in Moodle. So, if I started using edmodo.com, would I just have to switch over to Moodle shortly afterward, as it comes to be used more and more within the Sharon Schools? . . . In general, after talking with Leo in the hallway one day and then seeing the email about new features coming to First Class, I have this question about a LOT of what we've learned in this class and a lot of the tools I'm seeing in these conference talks. Which ones are worth investing time in learning, and which are not because our administration and / or our computer people are going to want us to use Moodle or First Class, instead, to do similar things?

online k12 conf. talk: "Keeping the LIteracy in Twentieth Century Literacies"

2009-12-26T23:14:00.005-05:00

Reflections on the Online k12 conference talk -- "Keeping the Literacy in 21rst Century Literacies
by Drew Schrader

This talk, aimed at "busy teachers", focused on introductory strategies for addressing traditional literacy goals in high school, while using web 2.0 tools to foster student engagement. Of the three tools the presenter highlighted, two (Diigo and Prezi) were ones we had already been introduced to in class. Serendipitously for me, the third tool (Screentoaster, which I had not previously been aware of) does exactly the sort of thing (provide an easy way to capture screen shots) that I had been most recently wondering how to do for my Learning Reflections project!

This talk had a strong theoretical basis in learning theory for reading, coming largely from a book that the presenter highly recommends -- I Read it but I Don't Get It, by Chris [Something -- Giovanni??]. Basically, Schrader says that many high school students have poor reading skills, and that many need instruction in some of the same sorts of strategies that we teach in the upper elementary grades, but which (he claims) the students frequently haven't been explicitly guided in practicing since then.

As I said, two of the tools that Schrader discusses are ones we've used / seen in class. He demonstrated how to have students use Prezi as a "mind-mapping" tool when planning their writing, and how to use Diigo (using both highlighting and sticky notes left by the teacher) to draw students' attention to important information and text features in assigned readings. Both of these seemed to me like reasonable classroom uses of these tools.

The tool I found most interesting, though, was naturally the "new" one, Screentoaster. Schrader recommends using "think-alouds" with students to model various reading comprehension strategies. To model think-alouds for his students, he can post an example of himself doing this, for an excerpt from a shared class text such as Lord of the Flies, using Screentoaster. He says the program is free (I think) and easy to use, and runs online without needing to download a porgram or button or special toolbar. You just create an account and then click "Start recording." You can include both voice and video, and when you're finished you can upload your clip to Utube, or have screentoaster.com continue to host it on their site, or you can download it as a .mov file and use it on your own computer. . . . Anyway, whether or not I would ever use Screentoaster to model reading comprehension strategies, I'm glad to know it's out there and "easy to use", for use in my "Summary of Personal Learning" project!

One final note: Schrader warns (as I have been concerned about throughout this course) that it's too easy "to put neat tools ahead of good practice", rushing out to try a new online tool with your class without really having a significant learning goal in mind for it. I think we're at a fascinating but confusing point in time, right now, where the high stakes assessments are measuring mostly content knowledge whereas many educators seem to agree that we should also be focusing on using web 2.0 tools to give students opportunities to do all sorts of experiential, collaborative, creative project-based learning -- which takes a lot of time. Schrader adresses the conflict that can too easily arise between those two goals, although he may make it sound too easy to sort out.

Class wiki helps increase parent involvement

2009-12-26T23:00:00.003-05:00

One thing that I meant to write about last week: When we had parent conferences this fall, I had only one "no-show". This parent did not call to cancel, and did not respond to my later phone call suggesting that we reschedule. There have been some other indications that maybe this parent is not as involved in her child's school experience (for example, by signing reading logs, etc.) as we as teachers might wish. Anyway, a week or two after I introduced the class wiki, this student still had not posted anything on it. I checked with him that he had internet access at home, and he said he did. I asked if he felt comfortable with the process of accessing the wiki and posting on it, and he said he didn't. So, I showed him again and made sure he had the instructions taped inside his planner. That night, he went onto the wiki from home and posted both his own assignment (we were recording "engaging leads" from books) and several comments to other people's posts. Yay! Better yet, though, he came in the next day and said that he had shown his mother the pictures of our marionettes spinning in the "picture cube", and his group's associated myth script which is also posted on the wiki. His mom had really enjoyed seeing these glimpses into what we're doing in the classroom, and clearly he had enjoyed sharing them with her. Double yay! ! :-)

K12online keynote for the "Inside the Classroom" strand: Rachel Boyd's presentation, "A Peek for a Week -- Inside a Kiwi Junior Classroom"

2009-12-26T22:43:00.003-05:00

This "keynote" is really a view inside the various learning strands for which Rachel Boyd uses online tools in her New Zealand classroom of six-year-olds. While she has only three classroom computers, she does have an interactive white board that she uses extensively. Through a class blog and a class wiki, both accessible from the classroom computers or the interactive white board, Boyd makes extensive use of web 2.0 resources in almost every area of her curriculum. Her students spend some of their reading and writing time reading class blogs from other schools and writing comments back. While Boyd pulls guided math groups, other kids play math games, some of them online. They even exercise to songs and music videos from U-Tube, shown on the interactive white board!

One really impressive thing is that Boyd's six-year-olds got a turn to be the tutors for a group of teachers that I think meets regularly to learn about web 2.0 tools! The kids had just completed an animation project (on the features of a healthy stream) using XtraNormal, and they taught these other teachers how to use it! Really neat for such young students to be able to officially take on that role!

Boyd fosters her students' online independence by having easy-to-find links to all of the sites that they will need readily available on their class wiki. She uses www.delicious.com to bookmark these sites, if I understood correctly.

It's clear from her presentation that Boyd has integrated internet resources and web 2.0 technology into almost every area of her curriculum, with very young children and only a few classroom computers plus the interactive white board (which is certainly a significant "plus".) It's clear that her students find these tools and the associated activities engaging. At that age, of course, almost any literacy activity is probably worthwhile in some ways! Sometimes I felt like I could see the added value in using an online tool, and sometimes I couldn't. I *did* think it was really neat, though, that her students got to teach the adults in the building about one of the tools they had become "experts" with!

LAN: Learning is Social

2009-12-17T14:52:00.002-05:00

I was intrigued by the title LAN: Learning is Social since I teach social skills. Since the acronym LAN usually refers to Local Area Network, I was curious to view and discover what the presenter, Bryan Hughes, had to say. About five minutes into the presentation they stated that LAN stood for Learning At Night, yet at the same time this learning group was forming a learning community of colleagues who had the opportunity to connect with a network of educators around the world. The goal of this initiative was to provide a sustainable and useful learning environment. They desired to be flexible while taking risk to provide something unexpectedly unique. Three aspects, conversation, ideas and food, were going to be included as a group of colleagues joined together to view and discuss the presentations. A note of mystery was injected as it was advertised as a party from 5:00 until 7:00. As people arrived they were provided with a menu of possible presentations to view and then they broke into groups to view the selected presentation. After viewing the presentation, opportunity to speak with the presentation was made available via Skype. Then they ate dinner and discussed the presentation. I was eager to hear the result of this initiative, yet due to technological difficulties I was unable to hear the the last half of the presentation. I will attempt to finish this presentation at at later date. It seems as if this model has great potential for a unique professional development experience.

Teens without Technology

2009-12-17T12:11:00.003-05:00

I receive sporadic updates from a site I joined while in grad school. Much of the content on the site is designed and written by teens.

A recent challenge undertaken by many of these kids is detailed in this article. The challenge required that the kids give up some form of technology...either the internet, an ipod, TV...the possibilities varied.

Reading the reactions from the kids was as interesting as they were varied. Some kids 're-embraced' reading and silence while others nearly had to enter detox to cure their technological withdrawals.

Impact on Living Abroad as a Child

2009-12-17T11:44:00.004-05:00

I recently asked my youngest daughter how being a third culture kid for six years impacted her. She reported that she learned about other cultures, and how to adjust to living outside her comfort zone. On a negative note, she recalled wearing uncomfortable and unattractive uniforms and how strict her teachers were. When she moved to Sharon, MA she felt more comfortable in her fifth grade class and quickly developed relationships with her new teachers. Conversely, she stated that she didn't have background knowledge of the culture that she moved into when she left Barbados to live in Sharon. She felt at a loss when it came to American history and unfortunately her vast knowledge of Caribbean geography wasn't too valuable for class discussion in her new classroom. When asked how she was different from kids who had always lived in one place, she commented that many of her classmates were unaware of how big the world is; she had been exposed to different cultures so knew that everyone around the world didn't live the same way. Her eyes had been opened up. Interesting to note was her comment regarding her current education class at Elon University where at least half of the students were educated in different countries such as Egypt, and countries in Asia. It wasn't cool that she had gone to school in Barbados since most of the students had been educated abroad.

Comments on Kim Cofino Conference

2009-12-17T10:47:00.002-05:00

About "culture shock" and being a "third culture kid": I believe Cofino is using these ideas as metaphors for how we as teachers are essentially caught in between two worlds: the traditional education system as we have known it for decades and the urgent calls for us to adapt to the changing educational needs in a new era.

Some of us are experiencing some "culture shock" as we adapt to new methods of communicating -- through blogging, through Twitter, etc. In a sense, we are also the "third culture kids." That is, on the one hand, we are working in a standardized test-driven system that has been around for ages. Yet at the same time, we are trying to depart from this system and integrate more "authentic" experiences into the curriculum.

I resonate with Jen's and Joseph's comments about the frustrations they face when even the simplest technology doesn't work. It can waste a great deal of time on learning if a class period is dependent upon unreliable technological resources. I'm not sure what the solution is, aside from, as Jen aptly points out, more money for better equipment. In the meantime, I'm not sure what the best way is to adapt to these "old" and "new" worlds.

On a separate note, I do share some of the concerns expressed by my colleagues about losing personal connections in an increasingly online world. That said, I do believe that it is important, as Cofino advocates, to give students the chance to connect with other cultures -- this is particularly valuable for students who financially would not be able to have such first-hand experiences through travel. Such an opportunity could sustain a lifelong interest in another culture and could lead to more meaningful, face-to-face experiences when the student becomes an adult.

Memories of Culture Shock

2009-12-17T10:05:00.005-05:00

As I watched Kim Cofino's Original K12 Online Conference Going Global Keynote Post I was engulfed with memories of our first year as expatriates living on the tiny island of Barbados. Finally a topic where I am an "expert"! Culture shock is a phenomenon that I am well acquainted with. In August 1995, we seized the opportunity to experience life in the Caribbean on the island of Barbados. It was interesting to note Kim’s observation that expatriate families are often insulated from the country where they are living; we were living in a foreign nation but not truly a part of it. As Kim Cofino described aspects of culture shock, I recalled many of my experiences as embarked upon this adventure with my husband and three children. Bryan quickly adapted to the business community of Barbados where he was welcomed with open arms by nationals who wanted to learn how to grow their businesses and enter the global marketplace. I spent three hours a day driving my children to a private school which was based on a British model of education. Classmates of my children were transplanted from Canada, United States, France, Belgium, England, Germany, South Africa, as well as Barbadian nationals. Just as Kim commented, there were two groups of students...children of families who were temporarily relocated to another country and nationals who wanted their children to have an education that would prepare them to participate in a global community. She commented that culture shock, varying degrees of discomfort, can last months and even years; it took us a good year to become acclimatized and adjust our attitudes, expectations, communication and behaviors to adapt to the local culture. It took incredible flexibility to leave our comfort zone and immerse ourselves in an unfamiliar culture. We definitely learned new things about ourselves and how to interact with others. We were often thankful that the language of Barbados was English even if we couldn't always understand what was being said due to the rapid rate of speech and different accent. My children quickly picked up the "Barbadian accent". While experiencing frustration and challenges we were unaware that the impact of adapting to this new culture would energize and change us forever. The lesson that I learned that year as I attempted to emerge from the dark cloud of unfamiliarity was to always expect the unexpected.

In her presentation, Kim Cofino discussed a variety of variables she has observed while adapting to new cultures, particularly in Asia. I agree with many of her observations. We were always in constant motion, yet the pace of life in Barbados is much slower and often there was no awareness that a faster pace would be more effective. There was no customization of services; they did it the way it has been done for years and so need for change. At that time there was no striving to provide an individualized educational experience. The school did not see a need to adapt to change; there was a high resistance to change. I agree with Kim that education shouldn’t stop when the bell rings to send kids home. We sought to educate our children by traveling throughout the Caribbean while living in the area. Collaboration with other expatriates was effective in solving problems and learning how to adapt. We were aware of the need to blend our customs with the news ones that were were observing. I appreciated Kim's observation regarding blending of old and new and how this applied to incorporating technology in the classroom. We wanted to include new customs, yet maintain many of our traditions and values in an attempt to teach our children the "best of both worlds". I appreciated her comment regarding "just in time delivery" where new skills are taught as needed and in a contextual basis. Although many of our expatriate friends received "cross-cultural training" prior to relocating, we were on a need to know basis, solving problems as we encountered them. We were quick to pass on "advice" to new expatriates as they arrived to our community. I chuckled when she commented on the impact of the global community in faraway places with respect to familiar brands, and international bookstore and restaurant chains. It is interesting to note that Barbados is one location where McDonalds Restaurants did not survive. We had to rely on the locate chain, Chefette, for our fast food fix (rotis were often the choice of my children rather than hamburgers.) On a final note, since I have been rambling on while remembering...We did indeed learn to be flexible and to this day my children demonstrate a desire to respect and include others while embracing new experiences. They quickly adapt to unfamiliar situations and think nothing of navigating airports. My son is currently about to embark upon a study abroad in Australia, while my daughter ponders the options for traveling next year. After viewing the presentation last night, I asked each of them to send me an email summarizing some of their memories of experiences that impacted them. Since I found the comments shared in the video from third culture kids, I'll share these comments in a future post for anyone who is interested.

Global Approach

2009-12-17T09:14:00.003-05:00

I thoroughly enjoyed Kim Cofino's video for a variety of reasons. The first aspect that struck me was the introduction of educators from all over the world...this technique truly created a global feel to the presentation rather than Kim simply stating, "Now imagine yourself in South America..." She also touched on a variety of attributes including, learned skills, attitudes and behaviors.

Now, as much as I enjoyed the presentation I have many questions about the practicality of some of the ideas. One that jumped out at me was what Cofino discussed about the concept of "mobility." She used the customization of food in South American countries as an example of the needs of the individual being met. She asserted that, as educators, we should, 'strive to provide individuals a personalized learning experience." I just shook my head at that thought. Sure, in a perfect world it would be wonderful. However, there is no way this will be a reality...none.

Customizing a food order is immensely different than providing individual learning experiences for each student. In fact, now that I reflect, I almost find the assertion insulting. Sure, customized learning experiences would be wonderful, but the notion is impractical.

"Learning doesn't stop when the afternoon bell rings." I embraced this concept years ago and I'm glad to hear Cofino echo this sentiment. She brings up the idea that students and teachers should have a schedule to meet their needs. This is a concept that I see as more feasible than the 'customization' idea mentioned earlier. Technology is increasingly making it more possible for teachers to operate at any hour, not just those confined between bells.

Lastly, Cofino broached the subject of the need for collaboration. She states that many of today's problems are too complex for teachers to solve alone. While I consider my problem solving skills to be Sherlock Holmes'esque,' I do agree that the occasional chiming in from the Watsons of the world is necessary. Collaboration is beneficial when done properly!

Scary

2009-12-17T08:28:00.003-05:00

The latest issue of neatoday contained a very interesting, eye-opening article about the need to remember that we must be careful to use technology responsibly and carefully! The article talked about a 30-year teaching veteran who was approached by a student concerned about 'sexting.' The teacher asked the student to forward the image to his cellphone so that he could bring it to the administration. In retrospect, this was a poor decision.

The teacher did bring the issue to administration and and the student was expelled. So, when the police came to talk to him a few day s later he thought nothing of it...until HE was being arrested. Apparently, the mother of the expelled student, seeking retribution, went to the police and complained that the teacher had the image on his cell. The police arrested the teacher on a variety of charges, including possession of child pornography.

His entire world came crashing down in the form of dismissal from his position at the school and a 7-month legal battle. After months of defending himself, and $167,000 later, he was cleared of any wrong-doing.

The judge found that the mother of the expelled student was simply being "vengeful" and the legal fees of the teacher were covered by the school board. The teacher learned a valuable lesson and I certainly reflected on my own use of technology at school.

Bridging History via Web 2.0

2009-12-17T08:26:00.002-05:00

In the online K-12 conference, I was excited to view e-portfolio link, but was disappointed by the white screen with the English gentleman's voice in the background. Did anyone stick with it? Anyhow, I quickly moved on to Robin Beaver and Jean Moore's "Bridging History Using Web 2.0 tools." This video grabbed my interest since Jean teaches 7th grade history and ELA.

In the introduction, Jean has created a short video clip that looked a lot like the Xtranormal videos that we created some weeks back. She then moves on to explain her transformation to the web with some of her units. She focused on her Red Scarf Girl project during her Chinese history lessons. She initially used Webquest for the entire unit and had students create powerpoint presentations as the culminating activity. Today, she has moved on to Glogster because it had fewer limitations for her and for her students. I loved the concept of the virtual museum and I think my students would be equally intrigued by an activity like hers.

As I dream, though, of creating digital projects with my students, I feel slightly overwhelmed. How do teachers find the time to create the Webquest and then how did she decide whether to use Glogster versus Moodle versus a Wiki? Jean had some advantages in that her technology teacher, Robin, seemed to co-teach or at least cross plan with her on this assignment. With all the other demands placed on teachers today, there is so little time to plan cross curricular assignments. Interdisciplinary work has definitely taken a backseat to all of our meetings and MCAS demands. I am hopeful that I will find the time to create small steps towards creating a project like Jean and Robin's. However, I also realize that 21st Century Skills, if it becomes a priority, will require release time for teachers of all disciplines to collaborate and create.

The Wizard of Apps

2009-12-17T07:50:00.002-05:00

After watching Kim Confino's keynote, I was drawn to the Wizard of Apps. Since so many of you have already commented in such detail on Kim's piece, I will comment on Joyce Kasman Valenza's "Wizard of Apps." Joyce creatively had several students dress as characters from the Wizard of Oz and she eventually showed up as Glinda, the good witch. While I doubt that I will be dressing up in costume for my students anytime in the near future, I thought the introduction certainly caught people's attention.

As Dorothy sang about leaving good digital footprints and creating a PLN, I was thinking about how important it is for students to learn about the ethics of the the digital world. Many of the parents may be too busy or too clueless about their child's digital experiences to know what is out there. How do we teach how to become "good digital citizens?" In our already compact schedules, does something need to go or will we be adding more time? Who will teach this information? If it isn't assumed by a specific department, don't we risk teaching the same things over and over or missing some components???

The websites that Joyce mentioned pipl.com, 123people, and that'snotcool.com all have merits for demonstrating to students what their digital footprint looks like. So many students in middle school probably do not consider what comments or pictures they post on Myspace or Facebook as being an issue when they go years from now to apply to college or to apply for a job. We have enough of an issue trying to stress that they need to learn study strategies and good habits for high school....

Issues of ethical behavior on the web develop every year, though, at this level. Whether it be the recent news story about the Facebook page suggesting that students hurt an assistant principal or the many bullying issues that occur in cyberspace or students that post inappropriate pictures of themselves online or text them to "friends." No school is immune and I fear that we may already be behind. Many of the students believe that they know more than we do about the web. They find ways to get past the school filter and get into Facebook or text one another. How can we educate them while expanding their uses of the digital world? How do we teach them to be good digital citizens? How do we stress good, healthy collaboration where students "question, create, and invite" rather than the dark side of the digital footprint?

Kim Cofino's Keynote

2009-12-16T23:04:00.002-05:00

Hello all,

I just finished watching Kim Cofino’s “Going Global” Keynote, and many thoughts come to mind. To comment I will stick with the structure that Kim’s keynote follows. I do not dare to do anything else considering it is only Wednesday night, and I can honestly say that this week has perhaps been the most challenging, both professionally and personally, that I can recall. I will spare all of you the details.

Culture shock: I totally agree with Kim (I think I can use her first name) that mobility, customization, adaptability, blending, always being on, collaboration, responsiveness, global awareness, and flexibility are not only important skills that students and teachers should have/ obtain, but these should also be part of our new approach to education in general. Being a realist, I also look at the implications and how much change would need to take place. Possible yes; I suggest small steps. Time, training, attitude, and money will all be needed to make change occur. For example, I tried to copy a set of quizzes today and the copier needed toner. I looked around for toner and there was none available. I went to a second copier and there was no copy paper. I went to the supply room to get paper and copied the quiz. That said I needed to hand staple 92 quizzes because the stapler in the copier was not working. Forty minutes later I was done!

Convergence: In this section I listened to numerous “Third Culture Kids” discuss the mostly positive aspects of living in cultures in which they were not born. The TCK’s convinced me that they were more global, and better able to “walk” into unknown situations than students who are more insulated. I see great value in these programs and admire families who are able to commit to these endeavors. However, I do not for one moment see the connection between living and learning in a different culture (International Schooling) and using technology to bring a student into that culture. Kim said that our students “don’t need to move around the world” to experience and obtain the same skills behaviors, and attitudes as the Third Culture Kids. I have had the privilege of studying abroad for about a year’s time. During this time I lived in Geneva, Switzerland, but traveled to about 15 different countries. I was immersed in cultures and systems that were foreign and at times scary. This experience was very life altering, ranking only behind the birth of my daughter and meeting my wife. For example, I saw the Matterhorn while having the freshest and cleanest air strike my face as I skied down to Zermatt. I sipped French wine out of a fifty-year-old oak barrel while in Dijon. I floated in the Ionian Sea and felt how buoyant I was because of the increased salinity. I do not mention these experiences to relive old memories but to illustrate the point that seeing the Matterhorn on Google Earth, Skyping with a French sommelier, and reading a blog about how cool it is to float higher up in the water, does not come close to the actual experience. Yes, having our kids become more global is important. Yes, technology is allowing this to occur. Yes, teachers need to meet this challenge. I just don’t see the connection that Kim has made in this section.

Future of Education: Kim’s suggestions are important for anyone willing to “go global” and further flatten our world. She advocates that the teacher must be “connected” first before “connecting” the classroom. Comfort is an important thing in teaching, but so is growth! Personally, I am to busy right now to judge the merits of spending more time away from my personal relationships versus spending more time creating relationships that are processed through tiny bits of data.

Simple thoughts from a simple man!

Class wiki is taking off!

2009-12-16T23:02:00.004-05:00

Wow -- My fifth-graders, at least some of them, are apparently more Internet-savvy than I had realized. They LOVE the wiki (or at least, the ones who are being the most vocal, right now, love it). Some kids are logging on right away to do assignments that aren't due for a couple of days -- always a good sign! And, they're figuring out (or maybe someone at home is showing them) ways to to things that I haven't taught them. For example, I asked the kids to try out five games of their choice on Johnnie's Math Page, and then to either write a review of one of the games or post a comment on which of the "engaging leads" (posted by their classmates on one of our English Language Arts pages) most makes them most want to read the associated book. On the page for reviewing math games, the first kid to post included links to the games he was describing, and the second kid included the actual picure icon of the game as her link!

The students are already devloping their/our own "norms" for posting on our wiki, by a sort of group osmosis process. When I asked them to comment on each others' posted leads, many students wrote their comments in color (also not something I had shown them). It works so well to distinguish the leads from the comments, that I changed the rest of the comments to colored text and wrote a post suggesting that we all adopt that idea for the wiki. (The colors also add interest to the page.) It's really cool that that idea came originally from the students, just following each others' example!

Here's the link to the kids' leads and comments on them:
http://dkinneyclass09-10.wikispaces.com/Engaging+Leads

So far, I am steering clear of inviting the kids to post on anything that might get them mad at each other. For example, I thought about having them post reflections on the process of writing their myths in small groups, but then decided that that would just be inviting hurt feelings since some of the groups did have to work through some conflicts, and there might still be some lingering resentment in some cases. (Did I already mention this part in an earlier post?)

Anyway, I'm thrilled with how this is going, so far! The kids who are posting comments to each others' leads are obviously reading each other's leads, and in evaluating which they like best I know they're really thinking about them. The kids who are posting math game reviews are evaluating what makes a good learning game for them -- it's great that they're thinking actively about whether or not they're necessarily learning anything from some of the "fun" games.

Yay, wiki!

Kim Cofino Conference

2009-12-16T20:43:00.003-05:00

Culture Shock

I wonder if after moving around so many times, even though the culture shock still exists, if each new time becomes easier to get over it. Even though the "shock" might be based on something new, what you take away from experience, and what you learn from it, should help you recover from each new shock you encounter in a new environment.

I also hadn't really realized or really thought about the families or teachers in other countries aren't necessarily immersed in the culture - that they live semi separated from the culture as a whole.

"Always On"
Kim spoke of online learning being necessary for today's life style. Having access to curriculum at all times helps facilitated the learning that we expect to happen. I think that Sharon has made a good step in that direction with the implementation of Moodle at the middle school and high school level.

Although we have the "always on" model with moodle, what I do think we are missing is the collaboration piece. I think that it is daunting to think of how to "manage" it with our students. Moodle does have a wiki piece, however I haven't ventured out to work with it and the students yet.

"No one in Asia hesitates to incorporate technology into their lives when it is useful." This is a key point that we should focus on - when it is useful. I am not someone to fall into gimmicks easily. I need to see the value proven and proven again. I can't stand wasting my time on something that I do not see is useful and is the best way to get something done.

Personal Learning Network
I have found one of the things that is frustrating to me is that I feel that I am the only person in the middle school world who is teaching what I am teaching with my 8th grade in the way that I am doing it. I've tried to reach out and find blogs and twitter posts that relate to ArchiCAD in the middle school curriculum, but I am only able to find things related to high school or higher education. This is very frustrating.

More thoughts on Kim Cofino's Presentation

2009-12-15T08:25:00.000-05:00

I just watched Kim Cofino's presentation, and there were some points that stood out to me.

1. She notes that schools need to change more quickly and be more adaptable. I am wondering how this will happen. I don't disagree with what she is saying on that topic, but being more adaptable costs MONEY. I think about our situation here in Sharon. I know so many creative teachers who are up to date on all of the new technologies that are out there for communication, social networking, presenting, and more. We want to implement these technologies in our classrooms because they are so beneficial for student learning. For example, I really wanted to do a podcast activity as an assessment for one of my classes. I thought, "hey, this really gives power to the students to create a platform to present and discuss their ideas about what we have been studying." Unfortunately, earlier in they school year, when we were using the laptop carts to work on a PowerPoint project, the problems that the students encountered really hindered the success of the project. They were able to get it done, but rather than the technology making our lives easier, it was frustrating because of all of the issues that arose with the functionality of the computers. It made me nervous about trying to do something with podcasting, a technology that less of them are familiar with than they are with PowerPoint. I really hope to implement this in the future, but I don't want to lose the educational benefit/time for students to learn when we are trying to do this... technology should make life easier, not harder in my opinion.

2. On the topic of change and adaptability, again, with money being the issue, another thought came to my mind. I, and the majority of other teachers that I work with at the high school, use our own personal laptops at school because we want to implement these 21st century skills the best that we can. I would not be able to do that nearly as easily without my personal laptop, especially because I travel from classroom to classroom during the day. I know that many districts provide their teachers with laptops. I have friends who work in towns where this is the case. Unfortunately this does cost money, and schools have so many issues to address, so this may not be the first priority. But when Kim discusses adaptability and change, I think that providing teachers with the tools that they need is really important and it directly impacts student learning if the teacher is supplied with the best tools.

3. One other thing that stood out to me was how Kim mentioned that there is a "fear of new technology" that exists amongst some teachers. I definitely see this. I was reading an earlier post on this blog about iPhones in the classroom, and I was thinking of how fearful some teachers can be when discussing this topic (although not in this class :). I myself was thinking of how useful my iPhone is-- I can enter my attendance on it when I'm not near the computer, I can post on my wiki... lots of conveniences. I'm not sure whether they should be given to students necessarily, but it is something to think about. Regardless, students have embraced smartphone technology. The pace at which they have done so has surpassed many adults, although many adults are catching up. As teachers, we need to meet students at a certain level and instead of shunning or making certain technological tools taboo, we need to continue to define when, where, and how they should be used. They have both benefits and risks, but we cannot ignore the benefits because we fear the risks.

Overall, I think certain aspects of Kim's presentation definitely resonate. I do agree with dkinney about the criticisms of what Kim says. I worry about the time that we spend on the internet (doing all of the things that dkinney mentions and more) and not having face to face time with other people. I find myself constantly online (not necessarily by choice) and wishing I could just shut my computer and sit on the couch and hang out with my boyfriend when I get home and relax. Everything is online and I like that... but we are human beings who need interpersonal connections. You can't hug someone or shake their hand through a computer. Blogging is great (although I can't see myself doing it outside of this class), but you miss the intonation in people's voices when you simply look at text. I love learning about new technology, but I never want to lose sight of the importance of real, live people and community... the idea that Americans are "bowling alone" (according to Robert Putnam) has disappeared due to online communities, but I also think that it has been emphasized in cases where people don't embrace REAL communities as well.

Kim Cofino's talk

2009-12-14T23:03:00.004-05:00

I just listened to Kim Cofino's keynote address for the online conference. It was interesting, but I did not find it inspiring. (Throughout this course, I've found the practical aspect of learning how to use new tools more interesting than the philosophical parts.) It did make me think that if I were just starting out in my career, or had started teaching early enough to retire younger than I'll be able to, it might be fun to teach in an international school for a few years. If I didn't have a spouse and child (and I'm very glad I do :-) ), it might be an exciting alternate path to spend my life living in different places in the world and teaching in international schools. I wouldn't do it with a child, though (even if it would work for my husband's career, which it wouldn't). I understand that Kim Cofino sees lots of benefits to being a "third culture kid", but I see mostly a lack of comforting roots, and the danger of potentially not learning to make close personal connections, in putting a child through a lifestyle of frequent moves. (I know you can be a "third culture kid" without moving more than once, but to some extent the part that sounds potentially interesting to me, as an adult, would be moving every 7 to 10 years or so, to radically different places each time. I wouldn't want to put a child through that, even though Cofino presents that sort of thing as a positive.)

I found it a bit of a stretch when Kim Cofino said something like, "These experiences [like what third-culture-kids have] can now be available to anyone through meaningful Internet projects and connections."

Kim Cofino suggests that teachers prepare to be able to give kids experiences of global connectedness by first developing their own PLNs (Personal Learning Networks). The six steps she recommends trying, in this order, are (1) to use an RSS reader to be able to "learn by lurking" without needing to respond; (2) to join education-related Nings; (3) to begin to develop an online persona by starting a blog; (4) to use Skype to connect with people more personally; (5) to participate in online conferences (either downloaded like this one, or synchronously through, for example, Second Life), and (6) to use Twitter to further build your social/professional network, expand your interests, and make more real-time connections with people.

Most of these suggestions are things I do not wish to do. I have no desire to spend enough time online to need to get information through an RSS reader. Double-plus-likewise for joining a Ning!!!!! I don't anticipate spending much time blogging once it's no longer required for this course -- I don't see how I could justify continuing to take the time away from my family, friends, physical exercise, etc. for that. I've tried Skype and don't like it; it makes me feel like I'm talking through a tunnel. Online conferences seem OK, at least asynchronous ones -- I like the Internet as a source of searchable information. As for Twitter, while I can see how it could expand someone's interests and knowledge of what's available, I'd much, much rather spend my time searching purposefully for information that I already know I want.

As keeps happening with a lot of the philosophical part of this "web 2.0" stuff, I find myself more and more aware of how much I value right-here, in-person (or over the phone) connections. Our society has for quite some time been changing in ways that make it harder and harder to develop and maintain close in-person connections. No wonder lots of people want to build social and professional networks with people far away -- nothing has to change in those relationships if you or they move, for example! I really feel the time pulled away from family and local friends, though, and I don't see any degree of global connectedness ever making up for that.

This past Saturday evening an old, close friend came over. We've been friends for almost 25 years and lived near each other in three towns in two states, but in recent years we've seen each other infrequently despite living only ten minutes apart. The reasons include her work schedule and the fact that our children are very different ages, but still, a big part of what's been making me too busy to get together this fall is my spending lots of time online. In the final analysis, I'd far, far, far rather spend a couple of hours talking with my close old friend in my living room, than developing a social network with people around the world!

Giving students a voice

2009-12-14T22:59:00.000-05:00

In my last post, I discussed giving students more credit for their ideas and pre-existing knowledge when it comes to technology. Now, my next task is to give students more of a voice when it comes to their technology use and possibly how they'd like to use technology in the classroom. As many of us have already discovered, students are much more technology-savvy than we can even comprehend, and they may have great ideas of how to use technology that we haven't yet thought about.

Last week, I was considering having my student fill out a brief survey about their personal technology use. I hadn't decided on the range of questions and answers I hoped to gain from the survey, but, thinking I might have time to put something together by the afternoon, I wrote "technology survey" on the bottom of the agenda.

As it turned out, I did not have time to formulate survey questions, so that item on the agenda was erased. However, at least ten students who had read the agenda were inquisitive about what the "technology survey" was all about, and even if we didn't have time that day to do it, could they complete it another day. Their interest, based solely on the fact that the survey had something to do with technology amazed me. And it wasn't just a handful of kids from the same table group asking, it was multiple students throughout the day expressing their excitement.

Eventually, I am hoping to survey my students on various aspects of technology, mainly to find out what they currently use at home, and what they would like to see used in the classroom. However, I am waiting until I can come up with questions that will be purposeful and school-related. For example, one idea for a question that I initially had was to ask students the top 5 websites they visit on a regular basis. However, after further consideration, there are some questions that I may not want to know the answers to (i.e. It doesn't really impact me or the classroom if a student shares that he or she has a facebook page and spends 2-3 hours on it per week, but if said student's parents don't know about the facebook page, it would be uncomfortable information for me to know).

So-I am welcome to ideas and suggestions of ways to get students involved in the conversation. I am more and more interested in what they already know, what they are interested in, and what they would like assistance learning more about. If you have any ideas of helpful questions I could ask or other ways to begin the discussion, please let me know. My current focus revolves around internet use, but I'd be open to expanding the part of the survey/discussion to other aspects of technology.
[Ideally, it would be nice to just have an open conversation/discussion, but it would also be helpful to have written answers and some concrete data to work from.]

Wiki homework

2009-12-14T22:04:00.003-05:00

Today I experimented with assigning homework on my wiki. We've been studying effective leads off-and-on throughout the fall, and I had previously gathered examples written by their classmates to share with the class. Today I posted some of those on the wiki, in categories, and assigned the students to find a lead that they really liked and type it into the wiki in the category that fit best. My two main goals were, first, to get them to think about the VARIETY of types of leads that can be engaging (since too many of them were writing question leads -- more interesting than just restating the prompt in their first sentence when writing to a prompt, but less and less interesting if too many people take that approach for a given assignment), and, second, to expose them to more good leads by having them posted publicly. (I was hoping that the kids, like me, wouldn't be able to resist reading what their classmates had posted.) It's 10:00 pm, now, and half the class has posted. Pretty good for the first time, I think! (We'll work out the glitches tomorrow. I know not everyone has computer access, and I told the class we'd work something out, but that still leaves about 7 or 8 kids who "should" have posted by now but haven't. Still, I'm really happy to see 13 student posts there to start with!)

My other motive was to experiment with ways of using the class wiki as a teaching tool, and ways of having students interact online without ending up in a quagmire of hurt feelings, etc. This sort of limited interaction, with a very clear academic focus, felt like a good place to start. I DO feel that posting on the wiki added a dimension beyond what we would have gotten without it -- some students will read each other's posts while puting their own up, and also when we share the results tomorrow in class, they'll be easy to display on the overhead projection screen.

PictureTrail (Nifty tool; used it in my class wiki)

2009-12-13T16:02:00.003-05:00

A few sessions ago, Dennis had posted a bunch of examples of teachers using blogs with their classes. One third-grade teacher had included some pictures in her site in really nifty ways, using a tool called PictureTrail. (You can find it by googling it. I think it's just www.picturetrail.com)

I put pictures of 20 of my students' marionette puppets (for the myths project that we're doing) on a page of my class wiki. They're in a really neat rotating picture cube! (The cube turns, and periodically features one picture in a close-up, and also automatically cycles through all 20 pictures even though there would, of course, only be room for 6 on a real photo cube.) You can see it by clicking on the title of this post. Once in a while it has trouble loading; try refreshing the page if so. Usually it works well.

One potential dificulty: In 31 days, my account will automatically downgrade to a more basic level unless I pay for it. This might not be a problem, or it might be -- I haven't found a list of which features will disappear when the account downgrades, so I don't know whether my picture cube will vanish at that point, or not! (Interesting business model. There's a little bit of a "bait and switch" feel to this ploy, which I don't really appreciate. On the other hand, the things the site lets you do to display and share pictures really are very cool. I might even consider paying for it -- which is exactly how they want their bait and switch tactic to work, of course! I still wish that they had an clear, easy-to-find list of which features disappear when an initial free account downgrades to a "more basic" free account after a month. There might still be some very nice options available, for free -- I don't know.)

One more interesting issue, that maybe someone reading this can help me with: When I first looked at those example blogs that Dennis had posted, I put comments and links to some I really liked in my own blog so that I could find them easily, later. When I was trying to remember the name "Picture Trail" Iwent looking there. My comments led me easily to the right link -- but, of course, it was an ACTIVE link, so clicking on it took me to that third-grade teacher's CURRENT blog post, not to the earlier one where I'd seen the Picture Trail stuff! I looked around in her blog's previous posts a bit, but didn't find it. (In the end, I just remembered the name "Picturetrail" on my own.) I understand from the course readings a few sessions ago (on searching using current links versus cached versions) that what happened is that I was sent to the current post rather than the one I actually wanted. What I DON'T know how to do (for the future) is to make my own "cached version" of a blog entry, so that I can link to the actual post I wanted to remember, rather than the person's current blog. Anyone know how to do that?

Global Education

2009-12-13T14:27:00.003-05:00

I came on here to write about the keynote address for the on-line conference we watched last week, and ended up reading my classmates entries here. An awful lot of us are really finding exciting ways to use 2.0 resources in our classrooms and it was great to read about so many projects--and realize that there are so many of you out there who can help me when mine gets to the stage where I'm actually using it with students.

This is what I found exciting--real projects, conducted in real public school classrooms with the actual resources I'll have to use. This is also what I found lacking in the presentation, although I agreed with every bit of it theoretically.

I'm not sure how many of you have read Bloomability by Sharon Creech. It is a kind of "grow where you're planted " tale, set in an international school in Switzerland. I loved the book when I read it and think working in an international school would be pretty amazing. But it is a little like Disney World. In many ways, it isn't real.

The speaker used aspects of Asian Culture to describe what schools need to do. I travelled to China with Primary Source several summers ago, and could recognize the qualities she cited both in the culture and in terms of school success. She made some excellent and interesting points. But to use a culture to school comparison without discussing the actual education in that culture is a serious disconnect. China, for example, supports free education only through grade 6. I was able to visit a subsidised school during my stay in china and found cinder block walls with room for 40 children who sat on benches at tables. 21st century techniques, such as collaborative learning or student centered projects were completely non-existant. Their computed lab had only painting and typing programs. There was no internet access.

So obviously, international schools, which use Westerm models and are filled mostly with people not native to that land, speak to an advantage had by some which the majority in a nation do not share. This doesn't make them bad places--they are probably wonderful places--but this issue of advantage and elitism can't be ignored.

I agreed completely with the gift of Global awareness being gained by these students--even from the safety of their schools. I was lucky enough to have some of these advantages myself. My parents took me to Haiti in grade 7, and I saw how incredibly little some people in the world have. I had to deal with my feelings of guilt over having so much--and be impressed by how some could do so much with so little. I got a true understanding that many parts of the world are not "safe". Our brakes were cut by people who wanted us to hire them as drivers. When passing the presidential palace, a taxi driver stopped and hurried us out of the car to stand at attention because the military band began playing. He was cleary afraid. I had never sensed this in the United States. I spent a summer in Sicily with the Experiment in International living in 1979. This experience was too amazing to go into too much here. But my point is, that I see the value of Global awareness.

I am frustrated when some of our students whose families have the resources choose to spend the money on "safe" and "fun" vacations such as Disney or cruises. There is nothing wrong with either of these--the cruise is yet to come--but Disney was fun. But I think more can be gained through travel which challenges our assuptions about the world. I appreciate the point made in the address that learning about other cultures helps one learn about one's own culture and oneself. Sometimes to learn, a level of discomfort is necessary. In some cases, it is healthy to ask, why do I have so much, while these people have so little?When I traveled to China, a man came up to me in a museum and asked me if I was rich. I answered, "Not in the United State", because I am rich compared to 90% of the people in China.

I've been actively trying to find a pen pal project with Egypt for a project on current day Egypt with my class. I've tried epals, a contact at the middle eastern resource center, flat classroom, ilearn, ($100.00 to join--and that doesn't guarentee a project...), joined a Global ning... None of this seems to be helping. I do plan to try another burst of leads--I have some in mind and welcome other--but may need to shift directions. These networks aren't really helping me so far.
But seeing what the rest of you have done in real classrooms. That is very helpful.

Publishers Weekly Best of 2009

2009-12-13T11:48:00.002-05:00

Here's a list from Publishers Weekly of the best books of 2009. I always like to take a look at the "best of" lists to see what I've read, what I've missed, and what surprises me. Generally what surprises me is how much I've missed. Oh well. Haven't had much of chance to read these last few months...

IPHONES in the classroom

2009-12-11T08:17:00.004-05:00

Last week in class, I was in the #1 group and we examined the technology piece. One of the technologies was the IPHONE. When I saw think link on Safari this morning, I realized that some places are already piloting the IPHONE in the classroom. Some of us keep hoping to get a few extra computers in our classrooms for research and writing, but perhaps we will be bypassing the computers and heading straight for phones. I wonder how high schools and college/universities are able to set limits on the uses of cell phones in the classroom. For example, do students still try to text and cheat? Are students using the technology to anonymously bully other students in the classroom? How do we take the benefits of mobile technology and eliminate the problems?

Even if we get past any potential issues, who provides the IPHONES to every student? Will students be expected to have one when they enter or will the schools be purchasing them? What happens if one student loses it? forgets it? breaks it? I think it is an exciting possibility that we could create a new immediate technology if it could be distributed equally and limits were set to protect students from abuse.

Giving the students more credit

2009-12-06T18:44:00.000-05:00

Last week, I realized just how eager students are to learn and appropriately use technology.

First, a student of ours sent an Animoto get-well video to the other teacher on my team, who had been out sick for a few days. This was amazing to me, as I was so excited to learn about Animoto and teach students about it. Little did I know, many of them already know about it and were using it proficiently!!

Second, I showed my math classes a "who wants to be a millionaire" game that was great to review material. I actually linked the them to the site by creating a sharetabs page, which was really helpful. However, if I had to do it again, I would rethink what I named my sharetabs page because I chose sharetabs.com/?spak, and once you create a page, (unless I'm missing something) you cannot go back to edit or add links.
That being said, I was also pleasantly surprised to recognize that at least 5 students logged back onto the sharetabs to access the game I posted after class was over. (You are able to see how many times a page has been viewed)

Finally, I gave my students a writing assignment where they were required to write about their idea of a utopia, and several students opted to create videos for "extra credit." Although I wasn't planning on offering extra credit, I was so excited about the intrinsic motivation for learning/creativity/use of technology, I decided to encourage the projects and was very pleased with the results.

So, in summary, the terrific realization of the week is that I really should include my students in more discussions and activities using technology. Although some of them have demonstrated otherwise, the majority of them are eager to learn, and just as ready to explore the the web 2.0 tools as I am.

Class wiki update with glog (click here to see)

2009-12-05T21:37:00.004-05:00

Following Suzanne's inspiring example, I have now successfully created a glog and embedded it as the home page of my classroom wiki! I've even set up links within it that match my menu choices in the wiki (although if you click on the links within the glog instead of on the menu bar, it opens up a whole new window rather than just jumping directly there).

It was fun to do, but it took many hours. I'm still thinking of making glogs with students -- maybe have each kid make a book poster with links to character traits of the main character, backed up by evidence, examples, and quotes from the book. I'm not quite as happy with the final results of my glog as I expected to be, though -- it's just not as exciting as I thought it would be to look at, partly because it does not fill the screen unless you right-click and tell it to (in which case you can't see all the glog elements, any more). In fact, when I first embedded my glog into my wiki it seemed WAY too small. I changed the dimensions in the embed code to half again as large, which helped, but what would help more with the whole impressiveness thing would be to turn the page to a landscape orientation, which I haven't seen any information on how to do, or if it's even possible. Any suggestions, anyone?

Of course, it took all of my free time today to do this, so now I really need to spend tomorrow on other things!

How change student account names in glogster?

2009-12-05T16:36:00.001-05:00

Does anyone who's experimented with glogster know whether it is possible to change the names on student accounts? (They are generated with very random, hard-to-remember userids.) I see how to change the passwords, but not the names.

Great glogging tutorial

2009-12-05T16:31:00.003-05:00

I followed Suzanne's original link to check out glogster. Haven't actually made a glog yet, but I found this powerpoint tutorial REALLY clear and easy to follow. (I wanted to post the link before I accidentally clicked away and lost track of it. The link is in the title of this post.) It's all screen shots with arrows and explanatory notes, so you don't have to watch a video or be tied to the pace of a video tutorial.

Yay Class Wiki!

2009-12-04T21:23:00.011-05:00

On Tuesday wikispaces.com approved my request for an upgrade to a free Plus account for K-12 teachers. This made my wiki ad-free (although I think it already was), and allowed me to set up accounts for my fifth-grade students without needing to submit email addresses for them. I set the accounts up very easily on Tuesday night (just by making a two-column spreadsheet of usernames and passwords and then following a few easy and well-guided steps), and on Wednesday I introduced my students to the wiki. They used it in class to work on editing the myth puppet show scripts that they have been writing in small groups. That went very well.

Then, today (Friday) one of my students mentioned that she had, on her own initiative, gone on to the wiki from home and continued working on her group's script in the evening. Wow! Yay!!! That's exactly the sort of thing that I was hoping would happen, but I never expected it to happen so soon or so spontaneously!

A wiki really turns out to be the perfect tool for this particular project. Groups had already written a first (and in some cases second) draft of their scripts, and most were already typed up. It was easy to upload the ones that were already typed, and easy for me to type in the ones that weren't. I found the editor a little bit annoying when working on the ones that had been uploaded from pre-existing files -- the cursor often jumped to a different place than where I wanted it when I would first start editing a page. The kids haven't complained about this at all, though, so either it isn't happening as much as I'd thought, or it isn't bothering them enough to mention to me.

The wiki is not only a good collaborative tool for this group writing project, it's also a great management tool. Before, I had folders (the manila kind, riding around in my backpack every day) full of script drafts. Some had been typed at school, some by me at my house, and some by kids at their houses. It was hard to keep track of which script was at which stage of editing, and hard to figure out how we were ever going to find time to finish the project. I thought about putting all of the files into the Shared folder on our school's server, which would also have collected them in a central place and allowed all of the kids and me to access them freely -- but only at school. I don't have that kind of time at school, to type in drafts and check students' editing -- I only have time to do that in the evenings and on weekends. And, YAY again, the wiki allows me to do just that, while also allowing the students to access and work on their files easily from school or home!

I typed up instructions for accessing the wiki and editing pages, and had each child glue them inside his / her homework planner. That's working great -- they've brought the planners to the school library, computer lab, and mini-lab, both with and without me, and easily followed those instructions to use the wiki.

One of my groups (actually it's kind of amazing that it's just one, at this age) has had some conflicts around two different kids really wanting to own their group's story. One useful "safety" feature of the wiki is that with the Show Page History option, if they ever argue over who's made what changes to their story and whether or not that's fair I'll be able to track that information down very easily.

(After all of the scripts are done, students are going to make or find background scenery either in KidPix or by drawing their own and scanning it into the computer. They'll use KidPix Slideshow to record their scripts, so that they can concentrate fully on manipulating their marionettes during the actual performance. For the performance, we'll lower the Smartboard (or whatever it's called) screen in the Computer Lab as far as it goes, and project the background scenery onto it. The stage is a refrigerator box (that size, anyway), which will be in front of the screen and covered with a black sheet. The kids will stand on chairs on either side of the box to manipulate their puppets. Hopefully we'll then film the whole thing, and I'll be able to post it on the wiki. We'll just have to be careful not to film the puppeteers themselves, in the couple of cases where parents haven't given permission for their kids' pictures to be posted.)

What's next for the class wiki after this project? I'm thinking of trying a "Choose Your Own Adventure"-style book with my kids, on the wiki (sort of like a hypertext book)! I've been doing a paper version of this project with kids for years, off-and-on. It's a high-interest project that the kids love. I'm thinking that on the wiki it could be pretty free-form, with each student adding as much or as little as he/she wishes since the need for tight pre-planning is so much less than with a pencil-and-paper version. I could use it for practice writing and punctuating dialogue if I make it a requirement to include some dialogue on each page of the story. Or I could do the same things with adverbs, or with strong verbs, or multi-sensory descriptions. Then, kids who are interested could experiment with me to find ways of using different tools to illustrate or add sound to some of the pages. This could be a very cool next project! :-)

P.S. - I tried to make the title of this post link to my class wiki page. I'm not sure if it will work. If it does and you choose to follow the link, please explore beyond the first page (which is nothing much, right now) to the Myths Project page, where the kids are working on their scripts. It still won't look like much, but there's lots of great student work going on, there!

Student Tech Assessment

2009-12-03T15:54:00.003-05:00

Students in the 8th grade have been participating in an assessment of their technology skills based on the NETS standards. It is a 60 question test containing questions that range from appropriate online etiquette to how to carry out specific skills in Microsoft Office products.

The results are starting to come in, and they are not surprising to me, however, the students are surprised. On average, only 3 - 4 students per section (of 20 - 26 students) are receiving a passing score of 80 or above.

This goes back to my belief that students are good at what they do - Facebook, gaming, social networks, and therefor believe that they are proficient users of technology. However, when it comes down to the skills we have been working on in this class, they are not proficient or even aware of what these things are.

They were surprised by their scores and expressed that they believed they would do much better on it than they did. I told them that their goal would be to show improvement when we take the assessment again in the fall.

We are continuing to analyze the data that is coming in. The results will become useful for giving us direction for the future of our curriculum.

Google Wave!

2009-12-03T13:46:00.002-05:00

So with all of the talk about Google Wave, I am very excited to report that I was just invited by Google to join the beta version! I logged in, but now I'm not so sure what to do with it. I know that it allows users to incorporate text, photo, video, and more, all into communications in real time.

In some ways I see this as an online tool that may be able to expand upon the discussion capabilities of the wiki. The discussion aspect of the wiki is kind of limited in terms of the types of media one is able to embed and the sophistication allowed in doing so. What would make this usable in the classroom is if everyone had a gmail account in order to utilize all of google's capabilities.

One other area of Google's that I think is useful is Google News. An idea that literally popped into my head this minute is how it can be used for students to follow current events topics. As I've mentioned, on my wiki, I have students following current events "hotspots." Google News allows users to customize their pages to show them news on specific topics. This would be pretty convenient for students to decide exactly how their news is aggregated as they follow a specific topic. I think I'll share this with them tomorrow...

From what it sounds like, Google is going to keep people's attention, and more of their tools are going to be used by teachers. I am looking forward to see what is next...

Creating a "symphony" for students

2009-12-03T11:26:00.003-05:00

Susan and our librarian pointed out an interesting article in today's Boston Globe South section. It discussed a class of sixth graders who are writing poetry on a Wiki. The teacher describes the Wiki as an equalizer for students since "even the shiest [student] is empowered to post work on line and is participating in classroom exchanges." The teacher feels it is an "equalizer."

I found this article very interesting and I like the idea of getting more out of a shy student in this forum as well as teaching students that there is a use of words on line that isn't about Facebook postings and texting. However, I still want to see educators pushing the shy student to participate in classroom exchanges in person and to present because it is not realistic that students will never be interacting in person with others. We need to use the online forums as an additional tool not as a substitute tool for the activities that work in the classroom.

Twitter #1

2009-12-02T11:31:00.003-05:00

This article covered a list of technology sites including the top ones for 2009. Twitter was #1. Seems amazing for something that was only created back in 2006. However, it makes you wonder how quickly it will fall. What will be the next Twitter? And do some people ever get turned off by the saturation of technology. A friend on Facebook wants me to join Google Wave but I don't know that I have the time and energy to devote to yet another online site so I haven't investigated it. Perhaps on Thursday, I can set aside some time....

But back to Twitter, it still amazes me. I am not sure if I will continue to use it after this class. It seems like a place for people to create inbound buzz on their beliefs, policies, or businesses. I still don't know that I have the time to tweet just to tweet.

Orkut

2009-12-02T09:20:00.003-05:00

Was reading a current article in Upfront magazine, which the New York Times puts out for kids. Unfortunately, I cannot link it because their site is still showing the previous issue. The article that caught my eye, though, dealt with Brazil and the 2016 Olympics. In it, though, they talked about how this choice was signaling a change in Brazil's economic status and a growth in their middle class. There are several quick photos of teens with little profiles in which they talk about their favorite shows, activities, music etc. They all social network on Orkut, which is a Brazilian version of Facebook. One also belongs to Twitter, but the need to network socially has become such a global phenomena.

Started the "adopt a volcano" website"

2009-12-01T21:02:00.003-05:00

I have been working on the project for the past few weeks or so. I am learning how to create a website as I venture forward. One step forward, one step back. I love how the website is going to be organized. That said, I don't like the fact that it is so static and does not allow for much student collaboration within the site. Any suggestions for the site? adopt a volcano

Oh ya, the bad side...

2009-12-01T19:10:00.002-05:00

Read this Time article about how people are using the internet in not the nicest of ways. The article talks about how colleges are dealing with the sites that spew nothing but rumors and gossip and the long-term effects these sites have. One administrator referred to these gossip sites as nothing more than an, "electronic bathroom wall."

Part of the problem is that the internet allows for faceless, made up names to sully the reputations of people. I think in this age of 'awareness' the fact that this type of libel and slander can occur is unfortunate.

Animoto Uses???

2009-11-30T09:14:00.003-05:00

Has anyone figured an Animoto use for the classroom? I am thinking about using it for one of my classes as a way to share their photos of their Latin American country if they can embed it within their text. Personally, I loved creating one for my relatives with pictures of my own children. I could see students really enjoying creating these, but I just want to make sure that it makes sense educationally....

Summarizing with Wordle

2009-11-25T10:16:00.002-05:00

During social skills groups this week students practiced expressing appreciation. We created a wordle to summarize our lists of people and things in our lives that we are thankful for. This is definitely a practical application of technology to enhance learning in the classroom.
title="Wordle: Showing Appreciation"> src="http://www.wordle.net/thumb/wrdl/1380342/Showing_Appreciation"
alt="Wordle: Showing Appreciation"
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MTA Twitter article

2009-11-24T08:54:00.003-05:00

Did anyone catch the Twitter article in the most recent MTA magazine? There was a brief article on how a union rep uses Twitter as a professional tool to keep in contact with her members in order to update the members on upcoming meetings, paycheck issues etc. In the article, she mentions that e-mail is no longer enough...I have a few questions. Are we thinking that Twitter, Ning, and some of these other sites that we have signed up for will be used solely for professional connections? At what point, do we become too saturated with technology? Can we really check Ning, Facebook, multiple e-mail accounts, Twitter, Chatzy, blogs and so on many times each day? Are we eliminating face to face contact if we are using Twitter and other devices with people that work in our same buildings? I am concerned that there may be this expectation that we use social networking for professional purposes and that it will be one additional task that overwhelms us. At what point is the technology enough or should we be choosing a limited number of technologies that actually make our lives easier not more complicated?

Finally, I still do not see a value in signing middle school students up for any of these social networks. It is already challenging for them to see a Wiki or blog as a school assignment that requires words and not abbreviations. Although students may be comfortable with social networking and may enjoy it outside of school, it does not currently have an appropriate place in the curriculum.

Do the students EXPECT too much...

2009-11-24T08:49:00.002-05:00

Catchy title, I know! Seriously though, in my opinion, students have come to expect technology in the classroom everyday AND they seem to need more to keep them engaged. In other words, because these students have experienced technology in the classroom for most of their lives they have come to expect to be "wow'ed" every day.

Using technology is great and can produce some wonderful results, but it's also very time consuming. So if i use technology once or twice a week and traditional methods the rest of the week I sometimes feel like there is a disconnect with the students. I take the time to plan fun, creative lessons and it's depressing when the students aren't as engaged as i had hoped or anticipated simply because the lesson wasn't presented in a 'technological' format.

I almost want to stand in front of the room and give them the, "Ten years ago..." speech. Of course I realize that's not the answer, but that speaks to my level of frustration. Clearly differentiation and adapting to different learning styles is key, but I still feel like the students need to be responsible for responding to ALL formats of presentation, not just the formats they find interesting.

Using technology transformatively

2009-11-21T16:09:00.040-05:00

Something that I've been thinking about, the past few weeks, is the difference between just "incorporating technology" and actually using technology to do significant, worthwhile things that couldn't have been done (or couldn't have been done as easily) before. Sometimes I feel like the idea of "using technology in the classroom" is currently at the point that "hands-on learning" was ten years ago, or that the whole-language movement was twenty (Thirty? Forty?) years ago. That is, each of these valuable techniques has passed through a stage where it is considered so valuable in and of itself that people are encouraged to use it whenever possible, without necessarily stopping to consider whether it's the best (most effective, most efficient, etc.) method for a given situation. (All three of these particular techniques share the benefit of being highly engaging, which is always worth something. All three are extremely valuable, worthwhile methods to employ some of the time. None is so good as to be the best method for every learner all the time, though, and as we've learned in the case of the other two, careful decisions need to be made as to when to use one of these techniques, when to use direct instruction, etc.)

This topic has come up in our course blog before, for example in terms of people being frustrated that some teachers seem to get "credit" for "incorporating technology" well just because they use lots of Powerpoints. To some extent the focus on "incorporating technology" for its own sake is built right into our Curriculum Standards, in the form of a list of suggested technology applications for each learning standard. Sometimes the suggested web sites, etc. are great content resources for teachers or students. At other times, though, they strike me as just incorporating technology for the sake of incorporating technology. What's inherently better about making a concept web in Kidspiration than on paper, for example? (Or is it that helping kids become proficient with technology is such an overarching goal that we really should be teaching everything we possibly can that way, even if it sometimes slows down a lesson that would work just fine with pencil and paper?)

By analogy, I was thinking about the push to incoporate more writing into every subject area. When I assign writing in Math or Science, sometimes my primary goal is literacy skills (e.g., I might want kids to practice writing a compare / contrast essay, while reviewing information about types of quadrilaterals as a side bonus at the same time), but often my primary goal is the math or science content itself. On the other hand, when I plan Computer Lab activities for my students, the primary goal is almost always content reinforcement or exploration in whatever area of the curriculum (often Science, this year) I most feel the need for extra time. I choose web sites and digital tools by how much they can help students learn the Science (or whatever), and only occasionally by how much they will help them learn the particular technology skill itself.

Some of the "cool tools" that we've seen in class feel more like "fun toys" than like real learning tools, to me. My students did a fun "introducing themselves" activity that I got from a colleague at the beginning of the year, using Wordle, and last year my class did a wonderful end-of-the-year project with our Computer teacher using Animoto and pictures of themselves from kindergarten through fifth grade. I'd be unlikely to use either of these "tools" to teach or even review real content, though (even after seeing examples on each of those web sites of ways that other teachers have done so). If I did, I'd feel like I was mostly incorporating technology for technology's sake, not efficiently and effectively enhancing student learning. (Again, to me this seems like the problem of teachers doing great hands-on activities with students, without making sure that they are also "minds-on": the students are very engaged, but can miss the academic point completely. And if the particular content to be taught through a hands-on activity isn't carefully chosen, students can potentially end up spending a long time on a very minor bit of academic content.)

At the other end of the spectrum from Wordle and Animoto, are projects like the one we read about using Kiva (the microlending site). That's why I think project-based learning is so exciting -- that's an area where web 2.0 tools can be truly transformative! Personally, I find the constant push to "incorporate technology" kind of overdone -- way too much like Whole Language a generation or two ago. We need to constantly stop and ask ourselves whether technology is the best way to teach a given concept, or whether we're just trying to mentally check off the "using technology" box. When kids do significant real-world projects that they couldn't have done without web 2.0 tools, that's truly worthwhile!

What got me thinking about all this again was trying to choose a "Digital Sharing Project". I thought about creating a wiki on project-based learning, which I'm truly interested in, but other people have already done that -- it felt like reinventing the wheel. I thought about making a wiki of grade 5 curriculum resources, but the Technology teachers in each elementary building have already done something pretty equivalent. Many people were talking, in class this past Thursday, about creating a wiki that their students would contribute to. I was leary of creating huge amounts of additional work for myself in moderating that kind of activity amoung ten-year-olds, though, and also I am still unconvinced that having students of that age share their thoughts online really adds anything significant to having them share their thoughts in class. It felt too much like incorporating technology just for the sake of incorporating technology!

Finally, I realized that I've been needing a venue in which the three-person groups that have been writing myths together, can easily revise them together or take turns revising them from home or school. I also wanted to be able to see and comment on their changes right away. At first I thought of using Google docs, but it wouldn't work with kids this age because it requires email addresses. All of a sudden, a free "Plus level" teacher wiki seemed like it might be just the right thing!

This is certainly not a "transformative" use of technology. It does feel like a real purpose for my wiki, though; one that goes beyond just "incorporating technology" or finding a final project for this course. I'm glad of that.

Summary of personal learning, anyone?

2009-11-21T14:37:00.001-05:00

Find more videos like this on TeacherLibrarianNetwork

Experimenting with Glogging

2009-11-18T11:39:00.003-05:00

Last night I discovered a creative way to make posters by glogging. I plan to use this poster in my social skills class as a review of conversation roles and rules. I successfully posted this glog in my personal blog and will now make it available for our class. I wondered if anyone knows how to print a glog after it is published?

My First Glog

Check out these websites to create your own glogs.and login to glogster.

2009-11-16T22:27:00.000-05:00

I'm not sure if this is permitted in the underlying rules of blogging, but my post is going to cover many topics, so bear with me!

1. Recreational computer use vs. Required computer use
This past week, I've been thinking a lot about the various reasons we use computers, and how these uses impact each other. Sometimes, we log on to our computers with a specific purpose: to write an email to a parent, to work on grades, to take attendance, to find a resource for an upcoming lesson, to write another email to the same parent. And some of the times, the interaction ends with the specific task we sat down to do. More times than not, however, these same brief tasks are accompanied by several other open tabs, leading us to news websites, fantasy football box scores, youtube, a quick check of our online banking, facebook, personal email accounts (sometimes more than one), a retail store's website (because when we opened our email, we found a one-day-only coupon for 20% off plus free shipping!!), plus any number of other sites. And don't forget about the documents, spreadsheets, and media players opened behind those browsers! This scenario, in my opinion has taken the concept of multi-tasking to a whole new level. It goes far beyond being able to complete several things at once. The idea of having several tabs and programs open with such diverse content requires our brains to switch gears in opposite directions, sometimes at lightening-fast speeds.

My first thought about this idea of "21st century multi-tasking" is that sometimes, when I've been so focused on completing my 'required' tasks on the computer/internet, I don't even want to begin the recreational uses for the internet. This week, for example, after completing grades and extra online research about a lesson I was preparing for an observation, the thought of sitting down to the computer for personal/leisure purposes nearly gave me anxiety. All of the required uses (which are clearly piling on as we find more practical uses for the web) leave me wanting to turn off the computer and spend as much time outside, spending time with family, or doing anything that does not involve technology. In other words, the more I have to use technology, the less I want to use it for other purpose. It is becoming synonymous with work tasks that the 'recreational' uses are losing their excitement for me. Admittedly, I am still going to enjoy writing emails to friends, posting pictures, following the latest celebrity gossip on TMZ, searching for a new recipe to try, and even eagerly searching for new ways to spice up a lesson.

In order to move forward, I think I need to make an effort to separate my web-usage. I think I will enjoy the web more and even be more efficient if I don't try to conquer the 21st century multitasking.

2. Student Web Use
I suspect that while I am shying away from web browsing and online multitasking, or students are probably embracing this multitasking and absorbing themselves (and much of their free time) in exploring the web. My current group of 6th grade students are the most web-savvy of any classes I've had in the past few years. They are comfortable with email, often suggest new sites to each other during class discussions, and are even more willing to edit and revise their writing because they recognize how easy it is to do once a document is typed.

It would be interesting to spend some time discovering student opinions about their personal internet use. Do they multitask with ease? Do they feel the same pressure that I feel when balancing required web tasks and leisure-browsing? Do they recognize the practical uses for the internet, or are they too busy instant messaging and posting on each others' walls?
Regardless, I'm happy to realize that despite the fact that, as we've discussed, students to need guidance on appropriate internet use, along the way they have learned a great deal of computer fluency that has been and will continue to be beneficial in a classroom setting.

3. How Far We've Come
I am still pretty new to teachings, so I didn't expect that I'd be saying something anything like this for many years, but--- it's amazing how far technology has come since I started teaching. To think of the technological improvements that have been made in the classroom in just five short years is incredible. As an example, the fact that students (and I) get frustrated when a computer's wireless printer queue isn't set up to print to the exact printer right across the hall is incredible! Five years ago, wireless printing wasn't even a possibility, and now it's become a norm.

4. Comment on the 'Blogging on the Brink' article

The article Blogging on the Brink brings up several interesting points about the accountability of bloggers. Then, below the article, there are dozens of comments that people have posted. The irony in these comments, however, is that many of them include spelling errors, capitalization issues, and poor sentence structures. So, here are people who feel strongly enough to agree that people should be held accountable for what they blog about, yet they don't even realize the basic idea that whatever they type, regardless of its content, is also a reflection on their intelligence, writing ability, and basic knowledge of grammar!
As an ELA teacher, I may have a stronger interest in spelling and grammar than most, but as we are all reading a great deal of web content, a quick way that many of us sift out less-reliable and less-respected sources is to make snap-judgments based on typos, forgotten punctuation, and often blatant disregard for capitalization.

5. Texting (not much relation to the class content, just an interesting tidbit)

I was at a wedding this weekend, where the father of the bride mentioned in his toast how he loved his daughter and her new husband, and how it has been such a pleasure watching their love grow. "However," he added, "I could do without all the texting between you two!" This was a tiny moment that caught my attention, mainly because it seemed so out of place for texting to be mentioned at a wedding!

Blogging Standards: To have or not to have?

2009-11-16T19:20:00.008-05:00

As I signed in to my blog, contemplating the content of my post, an article about blogging standards caught my eye, "Blogging on the Brink: Time to Set Standards" (I tried to make my title link to the website, but to no avail. I'll work on that tomorrow when I am more alert.) Since I teach social skills and encourage students to take responsibility for what they say and do, I was pleasantly pleased to see that some bloggers are raising the bar when it comes to posting blogs. While some continue to take a wild west approach to blogging, there is an increasing trend towards holding bloggers accountable for their posted comments. I agree that standards are necessary for responsible blogging as opposed to an "anything goes" policy for posting.

Comments on other people's posts

2009-11-15T18:35:00.003-05:00

"Will it be harder to grade 100 blog comments or wiki projects than traditional projects and tests?" I wanted to respond to SLehr's comments on this topic.

I have thought a great deal about this. I've assigned a number of wiki projects in the past year. I've had students create wiki pages and have had to grade 25 of them at a time. That was not too difficult because I had a clear rubric for my students to begin with, as I would with any other assignment. I graded their wiki pages based strictly on that rubric. Rubrics can be invaluable.

The area where grading has been difficult has been when students are posting to a discussion. I've established criteria for discussion posts related to thought and relevance, but I still find it hard to grade those, especially when students are posting in more than one place. It can be more time consuming to grade than having students write a reflection to turn in on paper. But... the benefit is giving students the ability to see each other's thoughts and be able to discuss/comment.

Also, in response to DKinney's earlier post about books, I have some comments.

My big concern is attention span. I notice it with myself sometimes. Younger generations are more and more accustomed to gathering information in small snippets and sound bites. The question has been posed as to whether Google is making us less intelligent. I think that having access to so much information is hugely beneficial, but there is something about being deeply ensconced in a book. That level of deep concentration that leads to in depth learning and understanding. If people only think in sound bites and do not have the patience to read something that takes them more than five minutes before giving up the desire for understanding, I think that will be detrimental to our society's future.

Finally, I totally agree with your statement DKinney, about NPR and Time, and stumbling across information that you weren't necessarily seeking out. Whenever something comes on NPR that I'm not sure that I'm interested in, I often leave it on anyways. It is amazing how often my knowledge of a topic that I have heard about as a result of reading/listening to something from start to finish has benefited me in conversations.

The bottom line is that when we incorporate new technologies, we need to be sure that we are not sacrificing efficiency (in regard to grading-- technology doesn't seem useful if it makes us less efficient as teachers-- this will affect our students) and depth of knowledge (it is good to know a lot about a variety of topics, but it is also important to have depth and expertise in one or more areas).

Creativity and information literacy

2009-11-08T15:55:00.004-05:00

Our new cluster concerns creativity and information literacy. At first glance, I thought the two ideas were rather mismatched. Upon reflection, though, I can see the connection. Without information literacy, it would be impossible for the New Biology folks to share their data and grapple with some of the worlds most challenging issues. The Philadelphia school uses the resources available on the web for creative project work in which I would imagine the students must analyze and utilize data from the internet. So while the two areas are separate, the 2.0 connection can clearly be made.

So the question remains. What are the ways that we can utilize the richness of the internet to foster our students collaborative and creative abilities? Some of our table and hallway conversations have been very rich. We've considered the obstacles, both in terms of resources, but in terms of the expectations on us to "cover" material. While discussing obstacles might seem like coming up excuses for not doing more of what the school in Philadelphia does, it is necessary to identify obstacles before you can remove or modify them. These conversations need to happen.

We also need to continue our discussions about these new technologies and when they are best used. As Diana suggests, books continue to be invaluable resources--and are sometimes the best way to glean specific and trustworthy information. Do students utilize different skills when collaborating face to face vs. over the internet? Should we balance our curriculum so that both are required? Should assignments be planned with student goals in mind first--or with utilizing technology first. When I first began planning my wiki for my sharing project, I began by looking for internet resources before I'd even thought about what I wanted students to learn. Three hours into things, I realized that this was completely backwards. But when educators try something new, they need to experiment--and sometimes learn how to avoid pitfalls like the one I fell into. The use of internet 2.0 tools in schools also brings up issues of etiquette. Should students be tweeting from lectures? Adults do it all the time. Is this O.K.? Is it rude? Some discussion is needed here, and I love to have some of these conversations in class with interested educators from my district.

I would also love to see what those of you who've used wikis and moodle and other resources have already done in your classrooms. I'm sure some of you have encountered problems I'll encounter and could save me some time consuming trial and error. I hope they'll be some forum for this, in a live context, as the class continues.

Believing in Books

2009-11-08T08:05:00.028-05:00

Friday night, after I tucked my daughter into bed, I was sitting in the comfy chair in our library room across the hall from her bedroom, where I always sit and read or plan or grade papers while she's falling asleep. I was thinking about a question my students had had that day, about platypuses. So I reached one arm down next to my chair, pulled up the one-volume New Columbia Encyclopedia that I've had since I was twelve (3,000 tissue-paper-thin pages of information in tiny print), quickly and easily flipped to the paragraph on platypuses -- and found exactly what I was looking for. The Platypus article said that they shared a primitive order of mammals only with the echidna, and I was curious, so I flipped to the Echidna article and read about those primitive spiny anteaters. On that same page was a long article on Echinoderms, so I happily read for a while about starfish and sea urchins and sea cucumbers, too.

Last night, I was too tired to plan or grade or read for information (and novels generally wait for school vacations), so I reached for my favorite book of poetry -- Always A Reckoning, by Jimmy Carter. (Yes, Jimmy Carter writes beautiful, evocative poetry about things like growing up in the deep South in the 1940's, or how a flock of geese flew by and reflected city lights beautifully one night when he and his family had been searching in vain for constellations through those same city lights, from the roof of the White House.) Other nights, I might read too many selections from my large collection of Chicken Soup for the Soul books (yes, I like that sort of thing), or browse through the perceptively told anecdotes in one of Vivian Paley's books about teaching kindergarten, or one of several books on urban high schools that were excelling through the use of "best practices" before the Internet.

In the video that we watched in class, on that high school in Philadelphia that apparently relies almost entirely on project-based-learning through web 2.0 resources, a young woman (Student? Teacher?) was quoted enthusing about her school. In explaining what it wasn't, she managed to use the words "books" and "worksheets", together, twice in a row. Yes, she's just one person -- but not really, since the editors and producers of the video decided to include her comments. Apparently, they didn't mind protraying their school, for the world, as a place where people equate books with worksheets.

I hope that the students, teachers, and schools of the future, as they continue to explore and enjoy and benefit from all of the new opportunities brought by the Internet, never lose sight of the beauty and wonder of books! The web is a great place to go when you want to know a lot about a topic, but for my simple question about platypuses, a book was perfect. I found what I wanted to know quickly and easily, without having to guess which of many articles might turn out to be written by a second-grader and which might turn out to be written half in Latin by a Ph.D. researcher on monotremes. There were no advertisements, and I didn't have to follow a zillion links to find what I was looking for. I did choose to "follow a link" (turn a few pages) to learn about a related topic (echidnas). And, I did this all from the comfort of my favorite green armchair, with nothing to plug in or boot up, and no email black hole to fall into, and no feeling that as long as I was online I ought to be working on this course as well. . .

When I browsed to the article on echinoderms, on the same page as the article on echidnas, I made use of perhaps the very best feature of traditional print resources, and the one feature that I think the Internet may never be able to replicate because it either "overdoes" it or "underdoes" it. I could probably have followed links on platypuses for a long time (Too long!) on the Internet, and I'm sure they would have led me eventually to the echidna, just as my book did. The patypus links would not have led me to echinoderms, though. There is something wonderful about the way that you can stumble upon fascinating unrelated information by flipping through a reference book or wandering the shelves of a public library, that just doesn't happen yet (and perhaps never will) when you follow links or Google something or shop at Amazon.com. Similarly, when I listen to NPR or read my Time Magazine, I hear or stumble across information on topics that I'm not all that interested in -- movie reviews and pop culture stuff and such -- that I would never set up my RSS feed to send me, but that it is still nice to know at least a little bit about.

Don't get me wrong: I think the Internet is a wonderful resource! And someday, when I want to know a lot about platypuses, I'll look there. In the meantime, I really love my library room, and I hope that books always maintain an important place in our schools and our society.

21st Century Literacy

2009-11-05T16:38:00.002-05:00

At my table, we talked about how you could completely eliminate some "traditional" teaching methods. For example, can you teach decimals using technology? Do we think that we should lose the experience of examining primary source documents because students can simply google information? Will it be harder to grade 100 blog comments or wiki projects than traditional projects and tests? We all seem excited about integrating some technology into our classrooms assuming that we have consistent access to the technology, but we still aren't completely sure how we integrate it and how we grade it.

creativity/info literacy

2009-11-05T15:57:00.002-05:00

creativity is not just a manual art anymore....also a technological one. once fear is overcome, the options are not only huge but professional. literacy is not just using tools but also knowing where to find and how to access info.

did i learn how to post from the tutorial?

2009-11-05T15:38:00.002-05:00

I just watched the tutorial here at class...let's see if this post makes it to right spot....my blog....

A 21st Century Classroom

2009-11-04T22:16:00.001-05:00

This is a duplicate post. I've posted it in my own blog as well.

We have been concentrating on the technology end of what 21st century skills mean for children and teachers alike. The piece that we haven't touched on so far is what it means for a global education. How can these skills help students be more global. We know that these skills, colaborating, communication and creating, are valuable skills to build within our own classroom walls, but what about beyond the four walls. We talked about the world being "flat", so how can we use these skills on a global level? We should seek out opportunities for our students to collaborate and communicate with classrooms across the country and across the seas. These opportunities will not present themselves easily, they need to be sought out by the teacher who is willing to put the extra effort into making these experiences meaningful for the students in front of them.

In a 21st Century classroom we should not notice the technology. It shouldn't be a special day that we got the laptop carts or the special lesson that uses the interactive whiteboard. These things should be blended into the daily routine in a manner that students don't see that it is something special. It should be like taking out their notebook. We need to become as comfortable with its potential and uses as we are with our text books and whiteboard markers. Students shouldn't notice technology happening in their classrooms. They don't use technology as a special treat in their lives outside of the classroom, it should be that seamless.

21st Century Skills/Kiva Reaction

2009-11-04T18:42:00.010-05:00

When I read the Kiva article, I was impressed with what Jen was able to accomplish with her 4/5th graders, and how many things the students had learned from this project. I also realized that this type of project would be more challenging with our middle school schedule.

The question of 21st century skills reminded me of our school committee and their goals along with the goals of our superintendent.

21st Century Skills: Ensure all students are equipped with the knowledge and skills to succeed in the 21st century. These skills include communication, information processing, critical thinking (creative problem-solving), media literacy, creativity/innovation, global awareness, cultural competency (social competencies and social interactions with diverse groups), problem-solving, teamwork/collaboration (interdisciplinary curriculum), self-directed learning (project based learning) and leadership. Taken from the Sharon Public Schools School Committee and Superintendent Goals for 2009-10.

What would this learning look like in a middle school classroom?

Many of us ask our students to work in cooperative groups for various activities. The interpersonal skills students develop through their successful interaction with classmates while solving a challenge allows students to practice their critical thinking skills as well as hone in on their ability to communicate. While this type of activity could take place remotely, there is something to be said for face to face conversations. Students learn to read body language and facial cues.

The use of technology: An observation I have made in the past is when students to run to the Internet for answers, check one site (usually Wikipedia), and declare themselves done with their research. While this is all well and good, they still need a reminder that just because "facts" are in print (especially the Internet and Wikipedia - although Wikipedia for schools has been approved by MTA - http://schools-wikipedia.org/wp/index/subject.Geography.htm) - it doesn't mean they are true. It is essential for us to remind our students what reliable sources are and how to cross-check research information. With all of the digital resources available (many that our students have become incredibly proficient at) we really do become facilitators or coaches, as we help them navigate through the waters of their education.

Hopefully, as we guide our students through our curriculum we give them the tools they will need to become successful adults; learning how to think globally, be effective communicators, collaborators, and problem solvers.

Kiva Reaction/Features of a 21st C. Classroom

2009-11-04T13:25:00.004-05:00

One of the aspects of the Kiva article that particularly resonated with me was the question of appropriately using time in our classrooms with an already existing, mandated curriculum.

I'd like to think that a feature of a classroom in the 21st century, hopefully something I'm doing, is that time management and lesson planning allow for the inclusion of the skills we have been talking about. I think that the more comfortable I become with using all of these skills the more natural the planning process will be which will take the stress off of, "how do I do this?" ringing in my head.

The article we read explored the theme of 'changing the world.' For me, this is just a little bit too zealous. However, I do like to think that I am of the mindset of, "how can I impact my student's lives?" One of the ways I like to think I have an impact is through the creation of interesting lessons and discussions. Certainly, there are some days in school which will simply be rote memorization, we all know that, but there are plenty of opportunities to allow for the use of 21st. century skills. As an ELA teacher one thing I would like to bring to the classroom is the ability for my students to interact with student around the world. There are many avenues, including Skype, email, video mail, blogs, etc., which make this a possibility. At the same time, I like to remind the kids that a 'simple' letter is also still an effective tool of communication.

Many of the options we have as educators today are already things that students are comfortable with using. This, in theory, should make it a little easier for us to use the technology in our rooms.

Features of a 21st C. classroom

2009-11-04T12:57:00.003-05:00

I think that we need to pair technology with active learning. The students must see how the are connected to the rest of the world. Our study of geography can help them with the location of places but what then? They need to connect with students to understand life in these places. They need to figure out how to be less self centered and more about how they can make a difference in this world. Of course, this is no easy feat.

Given that technology has become such a huge part of all of our lives, we need to embrace the parts that make sense for our classrooms. Of course, it requires us to actually have consistent use of technology, which right now, I do not. In addition, teachers may need to be given more training time to evaluate the role of technology in their classrooms. It isn't just can I show a video or use an overhead anymore. For students to evaluate a micro-lending project, they need to be able to receive current information not out dated statistics from books. Again, this requires technology.

As much as technology plays a role, I think we don't want to diminish the role that classroom learning and collaboration can have. Friends of mine who have recently taken higher education classes have been split on how well they have enjoyed the on line classes. Many of my friends miss the classroom interaction and resent the amount of time that they are taking to "chat" on virtual blackboards about readings. Students need our guidance on issues such as innovation, global awareness, and problem solving. We cannot just rely on the technology.

Overall, I guess for me, a 21st century classroom would have technology mixed with innovative learning about the world. In all of that, there is a need for a sense of citizenship and character that would ask students to evaluate their role and ask them to solve some of the problems that exist today. I think the Kiva article tried to do that in a meaningful way.

2009-11-04T11:23:00.001-05:00

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Interesting articles from Boston Globe Magazine

2009-11-03T21:26:00.001-05:00

I came across an interesting article in the Boston Globe Magazine that, although I can't relate to on the parenting level yet, I can relate to from the teacher perspective. As we've discussed, kids often don't realize the parameters and appropriate usage of the internet, and the article highlights the fact that most of the time, they aren't misusing intentionally--they just haven't thought about it!

And truly, having nothing to do with the class, it's really a quick, entertaining article!
Too hot to handle: One dad dials back his daughter's online ID

Also, when I went online to find an electronic copy of the article, I came across this article, which brings up some interesting points....
Why an iPhone could actually be good for your 3-year-old

still trying

2009-11-03T16:48:00.002-05:00

I am still trying to figure out how to add/alter my blog. I am now thinking I should just be putting my reflections on my learning there. I AM learning, just at my own much slower pace. I still feel a need to start all over. Have found a PT ning which I have joined. I have not posted anything because I am too nervous about confidentiality and how it has my full name/where I am from. Will continue to explore. I am very frustrated by having made a typo in diigo and it not responding to delete. My study group is the best but I still feel so lost. Will continue to try to untangle myself. Next on my agenda if I ever figure out this blog posting is google reader and i reader. I already have a google reader account but can't figure out more than that.

Perpetual confusion

2009-11-03T15:51:00.002-05:00

I think I am posting to my personal gross motor development blog...here's the test to see if I am right.

Kiva Article

2009-11-02T20:45:00.003-05:00

Jen Whiffen does a great job! She uses technology as an agent, which allows her students access to more authentic learning. While her class is making differences in the lives of others, she is also instilling a sense of social awareness and global competency in her students. One wonders who gets the most out of her class. Is it her students or the recipients of the micro-loans?

She mentions that she started off small, and this project grew over the years. That said it is fairly intimidating to think of creating a project of this magnitude.
I included a Wordle picture based upon my impressions of Kiva and a 21st Century classroom.

In Respoonse to the Kiva Article

2009-11-02T20:41:00.002-05:00

I also thought that the Kiva article made me think of how useful the internet has become in allowing students to have authentic experiences as they learn some of the same things they have always been learning. As a history teacher, rather than having my students read about the conflict in the Middle East in the newspaper or in a book, we have the potential for students to have person to person contact with people their own age who are actually living in the West Bank. There is an actual program that has been discussed in my department in which a class can actually develop a relationship with a class in the West Bank-- I believe they would communicate through Skype. In addition to Skype there are so many other ways to communicate. Teens in that part of the world use Google chat/talk, Facebook, and other free and easy ways to communicate. It is pretty awesome for kids to see that there are real people associated with global conflicts-- it allows them to see important issues as being real.

That being said, I agree with what Kelley and Ruthie said about best practices. I have found myself spending way more time than is efficient doing "techie" kinds of things. Some of these things make teaching/learning easier, but some could also be done in a more low tech way that has the exact same effect. I think that we must be careful when getting excited about new technology that we truly understand it and make sure that it is worthwhile for us to be using.

Learning how to use new technological tools step by step is essential, otherwise their value will be lost and we teachers will not use them in ways that maximize their potential.

Mixed feelings about Google Reader

2009-11-01T11:58:00.000-05:00

My first experiences with Google Reader a few weeks ago were positive, but now I'm not so sure. I was originally happy with the fact that all of the posts I wanted to read were in one place. This saved me some time not having to flip-flop between sites. However, I am now finding that I think I prefer visiting specific blogs at specific times, not all at once. For example, if I am interested in seeing what Joe is up to in his Earth Science curriculum, I think I'll take the time to look solely at his site. And if I want to find out what's new with my friend who moved to Ethiopia, I'll go to her blog when I have a minute. But to see all of the diverse blogs in the same place isn't really working for me. I also found that when I went back to Google Reader after a week (during which I did visit individual sites), there were many repeats that Google Reader had marked as new that I'd actually already seen.

I imagine that as I get more comfortable with this tool, I will find that there are ways around all of the problems I'm discovering, but in the meantime, is there anyone who has found features of Google Reader that they really enjoy that I might be missing?

Willing to give it another shot if encouraged......