Moving at the Speed of Creativity

I continue to be a vocal advocate of web-based digital storytelling tools which primarily use still images and audio narration, like VoiceThread, but the growing availability of web-based video editing and animation creation environments may entice me to begin experimenting with web-based digital stories which go beyond narrated slideshows. One difficulty with all these websites is categorizing them to understand what functionalities they provide. Obviously a lot of these sites have been created primarily for entertainment, but there are lots of potential educational possibilities for some of these tools as well. In this post, I’ll attempt to categorize video websites which provide different types of remixing and editing in addition to “plain” hosting.

Before I examine different video editing and remixing website options, I’d like to reflect briefly on the importance of educational leaders modeling the use web video for their communities. YouTube may be blocked in your own local school district, but there are a few signs that user-created, web-based video is becoming more accepted in some educational environments. An example is the video page for the new president of Oklahoma State University, V. Burns Hargis, which he has used this past spring semester to directly communicate with students, parents, faculty, staff, and other college community constituents. This type of leadership and example from a university President is both refreshing and wonderful, since it provides tangible examples of the constructive ways web video can be used for learning, communication, and outreach. There may be a wealth of web video options available online, but if all of them are blocked from teacher and student access in our K-12 schools, their existence means very little during the school day. Hopefully we’ll see even more educational leaders here in Oklahoma and elsewhere follow the lead of President Hargis in demonstrating the positive ways these tools can be used for learning and constructive communication.

YouTube is currently the best-known video hosting website, but is just one of many. YouTube permits users to rate videos and comment on them, and contributors can add videos directly with their webcam or by uploading a previously created and edited video. To my knowledge, YouTube does not (yet anyway) permit online video editing. Users can reply or respond to videos submitted by others or videos they’ve previously submitted themselves, leading to hyperlinked, asynchronous, multi-node video conversations. Those are a lot of adjectives to get your head around when it comes to web videos! It’s amazing to realize these sorts of multimedia interactions have just become mainstream in the past couple of years. The wide adoption of the Flash plugin into web browsers has accelerated the dynamic growth of web video. Competing formats like QuickTime and Windows Media are still strong, but flash-based videos dominate the current marketplace for user-created and shared web videos.

Flickr has started to support video, but limits uploads to just 90 seconds and only Pro (paying) users can contribute videos. I love posting images to Flickr, and use it almost every day, but I have not yet added any videos to my account. VoiceThread has been supporting video comments for awhile now, but I haven’t tried using it yet either. YET. In our joint presentation Thursday in Richardson, Texas, titled “Web 2.0 Tools Which Can Be Used For Assessing Student Learning” (available as an archived video on Ustream) Vicki Allen shared the VoiceThread example “What Will Grow?” At the start of this VoiceThread, the teacher (Wm Chamberlain) created a video comment with his webcam to provide instructions for a student assignment. This is the first example of a webcam being used in this way for a classroom assignment that I’ve seen on VoiceThread.

A more limited number of websites currently permit actual video editing. The three of which I am aware that provide this functionality are JumpCut, EyeSpot, and Motionbox. I should probably volunteer to teach a workshop or offer a presentation on these tools in the fall so I’ll be forced by a deadline to play with and learn about these sites. To date, however, I haven’t attempted to edit video online.

In addition to permitting online video editing, a growing number of video sharing sites permit tagging and bookmarked commenting within videos. Viddler is one example of a site which permits this.

Jason Kincaid shared a post recently about some other web-based video sites which provide still another type of functionality. I’ve seen JibJab previously, which lets users insert a cropped image of their head or someone else to make amusing (potentially amusing, anyway) flash-based animations. (Remember the dancing elf card someone sent you last Christmas? They probably made it with JibJab.) Jason mentioned some other websites in his post, however, which go beyond the simple greeting card or online joke creativity threshold of JibJab. Fuzzwich’s animator looks like an intriguing environment to merge images and videos to create original web-based animations. This preview screeencast gives a good overview:

Shapeshifter by Aniboom permits users to create web-based animations using simple shapes– all in an online web environment. If you’ve ever tried to create even a simple animation with Adobe Flash you’ll likely be amazed (as I am) about how easy websites like Aniboom and Fuzzwich are making this process!

Animoto is another video creation website I’ve used a bit, but so far it seems to be in a class by itself. Animoto allows users to submit images and music to have a short video created automatically with some impressive special effects. I wrote about Animoto in my September post, “No time to make a video? No problem with Animoto!” While the results of a few mouse clicks with Animoto can be entertaining and even amazing, as is the case with all multimedia in schools and learning environments, we should remain wary to not be awed by bells and whistles. “Lots of bells and whistles do not a critical thinker make.”

For better or for worse, the availability of webcams, video editing software and websites, and video sharing sites will continue to invite the creation and sharing of inappropriate as well as appropriate content on the global stage of the Internet. I’ve recently amended my now-standard Internet safety / safe online social networking discussions during presentations to move beyond “pencils and pens” and the choices we can make with them. Instead of just having audience members brainstorm (for about 30 seconds) the good and bad choices we could make with a pencil, I have started recording a short, live video using QuickTime Pro and then challenged folks to think of all the good and bad choices I could choose to make with a webcam. We don’t need to ask for many volunteers to get the idea out in the open that people certainly can (and are) using webcams and web videos for destructive, offensive purposes. Yet those negative examples should not entirely color and define our perceptions of web video.

Websites like Ustream.tv and justin.tv not only permit live and archived sharing of formal presentations at conferences (like mine from ESC10 this past week) but also permit “lifecasting.” The English WikiPedia currently defines “lifecasting” as:

a continual broadcast of events in a person’s life through digital media. Typically, lifecasting is transmitted through the medium of the Internet and can involve wearable technology. Lifecasting reverses the concept of surveillance, giving rise to sousveillance through portability, personal experience capture, daily routines and interactive communication with viewers.

In our media-drenched society, which grows ever more replete with digitally interactive environments and opportunities, it is absolutely essential that we focus our attention on the critical goal of helping students develop their own capacities for ethical decision making. Digital citizenship may not be on your state’s list of formal curriculum standards, but it is none-the-less an essential topic of discussion and debate for learners of all ages in the 21st century.

Alan Levine’s amazing wiki project “50 Web 2.0 Ways To Tell a Story” lists even more sites than those I’ve referenced here for creating online digital stories. He categorizes tools in the following groups:

1. Slideshow Tools
2. Timeline Tools
3. Mixer Tools
4. Comic Tools
5. Map Tools
6. Flickr Tools / Ideas
7. Audio Tools
8. Video Tools
9. Presentation Tools
10. New Tools

This is an amazing list and a helpful taxonomy to use when considering the different tools available for digital storytelling. If you are organizing a professional development event this summer (in the northern hemisphere) or winter (in the southern hemisphere) consider an activity in which teachers use some of these tools to create and share their own stories.

Experience is generally a much more persuasive and valuable teacher than bulleted lists in a PowerPoint presentation. To help other educators learn the value and practical “step by step” procedures for using tools like those mentioned in this post for digital storytelling, we can’t just talk the talk. We have to walk the walk, and provide opportunities for teachers to USE these tools AS STUDENTS in learning environments which closely mirror the sorts of interactive, project-based environments we HOPEFULLY want teachers to create in our classrooms with students.

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education, video, learning, storytelling, digitalstorytelling, youtube, voicethread, jumpcut, eyespot

(I have shared the following as a new post on the TechLearning blog, but because of problems with the commenting setup there I am cross-posting here so you can leave comments if desired.)

This past week, thanks to Bob Sprankle’s “geek of the week” on the May 8th edition of the Bit by Bit podcast, I learned about the new website “Read The Words.” After registering for a free account, I was able to upload two articles I have wanted to read for several weeks but haven’t made the time, and had the site convert them into mp3 audio files. One of these articles was originally in PDF format, the other was in Microsoft Word format. One article was fifteen pages long, the other was 31 pages. In both cases, the text to audio conversion process took just a few minutes. After the files were converted, the website allowed me to download an mp3 version of each article.

I opened the converted mp3 audio files in iTunes, created a new playlist for the files, and then synchronized iTunes to my iPhone. As a result of these steps, which took about ten minutes, I was able to listen to both of these articles in the car this week as I drove to and from a regional educational technology conference.

I find this ability and functionality to transform any text document into a computer-read, portable audio file absolutely amazing! While it is true listening to one of these computerized voices is NOT as pleasant or “natural sounding” as listening to a real person read, the audio quality is very understandable. I am not an entirely auditory learner, of course, but I find I am able to learn a great deal listening to podcasts and audio books on my portable mp3 players. I wish this functionality had been available to me when I was still completing coursework in graduate school! I am sure I would have been selective in choosing to LISTEN rather than read assigned articles from my instructors, but I am equally sure I would have chosen to do so in many cases. If you are a student, teacher, instructor or professor reading or sharing articles which are available as digital text (NOT scanned as images) I encourage you to check out Read The Words. I am not affiliated in any way with this website, other than having a free account on it myself, but I am thoroughly enamored with the functionality this free web service provides. There are several client-side software programs which provide similar text to audio file conversion functionality, like 2nd Speech Center. Browser plug-ins like Speak It and CLiCk, Speak are available as well which convert webpage text into audio, but not into downloadable audio files. “Read the Words” is the first free, entirely web-based service I have seen which converts text files in various formats to downloadable mp3 files. Links to additional programs are available on the Maine VRC website.

This experience reminds me of a central theme in Nicholas Negroponte’s 1995 book “Being Digital.” When we convert ideas into digital forms (ones and zeros) we open the door to an almost unlimited menu of communication possibilities with that content. In chapter one of the book, Negroponte wrote:

The information superhighway is about the global movement of weightless bits at the speed of light. As one industry after another looks at itself in the mirror and asks about its future in a digital world, that future is driven almost 100 percent by the ability of that company’s product or services to be rendered in digital form. If you make cashmere sweaters or Chinese food, it will be a long time before we can convert them to bits. “Beam me up, Scotty” is a wonderful dream, but not likely to come true for several centuries. Until then you will have to rely on FedEx, bicycles, and sneakers to get your atoms from one place to another. This is not to say that digital technologies will be of no help in design, manufacturing, marketing, and management of atom-based businesses. I am only saying that the core business won’t change and your product won’t have bits standing in for atoms.

In the information and entertainment industries, bits and atoms often are confused. Is the publisher of a book in the information delivery business (bits) or in the manufacturing business (atoms)? The historical answer is both, but that will change rapidly as information appliances become more ubiquitous and user-friendly. Right now it is hard, but not impossible, to compete with the qualities of a printed book.

Since Negroponte penned (or most likely keyboarded) those words published in 1995, a great deal has changed in our information landscape. I find his ideas prophetic, however, as I continue to experience and benefit from my growing digital access to information and ideas.

Here is a classroom analysis challenge for you: How much of the information and ideas you exchange with students is available only in an “atomic” form, and how much is available optionally or exclusively in a “digital” form? I think a hallmark of 21st century education is the provision of course and curriculum content in digital forms. When the information is digital, our opportunities to consume, interact with, share, and further process that information grow by leaps and bounds.

Most likely, the majority of people reading this blog post in 2008 were predominantly schooled in the “atomic” age of the 20th century. We are living and quickly moving forward into the “digital” age of the 21st century. I love paper-based, atomic books as well as “atomic” artifacts from the past, but I also love the flexibility and possibilities for differentiated learning which digital texts offer.

What have your experiences been with digital texts? Are you consuming more digital rather than printed texts these days, via your computer and/or smartphone? How about your students? As Alan Kay has observed, the predominant technology in the classroom defines the predominant learning tasks of students and teachers. As more schools embrace 1:1 learning initiatives and mobile devices capable of accessing the Internet become more ubiquitous, our opportunities to consume as well as create digital texts will continue to increase. To be relevant educators in the 21st century, we need to continue exploring, understanding, and utilizing tools which permit us to blend learning interactions with information and ideas in both “atomic” and “digital” forms.

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education, learning, accessibility, access, convert, texttospeech, readthwords, negroponte, digital, being, beingdigital, classroom, atomic

Both my keynote address and the session I co-presented with Vicki Allen were broadcast live over the web this morning from Richardson, Texas, and are available as archived videos. If you watched either or both of these videos “live” or view the archived versions, please leave comments and feedback here! Unfortunately the chat feature of Ustream wouldn’t work on the ESC10 network, but I am grateful the bandwidth was great and the firewall was friendly to these broadcasts!

Keynote: The Assessment Menu in our Web 2.0 World
- Slides (PDF) (3.9 MB)
- Wiki links
- Video

Breakout session: “Web 2.0 Tools Which Can Be Used For Assessing Student Learning”
- Wiki links
- Video

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assessment, learning, education, web2, school, wiki, wikis, voicethread, googlenotebook

I’m sharing the keynote address tomorrow morning here in Richardson, Texas, for Education Service Center Region 10’s 14th Annual Technology Planning Conference. The theme this year is “Assessment for a Web 2.0 World.” I shared a keynote here two years ago titled “The Vocabulary of 21st Century Learning.” It would be interesting to compare my message and ideas two years later and see what has changed, and what has not!

I’ve reworked my slides from last week’s CILC webinar on “Quick Victories for Blended Learning” to focus specifically on the ways web 2.0 tools can be used for assessment. I always like to utilize some video in my keynote presentations, and when looking for a new video to share I came across “A Vision of K-12 Students Today” which is similarly styled to Michael Wesch’s “A Vision of Students Today” but created with students from K-12 classrooms instead of a university. Thanks to David Warlick, however, I discovered the video “Learning to change” created by by Pearson for CoSN to use in public advocacy, and posted to YouTube by Greg Whitby as well as COSN. The final version of this video is titled “Learning to Change — Changing to Learn” and is the video I’m going to use to help frame my presentation tomorrow:

I’m titling my keynote “The Assessment Menu in our Web 2.0 World.” I’ve posted my presentation slides as a PDF file, and will attempt to broadcast and archive my presentation tomorrow on Ustream.tv since my wife generously loaned me her laptop for this trip. The presentation is scheduled to begin at 9:00 am US Central time. Please join us if you can!
Moving at the Speed of Creativity Live from Ustream

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learning, assessment, education, school, reform, web2, internet, technology, revolution, texas, NCLB, testing, schoolreform

Many thanks to Bob Sprankle for mentioning the outstanding website readthewords.com on the most recent episode (May 4) of Bit by Bit. I’m going to be driving in a car at least fourteen hours in the next three days, and I’ve used readthewords.com to convert three articles about coursecasting into mp3 audio files I can listen to via my iPhone in the car.

I am VERY enthused to be able to listen to these articles in the car when I am on the go! While readthewords.com does provide a MP3 download link and a podcast RSS link, it does NOT appear (yet) to provide a single web feed / RSS feed for all the articles a user has converted. This is unfortunate, because if an aggregated web feed was provided that would permit me to simply add that feed to my PodNova subscriptions and then be able to directly download my new converted articles as mp3 files whenever I sync my iPhone and iPod. Perhaps they will add this feature later. It would also be great to let users create different channels of content, so converted audio files could be organized essentially into different “folders.” It would be handy if the same file could be linked within multiple categories as well.

readthewords.com lets you select from a pretty long list of different computerized voices when you register for a free account and choose to convert a text file:

So far I’ve just gone with Michael (US) and Elizabeth (UK.)

It would (will?) be great to see tools like this continue to develop which allow teachers and instructors to not only create customized playlists of articles converted to audio mp3 files, but also include spoken podcasts and vodcasts. I can foresee customized “channels” of content like this being welcome rich-media additions to courses at both the university and K-12 levels. This text to speech technology is VERY important from an accessibility standpoint, but not just for learners formally identified as needing accomodations. See my post “Converting text to and from speech for accessibility and convenience” from March 2008 for some additional text to speech tools and links. I’ll check in following this week’s experiences driving and listening to articles from readthewords.com later next week!

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convert, text, article, teaching, speech, readthewords, accessibility, education, learning, blended

Following our conveners meeting for the 2008 K-12 Online Conference this evening over skype, we recorded a short (approx. 10 minute) discussion of the length changes for presentations in this year’s conference. Please give a listen and share your comments and feedback on the podcast blog post.

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k12online08, k12online, online, learning, conference

The following ideas were brainstormed results from our Oklahoma Library Association sponsored workshop on Internet Safety issues today in Midwest City. I primarily referenced my wiki curriculum “Internet Safety and Social Networking for Parents”, but also referenced resources from “Safe Digital Social Networking (DSN) -or- Proactive Approaches to Address Cyberbullying and Digital Social Networking.” My text notes from Larry Boggess of OSBI’s presentation “Internet Crimes” are available and I will subsequently post the audio recording from his preso here as a podcast. I was thrilled to meet Joel Gabel of Google from their new Pryor/Tulsa office today, and my text notes from his presentation “Internet Safety Issues” are also available.

Top Issues, Concerns and Questions:
1.In a public school teachers have a captive space, in a library kids are not captive - you have to get creative to get kids to participate!
2.How do you keep up?
3.I want kids to be safe online as a parent and librarian, but I am not sure I know how to do that, or my role?
4.balancing safety and access
5.our constituents are our staff, the public, patrons, legislators: educating all about the role of a public library
6.how do we get seasoned professionals to see the value? (we referenced the diffusion of innovations graph)
7.Internet is ever changing / dynamic, how can we monitor the changes without becoming obsolete?
8.how do we fit this in with how we spend our time at work? (what is appropriate and not appropriate )
9.Classrooms are different: captive audience, year long relationship – librarians are in a different situation, how do we make an impact in our role?
10.Chat rooms and filtering are big issues: want to close down chats in some cases
11.People watching out for the children: it is not part of library policy but is a moral or social issue
12.No cheese with the whine
13.electronic gaming: hard to keep up, kids taking over the computer room
14.people have moved their role (CIPA) from protecting from objectionable content to keeping kids productive / on task
15.importance of boundaries and communication, texting, gaming
16.considering having teens make a social networking account (We discussed how a moderated and managed/controlled social networking environment like ning.com could be preferable to just having kids setup a MySpace page. We also discussed the importance of parent permission and getting signed forms for participation from them as well as kids.)
17.we may have to break bad habits
18.boundaries are so important: cell phone example, parents wanting that contact

Internet Safety Education & Outreach Options (menu choices):
1.make it a cause
2.virtual worlds in our summer teens program, could sneak it in!
3.more specific teen programming, giving teens a reason to come (getting teens to teach)
4.setting up a ning or other social network for librarians (celebrateoklahoma.ning.com)
5.workshop for parents on iSafety (maybe PSAs created by the kids and published on YouTube)
6.to help participants in workshops process information and ideas: updates that are needed to their computer system (reaching out to seniors)
7.workshop idea: aimed at parents, get knowledgeable speakers, have people give the dark side and scare people, but also look at the good and the positive (don’t just hear 1 side)
8.low tech: provide bookmarks and flyers
9.netiquette class about digital citizenship
10.oral history project idea
11.demand for adult computer classes
12.voicethread.com
13.Celebrate Oklahoma Voices project
14.Genealogy project workshops in the library!

Additional items:
- The online timer we used
- VoiceThread

Technorati Tags:
safety, internet, oklahoma, library, librarian, outreach, parent, education, kids, schools

For several months now, my 10 year old son and I have been having LOTS of fun playing the online real-time war game Travian. We recorded podcasts in December 2007 and March 2008 to discuss what we have learned so far playing the game. This week, we have been focusing on “chiefing” other villages. There are two basic ways to expand your personal “empire” in Travian and build/obtain more villages. The first way is to build up your palace or residence (one of the buildings in each of your villages) to level 10, 15, or 20, and earn enough “culture points” to found a new village. You can found a new village either by training “settlers” who can be sent with basic resources to an unoccupied area on the virtual Travian map grid, or you can train a “chief” (in my case he is called a Senator, because I am in the Roman tribe) who can be sent repeatedly to another existing village. It is necessary to destroy the residence in the village you want to take over with your chief first, before sending the chief, and afterwards each time your chief arrives in the village he lowers the “loyalty” of that village by a percentage. When the village’s loyalty is lowered to zero, the entire village becomes yours. This entire process (which is admittedly and delightfully complex) is explained well in this official Travian tutorial, “Preventing Conquerings.” This is the screen I saw yesterday after having destroyed the residence of a nearby village and repeatedly sending my Senator to it with an armed escort:

I chose to “chief” a smaller village than Alexander did, and the player who owned the village I successfully “chiefed” wasn’t active in trying to fight off or resist my attacks. The situation with the village Alexander is trying to take over has been quite different, however. The population of the village is larger, and the player is very active. This situation has provided a great context for us to discuss math skills and learn some new ways to use mathematical tools as well as strategies to solve problems.

I have written previously about the value of playing Travian in terms of learning Internet safety. I have not posted about the mathematics learning value of Travian previously, but this has been one of the main reasons Travian caught my attention in the first place and I considered playing this game with my son. One evening a few months ago, Alexander was working out double digit multiplication problems on paper at the dining room table. He was not doing any homework, so I asked him what he was doing, and he explained that he was calculating how many resources he needed to trade or send to his village to build some type of new building. I was quite impressed that he was voluntarily doing some arithmetic “for fun,” and the more I learned about Travian, the more I learned about the value it can provide as a meaningful context for problem solving, math skills, communication skills, team leadership, and other important things.

I will post later about what Alexander has learned about coordinate plane geometry and two-dimensional graphing, because I am not able to locate a copy of one of the early graphs he created for our alliance using an online graphing program. This evening, I’d like to relate and document some of the learning I’ve seen him experience related to “chiefing” a new village.”

The following image shows a troop report from Alexander’s “rally point” in Travian, from his main village which he is using to “chief” or take over a neighboring village.

In this report, you can see that Alexander had sent two attacks to the target village. The first attack includes two different types of soldiers, battering rams, and trebuchets. (Trebuchets are the catapults or “cats” for Gauls in Travian.) This first attack is sent to destroy the “residence” building of the opponent. Alexander timed his second attack, which included soldiers that could move much faster because they weren’t traveling with battering rams at cats, to “land” (arrive) 1 minute and 34 seconds after the first attack landed. This was somewhat challenging to do, because of the different speeds of the attack forces. He did it, however, and the result was that his opponent did not have time to reconstruct (or start construction) on a new residence building after the first attack destroyed that building via the trebuchets.

Since I have a larger set of villages on our Travian server and want to help out my son, I offered (and he accepted) to send my own troops and catpults (called “Fire Catapults” since I am a Roman) to destroy the residence building in the village Alexander is trying to “chief.” I am much farther away, geographically, from the targeted village than Alexander’s main village is, however. One result of this difference is that my troops take MUCH longer to travel to that village and attack it. Travian is a realtime war and strategy came, which means events take place according to real time in the face-to-face world. Alexander’s cats can depart and land in the target village in a just under two hours, but it takes over ten hours for my troops and cats to land. Because of this challenge, last night we created a basic Excel spreadsheet together to make some calculations, based on the inputs we knew. We used the Travian website to calculate when I should send my troops and cats, so they could hopefully arrive just before Alexander’s. We were basing his options on when he would get up in the morning, since he couldn’t send the attacks in the middle of the night. This is what our spreadsheet looked like:

This morning Alexander launched his attack, but it turned out the defending player had enough time (about 30 minutes) to start reconstruction on his residence after my attacks had landed. The result was that Alexander’s “chief” attack failed. The message he received said the residence had not yet been destroyed:

In considering these events, keep in mind that Alexander is attending 4th grade at our local, public elementary school during the day, so is having to make these decisions and send out these attacks before and after school. (He doesn’t have web access to Travian during the day, since he doesn’t use his personal laptop at school at all or have an iPhone.) Since our attempted coordinated attack had failed this morning when he was at school, we discussed a new battle strategy late this afternoon. We realized that instead of sending ALL his cats in an initial “cleaning wave” attack, and then having to carefully time his second attack with his “chief” to arrive closely after the first one, he could hold back one cat (trebuchet) and send it with the chief’s attack. That way, the two attacking parties would have the same speed and “land” immediately after one another. The result? The first “cleaning attack” successfully destroyed the opponent village’s residence and village wall:

The second attack (including the “chief” who would persuade the inhabitants of the receiving village to have lessened “loyalty” to the current owner/ruler/player of that village) landed exactly 1 minute and 34 seconds later. The defending player didn’t have sufficient time to rebuild his/her residence, so the village’s loyalty was reduced by almost 25 percent:

This entire sequence of conversations, decisions, and actions by Alexander was a great opportunity to see him practice problem solving and mathematical calculations in a relevant, meaningful context. Too often in school, we are teaching skills “just in case” instead of “just in time.” Alexander is using his math skills and learning new ones in Travian, as well as further developing his problem solving skills, to accomplish tangible objectives he really cares about.

It is exciting to be learning and playing together in Travian, and to witness how online games like Travian can help young students develop a rich repertoire of skills– including mathematical abilities!

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travian, game, online, war, strategy, learning, excel, spreadsheet, problemsolving, problem, solving

The K12Online08 Call for Proposals: Amplifying Possibilities has been released! Please share this call far and wide, and consider sharing a presentation yourself. Team presentations are welcome! The deadline for proposals is June 23rd, and we will announce selected presentations at NECC on July 2nd. There are several changes from last year which are detailed in the call. I’m very enthused to be convening the strand “Leading the Change” this year. Read all about it and tell all your friends!

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k12online08, conference, web2, education, leadership, school, professionaldevelopment

I’ve been using the website 43actions to keep track of my personal to-do lists for a few weeks now. Today I visited with two friends who are using reQall and Toodledo for their personal to-do lists, and both like the tools a great deal. None of these tools (as far as I know) are configured to be used by groups, however, just individuals. Short of utilizing full-blown project management software, does anyone know of a website offering group “to-do list” functionality? I’m thinking of something which would permit tasks to be defined, assigned to individuals, and tracked per specified deadlines. This sounds like a great application for Google Labs to tackle! Does anyone know of group “to-do list” webapps which are available today? (And preferably free!)

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group, productivity, organize, software, todo

This evening I took some time to review the ClustrMaps for my blog over the course of the past month (April 2008.) ClustrMaps is a wonderful website which provides code people can insert onto their blog or other website to track (by IP address) the general locations of people who are accessing and viewing content on that particular website. As I have remarked previously, these visual representations of readership continue to absolutely astound me! The Pitcairn Islands ClustrMap Mystery continues, however. I would love to know who my reader(s) are on the Pitcairn Islands, or on the other south Pacific island which is showing up on my ClustrMap again! The April 2008 ClustrMaps show visitors to my blog from almost 25,000 different locations worldwide. This is a clear sign of the times. We’re not living in 20th century Kansas anymore.

Hello to Sue Waters in Perth! I can see your city on the ClustrMap image above! But who is making that access dot in Alice Springs?!

What I’d really love to do is arrange to travel IN PERSON to all these locations around the world, along with members of my family. Planning an international education, learning, or educational technology conference in 2008-2009? Please consider me as a possible keynote speaker and drop me a line! I was able to take my son to COSN this past March in Washington DC, but I’m sure he’d flip if at some point he could accompany me to Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, or another location which seems quite exotic to us living here in central Oklahoma!

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clustrmap, blog, readership

I have posted the following entry to the TechLearning blog, but am cross-posting here in case there are still commenting problems there. In that event, please comment here!

For educators living in the northern hemisphere, summer is approaching fast. Today I had an opportunity to visit with about fifteen elementary teachers in a rural Oklahoma school, and the topics I was asked to address were:

1. Internet Safety
2. Wikis
3. Blogs

Less than one-third of the teachers in my presentation had high speed Internet access at their home currently, and none were acquainted with web 2.0 tools and websites. This context provided a formidable and yet inviting challenge, which I can paraphrase as a rhetorical question:

If you could spend just sixty minutes talking with a group of elementary teachers who have not had much prior exposure to blogs, wikis, educator social networks, or other web 2.0 tools, what would you choose to discuss and explore?

A basic challenge for this context is LIMITING the information. There are SO MANY web 2.0 tools and learning possibilities presented by our digital information environment today! I have heard conference keynote speakers start their presentations by asking, “Is anyone overwhelmed by technology and the possibilities it offers? Well hang on, because we’re going to explore even more today!” The presenter then launched into a litany of tools and sites, which likely left attendees feeling even more overwhelmed than they had previously felt.

My goal today with these teachers was NOT to overwhelm them, but rather to invite them to explore some of the ways they could use websites and web 2.0 tools for PERSONAL uses over the summer. I am convinced (along with many others) that as teachers learn to use technology for personal purposes, we are able to better understand the instructional and learning applications of these tools for ourselves. This is a gradual process and takes place at different rates and in different ways for each educator, but I’m convinced this is a constructive path to follow in trying to help teachers learn effective ways to utilize technology for learning.

For today’s after-school presentation, I created a single page handout (available as a PDF) for ten different options teachers could pursue this summer for digitally powered professional development. These options are:

1. Join a local (state) online learning community.
2. Learn about wikis and create one.
3. Create and share digital stories with VoiceThread.
4. Start using social bookmarking.
5. Join an online professional learning community like Classroom 2.0, and attend the 2007 K-12 Online Conference.
6. Share photos with family and friends on Flickr.
7. Watch and share outstanding videos online.
8. Videoconference with family and friends using Skype or iChat.
9. Create and read a customized digital newspaper. (With Google Reader.)
10. Learn to text message from a patient teenager.

Remembering that this presentation was for an audience of elementary teachers who were not previously acquainted with web 2.0 tools and technologies, are there any topics or tools that you would have substituted for any of those I selected here? (So the list of options was still kept to ten.) This was a fun challenge, and one informed by a workshop I’ve shared previously entitled “Powerful Ingredients for Digitally Interactive Learning.” I did create a wiki page for the teachers which includes links to all the resources we discussed.

We did NOT, in fact, have time in sixty minutes to discuss all these options. We started with VoiceThread, proceeded to talk about wikis, explored the Classroom 2.0 Ning, and wrapped up by watching part of an online video. (Sir Ken Robinson on Creativity in Schools.) Even though we didn’t cover ALL the content I had prepared, I felt good about the time we’d spent together overall. I don’t think the teachers felt overwhelmed, and many of them were enthused by the possibilities they saw for some of these tools (especially VoiceThread) for helping their students safely publish their work online.

I was a bit surprised, however, how many of the teachers expressed fear when I showed them the Classroom 2.0 social network and the ways teachers are and can connect with each other to share ideas and collaborate. The “fear and death” message of social networking has sunk deep into the fabric of educator consciousness, and a proposal to JOIN and USE online social networks for learning strikes many as heresy.

When I have chances like today to visit with teachers who have very limited prior exposure to web 2.0 tools and the powerfully constructive ways they can be used to facilitate student learning, I am simultaneously struck with feelings of frustration as well as optimism. On the one hand, it is frustrating to see how entrenched many classrooms remain today in an isolationist, 19th century paradigm of teacher-directed and textbook-dominated learning. On the other hand, it is exciting to see what amazing opportunities we have to help teachers as well as students take “a great leap forward” into the flat world of 21st century learning and collaboration.

There are many things our schools desperately need, but professional development should figure high on anyone’s wish list for schools. Although our time together today was short, I am glad to have had a chance to cross paths with those Oklahoma educators today. If even one of them goes on to use VoiceThread or another tool we discussed and share it with their own family and/or with their students, then I think my time today was well spent.

Systemic education reform truly is advanced one conversation at a time.

I’m not sure how long this has been available, but I was glad this evening to discover that Google Reader permits users to share subscribed feeds by tag:

To do this, click MANAGE SUBSCRIPTIONS below your list of subscribed feeds in Google Reader and click the TAGS link. Click the checkbox beside the tag you’d like to publicly share, and then choose PUBLIC under the “Change Sharing” popup menu at the top.

Once public sharing is enabled several links are automatically created by Google Reader, including a public page showing all updated posts in feeds to which you are subscribed under that tag, and the option to add a “clip” or blogroll to your website.

The “clip” option lets you select how many items to show, the color, and whether the source feed should be shown. This is my current clip from education blogs to which I am subscribed:

For some time I’ve kept a Google Reader clip of blog posts I’ve chosen to share in the right sidebar of my blog. I am continually adding new blogs to my “education” blog category in Google Reader (Google Reader calls this a “tag”) as I read and process ideas on the web. I have created a new page on my blog, which is accessible from the top drop-down menu under “Resources,” for Education Blogs I read. I’ll be the first to admit there is more here than I ever have time to process, but these are the feeds to which I’m subscribed today. I was curious how many there are, since Google Reader doesn’t show that number readily, so I copied the blog titles and used TextWrangler to count the lines– there are 237 as of tonight. I am not sharing this to brag or or in some way say “wow look at how many feeds I read” — because the truth is, I do NOT read all these feeds every day and stay up on all the content here. Even if I just read non-stop all day, I don’t think I could process all this information. I was interested myself in this number, and continue to wonder how our conversations and idea sharing interactions are going to continue to change in the years ahead as still more educator voices and perspectives are added in the edu-blogosphere.

I reflected a little in my April 14th post “Here for the learning revolution” about how my own process for subscribing and reading feeds in my professional learning network differs from those of others (specifically David Warlick as he discussed in his post “10 Ways to Keep your PLN from Running Amok!”) David may have the good advice here, and I may be following the wrong path when it comes to blog subscriptions and reading. I’m inclined to continue thinking, however, that it is essential to always be open to not only reading and listening to “new voices” one time (like when I visit someone’s blog link after they comment on my blog) but also subscribing to those voices (blog web feeds) so the likelihood of being influenced by the ideas of those individuals in the future is much higher.

As I’ve written previously, I continue to consider information access and processing in our digital information landscape via the analogy of a radar screen. Information is flowing all around us in streams that are too large to be fully digestible and comprehensible, so our challenge is to find and utilize radar screens which permit us to remain up to date, effective, and “digitally enlightened” as we can and want to be. Google Reader is a CRITICAL element of my personal information radar array.

I continue to struggle with email, and am in the midst of a transition from Yahoo mail to GMail. I certainly don’t keep up with all the latest buzz and discussion in the edu-blogosphere, but I do feel pretty satisfied with my use of Google Reader. The option of being able to access my Google Reader subscriptions on my iPhone has definitely been a MAJOR benefit, since it has permitted my iPhone to become my “use anywhere” digital newspaper.

I do not have a current statistic for this, but I’m very confident the number of Oklahoma teachers currently using some type of RSS/feed reader like Google Reader on a regular basis is very small– less than 25 percent is a reasonable guess. The actual number is probably far smaller.

As information flows and the quantity of information available and moving around us continues to grow, I think it will become more and more important to utilize feed readers. I love Oprah’s definition of RSS: “Ready for Some Stories.” Our family continues to take the local Oklahoma City newspaper on Wednesdays and Sundays, but one of the main reasons we did this through the winter was so we’d have newspaper to use when we had fires in our fireplace. Now that spring has officially sprung here in the midwest and our chances for evening fires at home have dwindled, I think we’re going to cancel that subscription. This is the future of newsprint: Canceling the paper subscription because of easy digital access to news feeds via a smart phone. I know plenty of folks who will probably NEVER cancel their print subscription to their local newspaper, but none of those people (as far as I know) have an iPhone or other smartphone either.

Literacy and our access to literature in various formats continues to morph and change. Thankfully, the tools at our fingertips (like Google Reader) continue to mature and grow in power as well.

I wonder how I’ll be reading my news in thirty more years?! It’s going to be a dynamic and exciting ride into the future.

It’s easy to lose or turn off someone who does not consider themselves tech-saavy by using acronyms like RSS. Just what is RSS? I created a short video in 2005 with my graduate students at Wayland Baptist University in Lubbock to try and explain RSS in plain language, but I think Oprah has an even more succinct and understandable way to help people understand RSS. According to Oprah, RSS should stand for:

Ready for Some Stories.

I love it!

Linktribution: “How to explain RSS the Oprah way” by Stephanie Quilao via the RSS help link on “What’s reQall” via Hannah’s post “news to me…” on the Web2oh4Teachers Ning.

Many advocates for effective technology integration in the classroom and in our lives discuss the importance of PERSONAL use of technology tools. As teachers (and others) embrace technology uses for tasks they find personally rewarding, engaging, meaningful and relevant, they begin to not only overcome some of their fears about using technologies but also begin to experience “a-ha” moments when they see potential uses for digital technologies which they did not consider previously. This process of personally experiencing the value of digital technologies to deepen and improve important relationships in our lives is VERY important, not only for teachers but also for our school board members, administrators, and anyone else involved in helping children in our communities learn. Too often I hear adults say things like, “I just think all technology is evil.” These folks need to “get out more” in a digital sense. I believe it is our responsibility, as advocates for the appropriate, safe and constructive uses of digital technologies, to help others understand and actually experience these types of positive, personal uses of technology.

In his keynote at 2007 Christa McAuliffe Technology Conference, Dr. Tim Tyson noted that when it comes to technology (and many other things) “people like what they know, they don’t know what they like.” It is important that we help others understand and experience the diverse ways technologies can be used to constructively support learning, communication and collaboration. This authentic process is the only viable way I think we help others move forward in their personal as well as professional uses of technologies. This is vital in a “big picture” sense as we strive to promote digital learning initiatives in our schools and communities like 1:1 learning, which can (potentially) have an amazing, transformative effect on multiple stakeholders in multiple ways. Those of us who are here for the learning revolution can serve as powerful catalysts of change in our local communities when we help others become aware of the possibilities and benefits of digital technologies which are used safely to communicate, collaborate, learn and play.

Roger Shank, author of the outstanding book “Coloring Outside the Lines” and a school reform revolutionary I heard present at the SITE 2007 conference in San Antonio as a keynote speaker, has created a new website called “Grandparent Games.” The website functions by providing screen content grandparents and grandchildren can discuss “live” (synchronously) even when they are living in different parts of the country or world. Internet-connected computers, a high speed Internet connection, microphones and webcams are on the required equipment list. According to the site:

We supply age-appropriate interactions to facilitate internet mediated play with your grandchild. All the interactions are really to help the grandparent talk with the grandchild about what is on the screen. For example, when the grandparent sends a “K” to the child the grandparent says what grandparents say when they are trying to teach – what letter is that? Is that an A? Is that a K? What sound does the K make? See the kite. The kite got stuck in the tree. Kkkite.

Internet-mediated play? This must be the 21st century. Of course it is, but things like “Internet-mediated play” have not found their way into many of our public and private schools. How can we help our own children as well as others experience the powerful, constructive potential of learning interactions like these– which can take place between people who are significant in our our lives and with whome we share important relationships? Grandparent Games offers some powerful possibilities.

Nothing beats grandparents and grandchildren having opportunities for face-to-face interaction, play and learning together. The reality of our third-wave society in many cases, however, is that grandparents and grandchildren often live far apart. Digital technologies and our network economy seem laden with the promise of greater personal connectivity. Cell phones have certainly allowed teens, college students, and parents to (in many cases) remain closer connected than ever before in history. Doesn’t the goal of bringing grandparents and grandchildren closer together via digital interactive possibilities and PLAY strike you as a great idea?

The philosophy of the site is straightforward:

People have been writing software for kids as long as there have been computers. What has changed is that there are now people (like me and other grandparents) who want to be and can be part of the interaction. Just think – a grandparent on the other end of the computer makes the computer as teacher a much more powerful idea. A kid who is staring at a computer for hours is a way different thing than a kid who is talking to his grandfather via computer for hours. Together, the two are doing something that’s better for both.

To make this happen we need a software environment that will facilitate the interaction between grandparent and grandchild so that they both will want to engage on a daily basis. The connection part is getting very easy. Today with instant messaging and a webcam and microphone you can talk to and see another person. This will only get better. So, assuming the grandparent can see and talk to the grandchild on the computer with ease, what can they do together?

Roger has used the site for two years now with his own grandson who is not yet three years old. I’m eager to show this to my parents and in-laws to see if they are interested in using this site with our 4 year old daughter, Rachel. If you have grandchildren or have children who would like to interact with their grandparents more but live apart, let them know about Grandparent Games and facilitate those connections. I’m going to give it a try and will report on what experiences we have here in later posts.

Thanks to Roger for emailing me about Grandparent Games to let me know about it. The cost of the site is $10 per month, which is paid by the grandparent. Grandkids don’t pay to connect, they (with their parents help, of course) use the grandparent’s email address to connect to them. To read more about the site, it’s educational philosophy and the experiences of Roger and others using the site, check out Roger’s blog for the site, “Papa Talks.”

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