Simple Ideas for Powerful Sharing
resources: wfryer.me/improve
description: Interested in helping students become better readers, writers, and critical thinkers? We need to “play with media” to become more effective communicators and improve our media literacy skills as both learners and citizens. As you learn to play with digital text, images, audio and video, you will communicate more creatively and flexibly with a wider variety of options. Author and educator Wesley Fryer will inspire and empower you, as a creative person, to expand your personal senses of digital literacy and digital agency as a multimedia communicator!
Session audio:

(The slides I used today for this session were the same as those I shared in Yukon PS last month)

Creating MultiMedia eBooks
resources: wfryer.me/ebooks
description: Learn how to create enhanced/multimedia eBooks including digital text, hyperlinks, images, and embedded videos. In addition to using Apple Pages software (part of iWork) participants will learn how to use Calibre software (free and cross-platform) to convert multimedia documents into a variety of eBook formats.
Session Audio:

All my session resources are available in a single PDF which I handed out today, these are linked on this post from last week. Here’s the PDF link on Google Docs. The one link I wrote on the back of my handout is okedushare.org.

Technorati Tags: education, oklahoma, otaem12, technology

Recorded Audio & Resources from my #otaem12 Presentations Today originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on February 7, 2012.

Discover how easy it is to Standards Map the Common Core State Standards to lesson plans- curriculum- instruction- and learning. Why Standards Map? It documents not only WHAT standard is aligned to a specific lesson- test item- or instructional strategy- but also the specific content (nouns)- skills (verbs)- level of rigor (Bloom Level)- I?Can statement- Big Idea- and Essential Question. It’s alignment with rigor!

teachers will have to use the library in different ways under Common Core State Standards
- requires collaboration between teachers to require different kinds of collaboration

www.alcaweb.org
- curriculum threads standards

We have created a 14 foot long wall poster that is the reading common core (MY COMMENT: WHEN I ASKED GARY FOR THE LINK TO THIS MAP, HE SAID ONLY PAYING CUSTOMERS WITH REGISTRATION CODES AND LOGIN ACCOUNTS CAN ACCESS ANY OF THE RESOURCES HE’S SHARING TODAY.

Wouldn’t it be nice if students in older grade levels could create curriculum and materials for use by younger students
- wouldn’t it be nice for students to create and save artifacts of their learning which can be maintained year-to-year?

If you don’t do these things, it is going to be a LOT harder to implement the CCSS

Need to be able to assess how students can use a skill in ‘unpredictable ways’
- for the past 16 years we have been dumbing down students, because we have been focusing mostly on lower level skills

We (ALCA) have been doing research for years, we are driven purely by research, not whether we make money or create a product that sells
- “we are like Steve Jobs who built a computer in his own garage, we are doing it our own way”
- we’ve been doing this since 1997
- the problem up to this point is the system wasn’t in place for school districts, with carrots and sticks

“I can tell you this for sure, the Common Core isn’t ever going to go away”

How many reading standards in CCSS K-12?

This is the ‘traditional’ CCSS curriculum map for Algebra I in the U.S. developed by www.alcaweb.org. (MY COMMENT: I’M WONDERING WHY IT IS HELPFUL TO VIEW THIS, IN THIS ZOOMED OUT FORMAT?)

Standards mapping is two things:
1- unwrapping or unpacking: breaking standard apart so you can get all the information out of it, so kids / parents / teachers can relate to it
2- ‘wrapping it back’ around test items, a lesson plan, a website you found

MY COMMENT: THIS STEP 2 IS CONNECTING THE ‘UNWRAPPED STANDARDS’ TO LEARNING TASKS FOR STUDENTS

Whatever you do, you have to be able to unpack the standards as a teacher

MY COMMENT AND IDEA: I ASKED GARY HOW MUCH IT COSTS FOR A SCHOOL DISTRICT TO GET ACCESS TO ALL ITS ‘UNPACKED CCSS STANDARDS.’ HE SAID HE DIDN’T WANT TO GET INTO PRICING TODAY. I’M THINKING THIS IS A CRITICAL QUESTION. IT’S ALSO AN IDEA FOR A COLLABORATION AMONG OKLAHOMA DISTRICTS. AS WE HAVE TEACHERS UNPACK STANDARDS, WHY DON’T WE HAEV THOSE DOCUMENTS SHARED OPENLY AS PUBLIC GOOGLE DOCS? THEN ANYONE COULD UTILIZE AND BUILD ON THOSE PRODUCTS? I’M SEEING AN AMAZING AMOUNT OF WORK THAT ALCA HAS DONE UNPACKING THESE STANDARDS, BUT I’M THINKING THERE ARE GREAT OPPORTUNITIES HERE FOR SCHOOL DISTRICTS TO OPENLY LICENSE (WITH CREATIVE COMMONS) THEIR OWN ‘UNPACKED STANDARDS’ FOR ANYONE TO USE.

Larry Ainsworth is the ‘father of unpacking’
- no one of the planet has done this… what I am about to show you
- it takes a lot of time and work to unpack standards

Where does the vocabulary list for this come from?

Columns for the ALAWEB unwrapping:
1 Content
- relevant information
- paraphrased information
- List
2 Skills
- recall
- gather
- summarize / paraphrase
- provide
3 Learning Targets
- I can…. statements
4 Big Ideas
5 Essential Questions

You never want to show a student “the big ideas”

Teachers on the east coast particularly will put the ‘big ideas’ and ‘essential questions’ on the wall, so at the end of the day the teacher can point to them and ask students to describe/discuss how those were addressed in our activities of the day

Wiggins and others have done the research and found: If you don’t tie learning students are doing to a ‘global concept’ that a student can relate to forever, s/he is NOT going to remember it
- must tie to a global set of knowledge

Students must use all four: reading, writing, speaking, listening
- kids are using four different parts of their brain, so they have a greater opportunity to burn it to long term memory

“Measurement and Data standard goes away in CCSS math standards after grade 5″

There are about 200 school districts in OKlahoma who are members and now actively contributing to these databases of resources
- schools retain ownership over materials created from a legal standpoint
- we hope schools share their products

I’M WONDERING IF ALCA PERMITS SCHOOL DISTRICTS TO SPECIFICALLY LICENSE THEIR UNPACKED STANDARDS UNDER CREATIVE COMMONS AND SHARE THEM ON THE OPEN, VERSUS THE CLOSED WEB?

My brother is the science coordinator in Enid, now I’m going to copy a benchmark test they created
- I am using a ‘room key’ as a password to access this
“sdMev”
- use that room code to import that ‘virtual room’ in our ‘learning community management system’ (more than Moodle, you can document TLE in an assessment way, not an evaluation way – teachers can self-assess, create smart goals. Also teams can do action research on specific competencies or skills)

I’m going to show you know how you can wrap an unpacked standard around a test item
- teachers are going to have to document how they are teaching
- this process allows for documentation of teacher instruction, as well as student learning
- using rubrics for formative assessment, tests, also other strategies

Story of an Ag teacher who is using iPads with students to assess how they showed sheep at a stock show
- students can do similar things with water quality data
- in lower grades, students have to participate in research
- need to engage students up and down grade levels

Most important takeaway today was shared by
- every system there will let you connect it to a standard, and then it’s ‘magically aligned’
- the level of rigor in terms of alignments with other tools (not ours) is too shallow
- systems that just let you attach a standard create too much grey area for a principal to talk to a teacher, or teachers to talk to a teacher
- those systems are always open to interpretation when we ask, “how is this aligned?”
- “most systems just link”

With the CCSS you need to assess two or more standards in every question

Right now we are doing leadership retreats and workshops with school administrators
- working with superintendents as well as principals
- all of them have to work with TLE

We created this for Oklahoma Career Tech, we call it Professional Development
- we don’t know yet if we
- it will be a personal learning network for students

Schools start with ePASS, Dibbles, anything, our system can ingest anything
- “our system never requires help from your IT department, we do it all”
- “we prefer to do the [student test score result] importing, because Pearson isn’t known for providing ‘clean’ data”

We are going to have science institutes, and have science teachers create content
- ‘we are going to Missouri next’
- we want Oklahoma to be a national model for this

“We paid 5 or 6 people to unpack all the CCSS standards last summer. We think individual teachers should only unpack 1 or 2 standards, it’s very time consuming.”

MY CLOSING COMMENT: I ASKED GARY IF THEY LICENSE ACCESS TO THEIR SYSTEM ON A PER SEAT BASIS, AND HE SAID YES. IT LOOKS LIKE HE WANTS SCHOOLS TO EMBRACE THEIR PROPRIETARY SYSTEM AS A COMPREHENSIVE LEARNING MANAGEMENT SYSTEM (LMS) WHICH WOULD REPLACE MOODLE, BLACKBOARD, ETC. I AM VERY GLAD TO HEAR GARY SHARE THIS INFO, I WANT TO LEARN MORE. I’M CONCERNED THAT OKLAHOMA SCHOOLS AND TEACHERS ARE NOT BEING CURRENTLY ENCOURAGED BY ANYONE (APPARENTLY) TO OPENLY SHARE AND LICENSE UNDER CREATIVE COMMONS UNPACKED CCSS AS WELL AS LESSONS.

Sign up for the ALCA sacking [at] alcaweb [dot] org

Standards Mapping the Common Core to Everyday Instruction and Teaching originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on February 7, 2012.

Master learners today and master teachers must model lifelong learning
- that is one of the best ways to develop students who are lifelong learners

Handouts / backchannel archive from David’s presentations: (these are the same site, the first points to the second)
colearners.idave.us
http://davidwarlick.com/colearners

Links from today’s session: http://davidwarlick.com/colearners/?p=426

David is using his own Twitter site that also lets people share resources: http://knitterchat.com
- I will archive this conversation, and add comments/feedback
- this models how our conversations should extend beyond this F2F moment

20th century education was defined by its limits
21st century education must be defined by its lack of limits

Calculators were introduced when I started teaching, it was going to be ‘the gift to last a lifetime

I taught in an information scarce learning environment
- the pedagogues I learned college were based on that model
- over 2.5 million images uploaded PER DAY to Flickr alone

Interesting question: what are the pedagogies of information abundant learning environments
- when you have access to this world, what are the best learning strategies?

We have access to a billion people, almost 300 billion pieces of new information
- this access is part of the culture of young people

We could not have predicted this in the early 1970s when I started teaching as a history teacher

I’m going to jump ahead to my conclusion: I think we should stop integrating technology and start integrating literacy
- what should kids learn today is how to teach themselves

Literacy: reading what someone you trust hands to you?
- now we have WikiPedia

Stories about WikiPedia
- highlighting warnings on different WikiPedia about accuracy, bias, etc.

Basic literacy skills today are discerning

We must expand our notions of what it means to be literate today
- can you expose what is true in the information

My kids can Google, but can they find information with Google that is appropriate to the learning task
- being able to find it, decode it, evaluate it, conceptualize, and organize

Today online we’re not working with a few numbers, we can be working with thousands of numbers

Sources of raw data from David’s Landmark project website
- specifically looking at ANSS to get earthquakes since 2004 with magnitude over 4
- this renders a data set with time, lat, long, magnitude, etc
- copy all those numbers
- in this example there are about 10,000 numbers
- now I can copy these into a free spreadsheet from OpenOffice.org

Paste Data in
- pastes into first column
- select first column
- select TEXT TO COLUMNS
- choose fixed width
- now I can define each column, hid those I don’t need
- now I get a spreadsheet
- latitude needs to be on the right with open office
- make an XY scatterplot

What you are looking at here is history
- I used skills to make those numbers tell their story
- isn’t that what math is all about?

but now we have invisible numbers
- when I grew up we just learned about abstract numbers in math class
- now text, images, sound, video, animation, are all made out of numbers

Now we’ll go to Words of Humankind from the Landmark Project
- US Presidential Addresses
- use TagCrowd to make a tag cloud, this can empower that text to better tell its story

I used carry an Oxygen* keyboard, it’s not a musical instrument, it’s designed to generate numbers and my computer
- David sharing a song he made with Intuem software

We all have a story to tell, we all have something to teach

New record for information transfer: 186 gigabits per second (Dec 2011)
- what can you and your students do with that quantity of information?!

MY THOUGHT: WE’RE OVERWHELMED WITH TMI ALREADY, AS DAVID POINTS OUT THE KEY IS FILTERING AND USING

information competes for our attention, just like products on the school shelf competed for our attention historically in our classrooms
- our kids need to
- not just the ability to write a coherent paragraphs, our goal should be expressing ideas compellingly to a real audience

Shared a video from SFETT 2011 which has been seen in at least 23 different countries, and the girl who made the video has been contacted by the CEOs
- music communicates powerfully

Much of what I’m talking about today are things I believe
- Any school today that thinks it can teach children to be literacy

Now discussing SPAM: Spam cost the world $50 billion in 2005, cost doubled in 2007
- yet the Copenhagen group estimates we could solve HIV/AIDS worldwide for $27 billion

Learning and Literacy today is exposing what is true, employing information, expressing ideas compellingly, ethically, generously

Conclusion: Redefine literacy so it reflects today’s prevailing information environment
- digital tools are the paper and pencil of our time

How do we do this? It starts with us!
- it can be scary but you can do it

Now telling story about my senior English teacher from 1969

Today the world is the curriculum
- our information landscape has changed, and our kids are different

We will have obtained a transformation of education when we no longer have teachers who believe they can teach the same thing, the same way, each day / month / year
- anything less than that is just

It is having access to today’s prevailing information landscape
- become information artisans and master learners

Now sharing blog setup after London bombings: We’re Not Afraid.com

When in history have people like you and I been able to whisper to the world something as powerful as, “We are not afraid?”

Technorati Tags: association, edtech, okc, oklahoma, otaem12, technology, learning, david, warlick

Visioning New Schools with David Warlick originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on February 7, 2012.

The technology tools in this case, digital voice recorders, ARE important for the learning which took place in Renee’s classroom. They are NOT, however, the factor which makes the biggest difference. As I noted in last month’s post, “Remember TEACHERS Make the Biggest Difference, Not Devices,” the WAYS teachers choose to invite students to use technology tools are most important when it comes to learning and achievement. Yes, having access to digital tools IS important. We must remember to focus on the PEDAGOGY more than the tools, however, as we discuss and highlight effective uses of educational technology. Renee’s video is a beautiful example of this.

I found this video today when I was researching links to add to a new page on the Storychasers’ website: Storychaser School Clubs.

Technorati Tags: digital, reading, technology, writing, voice, audio, recorder, nwp, edtech

Use Digital Voice Recorders to Hear Student Voices originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on February 2, 2012.

This semester, students taught by Debbie Callison at the Yukon Middle School 6th Grade Academy have been writing and sharing their poetry online using free, interactive websites hosted by Kidblog.org. All the posts written by students, as well as comments submitted by others to each website, are MODERATED by Mrs. Callison. Students have not only been working on the quality and content of their own poetry, but also discussing “What makes a good comment?” Students are identifying specific elements of poems to highlight and providing constructive feedback to each other. Online, student publishing and interactive commenting moderated by a classroom teacher is one specific element of the new “Common Core” standards for Oklahoma students which Yukon Public Schools is currently working to implement at the direction of the Oklahoma State Department of Education.

One of the best things about students sharing their writing online using an open site like KidBlog is the opportunity it provides for parents to provide feedback, as well as teachers and students. Here is a specific example from Mrs. Callison’s 2nd hour, sixth grade English class this week.

This is a post written by Cooper last week, titled, “What is a Champion?”

Later in the day after Cooper wrote that post, Mrs. Callison shared some positive feedback as a comment on that post to accompany comments already moderated/approved. In addition, yesterday (January 31st) Cooper’s Dad logged on to the class website. He also wrote a comment, providing feedback and encouragement to his son.

It takes practice to get better at anything, and Yukon middle school students are improving their writing skills with digitally-saavy learning opportunities provided by Mrs. Callison. Kudos to Cooper for sharing his poem, and kudos to his classmates, Mrs. Callison, and Cooper’s dad for providing constructive feedback! We’re living in times of change, and it’s great to see this example of how Yukon Public School teachers are providing ways to extend learning experiences digitally beyond the “four walls of the classroom” and involve parents as partners in developing literacy skills.

Technorati Tags: kidblog, writing, blogging, poetry

Yukon 6th Grade Parents and Teachers Provide Students Feedback on Writing originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on February 1, 2012.

Rachel brought the handwritten draft of the book along with the illustrations home this past Friday. She was missing one illustration (for part 3) so Madison drew that yesterday and delivered it to our house (with her dad) this afternoon.

Rachel was on “cloud 9″ yesterday as we compiled the book together and she recorded the audio for each part. We ended up using RecordPad Sound Recorder to make the audio recordings. In all, for seven “final” recordings Rachel made 35 “takes.” She was very pleased with the final result which she’s shown to all our family on an iPad.

The download page of MeetSnowflake.com currently includes links to download the eBook from ePubBud as well as DropBox. More distribution channels are pending, and we’re going to also create a print version. Rachel and Madison have dedicated the book to their 2nd grade teacher (Mrs. Zahn) and hope to give her a print version for Valentine’s Day on February 14th as a surprise! It’s fantastic ePubBud automatically created a browser-based version of the eBook, which includes the audio recordings of each part. VERY cool!

If you have comments or feedback for Rachel and Madison, please post them on the About page of MeetSnowflake.com.

Rachel asked me this afternoon if publishing this eBook means she might be able to go on more trips with me to teach teachers about technology. I said, “I bet so!”

Few things rival the excitement of working with your own child when they are “on fire” for writing, reading, creating, and sharing. Long live “the writing workshop” in the classrooms of the world! Mrs. Zahn is a GREAT 2nd grade teacher in Oklahoma City Public Schools, and here’s a published eBook to prove it!

Technorati Tags: download, ebook, publish, snowflake, meetsnowflake

FREE Enhanced eBook for Kids: “Snowflake Gets Lost” by Rachel Fryer originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on January 29, 2012.

This semester I’m working on a contract basis (thanks to federal grant dollars) as an “innovative instructional coach” in Yukon Public Schools. This morning I helped one of our sixth grade teachers facilitate her first lessons using free, ad-free class blogs hosted by KidBlog.org. In this post, I’ll share some of the configuration specifics for these class blogs and a nine minute screencast in which I demonstrate each step. The teacher has six sections of students (136 in all) so the techniques described here for importing student userIDs and passwords from the district’s student information system can be HUGE time savers!

I am a big fan of free Posterous blogs for publishing student work, including media products. You’ll see multiple examples of student work shared on Posterous blogs on share.playingwithmedia.com, which I created to complement my eBook, “Playing with Media: simple ideas for powerful sharing.” KidBlog is a great platform too, but it has different advantages. Posterous makes the posting and sharing of rich-media files including images, audio and video very straightforward. KidBlog lends itself best to sharing text, but it can handle most kinds of embedded media. For the teacher I worked with today, as an English teacher it’s important her students have their own directory of posts they can readily view along with their parents. KidBlog automatically creates “student pages” of all posts an individual has published. (Usually in the right sidebar, but this can vary with the selected blog theme.) Other features of KidBlog I really like are:

1. It makes moderation of both posts and comments to a blog very easy / fast
2. It shows how many comments different posts have received on the homepage, so students as well as parents/other visitors can identify posts which “need some attention” and a helpful comment.
3. KidBlog is built on WordPress, so it supports the free WordPress iOS app. One of the 6th graders this morning asked, in fact, “Is there an app for this site?” I was pleased to tell her: Yes there is!
4. KidBlog supports “broadcast” posts, so a teacher can write a single post but have it automatically cross-post (“broadcast”) to all his/her blogs. This is HUGE for teachers using KidBlog with multiple sections.
5. It supports the importing of student userIDs and passwords as comma separated (CSV) files.
6. It supports nested commenting.
7. Students can change their own display name. This is important in our district, since student’s initial network userID is a series of numbers. For the teacher’s purposes, it’s important to identify students by first name. This is also critical for peer and parent commenting, and great the students can change these display names directly.

Today in two of the classes, students submitted over 100 different comments for their peers. Even though we coached students to “be thoughtful” in their comments and not just write things like “Good” or “Awesome,” of course we had some comments like that. About half the students in the first class today had used LightSpeed Systems’ free learning management system, “My Big Campus,” in other classes. Unlike My Big Campus, however, the KidBlog sites used today and I configured for the teacher are OPENLY visible to anyone online (without a login) but all posts as well as comments are moderated.

I recorded a nine minute screencast earlier in the week when I was configuring these student blogs, which shows all the steps I performed to each KidBlog site so it was ready for teacher-moderated posting and commenting today. I encourage you to check out KidBlog. More digital text / blogging platform options are linked on the “Text” page of playingwithmedia.com.

Technorati Tags: blog, kidblog, writing, configure, configuration

Configure KidBlog for Safe, Moderated, Interactive Student Blogging & Commenting originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on January 27, 2012.

On January 26, 2012, we attended a full-day workshop about “Common Core Transition” led by Jan Hough with Marzano Research Lab. These are some of our takeaways from the day. Handouts from Jan’s session are available on the OSSBA website.

Writing Across the Curriculum
One of the most important changes emphasized in the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) is writing across the curriculum. This means students in all grades, in all content areas, need to be doing more writing about what they are learning. Writing is not just just something students need to do in English class, students need to be writing in ALL their subject areas.

4 Key Steps to Implementation
Jan used a four part framework to explain how school districts are and should transition to CCSS. These four parts are:
Awareness
Proficiency Scales
Instructional Practices
Assessment Practices

These are explained in greater detail on this two page handout from Jan.

Unpacking the Standards
Jan emphasized the importance of “unpacking the standards” for teachers to learn the differences and similarities between what classroom practices they HAVE been doing and the new classroom practices which are expected under the CCSS. Jan provided a template document for teachers to use to “unpack the standards.” Unpacking the standards means taking a CCSS standard and identifying skills a teacher must explicitly teach for the student to successfully master that standard. It was not clear “how many” different standards individual teachers should unpack to adequately understand the CCSS. It seems reasonable for teachers to unpack some, but NOT reasonable for each teacher to individually or even collectively unpack ALL the CCSS which apply to them. Districts which have “unpacked the standards” with their curriculum have created new curriculum maps. This is a process we may include in our transition plan for the current (2011-2012) academic year.

Proficiency Scales / Rubrics
The cornerstone of CCSS implementation from the “Marzano Laboratory” is the creation and use of “proficiency scales” to specify student expectations. These are rubrics which have four levels of student expectations. Jan provided a template document for teachers to use when creating proficiency scales. The Marzano Research Lab provides a free, online “bank” of proficiency scales anyone can access after creating a free account on their website. Quality varies widely for the scales currently “in the bank.”

Written Response Tips
As teachers create assignments and assessments, Jan emphasized the importance of using informational texts. She also emphasized the importance of students citing evidence and writing across the curriculum. Teachers need to work collaboratively with team members on writing across the curriculum.

Ideas for Curriculum Maps
These are ideas we’ve discussed, not ones which were specifically suggested by Jan in the workshop. One of the things we may want to build (or have built) as an action script for Google Documents is a tool to insert different standards into our curriculum maps. We need to make it easy for our teachers to look up and insert CCSS standards as well as PASS objectives for non ELA or math teachers.

Our curriculum maps for each course and each grade level must be “living documents” which are continually open for editing / revision / additions. We will not be well served, going forward into the future, to select a commercial / proprietary tool for curriculum mapping which will require us to pay an annual licensing fee. What makes the most sense, at this point, seems to be using Google Docs as spaces for creating, sharing and updating Curriculum Maps.

The best example of completed curriculum maps we’ve seen are secondary maps from Stillwater PS. North Carolina has excellent resources on ELA and Math “unpacking the standards.”

We’ve created an open group on the social bookmarking site Diigo, called “Oklahoma CCSS,” where we have started to share links to resources. Anyone is welcome to join.

Collaboratively written by Kathy Davis and Wesley Fryer

Common Core Transition Ideas via Marzano originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on January 26, 2012.

Currently, a transition to Common Core Standards is prevalent in the educational environment. This session will overview key steps in successful Common Core implementation. A focus of the presentation will be resources the Marzano Research Laboratory has developed to support teachers and administrators in this transition from state standards to Common Core Standards.

ONE OF THE PARTICPANTS NEXT TO US ASKED JAN ABOUT COMING TO THEIR DISTRICT FOR PD, SHE QUOTED $6K PER DAY AS HER PRICE

Handouts from today are linked on www.ossba.org/ocic

Effective pedagogy in “Classroom Strategies that Work” by Robert Marzano
- curriculum articulation
- instructional methodology
- encapsulating both within classroom management

The instructional methodology piece is the one we hold closest as teachers

Now lets think about the definition of college and career ready
- this should make us think about instructional practices in our classrooms

think about the term “deep understanding” carefully
- if we are to be effective in that orchestration of complex skills, deep understanding is key

Now we’re going to talk about young people growing up today

Reference April 2010 FastCompany article: “A Is for App: How Smartphones, Handheld Computers Sparked an Educational Revolution”
- name things kids today have no concept of because of their generation

We need to think about skills kids need now

Take a look at the research (Wells & Croxton, pg 1)

Schools may once have done an adequate job of equipping and sifting young people to take their various places in the prevailing society, but that world is gone.

Now showing a YouTube video listing short change facts “Did You Know” style

PISA assessment
- “US students scored lowest on the problem-solving items.”

Jobs for the Future (2005) “Fore every 10 students who enter eighth grade, only seven graduate high school on time, and only three complete a postsecondary degree by age 26″

MY THOUGHTS: IT IS SO IMPORTANT TO CONSIDER THESE QUOTATIONS AND STATISTICS IN CONTEXT, AND THAT CONTEXT IS NOT BEING PROVIDED HERE. THIS IS A TYPICAL PRESENTATION OF “NATION AT RISK” STYLE STATS: OUR SCHOOLS SUCK, WE’RE IN A CRISIS, SO WE BETTER CHANGE. NO DISCUSSION OF POVERTY, CHANGING DEMOGRAPHICS, WHAT STUDENTS TAKE THE PISA IN OTHER COUNTRIES VERSUS US SCHOOLS, ETC. THE CITATION ON THE PROBLEM SOLVING PISA RESULTS IS DARLING-HAMMOND, 2010, P. 35, BUT THE MAIN FOCUS OF HER RESEACH (FROM WHAT I’VE READ) ABOUT TEACHER QUALITY IS NOT MENTIONED AT ALL. MORE DE-CONTEXTUALIZED CITATION OF “RESEARCH SAYS.”

Two resources to recommend to focus on cognitive skills and cognitive skills
- “The Highly Engaged Classroom”
- “Teaching and Assessming 21st Century Skills”
- surveyed 10,000 teachers, asked 3 questions: top 3 challenges you face as a classroom teacher
– #1 students reading below grade level
– #2 unsupportive home environment
– #3 student not being engaged in the learning process

Cognitive Skills
- mental abilities like logic, reasoning, thinking and attention to detail
- teaching of cognitive skills is not unique to the 21st century (VERY GOOD POINT, GLAD SHE POINTED THIS OUT)
- what is new to the 21st century is the idea that cognitive skills should take a dominant role in the curriculum
- analyzing and using information, addressing complex problems and issues, creating patterns and mental models

Conative skills
- the process of combining what one knows (cognitive) with how one feels (affective) and deciding what action to take in light of both
- understanding and controlling yourself, interacting with others

identifying “faulty logic” is a key element in CCSS

What of all this would we call “securely held content”
- what pieces of content are going to remain with my students forever
- the reality is nonoe of it will (so process skills are most important, not content)

Consider the students you are preparing for the 21st century
- discuss implications for educators and critical steps for successful implications of CCSS

OCIC part 2

How do we use proficiency scales to build higher quality assessments?

We don’t know what those assessments are going to look like?
- what assessment practices to support Common Core implementation?

Need specific items that support level 2, 3 and 4 scale outcomes
- most of your assessment items shouldn’t be level 4, ht need to be distributed

Research by Jorissen 2006: “Most Tachers say they develop their assessment knowledge and practices on the job”

These are about how we prepare teachers to craft assessments

MY THOUGHT: THIS IS DEFINITELY THE KEY TO WHAT WE NEED TO BE DOING IN PD

Rick Stiggins, 2008: “We have trusted those we believe… (trusted our textbooks)

Educators must gain deep understanding of how to develop high-quality classroom assessments that inform instructional assessments

He do we build quality classroom assessments

Recommend: “Classroom Assessment and Grading that Works” by Marzano 2006
- “Formative Assessment and Standards Based Grading” by Marzano 2010
- Teacher-Made Assessments: Gareis and Grant 2008

I believe in dual coding theory, we need both words/text and non-linguistic representations

Forms of assessment
- obtrusive
- non-obtrusive
- student generated

Obtrusive assessments interrupt the normal flow of activity in the classroom

Student-generated assessments are the most underutilized form, students generate ideas about how they can show they have mastered the content, students will create something and share it
- we can’t do this kind of assessment all the time

Classroom assessment = anything a teacher does to gather information about a student’s knowledge or skill regarding a specific topic

“Purpose of assessment is to enhance the experience”

MY THOUGHT: THIS MAY BE THE MOST THOUGHT PROVOKING AND CHALLENGING THING SHE HAS SHARED ALL DAY. THIS VIEW OF ASSESSMENT IS SUCH A FAR CRY FROM HIGH STAKES TESTING…

Why should we do it?
- research reported here shows conclusively that formative assessment does improve learning

A quality test is:
- valid: accurately and appropriately measuring what is relevant
- reliable: consistent and precise
- fair: does not put any group at a disadvantage

Tests/assessments must have these three elements
- we’ll spend the most time talking about validity today (“if you build your lessons on our scales, validity will be there”)

reliability
- refers to the degree to which a test is consistent and stable in measuring what it is intended to measure, mist simply put a test is reliable if it is consistent within itself and across time

Remember the PARCC website has some sample items for assessments, but we don’t really know if those will be representative of the eventual assessments which are developed

We know the following things WILL be in the CCSS assessments:
- assessments may be perforance-based and multiple choice
- assessments may require technology skills to respond to questions
- technology skills will be required to respond to questions (this means kids will take the tests online)
- assessments may require critical thinking, for example: claim-evidence-counter-claim approach, compare and contrast tasks, cause and effect relationships
- assessments may require writing in response to text
- assessments may be timed
- a different approach to instruction may be required

HIgh quality item types:
- true/false use those sparingly (strong statements include a single idea, not multiple ideas for T/F)
- true/false need to be black/white, not shades of grey

Matching assessments
- homogenous in content
- matching set no more than 7
- uneven number of items to be matched or items
- uneven number of items to be matched OR items may be used more than once
- ordered logically (such as alphabetically)
- longer reading on the left, matching items on the right

Multiple choice
- being with question-starter (who, what, where, how, why)
- a single task is articulated in the question
- emphasize qualifiers
- all response items are plausible (no-throw away)
- written in present tense if possible
- avoid negatives (e.g., which is NOT)
- may include context: more complex questions

emphasizing qualifiers
- kids will be required to come up with the BEST answer, so give students experience with that as you craft items

there will be “none of the above” and “all of the above”
- in Nebraska we didn’t allow this on our state test, we thought it was poor test item construction
- a good friend of mine is now a high level test item developer for PARCC and she says these items will be included

Quality Constructed Response Items
- require students to justify their reasoning
- fill in the blank, short answer, essay

tips for fill-in-the-blank
- position the blank at the end of the sentence as often as possible
- limit the number of blanks in an item
- blanks should be the same length
- be sure information prior to/surrounding the blank is adequate
- may use a word bank

Use logs of analogies: those are high level thinking required

Short answer and essay items
- make the nature of the response desired clear to the reader
- develop and communicate a scoring criteria for the question
- provide adequate space for responses

Practice makes perfect
- absolutely include these types of items on your assessments
- Common Core Will!

You do NOT need to build assessments for all of the scales you will use, but you (as a classroom teacher) definitely DO need to craft and use a variety of assessments

Video shown as an exemplar: “Assessment at the Utmost”

My Favorite No
Grade 8, Math, Warm Up Routine
Common Core Standards: Math.MP.6

When I work with district I encourage them to look at the scales and determine which ones could be combined
- you can do that, your design goes into the classroom assessment process

How many items do I need to be reliable?

MY THOUGHT: I THINK WE MAY BE PLAYING FAST AND LOOSE WITH THE CONCEPT OF ‘TEST RELIABILITY’ HERE, ESP AS IT IS CONSIDERED IN ACADEMIC SETTINGS (HIGHER ED)

If an assessment is valid and reliable, inferences about learning are more appropriate

Fairness: assessment level is appropriate
- readability
- avoid types of bias: offensive content, stereotyping, unfair representation, more…

format: directions, enough space, visually appealing

MY THOUGHT: IF WE’RE ASKING ALL TEACHERS TO BECOME ASSESSMENT DESIGNERS AND EXPERTS (WHICH IS NOT AN ENTIRELY BAD IDEA) THEN WHERE ARE THE ONLINE CCSS WEBINARS (FREE BECAUSE THEY’VE BEEN PAID FOR WITH TAXPAYER DOLLARS) FOR TEACHERS AND SCHOOLS TO UTILIZE ON SPECIFIC TOPICS LIKE ASSESSMENT CREATION?!

assessment format issues: the format of the test can district students taking a test

around the country I’m seeing a little bit of everything with CCSS implementation
1- year to year model
2- key leader model
3- shared resources model
4- scheduling options: early dismissal, late start, PLC meetings, PD days, summer meeting time

Consider the development of an ‘explicit development model

First and foremost: everyone must be on the same page with respect to goals
- what are our desired outcomes
- identify your implementation process

MY CLOSING THOUGHTS: I REALLY THINK WE NEED (IN OKLAHOMA) TO STOP PUTTING OUR EDUCATIONAL FAITH IN STANDARDS AND HIGH STAKES / COMMERCIAL ASSESSMENTS, AND INSTEAD INVEST OUR RESOURCES AS WELL AS FAITH IN DEVELOPING HIGH QUALITY TEACHERS. TEACHERS ARE THE KEY. I AM THINKING WE SHOULD START AN ADVOCACY GROUP WHICH PUSHES FOR 2 MAIN THINGS:
1- STOPPING THE DRIVE TO LINK STUDENT TEST SCORES TO TEACHER EVALUATION
2- WITHDRAWING FROM OUR FORMAL PLEDGES TO SPEND MILLIONS ON CCSS ASSESSMENTS, STOP STATE-LEVEL MANDATED HIGH STAKES ASSESSMENTS AND INVEST ALL THOSE DOLLARS INSTEAD INTO TEACHER PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT, TEACHER MERIT PAY AS NATIONAL BOARD CERTIFICATION PAY, AND IN TEACHER PAY. GOOD TEACHERS ARE THE KEY. STANDARDS AND ASSESSMENTS ARE NOT SILVER BULLETS. THIS ISN’T 1983, WE DON’T NEED A ‘NATION AT RISK’ RE-RUN. WE NEED TO TURN THE SHIP OF POLITICALLY MANDATED EDUCATIONAL MALPRACTICE IN OUR STATE. OUR TEACHERS, PARENTS, AND OTHER STAKEHOLDERS HAVE BEEN BRAINWASHED OVER THE PAST DECADE TO BELIEVE THAT EDUCATIONAL QUALITY AND WORTHY EDUCATIONAL ASSESSMENT CAN ONLY BE ACCOMPLISHED THROUGH EXPENSIVE, HIGH STAKES ASSESSMENTS WHICH WE PAY COMMERCIAL COMPANIES TO DEVELOP. THAT IS A FARCE AND A LIE. WE MUST CHANGE THIS MINDSET AND THIS REALITY. THE PURPOSE OF SCHOOL IS NOT TO TAKE TESTS WELL. THERE ARE FAR MORE THINGS THAN JUST ‘ACADEMIC ACHIEVEMENT’ WHICH MATTER IN SCHOOLS. WE MUST ALWAYS PRESENT TEST SCORES AND RESEARCH RESULTS IN CONTEXT. WE MUST TALK ABOUT POVERTY AND HELPING STUDENTS AS WELL AS FAMILIES MOVE UP AND OUT OF POVERTY. NEW ACADEMIC STANDARDS AND NEW, FANCY, ONLINE ASSESSMENTS ARE NOT THE ANSWER TO THOSE CHALLENGES. PASSIONATE, DEDICATED, HIGHLY QUALIFIED TEACHERS DEFINITELY ARE A KEY PART OF THAT SOLUTION. THERE ARE SOME GREAT ELEMENTS OF CCSS WHICH WE SHOULD EMBRACE AND IMPLEMENT. THERE ARE OTHER KEY PARTS OF OUR EDUCATIONAL POLITICAL LANDSCAPE, HOWEVER, WHICH WE MUST STAND UP TO OPPOSE AND CHANGE.

WE’VE GOT TO TURN THE SHIP. AFTER ALL, WE LIVE IN THE USA. IT’S TIME TO SHOW HOW WE CAN ADVOCATE FOR DEMOCRATIC CHANGE IN A RESPONSIVE REPUBLIC.

Technorati Tags: ccss, change, common, core, leadership, marzano, standards, transition, state, ocic, ossba, literacy

Transition to Common Core Standards by Jan Hoegh @marzanoresearch (2 of 2) #ocic12 originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on January 24, 2012.

Currently, a transition to Common Core Standards is prevalent in the educational environment. This session will overview key steps in successful Common Core implementation. A focus of the presentation will be resources the Marzano Research Laboratory has developed to support teachers and administrators in this transition from state standards to Common Core Standards.

Handouts from today are linked on www.ossba.org/ocic

Jan is working on a book titled “Making Common Core Standards Useful” with Dr Robert Marzano

Thanks that seem little often times make a big difference
- story about her sister as a cardio-nurse about a charting error typo

Common Core implementation is monstrous, not little
- has come upon us on a quick manner
- today is pretty little in the grand scheme of things
- but today could make a significant difference in how we go about implementation

One of my favorite examples of brain research:

from Sousa, How the Brain Works, 2005

MY COMMENT: THIS ‘BRAIN RESEARCH’ IS AN URBAN LEGEND AND HAS BEEN DEBUNKED. I AM COMPLETELY BLOWN AWAY THAT THIS WAS SHARED AS THE FIRST EXAMPLE OF ‘BRAIN RESEARCH’ AND ‘ACADEMIC RESEARCH’ IN TODAY’S SEMINAR. IN ADDITION, MY GOOGLE SEARCH SHOWS THIS BOOK WAS INACCURATELY CITED ON THE SLIDE, IT IS “HOW THE BRAIN LEARNS” FROM 2006. THANKS DR. JON BECKER FOR SHARING THE LINK TO HOW “The “Learning Pyramid” IS A MYTH AND NOT ACADEMICALLY SOUND RESEARCH. www.learningandteaching.info/learning/myths.htm

There is a lot to consider today with Common Core State Standards

Age = our attention span
- change of state needed
- tops out at 18-20 minutes
- adult learners need chagne also
- 3 ways we will group and regroup

Your table family (a.k.a. the people at your table)
- sorry, you don’t get to pick your family
- your are stuck with them, just like life!

Next: your close partners
- some people sitting near you but not at your table
- form groups of 2 or 3
- take 30 seconds to introduce yourselves and then return to your table…

Last one we’ll just use 1 time: an across the room partner
- agree on a place in the room where you’ll meet and work together
- intro yourself and return to your table

4 Modules for Successful Implementation of CCSS (by Marzano Research Laboratory)
1- What are the CCSS?
2- How do proficiency scales support CCSS implementation?
3- What instructional practices support CCSS implementation?
4- What assessment practices support CCSS?

We have developed scales for every CCSS standard, working with leaders around the country

CCSS require us to look at our instructional practices and determine if we’re getting to higher order thinking
- 21st century teaching and learning

Take a moment to think of a time of ‘adjustment’ or transition in your life, either professional or personal
- with your table family, list emotions you experienced

Our group’s answers: anxiety, frustration, apprehension, anger, fear, stress, uncertainty, relief, excitement, relief

“We are transitioning now as a country to CCSS”
- “although CCSS isn’t our new normal yet, it will be”

MY THOUGHT: MANY PEOPLE WOULD LIKE OUR NATION TO TRANSITION, BUT THIS ISN’T THE CASE IN TEXAS AND (I THINK) 15 OTHER STATES

We need to ‘be real’ in this transition time and express these frustrations / emotions
- we need to embrace the change and focus on improving the educational experience for our students
- that is a choice we can make
- look today for things you find exciting

#1 Educators must gain deep understanding of the purpose, organization, and content of the CCSS

“Verbatim note-taking is the least effective way to process and keep information”

Mission statement of CCSS: (focus on bold

consider the implications of these things for us as educators

You as a state [OKLAHOMA] have chosen to be part of the Park Consortium
- states could sign on to either one: PARCC has 24 states, 17 are governing board states (PARCC = Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers)
- Nebraska has opted OUT of CCSS: educators in Nebraska are wondering why they are opting out of CCSS, since it’s coming down the road for everyone

as a veering board state Oklahoma has agreed to
- pilot and field test assessment system components
- administrator new assessment system during 2014-2015
- use results from PARCC assessments in state accountability system

Our state has chosen to take a leadership role, and that is to be commended

MY COMMENT: I WONDER HOW MANY ACTUAL PEOPLE WERE IN THE ROOM AND DECIDED WE WOULD JOIN PARCC AS A GOVERNING MEMBER? THIS WAS NOT SUBJECT TO PUBLIC DEBATE AND DISCUSSION AS FAR AS I KNOW. INTERESTING HOW THIS IS BEING PRESENTED AS A ‘GREAT THING’ WE SHOULD CELEBRATE AND BE PROUD OF.

“the promise of the standards…”
- “These standards are not intended to be new names for old ways of doing business… They are a call to take the next step. It is time for states to work together to build on lessons learned from two decades of standards based reforms. It is time to recognize that standards are not just promises to our children, but promises we intend to keep.”

When we talk about ‘rigor’ in this context, we are talking about “application of content knowledge and skills”

‘teachable and learnable’ = guidance for the design of curricula and instructional materials

measurable: observable and verifiable
- we give students tasks to complete in relation to the standards

coherent: progression of learning
- there are blocks upon which other blocks are learning
- a continuum of learning, you will see this in the standards so you don’t see a lot of repetition in grade levels
- some of the content we were repeating in 1st, 2nd and 3rd grade is no longer repeated

grade-by-grade standards

internationally benchmarked: success in our global economy
- our environment is much different now than from when I started in education in the 1980s

What you must do as you get involved with CCSS is get the document in front of you and others you are working with
- starting at the beginning
- our intuition is to ‘just get to the meat of it’
- I was in Ohio yesterday and the teachers there didn’t want to hear about all the steps needed for successful implementation
- like “The Sound of Music” we have to start with ABC… reading the actual document

what observations can you make reading the table of contents

MY COMMENT: IT IS PRETTY UNBELIEVABLE THAT ALL THE MATERIALS FOR THIS WORKSHOP ARE NOT PROVIDED UP-FRONT IN ELECTRONIC / DIGITAL FORMAT. I DID ASK IF THESE COULD BE SHARED AND JAN SAID SHE’D EMAIL THEM TO USE IF WE INDIVIDUALLY SEND HER AN EMAIL. THE PERSON WHO INTRODUCED HER SAID THEY WOULD BE POSTED/SHARED ON THE OSSBA WEBSITE. THIS IS AS MAINSTREAM A CURRICULUM CONFERENCE AS YOU CAN GET IN OKLAHOMA, AND THE STACK OF PAPERS DISTRIBUTED AS WE CAME IN THE ROOM MAKE IT CLEAR THIS IS ‘PAPER-BASED LECTURE LEARNING AS USUAL.” IF WE ARE SERIOUS ABOUT FACILITATING STUDENT USE OF DIGITAL TECHNOLOGIES APPROPRIATELY AND REGULARLY IN THE CLASSROOM, WE HAVE TO START WITH TEACHER-LEADERS. (US) WE’VE GOT TO MODEL BLENDED LEARNING, AND THAT’S NOT HAPPENING HERE TODAY.

design and organization: focus on results rather than means
- this means teachers get to do the designing
- teachers are not told how they have to teach something

integrated model of literacy means it’s an integrated approach

we have to focus on research and media skills, those are integrated throughout the document

Only 70% of high school students graduate on time with a regular diploma (Green and Winters, 2005)

MY COMMENT: THAT STATISTIC IS SEVEN YEARS OLD! WHY ARE WE USING RESEARCH FINDINGS THAT ARE SEVEN YEARS OLD WHEN WE ARE IN 2012?

Also: “Approximately 40% of high school graduates lack the literacy skills employers seek.” (Achieve, Inc. 2005)

“U.S. dropouts’ literacy skills are lower than those of dropouts in most industrialized nations.” (A Report to the Carnegie Corporation of New York)

MY COMMENT: WHERE IS THE DATE CITATION FOR THIS CARNEGIE CORP REPORT? WHERE IS THE LINK? HOW ARE WE SUPPOSED TO FACT-CHECK AND CRITICALLY ANALYZE THE INFORMATION BEING PRESENTED TO US TODAY, WHEN QUOTATIONS LIKE THIS ARE NOT APPROPRIATELY CITED? WE NEED TO MODEL BEST PRACTICE WHEN IT COMES TO CITATIONS, AND THESE SLIDES MISS THAT BOAT.

“Our students literacy skills today are not what they need to be”

NAPE focuses on informational text use a lot, so CCSS follows suit…
- significant shift and implications

Reading Design and Organization
3 sections
1- literature
2- informational text
3- foundational skills (k-5)

Where do we go to find literary / informational text
- look at appendices A-C in the CCSS, and especially appendix B for examples of exemplary texts

What does “college and career ready” mean for students?

Content is just good, solid ELA and math content

four strands
- reading (including reading foundational skills)
- writing
- speaking and listening
- language

Numbering System of K-5 ELA Standards
- RL = reading literature
- RI = reading informational text
- W = writing
- RF –
- SL

Need to carve out time to help teachers understand the language / coding system

RST.6-8.3 = Reading, Science and Technology, grades 6-8, 3rd standard

Gaining understanding of the CCSS requires spending time with teachers ‘learning the lingo’ of abbreviations / acronyms in the CCSS

We already do a lot as teachers which is “orchestration”
- an arrangement of events to achieve a maximum effect
- the desired maximum effect is optimum levels of student achievement

MY THOUGHT: ACTUALLY THERE ARE MANY OTHER VERY IMPORTANT AND EQUALLY IMPORTANT OUTCOMES ON WHICH WE SHOULD/MUST BE FOCUSED AS PROFESSIONAL EDUCATORS IN ADDITION TO STUDENT ACHIEVEMENT

Now we are shifting to module #2, looking at proficiency scales
- “Educators must gain keep understanding of how proficiency scales can be used to enhance CCSS processes”

Guiding Questions
- what is a proficiency scale and why is it necessary
- how does unpacking the standards support the development of scales?
- what resources does MRL have to support you regarding proficiency scales?

So what constitutes a clean refrigerator? (brainstorm)
- now discussing use of rubric to establish proficiency scales
- this creates documentation about the content of the standards and student performance

We are going to provide these scales as part of the appendix to the new book I’m writing with Dr Marzano

“the intent of CCSS was to create a national curriculum so students can move to different states and have the same learning”
- my fear is states are unpacking and unwrapping the standards so instead of having a national unpacking, we have 46 different unpackings
- so Marzano Research Labs has taken on the job of unpacking these standards as scales so these can be used as conversation pieces / starting places for conversations

On our proficiency scales, student expected performance is always at score 3 (score 3 is always explicitly taught in the classroom)
- application in real-world contexts

We want to get kids to college/career ready levels

MY THOUGHTS: I REALLY THINK WE NEED TO MORE CAREFULLY CONSIDER IF COLLEGE READY AND CAREER READY ARE THE SAME THING. THE CCSS ASSUME THEY ARE. OUR ELECTED STATE OFFICIALS ASSUME THEY ARE IN OKLAHOMA CURRENTLY (WHEN I’VE HEARD THEM TALK) BUT I’VE HEARD MEMBERS OF THE GOVERNOR’S WORKFORCE COUNCIL STRONGLY QUESTION THIS. THE CCSS ARE ASSUMING STUDENTS NEED A UNIFORM, CONSISTENT, STANDARDIZED SET OF EXPERIENCES TO PREPARE THEM FOR LIFE SUCCESS. I AM THINKING THIS IS ‘OLD WORLD’ THINKING IN MANY WAYS: 1 WAY, 1 SET OF STANDARDS, 1 PATH. THAT IS NOT DIFFERENTIATION. THAT IS FACTORY-THINKING.

Scale development
- now you’re going to create a scale for time and money
- start with level 3: what are all students expected to do? (learning goal / expectation)
- in level 2, include the vocabulary, foundational knowledge, simpler procedures, isolated details
- level 1: with help students can perform level 2 and 3
- level 0: even with help the student cannot perform expectations
- level 4: demonstrations of learning that go above and beyond what was explicitly taught

MY QUESTION: ARE WE REALLY JUST TALKING ABOUT RUBRIC DEVELOPMENT NOW?

Recommendation: Don’t have your teachers create all these scales
- have them go through the process to see what it takes
- scale captures content of the standard on the left side, the right hand shows example activities which pertain to content

Teachers get: “What does it look like in practice?”

We are in the process of posting our Scales as a bank
- access this from www.marzanoresearch.com/Free_Resources/itembank.aspx

MY COMMENT: NOTE A FREE ACCOUNT MUST BE REQUIRED TO ACCESS THE BANK

Now discussing implications: What does this mean for you in your district?

MY THOUGHTS ANSWERING THIS QUESTION:
- OUR TEACHERS NEED PD/OPPORTUNITIES TO DEVELOP CCSS-ALIGNED RUBRICS
- WE OUGHT TO DEFINE HOW MUCH OF THIS ‘UNPACKING’ OUR TEACHERS NEED TO DO, TO UNDERSTAND THE CCSS AND HOW THEY APPLY
- I’M WONDERING WHERE THE FOCUS ON LESSON PLANNING IS? WHAT ARE THE KEY ELEMENTS OF A CCSS-ALIGNED LESSON PLAN WHICH ARE DIFFERENT THAN A ‘TRADITIONAL’ MADELAINE-HUNTER STYLE LESSON PLAN? I ‘GET’ THAT THE MARZANO GROUP WANTS TEACHERS TO USE SCALES/RUBRICS TO DEFINE AND ASSESS STUDENT LEARNING TASKS.

Technorati Tags: ccss, common, core, oklahoma, school, marzano, research, jan, hough, academic, standards, transition

Transition to Common Core Standards by Jan Hoegh @marzanoresearch (1 of 2) originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on January 24, 2012.

  by  paul (dex) 

The most glaring omission from the 1.0 version of iBooks Author is the ability to export ebooks in EPUB format. It’s not there.

The only export formats iBooks Author 1.0 supports are iBooks, PDF, and plain text documents.

This is by design by Apple, but in my opinion it’s a mistake. Hopefully Apple will remedy this in the 2.0 version. We (as educators) need to make our voices heard and insist (whether we’re K-12 or college/university educators) that it’s not acceptable for Apple to ignore and deliberately try to undermine the EPUB standard for eBooks. We all understand Apple is a corporation and wants to make lots of money, but far more is at stake when it comes to digital curriculum than just income for a global corporation. As educators, learners and students, we need the ability to create standards-based e-texts which are compatible on MULTIPLE devices, not just iPads, iPhones and iPod Touches. I recommend Mathew Ingram‘s January 19th post for GigaOM, “Do we want textbooks to live in Apple’s walled garden?” for more background on these issues. My answer to Mathew’s rhetorical question is a resounding “No: Not exclusively.”

In the case of my new eBook project, I not only want to distribute this FREE eBook on Apple’s iBookstore, I also want to distribute it on Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble’s Nook store, and openly on the web. Dan Wineman is 100% correct in calling out the ridiculous, “over the top” restrictions Apple is trying to impose on curriculum authors in his post, “The Unprecedented Audacity of the iBooks Author EULA.”

Since I’m unwilling to restrict the intellectual property roaming potential of this new eBook to “just” Apple’s iBookstore, I chose to create it using Apple’s Pages software. I followed the same procedures I used in the summer of 2011 to write and publish, “Playing with Media: simple ideas for powerful sharing.” For more background and specific steps about how to create enhanced/multimedia eBooks with Apple’s Pages as well as distribute eBooks on Amazon and Barnes & Noble’s Nook eStore, please check out:

• Podcast380: The Summer of Podfading is OVER: Let’s Talk eBooks! (17 Sept 2011)
• 99¢ Podcast: Creating Multimedia eBooks (3 Dec 2011)

These and additional links are available on my conference breakout session curriculum for “Creating MultiMedia eBooks.” (I’d be delighted to share this session with educators at your conference or other professional development event, btw!)

As educators, we have moral obligations to share. Open Educational Resources (OER) are and will increasingly disrupt traditional publishing companies’ revenue streams by allowing learners around the world to collaborate and share digital curriculum. The 1.0 release of Apple’s iBooks Author software is configured to undermine rather than support OER and the learning revolution.

Apple education executives, I call on you to change this in iBooks Author 2.0. Change the EULA so publishers are not locked into ONLY publishing on the iBookstore, and add an EXPORT TO EPUB feature like Apple programmers include with Pages ’09. Until those changes are made, I’m going to remain UNDERWHELMED by iBooks Author.

(The first image in this post was formatted with Creative Commons attribution using ImageCodr.)

Technorati Tags: apple, author, ibooks, ipad, software, ebook, epub, etext

Underwhelmed by iBooks Author Software originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on January 23, 2012.

It is absolutely fantastic to be able to teach students with an iPad2 using an AppleTV, an HDMI-ready flatscreen TV, and an open wifi network. The mirroring feature of the iPad2 to an AppleTV is hands-down, without question, the best way to teach a class using an iOS device. (The iPhone 4GS will also mirror to an AppleTV, but earlier iPhone versions won’t and the iPad 1 won’t either.) I LOVE being able to be “wireless” and untethered from the television/display and be anywhere in the room during our lessons.

Earlier today, I helped some elementary administrators setup for a presentation at the Oklahoma Association of Elementary School Principals (OAESP) mid-winter conference using an AppleTV, an iPad and a projector. In that case we used a $40 HDMI to VGA converter recommended in this iEAR.org post and everything worked great. The main lesson learned there was to bring and use our own wifi hotspot. We downloaded all the YouTube videos used in the presentation to a laptop in advance using saveyoutube.com, and transferred them directly to the iPad’s photo roll using the PhotoSync app and PhotoSync Companion software. We did this because when we tested the setup earlier, we found the wireless performance of video playback was slow and choppy at times. This could have been due to the way the conference hotel’s router was configured, and/or because of a lot of traffic on the router. Using a wifi hotspot we’d brought along worked well, even though it wasn’t connected to the Internet. All the videos and the Keynote slideshow were copied offline on the iPad2 used for the presentation, so no Internet connectivity was required.

Getting back to Puppet Pals and our lessons learned… I’m working with 12 students and we have 3 iPads, so they’ve been working in groups of four. Last week we discussed the basics of three act structure, which I’ve drawn and described as “the story arc.” This is the first time any of these students have worked with iPads or videography like this. While everyone has seen movies and has some movie literacy, their initial tendency is to want to have characters fight and zoom around the screen. Last week each group made an initial video (each about 60 seconds long) and today we started by watching and evaluating them. These first videos didn’t have much of a semblance of “story,” but we were learning the basics of the program including how to manipulate characters, how it’s helpful to move characters when they are speaking, how to pass the microphone and speak clearly into it, and how to pause recordings if needed to discuss a plan for the next scene. Different students served as scribes today as we discussed some strengths as well as ways the initial movies could be improved.

Here are some of our lessons learned.

DISCUSS APPROPRIATE LANGUAGE FOR THE CONTEXT
Both weeks we’ve had discussions about appropriate language, considering the fact we’re in a church for Tiger Club and that we’re hoping to share these videos with other people online. Even with these discussions in advance, it’s been important to facilitate both the planning and production of videos with students. Two other adults are available for our class to help the students, but their involvement has been minimal. We want to have fun and are having fun, but boundaries are important and this wasn’t a conversation I was initially planning on having with students before our first lesson started. It’s an important conversation. For one of our videos today I actually had to edit out about 4 seconds which had some profane words which ‘slipped out.’ Fortunately it’s easy to do that in iMovie. It’s valuable to discuss with students the importance of choosing their words carefully depending on their surroundings and context. Reminds me of Ruby Payne’s book.

AN iRIG MIC IS CRITICAL TO ELIMINATE BACKGROUND NOISE
Our first two meetings we’ve just had one iRig mic to share among three groups with three iPads. If you watch and listen to some of our videos from today which are embedded below, you won’t have any doubts about which group used the iRig and which didn’t. The iRig does a fantastic job filtering out background noise in a classroom. Since we have three groups of students working in a small classroom and many are laughing/having fun as they’re creating videos, the iRig is really a must.

REMEMBER YOUR APPLE TV REMOTE CONTROL
Last week I forgot to pack and bring my remote control for the AppleTV, and as a result I couldn’t configure it to access the local church’s wifi network. Don’t forget the remote. It is possible to configure an iOS device to use the Remote app to control an AppleTV, but the device and the AppleTV have to be connected to the same wifi network for this to work. That initially requires use of the remote control.

DOWNLOAD ALL CHARACTERS FROM PUPPET PALS DIRECTORS EDITION FIRST
Puppet Pals for iPad comes in two versions, one that is free (with only a few character and background sets) and the $3 “Directors Pass” version which comes with all the characters and backgrounds. Definitely spring for the $3 version, but download all the backgrounds and characters in advance so students won’t have to do that when they are in class.

PROVIDE SOME LIMITS FOR STUDENTS IN PUPPET PALS
Even if you just have a few character and background sets downloaded and available in Puppet Pals, the choices can be pretty overwhelming for students. It’s always instructive to see how often students will copy or mimic something you demonstrate initially for them in a whole group setting, rather than striking out on their own with novel ideas. (That dynamic is why some constructivist learning advocates discourage showing students examples, I think.) It’s good to model possibilities, but I think it’s also helpful to provide limits. I asked students both last week and today to choose no more than 3 or 4 characters, and no more than 3 different scenes. We have been working to build short, 1-2 minute videos, so this is plenty. In some cases students used more characters in their groups, but generally this limitation has been helpful and students have followed it.

LET STUDENTS DO ALL THE iPAD DRIVING
Even during the whole-group demonstrations of the Puppet Pals app, it’s worked well to have different students do all the clicking and swiping on the app: They’ve “done all the driving.” It’s very good to facilitate this with oral instructions, rather than simply “do it” for students yourself as the teacher. They learn more when they ‘drive’ and they are far more engaged. Most students want a chance to participate, and there are plenty of ways to do that in an iPad lesson with Puppet Pals.

REQUIRE STUDENTS TO DISCUSS AND CREATE A PAPER-BASED PLANNING DOCUMENT FIRST
With just about any multimedia project, getting students to plan, get organized, and in some cases WRITE is the hardest part of the entire experience. It’s also the most important, however, because it contributes the most to the eventual success and quality of the project. This week students did plan and write out more details about their planned videos and stories, so they each have more of a semblance of a narrative. Remember I’ve just worked with these students two times for 50 minutes each week, and it’s challenging to do that without any prior relationship or experiences together. I’m not claiming we’ve created any masterpieces here, but we ARE definitely having fun and I think the kids are picking up some things about telling digital stories. I’m learning a lot too!

I created a new, free YouTube channel tonight to share these videos. (multimediasandbox) Here are the student planning pages for today’s videos (very sketchy and simple, but more than we did last week) and the videos they created. I am particularly proud of this first group’s video, who came a LONG way because of the planning and storyboarding they did last week following our lesson time.

What does it say that two of my three student groups made videos which primarily focused on two groups fighting? We talked about the importance of conflict and tension which leads to an eventual climax/resolution for the characters in a story, but we didn’t insist it had to be about fighting. Next week I’m thinking I’ll have students draw some characters out of a hat that they’ll be required to include in their story, along with a sentence or sentence fragment they’ll have to use and build on for a novel plot. I’m thinking I’ll add an additional guideline that their characters can’t fight. Can you think of other or better guidelines to use next week?

LAND FIGHT

PRESIDENTIAL FIGHT

SHREK 4 REMIX

(no photo of the planning doc is available)

Technorati Tags: ipad, puppet, pals, lessons, learned, videography

Lessons Learned Using Puppet Pals on iPads in an After School Program originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on January 19, 2012.

Areas the state department says we need to do:
- talk with our community stakeholders
- do professional development (do you have a plan)

MY THOUGHTS: WHERE ARE THE EXAMPLES OF COMMON CORE PD PLANS FOR OTHER OKLAHOMA SCHOOL DISTRICTS? WHERE IS THERE A SPACE TO SHARE LINKS TO DIFFERENT COMMON CORE TRANSITION PLANS IN OKLAHOMA? WHERE ARE CURRICULUM MAPS ONLINE?

How are you providing the big picture of who, what, when, where to everyone

The 6 areas are posted, we are going to do a ‘hosted carousel activity’
1- Professional Development
2- Assessment
3- Instruction
4- Curriculum
5- Stakeholders
6- Overview

What are you doing NOW to do these things?

HERE ARE THE PICTURES I TOOK OF OUR BRAINSTORMING IN THESE AREAS

Transition Timeline for Common Core

- June 2010: State Board adopts common core state standards

Transition: 2010 – 2014 teacher development, local curriculum revision, test development

Transition complete: 2014

New standards for math and language arts for Common Core
- there are literacy and other changes
- math and language arts are the only tests that will change

Very important that our students have informational texts to use

Resources
- See sde.state.ok.us
- click Common Core State Standards
- REAC3H Network

Common Core website: http://corestandards.org

CCOSA http://ccosa.org

K2 Center websites
- http://k20center.ou.edu
- http://k20alt.ou.edu

Presentations:
- K20 to the CORE

Park website (park.cc) will be in charge of questions, they are periodically publishing questions and asking for feedback

Very important that students are writing across the curriculum

Key lesson for teachers: good teaching practices and high expectations are the most important elements of Common Core

Strategies:
- Comintas (?)
- lots of focus on students discussing things and being able to communicate their ideas in both written and oral forms

Also K20 offers sessions on Core Tools and Core Design (lesson plan development)
- we are seeing teachers get really excited about these changes

MY COMMENTS: MOST OF THE IDEAS WHICH WERE SHARED TODAY, THAT I HEARD, WERE MORE AWARENESS-LEVEL THINGS. WE NEED BREAKOUT SESSIONS LIKE THIS WHICH ARE MORE FOCUSED ON IMPLEMENTATION SPECIFICS. HERE ARE QUESTIONS I HAD IN THIS SESSION WHICH WENT UNANSWERED:
- WHERE CAN WE DIGITALLY ACCESS LESSON PLAN TEMPLATES WHICH OKLAHOMA SCHOOLS ARE USING WITH TEACHERS FOR COMMON CORE ALIGNED LESSONS?
- HOW ARE TEACHERS WHO ARE TRANSITIONING TO COMMON CORE THIS YEAR (AND WE HAD ONE AT OUR TABLE) CHANGING THEIR LESSON PLANS FOR CCSS?
- WHERE CAN WE DIGITALLY ACCESS DISTRICT TRANSITION PLANS FOR CCSS IN OKLAHOMA?
- WHERE IS THE OKLAHOMA LESSON PLAN DATABASE FOR PUBLICLY SHARING (UNDER CREATIVE COMMONS LICENSES) CCSS ALIGNED LESSONS?
- WHAT SHOULD WE TELL TEACHERS WHO ARE TEACHING A COURSE WITH AN EOI (END OF INSTRUCTION EXAM) WHEN IT COMES TO COMMON CORE? (IT SEEMS TO BE THE GAME HASN’T CHANGED AT ALL FOR THEM AT THIS POINT AS LONG AS EOI’S REMAIN.)
- WHERE CAN WE DIGITALLY ACCESS WALKTHROUGH RUBRICS FOR OKLAHOMA SCHOOLS WHICH ARE COMMON CORE ALIGNED?
- WHERE ARE VIDEO RESOURCES AVAILABLE FOR TEACHERS TO SEE ‘BEST PRACTICE’ LESSONS FOR COMMON CORE?
- WHERE ARE SCHOOL DISTRICTS SAFELY PUBLISHING STUDENT WORK ONLINE IN AN INTERACTIVE ENVIRONMENT?

LOTS OF QUESTIONS. NOT MANY ANSWERS. YET.

Technorati Tags: oklahoma, ccss, common, core, commoncore, oaesp, oaesp12

What’s So Common About Common Core? originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on January 19, 2012.

Common Core state standards initiative
- state-led and developed common core standards for K12 in ELA and math
- initiative led by Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) and National Governors Association (NGA)

What are educational standards and why do they matter?
- standards define what the outcomes will be for our students?
- the create shared understanding for our student of what they need to know and be able to do at each grade level when they leave our schools

States were in the driver’s seat
- federal government did not develop the standards or require adoption

Why do we need common standards?
- disparate standards across states
- today’s jobs require different skills
- global competition
- for many young people, a high school degree isn’t preparing them for college or a good job

Why is this important for all students, teachers and parents?
- prepares students with knowledge and skills they need to succeed in college and work
- ensures consistent expectations regardless of student zip codes
- provide clear, focused guideposts
- offers economies of scale (will drive down costs for testing, we have several consortiums, we are in the Park Consortium, all states in that consortium will be using the same bank of questions to measure the outcomes)

In part this was a response to criticism that schools (not necessarily Yukon PS, however) were not preparing students adequately/well for college/work

Features of standards
- aligned with college and work expectations
- forced and coherent
- include rigorous content and application of knowledge through high-order skills
- build upon strengths and lessons of current state standards
- based on evidence and research
- internationally benchmarked
- should be read to allow the widest possible range of students to participate fully

Aligned with college and work expectations

Standards development process
- college and career readiness standards for ELA and Math developed in summer of 2009
- based on college and career readiness standards, K12 standards for each grade were developed
- continual input throughout process from states, educators, business and higher education leaders
- public commit period received almost 10,000 comments
- final standards were released in June 2010

Map of Common Core State Standards Adoption

Applications for English language learners
- learn academic content WHILE learning English

Design and organization
- intro have description of capacities of a literate student (e.g. demonstrate independence, come to understand other perspectives and cultures)

3 main sections
- K-5 cross-disciplinary
- 6-12 ELA
- 6-12 literacy

ELA Key advances

Reading
- balance of literature and informational texts
- text complexity

Writing
- emphasis on argument and informative/explanatory writing
- writing about sources

Standards for reading and writing in history / social studies, science and technical subjects
- will complement rather than replace existing content standards

Standards for mathematical practice
- carry across all grade levels to address ‘gaps’
- describe habits of mind of a mathematically expert studetn

Standards for math content
- K-8 standards presented by grade level
- high school standard presented by conceptual theme (some states call math courses math 1, math 2, math 3, etc)

Math key advances
- focus in early grades on numbers (arithmetic and operations) to build a solid foundation in math (good change, we’ve been teaching too many objectives to young children, too early)
- evened out pace across the grades
- focus on USING math and solving complex problems, similar to what we should see in the real world in high school
- emphasis on problem solving and communication

Yukon’s Plan
- implementation plan developed in 2010-2011
- building knowledge
- side by sides to current standards (PASS skills)
- deconstructing the standards
- ongoing PD for faculty and staff

CCSS should be fully implemented in our classrooms no later than 2013-2014

State department of education has developed the REACH Network
- Deer Creek is our lead, we’ve had 1 meeting so far
- they shared information from the SDE in the ‘toolkit’ they received

(no questions from the board)

Introduction to the Common Core State Standards by Karen Robertson originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on January 9, 2012.

1. Narrated Slideshows
2. iPhoneography
3. Tell a Story in 5 Photos
4. iPad Quick Edit Videography
5. Creating Multimedia eBooks

Use the following discount code to download a podcast FREE: freepodcast

After adding an eBook to your cart, enter the discount code and click UPDATE CART. The discount should apply to your total. You will NOT have to checkout using Paypal or Google Checkout, but will have to fill out some information about yourself including your email address.

Be aware these podcast files are large (over 1 GB each) and a high speed Internet connection is recommended for download. Depending on the speed of your connection, it may take over an hour to download each one. The screen quality is outstanding however, if you can put up with the geeky presenter’s voice.

This discount code will apply a 99¢ discount to your order total, so if you want to download more than one free podcast you’ll have to “check out” online multiple times.

To purchase one of my eBook versions for “Playing with Media: simple ideas for powerful sharing” at 50% off, use the following discount code: halfoff

Three eBook versions are available for iPad (the enhanced/multimedia version, normally $14.99), the .mobi version for Amazon Kindle, and the standard ePUB version (works on other eReaders including Nook.) Remember you can now download the enhanced or standard ePUB version of my eBOOK directly to an iPad, iPhone, or iPod Touch. If you want to download to your computer first and sync your iPad using iTunes, instructions for that process are available from Apple. More help and tutorial links for syncing eBooks to different kinds of eReaders is available.

Remember bulk/discounted pricing is available for “Playing with Media” if you’re interested in ordering ten or more copies for educators at your school, conference, or professional development event.

Have a Merry Christmas and a wonderful holiday!

Technorati Tags: ebook, playingwithmedia, tutorial, christmas, podcast, discount

Merry Christmas: Download #playingwithmedia Podcasts Free, Buy eBook 50% off Dec 24 & 25 Only originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on December 24, 2011.

• saves it to Diigo (my primary social bookmarking site)
• saves it to a “quick blog” I created on Posterous for stuff I’m reading (wesread.posterous.com)
• Subscribes to the blog or site in my Google Reader if it has an available RSS feed
• Tweets out the link if I choose to share it with a special tag (zt for “zoo tool”)

Update December 20th: By request I’ve created a 15 minute screencast explaining most of these steps.

All of the web services I’m using for this “clever information trap” are free, with the exception of Zoo Tool. To post links to Zoo Tool using email, a PRO account is required. You choose how much to pay for the PRO account however: From $1 to $100 per year. I paid $12 for mine.

BACKGROUND
Since the Google Reader design team made the lamentable decision to STOP allowing post sharing via its “Shared Items” API, I’ve been on a quest for an alternative article sharing solution. I like sharing articles I read via a blog sidebar widget, but at this point the Mobile RSS family of apps are the only tools I have which still let me share articles via the deprecated Google Reader “Shared Items” channel. (See my November 2011 post, “Google Reader Post Sharing Still working with Mobile RSS” for more info.) In August this year, I attended a fantastic breakout session in Montana by Jason Neiffer titled, “Capture: Setting Up Traps to Organize Mountains of Information.” I love Jason’s metaphor of creating “information traps.” Rodd Lucier (“The Clever Sheep”) showed me the fantasticly powerful website “if then that” (ifttt) about a month later in Shanghai during the Learning 2.011 conference. As I considered a replacement for the “old school” Google Reader article sharing method, I decided I wanted a solution which went beyond past functionality. Every news application on my iPad permits sharing via email, and I’ve been using a Posterous blog for several months now (wfryer.posterous.com) as a “sandbox site” for saving and sometimes sharing (via a cross-post) content I find online. Scott McLeod‘s “Mind Dump” quickblog was an inspiration to me for this.

In going “beyond past Google Reader article sharing,” I wanted to integrate my Diigo account. Since I started using web 2.0 tools around 2003, social bookmarking has been a vital cornerstone of the tools in my information toolbox. I started with Delicious and eventually moved to Diigo, in part because it supports cross-posting to Delicious. In addition to integrating Diigo, I also wanted to streamline the process of subscribing to new blogs. Typically when I find a new article I like, I subscribe to that blog in my Google Reader. This makes for a lot of feeds, but Google Reader doesn’t hiccup or stutter. I wanted to find a way to follow “the ethic of minimal clicks” which I highlight in “Playing with Media: simple ideas for powerful sharing.” With just a few clicks, I wanted to do a bunch of useful things. This “clever information trap” is what I came up with, and so far I love it. I used Feedburner to ‘burn’ the feed for my wesread.posterous.com quick blog, and its free “Buzzboost” HTML code to add an additional blog sidebar widget for these shared articles and links. This is a great technique more schools should consider to add blog content on the district homepage or in the sidebars of other website pages.

BASIC SETUP: POSTEROUS-ONLY
The easiest and fastest way to setup an email-driven information trap is to create a free Posterous blog. Email anything to post@posterous.com and the site will post the content of your email message to your own website. A Posterous-based “information trap” is great for groups and teams, as well as individuals. Add team member emails to your site, and then anyone can send links, notes, images, videos, and anything else for sharing on the site. Since the site can only be the ‘primary Posterous blog’ of the creator, team members wanting to post on it will use the name of the blog followed by @posterous.com. For example, people submitting 5 photo stories to my Posterous blog on 5photos.posterous.com send emails to 5photos@posterous.com. This “information trap” setup is relatively straightforward and simple. Consider doing this first, if you haven’t worked with Posterous already, before you attempt additional steps suggested in this post.

STEP 1: CREATE ACCOUNTS
For the procedures I’ll describe below, you’ll need to create several free web accounts and 1 “pro” account if you don’t already have these. They include:

• Posterous.com account (free)
• ifttt account (free)
• Diigo.com account (free)
• Google Account (free – for Google Reader)
• Zoo Tool Pro Account ($1 minimum)

STEP 2: CREATE IFTTT TASKS
The website ifttt is the key to this “clever information trap.” Ifttt works with ‘tasks’ which are composed of ‘triggers’ and ‘actions.’ Login to Ifttt and grant authorization for it to access your Posterous, Google Reader, Diigo and Twitter accounts. You could re-create all the tasks I made from scratch, but I’ve shared these as ifttt ‘recipes’ you can import and use.

STEP 3: USE YOUR ZOO TOOLS EMAIL TO SHARE
After upgrading to a pro Zoo Tools account, visit zootool.com/pro and click “Email-Lasso” to view your personal, private email address to post to “your Zoo.” I saved this in my address book so I can readily type “zoo” and the address auto-fills whether I’m sharing an article or link on my iPad, iPhone, or laptop. Ifttt doesn’t run continuously, it has a ‘schedule,’ so it may take awhile for your link to appear on all your connected sites: Posterous, Diigo, and Twitter. Here’s an example.

Earlier this evening, I used the Flipboard app on my iPad to view my Astronauts Twitter List. For any post in Flipboard, a SHARE link is available in the corner which provides different options. I chose EMAIL LINK.

I typed “zoo” in the “to” field of the email message which popped up and my iPad auto-filled my Zoo Tools sharing address. I edited the body of the message so the link came first. Then I added several tags I wanted to use for the saved bookmark, and preceded the tags with a # sign like we use for Twitter hashtags.

Since I included the tag “#zt” (for “Zoo Tool”) my ifttt task for Twitter cross-posted this link to my account.

I love how this “clever information trap” auto-magically adds the RSS feed for a blog or other website which I share, within Google Reader. This is a screenshot of blog feeds added to my Google Reader earlier today. I used Mobile RSS Free on my iPhone to categorize several of these and delete one of them. This process was quick and simple.

That’s it: A clever information trap” built with Zoo Tool, Posterous, & ifttt! Zoo Tool is a powerful service which has MANY more features than I’m using at present, but I was most interested in finding a service which supports social bookmarking via email. Diigo doesn’t do that, but thanks to ifttt that doesn’t matter. If you give this “information trap” idea a try, please let me know via a comment here or Twitter. I’d also like to hear other ideas about similar processes for “trapping information” with a minimum of clicks, both individually and in groups.

EXTRA INFO: SETTING UP A TASK ON IFTTT
While you’re welcome to simply import and copy the ifttt recipes I created, I did create some screenshots documenting the steps for creating a task on ifttt. I absolutely LOVE the creative ways this website is being used, and the ways it empowers “non-coding geeks” (like me) to create some very useful information functions.

Click CREATE A TASK. Click THIS to setup your trigger.

Choose the “trigger channel” you want to use on ifttt. For the examples I’ve described in this post, Zoo Tool was my trigger channel for all four tasks.

Select the specific context for your trigger. These vary according to the tool selected. For all my tasks in this example except the Twitter cross-post, I used the Zoo Tool trigger, “Any new page bookmark.” The Twitter task uses “New page bookmark tagged.”

Click to create your trigger.

If you selected “New page bookmark tagged” or another trigger requiring a specific tag or term, enter the desired info and click to create the trigger.

Click THAT to create the second part of your ifttt task.

Select your action channel. For these examples, I chose Posterous, Diigo, Google Reader and Twitter as my action channels.

Choose the desired action for your channel. Available options depend on the channel selected.

Note you can insert different kinds of content from the “trigger channel” to use as desired. In the case of my Twitter task, I chose to insert the text “Reading:” prior to the title of the link and link URL.

Last of all, enter an optional description for your task and click to create it. This description will help others decide if they want to use your task if you choose to later share it as a ‘recipe.”

Good luck and happy information trapping!

Technorati Tags: information, trap, diigo, zoo, tool, zootool, ifttt, trigger, task, recipe, education, school, collaborate, team, post, blog, posterous

Create Clever Information Traps with Zoo Tool, Posterous, & ifttt originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on December 20, 2011.

Steven Sande’s November 22, 2011, article, “iBookstore promo codes a no-show for e-publishers,” highlights some of the interesting dynamics at play for eBook publishers, authors, and readers. Steven wrote:

iBooks publishers looking to send ebooks to reviewers, or who want to stir up interest in a new title through a giveaway contest, are out of luck. Unlike the App Store, publishers cannot create promo codes for the iBookstore… That can be a bit of an issue for publishers. The Amazon Kindle Bookstore, which also lacks a way to generate promo codes, at least makes it possible to buy Amazon gift cards in any denomination. This allows publishers to offset ebook costs for their recipients.

Independent eBook publishing platforms including Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing, PubIt by Barnes and Noble, and Apple’s iBookStore all require contracts which forbid selling your ebook online at a lower cost than you sell it on their website. I’m thinking these contracts and policies seek to maintain profits for the publishers and prevent “a race to the bottom” for eBook prices, but as Steven notes they also impose some significant obstacles for independent writers wanting to generate buzz, reviews and sales around a new title.

Fortunately, I’ve found a good way to comply with these contractual requirements for consistent online eBook pricing but also provide some flexibility for schools and other organizations interested in purchasing my eBook (“Playing with Media: simple ideas for powerful sharing“) at a discount for larger quantity orders. I’ve configured my eBook information pages on both speedofcreativity.org as well as playingwithmedia.com to include “add to cart” options via E-junkie.com for all three eBook versions. E-junkie DOES let me generate and distribute discount codes for my eBooks, which can be for any amount. In some cases, organizations are ordering a fixed number of discounted eBook licenses, and with E-Junkie I’m able to provide them with download codes for those eBooks. (Those discount code amounts are for 100% since the discounted eBook cost has been paid for by the gifting organization.) In other cases, I can provide a short-term (time-limited) discount code for a special event. I’ve offered a 50% discount on the eBook, for example, for 24 hours following recent webinars and face-to-face conferences where I’ve presented the past few months. If I wasn’t using E-junkie’s extremely affordable service, however, I’m not sure how I could have done these things.

Recently, I was approached by the New Hampshire Society for Technology in Education, who want to provide copies of my eBook (at a discount) to all participants at an upcoming conference in December. Again, thanks to E-junkie, I was able to do this. Since my eBook is available in three different formats (enhanced EPUB for iPad, .mobi for Kindle, and standard EPUB for Nook & other eReaders) this discount code purchase option provides people with opportunities to purchase the specific eBook formatted for their eReader. For NHSTE, I provided flyers like the following for distribution to members and conference participants which includes their eBook download code:

I’ve created an inquiry form with Google Docs and embedded it in a new information page under eBooks titled, “Discounted / Bulk eBook Pricing.” If you’re interested in a quote for discounted pricing on my eBook, please submit it and let me know about your situation.

As educators, we are all “experts in literacy” in our communities. As literacy experts, we all need to be reading eBooks and sharing both their benefits as well as drawbacks with students, parents and others in our communities. If we haven’t read eBooks, it is impossible for us to have well-informed opinions about them. Consider giving “Playing with Media” to other educators in your school or educational organization! It’s a 21st century literacy gift which will hopefully have a “digital ripple effect” far into the future!

Remember I’m teaching a series of twelve workshops and videoconferences in December focusing on “Playing with Media: simple ideas for powerful sharing.” The workshop/videoconference series is called, “The Twelve Days of Playing with Media.” Learn more on learn.playingwithmedia.com.

Hat tip to James Deaton for sharing Steven Sande’s article with me.

Technorati Tags: discount, ebook, ebooks, literacy, playingwithmedia, reading, gift, give

Give eBook Copies of Playing with Media to Educators at a Discount originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on November 25, 2011.

I’ve been looking for a significant day or reason to offer a 50% discount on my eBook, “Playing with Media: simple ideas for powerful sharing,” and today’s events are the best reason for personal celebration I’ve encountered in many moons. So… please share this far and wide, anyone worldwide can purchase any of the three versions of my eBook from now through midnight EST Sunday, November 29th at a 50% discount! This means the enhanced/multimedia EPUB for iPad is $7.50 instead of $14.99, and the “standard” EPUB version along with the Kindle version is $5.00 instead of $9.99. Use the “ADD TO CART” buttons on my eBooks page and the following discount code:

docatlast

These links are available on both www.speedofcreativity.org/ebooks and playingwithmedia.com/pages/about. Tutorials and links about transferring the eBook to different kinds of eReaders (including iPads) are available on www.speedofcreativity.org/ebooks/help.

Also remember to share examples of student media work on share.playingwithmedia.com. This month (November 2011) I’ll be giving away another iRig microphone (courtesy of IK Multimedia) in a drawing as I did in September to Michigan educator Brad Wilson. All you have to do to enter the drawing is share ONE example of student media (with student and parent permission, of course) using the contribute form on share.playingwithmedia.com/contribute.

Technorati Tags: code, ebook, epub, media, playing, sharing, with, discount

Discount this weekend: Playing with Media eBook 50% off thru Nov 20th! originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on November 19, 2011.

Manual pagination is a hassle. While most people using word processors know you can add automatic page numbers in the header or footer of a document, I think fewer people know how to add captions and cross-references to those captions. This process is similar to adding an “anchor” on a HTML page (webpage) or within a document in Apple’s Pages, included with iWork.

My first step was to click and highlight the name of the table I wanted to make into a “caption” in Word 2008. From the INSERT menu at the top of the screen I chose CAPTION.

Word then prompted me to specify desired options. I chose to label the selected object as a table and number it sequentially, inserting the “caption” after my highlighted text.

After clicking OK, I deleted the original table number and formatted the “caption” table number as desired. This was analogous to creating a placemark in Google Maps/Earth parlance. Now my Word document had a referencable bookmark (called a ‘citation’) for that specific table.

The next step was to insert the automatic page number for my table at the front of my document, in the “List of Tables.” To do this, I clicked my cursor where I wanted it to go (with the tab settings already formatted) and chose INSERT – CROSS REFERENCE from the Word menu bar.

I then selected the desired table I was referencing and clicked INSERT.

The page number was inserted into my document, and if the location (and page number) of that table changes as I add or remove text the page number will automatically update.

Do you know a better or alternative way to do this in MS Word? I think this process is even easier in Apple’s Pages, but my committee members all work in Word so that’s what I’m using.

The end of this writing saga is near….

Technorati Tags: cross, format, howto, page, tutorial, update, word, caption, reference, number, automatic

Captions and Cross-References for Automatic Page Numbers in MS Word originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on November 15, 2011.

Doubtless the fact that children normally engage in play and work out of school has seemed to many educators a reason why they should concern themselves in school with things radically different. School time seemed too precious to spend in doing over again what children were sure to do any way. In some social conditions, this reason has weight. In pioneer times, for example, outside occupations gave a definite and valuable intellectual and moral training. Books and everything concerned with them were, on the other hand, rare and difficult of access; they were the only means of outlet from a narrow and crude environment. Wherever such conditions obtain, much may be said in favor of concentrating school activity upon books. The situation is very different, however, in most communities to-day. The kinds of work in which the young can engage, especially in cities, are largely anti-educational. That prevention of child labor is a social duty is evidence on this point. On the other hand, printed matter has been so cheapened and is in such universal circulation, and all the opportunities of intellectual culture have been so multiplied, that the older type of book work is far from having the force it used to possess.

And yet, in the words of Karl Fisch, many math teachers today are still “assigning one through thirty-one odd” and calling that education.

In the same chapter, Dewey reminds us about the importance of mistakes and fashioning learning opportunities for students which permit learning from mistakes. He wrote:

Moreover, opportunity for making mistakes is an incidental requirement. Not because mistakes are ever desirable, but because overzeal to select material and appliances which forbid a chance for mistakes to occur, restricts initiative, reduces judgment to a minimum, and compels the use of methods which are so remote from the complex situations of life that the power gained is of little availability.

This “requirement” pertains to digital as well as analog work, including digital writing / blogging. I resonate with Dewey’s reference to “the complex situations of life.” Too often in school we try to over-simplify reality. Attempts at simplification can be warranted in some cases, but frequently these attempts result in boring lessons and boring activities for students. Life IS complex, and many of the learning challenges we share with students should include elements of complexity. When they do, not only can we see their levels of interest and engagement go up, but also their opportunities to “make mistakes” and thereby learn valuable lessons they are unlikely to forget tomorrow.

Reading these passages today reminds me I need to “return to Dewey” and read his ideas more often. Project Gutenberg currently has seven of Dewey’s books available free in multiple formats.

Technorati Tags: education, learning, play, dewey, mistakes

Dewey on Book Work and Opportunities for Mistakes originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on November 14, 2011.

This session is available as a no-edit audio podcast via Cinch.

Conference Twitter hashtag: #k20ili

I’m passionate about these issues we’ll discuss today because of my 11 year old daughter, Abby
- particularly for her, I want you to think about YOUR Abby
- think about your young children or grandchildren you want to think about as I say “Abby” instead of thinking about ‘the generic student’
- make it personal, think of someone personal to you
- we need to think about what’s important

My purpose today is to be part of the conversation today, and the conversations you take back to your schools

Start: “I am a derivative”
- not a math derivative
- most of what I will share today I stole from someone else
- this first statement is from Dean Shareski in Moose Jaw, SA

Lots can say “Yeah, but…”
- I want you to change that to “yeah, AND”

As I teacher I set out in the audience
- I don’t have the answers, but I think I do have some good questions

backstory
- give you the context of how my thinking has evolved

As the director of technology, I am responsible for all the stuff which plugs in
- most important job is helping teachers and students USE the technology in compelling way

I was math teacher first
- fall of 1991 I started teaching math at Arapahoe High School

Generally our students are really ‘nice’ (compliant)
- for the most part they pay attention, do homework (or copy each other’s homework)
- some A’s, lots of B’s, a few C’s, generally everyone is happy

As an idealistic math teacher, I loved my content area and I wasn’t satisfied: I wanted

“We have a problem with math literacy: It affects 10 out of 6 people”

pushback: have an unwritten rule that we’ll ask just so much of each other, but not too much

“go back to giving 1 through 31 odd, and no one gets hurt”

1994 my administrator said, “I heard you know something about technology”
- photo of 8 mHZ processor Mac SE, 1 MB of RAM, dual 800K floppy drives for $2999, for $1000 more you could get a 20 MB hard drive
- flash drive in his hand: $15 and 400 times as big as that hard drive

Photo of Mac SE’s used as bookends in a school library

when I become full time tech director I started work on more staff development, starting writing grants
- I initially wrote grants but they were focused on tech, gradually I made them more about the teaching learning

Started blog “The Fischbowl” to continue the conversations in between grant meetings that were every two weeks
- faculty meeting: invitation to speak to teachers
- MY PARAPHRASE: KARL DIDN’T WANT TO PROVIDE THE ‘SAME OLD SAME OLD’ PD EXPERIENCE FOR TEACHERS, HE DID HAVE LOTS OF IDEAS TO SHARE, BUT HE WANTED TO DO THIS IN AN ENGAGING AND NOVEL WAY…
- went home over the weekend, created a PPT, shared it with staff, they liked it, and I posted it to my blog
- some wanted to share with their spouses

Video was “Did You Know” (Shift Happens)
- shifthappens.wikispaces.com
- video talking about changes happening and what it means for our students
- I was very concerned we were doing a great job preparing our students for 1985

Got posted by prominent educational bloggers (Will Richardson, David Warlick, Bud Hunt)
- 50,000 views by winter break
- in January Scott McLeod (at Univ of Kentucky now) asked for permission to remix it and post to his blog
- he posted it as video in multiple formats
- within 1.5 days someone downloaded it and re-uploaded to YouTube, http://glumbert.com (video sharing site), also iambored.com
- those sites track views
- I tracked top 4-5 sites: conservative estimate, PPT I created for my staff of 150 has been seen by 40+ Million folks in all

Video was shown for Senate Select Subcommittee for Intelligence and the DNI and heads of every intelligence agency!

If a simple little PPT created by , we live in a fundamentally different world than the one you and I grew up in
- if you buy that, then maybe school needs to look a little different than it does now

Schools as we know now were designed in the 1920s based on ideas from the 1890s
- students are widgets, we perform similar operations on the assembly line for 180 days per year
- after 12 or 13 years kids fall off the assembly line ready for success in industrial-age America
- the model is messed up
- if you put good people in a bad system, generally the system wins

“Never before have kids been so well prepared for success in an industrial…” (David Warlick partial quotation – I DIDN’T GET THE ENTIRE THING)

We need to prepare kids for a world of information abundance
- anyone wishing for more info today?

What should students be able to know and do?
- old conflict: content v skills
- I want both as an educator! (I’m biased of course)
- sometimes we err too much on the side of content

We are going for understanding and critical thinking
- Chris Giovanni, English teacher in Colorado, great books
- says “I can reach the finish line and cover the curriculum in the year, but the problem is I”m often the only one left” (kids can’t come with us)

We can teach Colorado history, but it might be more relevant to have kids research why a particular street has the name it does, and not just turn a report to the teacher
- make a video, publish to Youtube
- put a link and QR code on a plaque so students visiting a particular place can see the video

THIS IS A GREAT IDEA WE NEED TO DO FOR STORYCHASERS / CELEBRATE OKLAHOMA VOICES!

ADDITION FROM KARL VIA A BLOG COMMENT: The QR code and movie trailers are being done by two language arts teachers in my building (Anne Smith and Maura Moritz), but we got the idea from Becky Johnson (@librarybecky)

American Revolution (idea from Alan November)
- have students in England study American Revolution side-by-side with students in U.S.
- perspective really matters
- it’s easier than ever before

Founding Fathers or Insurgents?
- there are two sides to this
- victors write the history, but there is more to the story

world geography
- showing world map
- more accurate view via landmass
- we have skewed perceptions because anytime you make a 3D surface into 2D you get a skewed view
- you have to decide how to orient the map (showing upside down map)
- US students need to stop thinking of the US as ‘on top of the map’

Book reports
- we still do these
- but doing an old school book report doesn’t make as much sense
- so a student at my school is doing “BAnned Book Movie Trailers and QR Codes”
- students are doing movie trailers: 1 describes the book, 1 describes the controversy, and 1 shows their opinion
- making those links into QR codes and taping those onto the spines of those books on the shelf
- so if our kids have smartphones in the library, they can view those reviews right away

What does it mean to be LITERATE in the 21st century?
- I don’t think we know the answer to that question
- when I grew up it was about reading
- last 30 years, we know literacy is about much more
- I still don’t think we have a good idea about that

reading and analyzing “To Kill a Mockingbird” is different than reading and analyzing the WWW (photo of multiple websites) – teacher: Cris Tovani

Let’s talk about elections
- I grew up in Lexington, KY
- 1 newspaper and 2.5 TV stations (rabbit ears off, NBC didn’t come in)
- newspaper at most might have 5 stories in a night about national elections
- of 22 minutes of anchor news each night, about 4 or 5 minutes would be about national elections
- you had to be home at 6 pm to see the news
- we didn’t flip channels too much (no remotes!)

Think about how different elections are today
- collage of lots of other sites/sources
- surveys overwhelmingly show young people get their resources here, but older adults now do too increasingly

Websites of candidates, you could get pretty detailed policy briefs
- yes some spin there, but…
- compare this to Carter v Ford news ‘back in the day’
- no comparison…

Who is teaching our kids how to do this?

Showing graph of realtime searches during the debate between Palin and Biden
- searches of ‘clean coal,’ nuclear, maverick, and voter registration
- DURING the debates
- remember how few presidential debates there were in previous generations?
- now realtime conversations

literacies are not just for school or to get a job: it’s about citizenship

ABC started broadcasting in 1948 as 3rd major network

Thought experiment: 3 networks x 62 years x 365 days x 24 hours per day (all new content)
- over 1.5 million hours of programming (lot of TV)
- Last month, YouTube produced more info and that’s probably closer now to two weeks

Clay Shirky: says important things
- we lived in the past in a filter then publish world
- we now live in a publish then filter
- everything is published, we have to be the filter
- we all need to be media specialists
- media specialists are in the best place to help us figure all these things out

You can track rise and fall of Presidential candidates by what video is ‘hot’

Obama campaign said official campaign videos uploaded got 14.5 million hours of views
- would have cost $47 million to buy equivalent ad time (via traditional outlets)
- that was free

How many of our students can legally get to YouTube in our schools

Even the Vatican has a YouTube channel (the Pope!)
- now that the Vatican has given their blessing to YouTube who can’t: public U.S. schools and Taliban
- 17 year olds can defend our country in the military
- 15 year olds driving big SUVs to school
- but we still don’t let kids access YouTube at school

I understand there are issues with YouTube and distraction , but we have to work that out

Anyone watch enhanced, online version of last State of the Union address
- they had slides with additional info
- lots of folks like @nprpolitics asking for fact checking

3 groups of people
1- people who don’t watch State of the Union
2- people who watched it on TV and let the pundits do their thinking for them
3- people who watched it online and fact-checked / engaged in conversations

I want Abbey to be in group 3 as she grows up

Photo from Tunisa Arab Spring
- 10 years ago it might have stopped with the fruit vendor setting himself on fire
- no one is saying it’s a Facebook revolution
- but it DID help them spread their message

Picture from Tahir square
- blogging area, extension cords out to the edge of the square, people getting out their messages

US Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, requires eery diplomat who rotes through the forging service institute to get training in social media
- you think our students should? (no, let’s just ban it)

Quotes

Jason Ohler: “Literacy means being able to consume and produce the media of the day”
- not enough that students can consume media, they need to be producer
- if you know how to produce, you can deconstruct hand maybe not be manipulated by them
- think of the ‘media forms of the day’

My guess is “5 paragraph essay” not at the top of the essay
- I’m not saying the 5 paragraph essay is evil
- but if that’s all we teach our students, that’s educational malpractice

Ohler “Fluency is the ability to practice literacy at the advanced levels required for sophisticated communication within social and workplace environments.”

“The fluent will lead and the rest will get left behind…”
- thinking about NCLB

Partnership of 21st Century Skills
- “profound gap between knowledge and skills most students learn in schooll and the skills they need..”

ISTE: “work collaboratively, including at a distance…”

technology has increased the intensity and complexity of literate environments…many literacy”

NCTE definition of literacies:
when we were growing up literacy was a capital L, now it’s many lowercase “l’s”
- “literacies are multiple, dynamic and malleable”

NCSS position statement one media literacy:
- we live in multimedia age where majority of folks get info from non-print sources…
- that true of your classroom?

Howard Rheingold: “In the 21st century, participator media education and civic education are inextricable.”
- if you are teaching civics and not teaching social media, you’re really not teaching civics

Richard Miller, Chair of English Dept at Rutgers
“We are not longer grounded in the printing press… to compose and compose successfully in the 21st century, you have to now only excel at verbal expression, at written expression, you have to also excel in the use and manipulation of images. That’s sweat it means to compose.”
- I have shared videos from him

Idea of a digital footprint

gateway drugs to Facebook and MySpace: Webkinz and Club Penguin

I think we need to teach kids Facebook in class
- not how to upload photos
- we need to teach them how, when and the consequences of things

difference between stupid things when we were young and now: if it didn’t rise to the level of felony in the past, we don’t remember it now
- today stuff gets archived in ways it didn’t before

GEneral Electric has internal social networking site they call professional networking
- employees will interact around their passions
- if that happens, good things will happen
- the site gets 25 million hits per day
- how are we preparing kids for a world of work when we block most social networking sites

High school language arts class who read “A Whole New Mind”
- interacted

Fishbowl technique with inner circle and outer circle, involved live blogging
- author Dan Pink came in for 2 hours

post: Dan Pink Ustream and CoverItLive Archive
- this is now part of the digital footprint of these kids

What will your kids have in their digital footprint?

you never get a second chance to make a first impression
- the first impression we make now is often virtual, not physical
- people will know about you before they meet you
- your digital footprint will speak about you to college admissions officers, future employers, your future mate

In a world where info is a text away…

Text GOOGL (46645) or ChaCha (242242)

Google Mobiel App for iPhone
- now Google Googles
- take a photo of something and it will search the web for it

Apple released Siri a few weeks ago, interacting with searches
Try WolframAlpha, it does all of high school math and science with detailed steps

What do we do if this factual information is a lick away

kids must learn how to learn

Toffler: “The illiterate of the 21st century will be those…

Hoffer quotation” Learners inherit the earth….

That was my concern when I created “Did You Know”

How do we help students create their own Personal Learning Networks?
- cavemen had PLNs to learn about hunting, gathering, etc.
- PLNs are now on steroids

I have teachers on 6 different continents now, most of whom I have never met in person

Knowledge resides in the network

were you can find info and answers today is much broader than it ever ways

Will Richardson: we are moving form “do your own work” to “work with others”
- “hand it in” to “publish it”
- “just in case” to “just in time”

what should students (and their network connections) know and be able to do?
- the more people you know, the smarter you are

Jay Cross, “Informal Learning”
- “What can you do….”

Help kids build networks and go global
- education is both local and global

2009 Horizon Report “those who use tech in ways that expand personal connections…”

5 billion potential teachers by 2020
- lots of people for my kids to learn from
- why would I lock this down?

My daughter now in 6th grade, had project similar to Flat Stanley and you write
- within a week 200 people around the world participated by sharing a photo and writing a paragraph about where they live

A couple weeks ago: Skype conversation with a teacher in Bermuda as a result of an assignment at school

What about standards
- I think we can have high standards but not be standardized
- the things my teachers are asking students to do now are much harder than what we had to do in school, but they are not standardized

Example: Do all students need to know “there is a complex number i such that i squared = -1, and every complex number has the form a + bi with a and b real?”
- I wish people would acknowledge that Abbey

It’s as if the most important thing we know about our students is their date of manufactured

I care about Abby’s Yearly Progress, not your AYP
- I don’t measure this with test scores

rhetorical question: you ever going to be 18 again?
= your students ever going to be your age?
- should we be preparing students for the world of the Mac SE or the iPhone world

What do you want for your Abby?

We need to spend less time paper training, and more team using digital tools (David Warlick)

Richardson: differences between what we can do with analog paper and digital paper

I want you to have some VISION for your students, for your Abby
- I’m not asking you to not be accountable, I’m asking you to be accountable for my kid

1 thing worse than not being able to see, being able to see but not having vision: Helen Heller

Breakout session links: https://sites.google.com/site/k20ili111011/

We’re living in a read/write world

Technorati Tags: creativity, edtech, education, technology, karl, fisch, ili2011, k20ili

Karl Fisch at the 2011 Innovative Learning Institute originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on November 10, 2011.

Brian Shih, the original (and former) program manager for Google Reader, was on the money in his Halloween post, “Reader redesign: Terrible decision, or worst decision?” Brian wrote very critically:

It’s almost as if Google wants to demonstrate that, yes, they don’t really get platforms. Instead of improving the G+ API to support Reader as a fully functional 3rd party client (a la Twitter), they’ve instead crippled the product under the guise of improvements.

I was under the impression, before reading updates Brian shared on his post, that the only “new” way to share a Google Reader article is now to click the “1+” button on the article. For those of us used to sharing our “read items” from Google Reader on our blogs, this seems useless since Google+ does not presently (that I could figure out) provide a way to share the “1+ links” via RSS or a widget like you could with the old Google Reader. Turns out, when viewing an article in Google Reader in your browser you can now click a SHARE button in the upper right corner of the screen. This will share the article directly in your Google+ feed, however, for everyone to see who follows you in the “circles” you select.

Where this was previously a one click process in the old Google Reader, now it’s a two click process. More than being a problem for doubling the number of required clicks, this is a problem for me because I don’t want to share every article I read in Google Reader to my G+ stream. I haven’t, in fact, figured out how I want to use G+. I like Twitter and Facebook is ok, but I really don’t want a 3rd social networking platform to which I need to pay attention. Google is not giving us a choice about this, however, if we’ve “digitally invested” (as I have) in other platforms like Google Reader.

I want the old functionality of Google Reader back: I want to be able to click on the SHARE button under an article, and then have that article added to an RSS feed of articles which I can share via my blog and elsewhere. I’m pleased to report tonight that while that “old Google Reader sharing” system isn’t supported anymore on the actual Google Reader website, it IS still supported by the underlying API and by applications which use it. It’s possible Google will shut that down at some point, but I hope they don’t! I like this previous method of sharing read articles and don’t want a functional downgrade! Here’s how this still works.

For the past few months, I’ve shifted most of my mobile news/blog reading to my iPhone application, “MobileRSS Free.” It’s free (as the name indicates) and integrates directly into your Google Reader account. This evening when I read a great post by Scott Floyd from a couple weeks ago when he attended a Project Based Learning workshop put on by a trainer for The Buck Institute, I clicked the SHARE button at the bottom of the article.

Just as it had prior to the “new” Google Reader / Google Plus changes, this mobile app button still worked! In the screenshot below of my current “shared articles” on Google Reader, you’ll see Scott’s post listed first as the most recent share.

After this success, I tested the app Flipboard on my iPad and confirmed its “share to Google Reader” functionality is (at least partly and for now) still working too. Articles you view on Flipboard which come from your Google Reader account can still be shared, and show up on the “old” Google Reader shares list.

Previously, however, (and I’m not sure when this changed) Flipboard allowed users to cross-post articles from other sources over to their Google Reader shares. This doesn’t appear to work anymore. I tried tonight to share a Facebook update over on Google Reader, and my Google Reader account (even though it’s entered and validated in Flipboard) wasn’t provided as it had been in the past as a sharing platform option.

Overall when it comes to the “new Google Reader,” I hope the design and programming team will listen to user feedback and make some changes. I “get” that Google wants us all to use Google Plus instead of Twitter. I’m not excited about that plan. There are some good things about Google Plus, but I am heavily invested in Twitter and find it a valuable network to use for LOTS of reasons. I’m not leaving Twitter, and I’m not going to invest comparable time in Google Plus (or Facebook for that matter) as I devote to Twitter on a regular basis. That said, I also LOVE Google Reader and consider myself “heavily invested” with my time and attention in that platform. One of the things I want to continue doing is being able to share out different articles that I read via my Google Reader subscriptions, and have those appear in my blog’s right sidebar. I don’t know how many people use these links and click on them because I share them, but from time to time I use the feed to find old articles. I do NOT want to share every article I read in my Google Plus feed. So, I’m glad apps like Mobile RSS Free and Flipboard provide ways to still enjoy “the old functionality” of Google Reader article sharing.

If you’re a Google Reader user, what do you think of the new changes? Have you figured out other ways to still share things you’re reading via Google Reader subscriptions instead of just sharing them in your main Google Plus feed?

If you’re interested, links to all the education blogs in my Google Reader “education” subscriptions are available. This is a link under “Resources” on my blog’s navigation bar. I’m glad the underlying code of “the old Google Reader” which supported that kind of subscrption sharing is still working too despite the “new updates.”

Technorati Tags: flipboard, google, literacy, mobile, plus, reader, reading, share, sharing, rss

Google Reader Post Sharing Still working with Mobile RSS originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on November 3, 2011.

With iOS 5 on the iPad, Apple has added a “newsstand” app which apparently can’t be tucked away inside a folder you create. It has to be a “main” screen button, ostensibly because Apple wants us to use it and pay for digital magazine content.

Since I’m already a print subscriber to National Geographic, the iPad digital versions are free to me. Each issue is 200 – 300 MB in size, but like an enhanced/multimedia eBook they include embedded media files including videos.

In the table of contents, articles with accompanying multimedia are highlighted with a special icon. Rather than going to a computer and entering a URL from an article, it’s wonderful to simply click an accompanying video and watch it right away.

This is the future of reading, today. Our students need to be communicating and sharing with multimedia today because “text-only” is like Latin in the world of languages. It’s the basis for our communication forms in the Western world, but it’s just the foundation. Like modern languages, our multimedia communication forms have and are continuing to evolve far beyond their origins.

What an exciting day to be a reader and a communicator! We all need to be playing with media more so we can effectively communicate in our modern age of digital “text-plus” magazines, eBooks and newspapers.

Digital Magazines: Text Plus Multimedia originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on October 31, 2011.

iAnnotate PDF is $10 on iTunes, but it’s worth every penny. I generally use my free Dropbox account to upload PDF versions of documents to “the cloud,” then download them to my iPad with the free Dropbox iPad app to open them first in DropBox. Then I open the file in iAnnotate PDF. Just click the arrow icon in the upper right corner, and after it’s installed iAnnotate PDF should appear as a destination app option.

I love how iAnnotate PDF supports highlighting, adding notes to pages, and also freehand writing. My writing would look neater if I used an iOS stylus, but today I was just making notes for myself so neatness didn’t matter as much.

Goodreader is another iPad app I’ve used for annotation, but iAnnotate PDF is my favorite since it lets you save notes and annotations you add into a new PDF file you can share with others. Last March when we were closing on our home in Oklahoma City, I was in an Alabama airport and needed to sign a PDF document for our realtor. I had my iPad and iAnnotate PDF, so it wasn’t a problem!

I like to convert my Word files to PDF format when I proof them on my iPad. At this point, iAnnotate PDF is my favorite app for these digital editing tasks. If you’re an iPad user, definitely check it out!

You have another iPad app you prefer for digital annotations? Please share about it in the comments!

All our family’s iOS applications are linked in my Appolicious account library.

Technorati Tags: app, edit, ipad, annotate, annotation, highlight, save, PDF, goodreader

Annotate, Correct and Edit Documents on Your iPad originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on October 25, 2011.

Show Notes:

1. Digital Ethnography @ Kansas State University (blog of Michael Wesch)
2. Mike Wesch on Twitter: @mwesch
3. Michael Wesch’s YouTube Channel
4. “From Knowledgable to Knowledge-able: Learning in New Media Environments” by Michael Wesch: Academic Commons, Jan 2009
5. Academically Adrift by Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa (Kindle edition)
6. “Generation Me” by Jean M. Twenge (Kindle edition)
7. My text notes from Michael Wesch’s Heartland Learning 2011 keynote
8. Michael Wesch’s BLC 2010 Keynote podcasted by Bob Sprankle
9. Heartland eLearning Conference 2012 in Edmond, Oklahoma hosted by the University of Central Oklahoma: March 5 & 6, 2012
10. Tech or Treat: Playing with Media (on the Fuel for Educational Change Agents Podcast Channel)

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Podcast384: Michael Wesch at Heartland eLearning 2011 originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on October 23, 2011.

This podcast is an audio recording of Wesley Fryer’s keynote address, “Reach for the Stars Using Media in Your Classroom,” on September 28, 2011, in Concord, New Hampshire. This presentation was shared for a gathering celebrating the 30th anniversary of NHSTE (New Hampshire’s Affiliate of the International Society for Technology in Education) at the McAuliffe-Shepard Discovery Center in Concord. The presentation focused on our obligations to be multimedia communicators as educators, the basics of “Playing with Media,” and examples of outstanding student media projects from New Hampshire students. Amidst a continuing barrage of exciting new technologies like the Apple iPad, Amazon Fire and Google Chromebook, the right question to ask is NOT, “Should we buy X device for our students?” The right question to ask is, “What do we want our students to DO with the tool we buy?” Check out the podcast shownotes for links to the presentation slides as well as referenced links and videos from the presentation.

Show Notes:

1. Reach for the Stars Using Media in Your Classroom (slides)
2. What happens in 60 Seconds on the Internet (April 2011)
3. The Playing with Media 180 Challenge for Educators
4. “What Technology Wants” by Kevin Kelly (a great book to read or listen to on Audible)
5. The Kindle Fire
6. Kindle Fire TV Commercial (30 sec)
7. Google Chromebook
8. “You had me at 8 seconds”
9. Chromebooks for Education (2:13)
10. See resources for digital text, image, audio and video sharing on playingwithmedia.com
11. See examples of shared student projects on share.playingwithmedia.com
12. Purchase “Playing with Media: simple ideas for powerful sharing” as an eBook or paperback
13. Google Sketchup software (free)
14. Scratch software (free)
15. Green Cities – New Businesses
16. The Subtle Knife by Philip Pullman Book Trailer by Alec G.
17. The Great Book Stories project (examples of student-created VoiceThread-based book reports)
18. Roman Weapons In Plain English
19. Fuel for Educational Change Agents (my secondary podcast channel)
20. Contact Wesley Fryer
21. Wesley Fryer on Twitter: @wfryer

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Podcast381: Reach for the Stars Using Media in Your Classroom originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on October 2, 2011.

I learned that, in my humble opinion, to be literate in Canada today, to be literate in the world today, must include the ability to read and communicate with, and through, images. It’s not enough anymore to simply see literacy as reading and writing; overall literacy must include visuals as one of the forms of communication. I finally achieved an understanding of what this ‘visual literacy’ means and learned the beginnings of how to include it into my practice. See works by Elliot Eisner and David Jakes.

I agree wholeheartedly. In “Playing with Media: simple ideas for powerful sharing,” I attempt to “make the case” for blended learning in part by discussing the power of visual media and the importance of helping students make the shift from simply media CONSUMERS to media PRODUCERS. I had a conversation with a friend this weekend, who is a dad of young children, who had never really considered this idea before. He knows he wants his kids to become critical thinkers, but he hadn’t thought much about how they might need to learn MEDIA CREATION skills to do this effectively. Like many people, he’s aware of how the landscape of communication has changed in the business world, but isn’t “connecting the dots” about how these changes MUST change the ways we formally educate our children in our schools and more informally educate them at home.

John Seely Brown, co-author of A New Culture of Learning: Cultivating the Imagination for a World of Constant Change, shared the closing keynote at the 2010 NMC Summer Conference. John and his co-author, Douglas Thomas, make a strong case for cultivating a new range of skills of adaptability and content CREATION. At the 5:24 point of his NMC keynote, John stated:

…learning has a lot more to do with creating the new than learning the old…

John argues in our current era of constant flux and change, we MUST encourage students to become content creators as well as CURIOUS learners. In one of the more straightforward sound bytes in a conference keynote, he states simply:

…how do we afford curiosity? Because basically if you’re not curious, you’re screwed in a world of constant flux.

John encourages us to look at iPads, laptops, and other digital devices “not as communication devices” but rather as “curiosity amplifiers.” I love that idea. Applying this to the thoughts E Gregory shared in her Masters program reflection, I think we need to focus on more CONTENT CREATION with images and other media in our classrooms not only because it can be engaging and more active/hands-on, but also because of the powerful ways it can AMPLIFY as well as ARCHIVE our thinking, our ideas, our curiosity, and our discoveries. Media literacy isn’t just “for the computer lab.” It’s not just “for the geeks.” It’s for everyone, and embracing a more robust use of images in our teaching and in the learning assignments we provide to our students is an important step in the right direction. We need to be “playing with media” more and sharing examples of student media creations regularly!

Take a look at the full video of John’s keynote. It runs just over 50 minutes.

Technorati Tags: education, images, john, learning, literacy, new, playingwithmedia, school, teach, teaching, visual, seely, brown, douglas, thomas, culture, reflect

Visual Literacy, Talking with Images and Curiosity Amplifiers originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on September 18, 2011.

1. Hat tip to Dan Schmidt for sharing the term “podfader”
2. Sounds of My World: Ambient Audio Recordings by Wesley Fryer
3. Chinese Flute Music - Recorded September 11, 2011, walking near Yuyuan Garden in Shanghai, China. (35 sec)
4. “Life Sounds Like This,” a Posterous-powered sound blog by Jess McCulloch
5. YouTube Playlist: Videos from Learning 2.011 (18 videos)
6. SHARE: Playing with Media (examples of student media projects)
7. Share Student Media in September: Win an iRig Microphone!
8. Fuel for Educational Change Agents Podcast Channel
9. 2011 K-12 Online Conference – FREE, world-class professional development videos
10. The Seedlings Webcast on EdTechTalk (Seedlings on Facebook)
11. NOW Generation by the Black Eyed Peas (YouTube)
12. Disintermediation (English WikiPedia)
13. Kindle Direct Publishing
14. Comparison of eBook Formats (English WikiPedia)
15. EPUB format information from the International Digital Publishing Forum
16. Apple Pages Software (commercial)
17. Calibre Software (free / open source)
18. eBooks and ePub Format Digital Books: A #tltechforum Roundable (6 May 2011)
19. Oodles of eBooks (podcast) by Carolyn Foote (@technolibrary on Twitter) – Session resources
20. Working with Free eBooks on Kindle for iPad NOT from Amazon.com (24 May 2011)
21. Reading the Fine Print: Considering Different eBook Publishing Options for the iBookstore (25 Jul 2011)
22. Publishing eBooks to Amazon and iTunes iBookstore: Learning Curve Continues (29 Jul 2011)
23. Validation errors in a multimedia or enhanced EPUB eBook (5 Aug 2011)
24. Lessons Learned About Enhanced or Multimedia EPUB eBook Validation (15 Aug 2011)
25. Audio and Video in EPUB: Straight to the Point Miniguide #2 ($5 ebook)
26. Apple ePUB Template with recommended stylesheet
27. Lulu.com
28. Approved Apple Aggregators (companies) for the iTunes iBookstore – as of July 2011
29. CreateSpace (publish print books on demand, Amazon’s official partner / channel)
30. e-Junkie (sell digital content online)
31. ePubBud
32. A New Culture of Learning: Cultivating the Imagination for a World of Constant Change by Douglas Thomas and John Seely Brown
33. Brushes app for iPad (Rachel used this for the book illustrations in Playing with Media)
34. Playing with Media: simple ideas for powerful sharing (links to 3 eBook formats and print version)
35. Supplementary resources: playingwithmedia.com
36. Contact Wesley Fryer
37. Wesley Fryer on Twitter: @wfryer

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Podcast380: The Summer of Podfading is OVER: Let’s Talk eBooks! originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on September 17, 2011.

Today I’m enthused to announce a new website: SHARE – Playing with Media, as well as a monthly raffle for educators and parents sharing examples of student media products and projects on the site. Here are the details. Please help spread the word!

The website share.playingwithmedia.com has been launched to encourage more creative, responsible and ethical playing and sharing with media by students, educators and parents. Categories of shared media projects follow the chapters of the eBook, “Playing with Media: simple ideas for powerful sharing.” The site already includes ten examples of student media projects using digital text, images, audio and video. Now it’s your turn. In the month of September 2011, I challenge you as an educator / parent / media creator to share at least ONE example of student-created media on the site using the provided CONTRIBUTE form. Contributed media projects can be created by your students, your own children, grandchildren, after-school program student participants, or other kids. In all cases, submissions must comply with the website posting policy. Submitters are responsible for obtaining permission from the student(s) originally creating the media products and the student’s parent/guardian for sharing the work online under a Creative Commons Attribution-Only license.

Every individual submitting an example of student media on the site, which is approved by site moderators, will be entered in a raffle for an IK Multimedia iRig Microphone. This microphone ($60 US) plugs directly into an iPad, iPhone or iPod Touch and functions as a WONDERFUL external microphone for media projects created inside or outside the classroom.

Submissions for this September 2011 promotion must be received via the online CONTRIBUTE form no later than midnight, Pacific time on Friday, September 30th. One winner will be selected via a random drawing on October 1st. Anyone is welcome to submit more than one entry, but each person can only enter ONE time for the raffle. The iRig mic prize will be shipped to a mailing address (in the United States or an international location) provided by the winner during the week of October 3rd.

If you have questions about this contest promotion, please ask them as comments to this post. Please subscribe to updates to the SHARE – Playing with Media website, and also “like” the Playing with Media fan page on Facebook. As submitted media projects are approved on the website, they’ll be linked automatically on the Facebook page. Let’s all have fun “playing with media” and sharing our media creations with each other in the month of September!

Technorati Tags: #playingwithmedia, media, playingwithmedia, project, share, sharing, student

Share Student Media in September: Win an iRig Microphone! originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on September 4, 2011.

Rachel is going to donate a copy of the book to her elementary school library, and I’m going to talk to her 2nd grade teacher so we can make a deserved “big deal” out of this illustration milestone in her young career as a graphic artist.

I chose to self-publish the print version of “Playing with Media” with CreateSpace for several reasons. One of my models for this book project was Douglas Thomas and John Seely Brown’s book, “A New Culture of Learning: Cultivating the Imagination for a World of Constant Change.” They published with CreateSpace, although they released a print version before an eBook version. I reversed that order with my first book project. CreateSpace is an official Amazon partner, so printing with CreateSpace means the book can be readily available via Amazon’s website and distribution channels. I opted to pay $39 for a “Pro Plan” on CreateSpace, which gives my book three additional distribution channels including retail bookstores. I have no idea if any retail bookstores will actually order and choose to stock my book, but if they want to, they can. This should mean, for instance, if you go to Barnes and Noble in person and ask for a copy of my book, they should be able to order it for you by ISBN. (ISBN-13: 9780983104834) It will take 5-7 days for the print version of “Playing with Media” to show up on Amazon.com, but it’s available now for immediate ordering via my CreateSpace book project page.

This was the fourth ISBN number I used for this book project, since I purchased a “block” of ten numbers several months ago. Technically, and especially for sales purposes, authors and publishers are supposed to use a separate and unique ISBN number for each version of a published book. This is more important if you’re selling a book and wanting it available in retail book outlets, I think. If you’re publishing a free eBook for Internet download, I don’t think the ISBN issue is as critical. All print books have to have an ISBN, however. Companies like CreateSpace and Lulu can provide you with an ISBN but charge more (from what I’ve seen) that what you can pay if you order directly. ePubBud will sell you an ISBN for $5 which you can use for both eBooks and printed books. The main disadvantage of that option, from what I gather, is “ePubBud” is listed as the official ISBN holder rather than you or your publishing company. If that’s not a big deal to you (and for many people, it probably shouldn’t be) then ePubBud may have the best deal on ISBN sales going at present.

The process of using CreateSpace to publish a printed version of my book was great. They provide downloadable templates in MS Word which have the exact margins and size specifications for the book format you select. The template opened right into Apple Pages software, which I used to write my eBook, and I was able to readily copy and paste all my text, images and links from my older document into the new, properly formatted template. The process was straightforward and relatively “easy,” as I hoped it would be. I chose to publish a 6 inch by 9 inch book, and used the “Cover wizard” CreateSpace provides to design the book’s cover. Rachel helped me do this, since the book was a joint effort. Printed, the book in 6 x 9 size is 290 pages.

The “Pro Plan” with CreateSpace makes the printed copies of the book I order cheaper, in addition to providing the option for more distribution channels. Depending on the channel a buyer uses, my royalty for the book sale is also higher with a “Pro Plan.” The other option I considered for the print book was Lulu.com. Since Amazon is so much bigger as a book seller and distributor than Lulu, I decided it would be better to go with their “officially endorsed” printing company. I also have some friends who’ve had problems in the past with Lulu shipping books with MAJOR printing errors. (Like lots of blank pages.) I suppose that could happen with any printing company, but combined with the desire to have a strong sales presence on Amazon.com it made my decision to go with CreateSpace easy.

When I travel for conferences and presentations I’m not planning to bring LOTS of copies of the print book, but I generally will bring some that I’ll give away with the eBook versions included as session door prizes. This will give Rachel a chance to autograph the book as well! The fact my daughter is exceptionally proud of her accomplishments as a professionally paid illustrator is definitely the best part of publishing this book. Chances like this to realize dreams and develop self-esteem, for my daughter, are priceless.

Have you self-published a print book? If so, what publisher did you choose and why? Were you happy or disappointed? What advice do you have for others?

I definitely recommend CreateSpace if you want to publish a print version of a book.

Technorati Tags: book, ebook, literacy, media, playingwithmedia, publish, reading, self-publish, selfpublish, print

Lessons Learned & Advice for Printed Book Self-Publishers: Use @CreateSpace originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on September 1, 2011.

The book is available in three different eBook formats and shortly (within 3 days) will be available in paperback / print form via CreateSpace. All purchase links for “Playing with Media” on all eStores (Amazon, B&N, and my blog directly) are available on www.speedofcreativity.org/ebooks as well as playingwithmedia.com/pages/about. The photo below shows my 7 year old book illustrator, Rachel, holding the CreateSpace “book proof” we received and reviewed this week. I tweaked this photo on my iPhone using SigNote. (A bit of “playing with images.”)

“Playing with Media” is not yet available on the iTunes iBookstore, but I’m not giving up. I’ve been working for two months now to get the book both formatted and approved by Apple. It’s not a simple or easy process, unfortunately, and I still hope to figure out how to properly “tweak” my EPUB eBook code without selling my soul to a third party, Apple-approved eBook “aggregator” service. For the past two months when I’ve shared presentations at educational technology conferences and in school districts, I’ve sold copies of the eBook on CD which include the enhanced version. To make the enhanced/multimedia book available worldwide, however, I needed a way to create an electronic shopping cart with a service that can host content and provide secure download links. I am using the website e-junkie.com for this purpose. I originally learned about e-junkie from PFDebate’s advertising page, and used their site as a model for my own blog advertising page I created this week. (More on that later.) At some point I may create a more integrated “shopping cart” / store experience on my blog, but for now I’m giving this a try. My research both online and talking to Oklahoma City area developers about e-junkie.com suggests it’s a good site, and their fees are relatively low. I configured my account with e-junkie to accept both PayPal and Google Checkout payments.

If you have an iPad, iPhone, or iPod Touch, I HIGHLY recommend you try out the enhanced/multimedia version of “Playing with Media.” Alison Anderson’s August 7th tweet about the enhanced/multimedia version of my ebook summarizes why better than I can. She wrote:

reading #playingwithmedia I think Al Gore’s ebook is cool but your book is EXACTLY what an ebook should be! Great PD to end summer!

Tomorrow I’ll be announcing a special website I’m VERY enthused about for sharing student project examples using digital text, images, audio and video. (Following the chapters of the ebook.) If you read my new eBooks and Books page carefully, you can find it and preview it. I’m planning to offer a monthly raffle there for educators who submit examples of their own “playing with media” examples and those of their students. Everyone who shares an example will be eligible for a digital tool drawing at the end of each month. I’m excited to see what YOU’LL be sharing with media in the months ahead!

Technorati Tags: #playingwithmedia, digital, ebook, edtech, education, learning, playingwithmedia, technology, ebooks, sale

Enhanced / MultiMedia version of Playing with Media eBook Available originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on August 31, 2011.

One of my favorite images of the evening was this one, which I shared on TwitPic from the school with the caption:

Which can are you in? (as a learner)

This photo could make a great visual “object lesson” for your next faculty meeting. Are we each taking time to “sharpen the saw?” We all need to be lifelong learners, and our changing technology landscape makes this imperative clearer than ever. We all need to be in the “sharp” can! Sharp and getting sharper!

My 2nd grader was proud to share her writing journal with us today when we visited her classroom. She showed us each entry and read them all to us. You’ve gotta love self-confidence, and it clearly exudes in this journal entry!

I also happen to love invented spelling, like the words we see in this entry for “Lady Liberdy.”

Some teachers and parents freak out when they see invented spelling. “Oh my gosh,” they say. “That’s so embarrassing.” “I better fix that or not show that to parents.” Those perceptions are misinformed, but can be remedied. My advice: Read Steven Krashen‘s outstanding book, “The Power of Reading: Insights from the Research.” How do people learn to spell? By reading. A LOT. The more you read, the better a reader and a writer you become. It’s important to practice writing too, but the research shows we learn to write MOST by reading. I LOVE the fact that Rachel’s 2nd grade teacher encourages her students to write creatively in their journals each day, and include illustrations. It’s also wonderful she understands invented spelling and their importance for EXPRESSION and communication. Proper spelling will come with time. What’s most important now is maintaining our enthusiasm for creative expression and communication!

Even though she claims it’s Christmas, I really think Rachel’s favorite holiday is Halloween. She absolutely LOVES trick-or-treating, as well as the candy which accompanies it! That perception was reinforced in these self-portraits. (Yes, that is a candy corn.)

On a slightly critical note, I snapped a photo of this keyboarding poster tonight in the school computer lab. These are NOT the primary messages I’d want to share with kids and parents in my computer lab. Yes, keyboarding is important, but let’s learn it in the context of engaging WRITING rather than typing for typing’s sake!

I also noticed the lack of microphones on all the computers in the lab. It’s doubtful I’ll be able to change these peecees into Apples anytime soon, but I’m confident I can help add microphones to them. How else are the students going to “play with media” and use digital audio?

My girls are all glad to be “back at school.”

Life is good. We’re counting our blessings tonight.

If you’re a classroom teacher or educator of any stripe, God bless you. Thank you for your service to our children and to our communities. The work you do is vitally important, and you are paid far too little for the hours you put into your job.

Whether you’re starting a new school year in the northern hemisphere, or in the middle of a school year in the southern, I hope it’s a GREAT one for you and your students!

Technorati Tags:
back, oklahoma, photos, school, writing, okcps, spelling, invented, krashen

Images and Thoughts From Back to School Night – August 2011 originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on August 18, 2011.

• 25 Jul 2011: Reading the Fine Print: Considering Different eBook Publishing Options for the iBookstore
• 29 Jul 2011: Publishing eBooks to Amazon and iTunes iBookstore: Learning Curve Continues
• 5 Aug 2011: Validation errors in a multimedia or enhanced EPUB eBook

1. EPUB eBooks are Compressed Zip Files

An EPUB book may look like a single file on your computer’s hard drive or saved to the flash memory storage of your eReader, but it’s actually a collection of files. The “EPUB Overview” portion of the Sigil documentation website explains the different elements of an EPUB file in relatively plain language. In addition to individual HTML (specifically XHTML) pages for each chapter of an EPUB eBook, images and other media elements (including videos) are saved as separate files in their own folders or directories. “The OPF file” includes metadata for the book and the “manifest” which is a comprehensive list of all files comprising the eBook. “The NCX file” is the table of contents and is also included. A working knowledge of these files and directories proved helpful this evening as I sought to validate my EPUB to publish it on iTunes.

Although EPUB books are essentially compressed files using the ZIP file format, I learned it’s not advisable to unzip and zip EPUB files with “standard” file compression software. Instead, it’s best to use freely available EPUB editing software programs like Calibre and Sigil. I’ll discuss more about these later in the post.

2. Viewing an EPUB on iBooks on an iPad Doesn’t Guarantee Format Validity

Apple’s Pages ’09 software makes the process of creating an EPUB eBook relatively straightforward. From the FILE menu choose EXPORT and then EPUB. The resulting EPUB file can be transferred to an iPad for viewing in the iBooks application in several ways:

1. Load the file in iTunes on your computer (in the iBooks application) and sync your iPad.
2. Upload the EPUB eBook to a website like DropBox (free) and then download it to your iPad using the free DropBox app.
3. Use the app AirSharing ($3) to wirelessly connect your computer directly to your iPad, and use a web browser (with the AirSharing provided local URL) to upload the EPUB to the iPad. Once transferred, select it and choose to open it in iBooks.

Just because an EPUB you create in Pages ’09 can be viewed without apparent errors or problems on an iPad, don’t assume your EPUB is ready for upload to the iTunes iBookstore or other websites. Strict coding rules have been created for EPUB eBooks to insure compatibility on multiple devices, and the rules for embedding video as well as audio are still being finalized. I found Apple Pages is very forgiving with filenames and file formats when exporting to the EPUB format, but it does NOT export multimedia or enhanced EPUBS (at least in the version I’m using now) which “validate” properly according to official EPUB standards.

3. Apple Pages ’09 is Insufficient to Create Valid Enhanced or Multimedia EPUB eBooks

The term “enhanced EPUB” is used to describe EPUB ebooks which include embedded video files. These files are saved WITHIN the EPUB file, so a reader does not need to be online with a “live” Internet connection to view them. The phrase “multimedia EPUB” is also used by some individuals to describe these special files. While it’s possible to create working, enhanced EPUB eBooks using Apple Pages which include embedded videos, I found it necessary to use several other programs to “tweak” my exported Pages EPUB so it validated properly with the iTunes Connect website and “iTunes Producer” software. iTunes Producer is provided to people and organizations who register with iTunes Connect.

I used FlightCrew EPUB validator software, Calibre software, QuickTime Pro 7 software, TextWrangler software, and Elizabeth Castro’s $5 eBook, “Audio and Video in EPUB” to tweak my multimedia EPUB today so it validated successfully. I wish I could say Apple Pages ’09 is all you need for this process, but it’s not. If you’re creating multimedia EPUBs for classroom use and will just share them with other iPad users, you might be OK skipping this more rigorous process of “validating” the EPUB. I’m sure Apple will improve its EPUB exporting features in future versions of Pages too, so the steps I went through tonight may be unnecessary down the road.

In its current version, Pages ’09 always converts embedded video files to QuickTime (.mov) videos when a user exports a document to EPUB format. According to Elizabeth Castro, the best video format to include in EPUB eBooks today for compatibility on the Barnes & Noble Nook eReader as well as the iPad is MPEG-4 (.m4v) video files. I followed Elizabeth’s QuickTime Pro export settings precisely and created .m4v versions of my 17 embedded videos. This required a bunch of file and code changes to make these videos play properly within my final EPUB file.

4. Name EPUB Image and Video Files Carefully

Generally I follow strict file naming conventions when sharing online. I use all lowercase characters in file names, avoid special characters and spaces, and use hyphens when needed in longer file names. Thankfully I automatically followed those conventions for most of the 133 images included in my eBook and the 17 referenced videos. I did NOT follow those conventions in all cases, however, and that turned out to be one cause of validation errors in my EPUB files tonight. Apple offers the following five possibilities for why an uploaded EPUB file might not properly validate:

• Your EPUB contains files not listed in the manifest. This error is not generally caught by EPUBCheck. All files must be listed in the manifest, or there is no way to confirm that they are intended for distribution.
• Your EPUB contains characters that are not UTF-8 or UTF-16. This is typically caused by including accented or other special characters in the EPUB. If they are not properly encoded, they will not appear as expected when the customer reads your book. iTunes Producer lists the exact files that have these issues in the delivery error report.
• XHTML namespace is not properly declared in all HTML in your EPUB. This is a strict requirement for the EPUB standard. Check to ensure the proper namespace is declared in each HTML document. See the current spec at http://www.idpf.org/2007/ops/ops2.0/download/.
• All date formats are not full and complete. There are strict requirements for dates listed in the EPUB OPF and NCX files. Check to see that they are complete and properly formatted.
• Your filenames have spaces or encoded characters. If your EPUB has any spaces in filenames, be sure the spaces are properly encoded in the EPUB manifest by using “%20″ in their place. Filenames may not contain periods (“.”) other than to separate the filename from its extension.

I wish I’d known, at the start of this writing project, that I needed to follow strict conventions for filenames. That could have saved several hours of work today. Also, it would have been nice to know about this clever workaround for providing alternative text for embedded videos when people use screen readers with your EPUB eBook.

5. Use Specific M4V (MPEG-4) Video Compression Settings

The “expert settings” in QuickTime Pro can be daunting, and until today I’d just left my screencasts and videos in their original formats when I embedded them in my EPUB. Elizabeth Castro painstakingly details the settings needed for EPUB video compatibility on eReaders in addition to the iPad in her $5 “Audio and Video in EPUB” eBook, however, and I followed her advice. I’m not sure if I’ll sell the enhanced / multimedia version of my eBook outside the iTunes iBookstore for purchase on devices like the Nook, but at some point I might. (Currently B&N’s PubIt website doesn’t accept enhanced EPUB books from independent publishers. They also limit the size of uploaded EPUBs to 20 MB, which is generally too small for enhanced EPUBs.)

6. Try Different EPUB Validation and Editing Tools

I learned today there are at least three different EPUB format validation standards, and it’s a good idea to use several if you’re trying to upload to Apple’s iBookStore. EpubCheck is the most well known validation tool, but I never managed to get it running locally on my Mac. I used the free, web-based version of EpubCheck on Threepress Consulting’s website to validate the “standard” (non-multimedia) version of my eBook, but it limits upload file size to just 10 MB. My standard EPUB is 7.5 MB, but my final enhanced EPUB is 225 MB.

I used the FlightCrew EPUB validator, which is used by the Sigil eBook editor, to validate both my standard and multimedia EPUB versions.

Both EpubCheck and FlightCrew are validating EPUBs using the 2.0 standard, as of this writing. The 2.0 standard does not include videos and multimedia EPUBS. Those specifications are coming with version 3.0. For this reason, I had to disregard the errors FlightCrew turned up for my EPUB which were related to video tag elements, manifest entries, etc. Lulu.com also seems to validate EPUBs currently to the 2.0 standard, and does NOT accept enhanced/multimedia EPUBs.

Sigil lets you edit the contents of your eBook, but you cannot edit the “OPF file” which includes files on the manifest. For this reason, I found Calibre along with TextWrangler to be my software tools of choice for editing my EPUB files after exporting out of Pages.

After loading your EPUB into Calibre, right click (or control-click on a Mac) and choose “Tweak ePub” to make edits to your individual files.

Although it sounds violent, don’t be dissuaded by the name… Choose “Explode ePub” to view all the component parts within your file.

You can then use a text editor (I love TextWrangler, it’s free and powerful) to make needed text changes to your documents. You can also rename and move files as needed from the “images” and “media” folders within your EPUB. When finished, back in Calibre choose to REBUILD your EPUB.

7. Multiple ISBNs Required for Different Book Formats on iTunes

iTunes Connect requires different, unique ISBNs for each eBook you list on the store. ePubBud is one site where I’ve seen discussion forum posts discouraging the use of unique ISBNs for eBooks, but that advice can’t go for iTunes. Your need for an ISBN depends on purpose and context. If you’re not selling on iTunes, you may not need or want to buy an ISBN. ePubBud will sell you an ISBN for $5, which is far cheaper than you can buy them directly (in small quantities) in the United States from the official ISBN agency. I purchased a block of ten ISBNs several months ago, and I’m using three of them currently for “Playing with Media: simple ideas for powerful sharing.”

• One for the Amazon Kindle (.mobi & .azw) version
• One for the “standard EPUB” version
• One for the “enhanced EPUB” or “multimedia EPUB” version

Closing Thoughts

This process of getting an enhanced / multimedia EPUB eBook available for sale and download on the iTunes iBookstore has been a much more tedious and involved process than I anticipated. I knew I’d learn a great deal attempting this process myself, so on that front I haven’t been disappointed! I am hopeful the process will get a bit simpler, but I suspect companies serving as “Apple certified aggregators” for EPUB eBooks will enjoy this complexity since it will bring more business their way. Most people are NOT going to want to make the file conversion and coding changes which took me HOURS today to sell their own eBooks online. The price for having someone else do this “heavy lifting” is steep, however. These companies don’t just want a one-time fee, they require by contract (and it’s not negotiable, from what I’ve found) a PERMANENT PERCENTAGE of your eBook sales forever. Consider carefully if you want to give that up before signing a contract with an aggregator. As of late July 2011, only two companies (Ingram and Libre Digital) were certified “aggregators” by Apple to handle enhanced / multimedia EPUBs.

Now that I THINK I have successfully “validated” my EPUB versions for the iBookStore, it’s time to play “the waiting game” again for awhile.

Hopefully in a week or two, both the “enhanced” and “standard” versions of “Playing with Media: simple ideas for powerful sharing” will be available for sale via iTunes. Until then and afterwards, you can purchase the standard version on Amazon and Barnes & Noble! The book has five reviews on Amazon.com so far, and I encourage you to submit your own review after reading it!

Please also consider “liking” the “Playing with Media” book page I’ve setup on Facebook. I hope to release a complimentary, interactive website within a few months which I eventually hope to make into a mobile application for media project sharing and commenting. I’m hoping it will be “4Square-ish” in some ways. Let the “playing with media” continue!

Technorati Tags:
apple, ebook, epub, ibookstore, itunes, validate, connect, calibre, sigil, epubcheck, pages

Lessons Learned About Enhanced or Multimedia EPUB eBook Validation originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on August 15, 2011.

Jason’s resources for today’s session: http://www.workshophandouts.com/wildtech11capture-1

Framework for today
- let’s talk about diets
- Caveman diet?
- theory of this diet is similar to how we handle information
- we try to desperately hang onto information as if it will go away immediately
- 20 to 30 generations ago, information was used as a phenomenon to keep people oppressed
- we have learned information absolutely IS power
- ongoing debate about what Thomas Jefferson would do in the modern age (Jefferson WAS the first Library of Congress)

This has led us to a situation where we are media rotund
- we feel the pressure to consumer too much media
- story of a friend who felt a psychological obligation to follow each change in the debt ceiling debate recently
- this is a useful phenomenon to consider of rth

Last Oct 20th: Happy Information Overload Day!
stats:
- ‘the average knowledge worker’ (anyone who works on a computer) gets about 93 emails a day
- because people can be connected 24/7, many of them are
- some people draw clear lines between personal and professional lines, others have trouble with this
- we can get sucked into a massive info overload condition if we don’t draw these lines
- if I don’t limit my use of this device, it will control me

Not new: Richard Saul Wurman: Information Anxiety
- “information explosion has backfired leaving us stranded between mere facts and real understanding…”
- that was written in 1989, the year IBM released PS/2 and before the CD-ROM took the stage

The same tools which can overwhelm us can be used in clever ways to save us
- I call this a workflow
- a set of concrete steps you use to accomplish something
- this is common in business, IT, among organization gurus

Don’t just think about information IN and OUT
- think about how tools push information around in your life that help you attach MEANING for your life
- only adopt tools which have some function inside your broader toolset of tools

Goal
- create a regular set of steps to process information, content and knowledge

don’t ever just adopt verbatim someone else’s workflow

The rules:
1 – start with one process: develop more over time
2- less is more: don’t use four tools when two will accomplish the same task
3- review and evaluate: regularly review and evaluate, then eliminate, enhance or modify
4- adopt new tools carefully: don’t assume you need to use EVERYTHING that is cool, nifty or otherwise handy
5- don’t follow these rules: ignore the rules if you stumble on something that works better for you!

Often as teachers we “preach” metacognition, but we don’t model this for our own learning / information use

Tool organization: XMarks
- try to make all your workspaces look the same
- I have five potential places I could be working: desktops at home or work, laptops either place, etc. (multiple places where I could work)
- just like a workbench you have tools in front of you, it makes a difference if you aren’t at your workbench

Bookmarks in computer browsers
- biggest problem: they are stuck on your computer

2nd tool I recommend: RSS reader like Google Reader
- this is probably the most information tool which exists for capturing information
- this is THE most critical tool if you want to be information savvy, take mountains of information and turn them into digestible chunks
- example: I monitor about 300 websites
- I’ll teach you how to use this in a moment
- for most workflows which involve capturing and using information, this is essential

I disagree that Twitter makes RSS feeds and RSS readers less needed / useful
- I love Twitter
- there are a lot of sharers, and then most people spend time retweeting and chatting on Twitter
- I think the answer is a balance of both
- If I tried to read my entire twitter feed I’d never leave my house: I use Flipboard to filter and access content

I own a side business that writes debate handbooks, one site that is our friend is
pfdebate.com
- great example of why I want to subscribe to their site via RSS, they just publish once or twice per week

Critical tool #3 for Archiving / Sharing: Delicious Social Bookmarking

Critical Tool #4: Instapaper

Scenario: World geography teacher that has a unit for each continent, looking for fresh, current content to support unit on Africa, textbooks is dated and content isn’t very engaging

Five workflow process steps

1- check existing resources / consider new topics
2- set up traps for new information
3- process collected results
4- archive and/or share
5- review

Start with a Google search
- you may be surprised about this, but many of our colleagues don’t do this
- I always click at least 10 levels into a resource
- there is always a new resource to find
- people rarely (if ever) click past the first page of search results

Example for Africa information: BBC Africa page (offers an RSS feed) and NY Times Africa Page (offers an RSS feed)

in Google Reader: Good keyboard shortcuts: press “N” to go to the next item, many more!
- scan through in RSS reader
- get a sense of what is useful and what isn’t

Options are archive, share, or ignore
- remember: you don’t have to master EVERY information source!

summary
- RSS reader
- Xmarks
- search
- delicious social bookmarks
- extra credit: Instapaper

I love Google Reader for many reasons, but the way other apps plug into Google Reader is AWESOME
1st app: MobileRSS (free version and paid version)
- supports sharing to delicious, instapaper, Google Reader, etc with a button push

Recommended by Jason: Bit Literacy: Productivity in the Age of Information and E-mail Overload by Mark Hurst
- create different philosophies for RSS reader folders/bundles

1- stars
- rare sources that consistently give useful, relevant info
- in workflow: tools that are the core tools you use all the time

2- scans
- reliably deliver at least some relevant info
- in workflow: tools that may not be used every day, but so something very well

3- targets
- sources good for a targeted, single use
- in workflow

4- (I missed the rest of this….)

Email is a real challenge
- I am convinced email will look very different in 20 years
- we’ve worked hard to get everyone access to email
- lots of old and young people today have abandoned email
- some JUST communicate via Facebook
- this is a sign of something coming in the future

In the school world, we are very dominated by email
- concept I want to introduce: http://inboxzero.com/

main concepts
- email is just a medium
- 1 place for anything
- process to zero
- convert to actions

Actions: delete, delegate, respond, defer, do

Another recommendation from Jason: The Four Hour Workweek by Timothy Ferriss (not all ideas are applicable to public ed)

Workflow prices for email
1- establish regular email practice (check email 3 times per day)
2- choose action items: immediate action, short term action, long term action
3- immediate action: complete, schedule, share
4- short term action: schedule, archive and share
5- long term action: schedule, archive, share

Less is always more if you can get away with it
- don’t use tools to try to gather all info, use filters to gather only info you think you would use
- example: the RSS feed for the NYT or even my local newspaper

Technorati Tags:
#wildtech, aggregator, google, information, montana, reader, school, wildtech, jason, neiffer, tmi, overload, strategies, New Tag

Capture: Setting Up Traps to Organize Mountains of Information #wildtech originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on August 8, 2011.

Tuesday I’ll be sharing the opening keynote at the 2011 Educational Technology Conference, “Building Human Connections in a Digital World.” Use the Twitter hashtag #blackfootetc to follow the conference the next three days. A number of sessions will be streamed live online for free.

My keynote title is: “Transformative Personal Connections in a Hyperconnected World.” The official keynote description is:

Although our world is more wired and connected than ever, the most transformative uses of technology today are personal rather than technical. In our opening keynote Wesley will explore how individuals are utilizing technology to personalize learning and transformatively humanize education in the 21st century.

In the presentation I’ll focus on Screens, Stories and Sites. (Hat tip to Phillip Cummings for help with that last subtopic!) Here are the slides and videos I’ll be sharing. Among other things, I’ll be encouraging conference attendees to make time for playing with media!

Inclusion Video by Brian Crosby (embedded version not available)

USS Arizona Impressions (AudioBoo by 5 year old Rachel)

“The Dirty Thirties” by Jeanette Hale (originally posted to Celebrate Oklahoma Voices)

The Hobbit in Five Minutes

Technorati Tags:
conference, edtech, education, leadership, montana, stories, story, technology, blackfootetc, personal

Transformative Personal Connections in a Hyperconnected World #blackfootETC originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on August 2, 2011.

I had uploaded the “standard” EPUB version which I created using Apple Pages ’09 software to the Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) website, and let the site convert it to the proprietary Kindle “AZW” format. Everything looked good in the preview after I uploaded it, but once the book actually “went live” and I downloaded a preview I noticed the table of contents was not available. It turns out the KDP EPUB conversion process doesn’t include a table of contents. The iBooks application on the iPad does dynamically create a table of contents when viewing EPUBs, so it was disappointing to learn (at least at this point) direct EPUB conversions on the KDP site aren’t complete.

To remedy this, I shared the issue on Twitter and also posted to the KDP community website. Charlene Chausis (a fellow ADE and guru when it comes to EPUBs) answered my call for help, suggesting I convert my EPUB version to MOBI and then upload that to Amazon. Charlene also confirmed Calibre (a free, open source eBook conversion and management program) maintains the table of contents when making the EPUB to MOBI conversion. I did this tonight, and used all default Calibre settings except one: I chose to put the generated Table of Contents at the start of the book rather than the end.

I uploaded and published this new version on Amazon’s KDP website, and it will be available on the site (on the same link, and to previous buyers) within 24 hours. Amazon reviews each book prior to it “going live,” including updates to eBooks like this one. Tomorrow night I’m going to download the new version and verify it’s fine, but I’m 99% sure it will be. Thanks Charlene for your “just in time” Twitter help! (You’ll find Charlene among several smart folks I thanked and included in my eBook acknowledgements section.)

The second item of good news relating to my eBook is this morning, I received a message from Apple that my application for an iTunes Connect account had been approved. I’ve been researching and pursuing three alternative tracks for publishing my eBook on the iTunes iBookstore:

1. Publishing myself, directly, as my company “Speed of Creativity Learning LLC”
2. Publishing via a certified Apple iBookstore aggregator, LibreDigital
3. Publishing via Lulu.com, which is also a “certified Apple iBookstore aggregator” although not for multimedia EPUBs

I haven’t had any luck publishing either my “standard EPUB” or “multimedia EPUB” on Lulu. From what I’ve read on various sites, it sounds like they have a very stringent EPUB validation process and it may include some requirements Apple doesn’t… and they may do this to encourage people to use their commercial EPUB conversion services. I’m not sure if that allegation (which I read a few places) is correct or not, but I DO know the EPUBs which I exported right from Apple Pages did NOT pass muster on Lulu. Rather than spend time troubleshooting why and how to fix the problem, I’ve explored other options.

LibreDigital sounded initially like a good option to check out, but the fact that they take 15% of gross revenue from an author made them seem less desirable or needed. As a result, this evening I’ve gone through the steps to publish my EPUB directly on the iBookstore. Here are a few observations and lessons learned.

First of all, Apple provides a downloadable, Mac-only application content publishers must use to post content for sale on iTunes. The software application is iTunes Producer. Interestingly, the English WikiPedia article for “iTunes Producer” has been deleted as of this writing. I’m guessing it will be restored and further developed in the weeks ahead. Sometimes this happens with new Wikipedia articles.

Basically, iTunes Producer is used to enter all the META information for your eBook, along with the actual EPUB file and cover art. The program validates your EPUB format and uploads (delivers) your “package” of content to iTunes. Prior to using iTunes Producer, however, I had to setup all the contract details for my account with Apple. This included my business name/address, tax ID number, and bank account. I had to certify agreement with Apple’s iBookstore and iTunes, which means (among other things) they’ll keep 30% of gross revenues from my book sales.

After getting my “contract” details finalized, I used iTunes Producer to enter all the meta info for my book and actual files. This initially looked like this:

You might notice I chose to make the book available DRM free. This doesn’t mean I don’t want to make money from this eBook… I certainly do. I have very mixed feelings about DRM, however, and generally support open content sharing. On Amazon as well as Barnes & Noble, when you initially publish an eBook you have to decide if you want to use DRM or not. That decision can’t be changed on Amazon or B&N once you set it. I didn’t use DRM on any of the three sites. If you’re not familiar with DRM (“digital rights management”) the English WikiPedia article on it is pretty thorough and worth reading.

One thing I wasn’t expecting was the option to include a “preview” file of my book. Amazon did this automatically, giving the first twenty pages or so of my book away as a “sample.” Apple’s iBookstore lets you specify if you want a preview/sample version and what to include. I chose to include the first ten pages of my third book chapter on “Audio.” I copied those pages into a new Pages document and exported that as a new EPUB I included in iTunes Producer.

The big surprise (and disappointment) when I finally clicked ‘DELIVER’ in iTunes Producer was the following message, which indicated an illegal / unsupported video file was included in my eBook.

This seemed very strange, since the 17 videos and screencasts I’ve included in the multimedia version of this book play fine on my iPad when I preview them. I did some research on the iTunes Connect website, and found the following FAQ which inexplicably states rich media files (including videos) CANNOT be included in iBookstore EPUB eBooks.

I submitted a question about this to the iTunes Connect team at Apple, and also asked the LibreDigital employee who I’ve been communicating with and inquiring about their services to explain this. That LibreDigital person had recommended I offer the multimedia EPUB version at a higher price than the standard version, so it MUST be possible to publish EPUBs with videos. Hopefully I’ll learn the answer to this tomorrow. It’s possible I need to change the file format of some or all my videos, but since THEY WORK NOW on my iPad that doesn’t seem sensible. My best guess at this point is Apple is requiring publishers to work with certified aggregators like LibreDigital when publishing multimedia eBooks. That may not be right either. Tomorrow I should find out and I’ll pass along what I learn. If you have insights about this please share them as comments.

Since I ran into this problem, I decided to upload the “standard EPUB” version of my eBook to iTunes. That version uploaded fine without errors or problems.

I did end up changing the META info for the book, since (although I thought I’d chosen it as a subcategory) iTunes Connect was showing my book categorized as “Engineering.” It also showed Rachel (my daughter and book illustrator) as a primary author, so I tried to fix both these problems.

I updated this and just stuck with educational book categories.

That worked, and the META info looks good now.

A few final notes:

I did purchase my ISBNs separately and directly a few months ago. Technically you are supposed to have separate ISBNs for each book format you publish, so a Kindle version needs a different ISBN than an EPUB version published in the iBookstore. EpubBud will sell you an ISBN for just $5, but they are the book rights owner in the ISBN directory. This might not matter for some folks, but I wanted to be the owner / publisher of record for this book… so I bought the ISBNs.

It took several days for Barnes and Noble to approve my account to publish my standard EPUB on their Nook eBookstore, but as of this evening I’m delighted to report it’s for sale there!

I’m going to head to our local B&N in Oklahoma City this weekend and give the book a “test drive” on a Nook eReader, since we don’t own one.

Hopefully the standard ePUB version of the book will be available later Friday in iTunes. The six countries I’ve authorized for iTunes sales (all now available to me) are Australia, Canada, France, Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States. I’ve added links to the Amazon Kindle Stores and B&N pages for the book on my main Playing with Media Posterous site. This is an exciting process!

Remember you can stay up to date with “Playing with Media” by liking the Facebook page I’ve setup for the book.

I’m planning to record an audio podcast of some eBook writing and publishing lessons learned soon.

Technorati Tags:
amazon, apple, epub, ibookstore, itunes, kindle, publish, publisher, barnesandnoble

Publishing eBooks to Amazon and iTunes iBookstore: Learning Curve Continues originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on July 29, 2011.

According to Alison Flood’s June 23rd post for The Guardian:

Although the author made clear that she had “no plans to write another novel”, the fresh Potter material – to be unveiled later this year – already stretches to 18,000 words about the novels’ characters, places and objects, with more to come. From Professor McGonagall’s love for a Muggle as a young woman, to how the Dursleys met (Petunia was working in an office); from new information about Slytherin, Ravenclaw and Hufflepuff houses, to details about wand wood, Rowling’s writing will be just one part of the richly interactive, free Pottermore.com website, which is intended to bring the Harry Potter storylines to interactive life for readers.

To stay updated on the project, check out the official Pottermore blog and follow @pottermore on Twitter.

Henry Jenkins’ post “Three Reasons Why Pottermore Matters…” highlights the importance of Rowling FINALLY embracing transmedia. I see this announcement as yet another reason we, as educators, need to be regularly playing with media to become more comfortable learning with digital text, images, audio and video. The interactive website powered, to a large degree, by user generated content (UGC) promises to be the kind of participatory learning environment our students want and increasingly EXPECT given the powerful tools in our information landscape.

Are you utilizing and experimenting with different kinds of digital, interactive communication possibilities today? As 21st century educators, we each need to be.

Thanks to Camilla Elliott for sharing this announcement.

photo © 2007 rmkoske | more info (via: Wylio)

Technorati Tags:
book, books, education, playingwithmedia, rowling, potter

J.K. Rowling Announces a Magical World of Digital Text: Pottermore originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on July 19, 2011.

The additional videos I’m sharing in today’s keynote are the first two minutes of the music video, “Welcome to the Future” by Brad Paisley, and “Social Media Revolution 2 (Refresh).”

My breakout session today in White Oak is entitled, “Celebrate Texas Voices: Empowering Digital Witnesses.” Storychasers launched this statewide oral history project two months ago, with a workshop in Lubbock, Texas, and we already have 35 videos created by Texas teachers and students on the site. I am showing the following two videos from Celebrate Texas Voices during my presentation today.

Family Fabric by Janie Fryar: The story of SS Rush and his contribution to the cotton industry in Lubbock County.

Find more videos like this on Celebrate Texas Voices

Bill’s Day by students of Kathylyn Sedgwick: Ralls High School students did a history project. In this documentary, students chronicle Bill’s Day.

Find more videos like this on Celebrate Texas Voices

I shared my presentation slides for this breakout session on SlideShare.

If you are in Texas and are interested in “volunteering your site” to host a Celebrate Texas Voices two day digital storytelling workshop, read more about the hosting requirements and contact Storychasers for more information! We’d love to schedule more Celebrate Texas Voices workshops for later this summer and in the fall!

Technorati Tags:
celebrate, digital, digitalstorytelling, education, history, oral, oralhistory, project, school, story, storytelling, texas, voices, community

Celebrating Texas Voices in White Oak – TCEA Area 7 Tech Conference #tatc11 originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on June 10, 2011.

Storychasers is hosting THREE two day digital storytelling workshops this summer in Kansas for teachers, librarians, administrators and others interested in technology integration, multimedia video production, oral history and preserving community voices. The three workshop dates and locations are:

• June 28-29, 2011 in Haysville, Kansas
• July 25-26, 2011 in Greenbush, Kansas
• August 3-4, 2011 in Andover, Kansas

View Summer 2011: Celebrate Kansas Voices in a larger map

Be sure to check out some of the latest videos shared on our Celebrate Kansas Voices Ning website. We now have over 65 videos created by Kansas students and teachers!

Register to join us, and please forward this information to others you know who may be interested! A 1 page PDF marketing flyer about the workshop is available.

Why attend our 2 day workshop?

• Digitally preserve history
• Create and share a video
• Develop digital literacy skills
• Use MEDIA to meet curriculum standards
• Join a community of innovative educators
• Get cool technology gadgets

Workshop cost is $499 or $249 per person, depending on whether you want to KEEP ‘digital backpack’ equipment after the workshop. Submit the Storychasers Workshop Registration Inquiry and Storychasers will send you the official workshop registration link. Call or email Storychasers if you’d like more information.

If you have TitleIID professional development funds, or other professional development funds from grants or other sources, our two day workshop is a wonderful learning experience for educators that has direct, measurable impacts on classroom instruction through the videos students create with teachers afterwards. We hope to see you in a Storychasers’ workshop this summer!

Technorati Tags:
digital, edtech, history, kansas, storytelling, technology, workshop

Kansas Educators: Become a Storychaser this summer in Haysville, Greenbush or Andover! originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on June 7, 2011.

In addition to posting these photos and audio recordings to my AudioBoo channel, I also used AudioBoo as we recorded these to Tweet out links and cross-post each AudioBoo page via email on our family learning blog, “Learning Signs.” This two-part sharing process took literally 10 seconds each after she recorded each writing sample.

Sarah can read very expressively, and it was not only fun to review her writing progress over the years tonight, but also remember together many of the things that have happened since we moved to Oklahoma from Texas five years ago. Without a doubt the most touching essay Sarah read tonight was “Yellow Cards.” It made us both cry. In it, she recounts a story about Kent Wilson, who was a member of our church and Sunday School teacher who was very dear to Sarah. It is precious to have this story recorded in her voice, at age 10.

Initially I was going to use the Cinch app (also free) on the iPad to record and share these audio recordings with accompanying photos. For some reason, however, the app was crashing on my iPad. I already had AudioBoo downloaded and configured. It worked great for this purpose!

By the time we finished recording all these essays, after about an hour, Sarah was pretty tired! This was my favorite photo of the evening, as she used one of my shoes as a microphone stand for the iRig mic.

As school wraps up here in the northern hemisphere, consider ways you can digitally document some of your students’ work and the work of your own children or grandchildren from the past academic year. Digital portfolios are wonderful assessment resources, and can provide a rich window into the skills, perceptions, ideas, and knowledge of learners. Mobile devices like the iPad which take photos, record audio, and allow immediate online sharing of those files make the creation of media-rich digital portfolios more “doable” than ever.

For more information about using a free Posterous site to cross-post to a blog, as we did tonight with Learning Signs, see my May 9th post, “Configure Autoposting to a WordPress Blog from Emails via Posterous.”

Technorati Tags:
audio, audioboo, edtech, learning, record, school, portfolio, eportfolio, document, assess, 5thgrade

Digitizing an Elementary Writing Portfolio originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on May 26, 2011.

Sarah is the co-founder of Project V.O.I.C.E. (Vocal Outreach Into Creative Expression) described as:

… a national movement that celebrates and inspires youth self-expression through Spoken Word Poetry. Conceived in 2004, Project V.O.I.C.E. encourages young people to engage with the world around them and use Spoken Word Poetry as an instrument through which they can explore and better understand their culture, their society, and ultimately themselves. Project V.O.I.C.E. brings together performance, writing, and a supportive environment to inspire youth to recognize that their views are significant, valid, and necessary.

Sarah was born and raised in New York City, and this was her first trip to Oklahoma City. She shared some of her own, powerful poetry to kick off our TEDxOKC conference today with an inspirational and touching flourish. She was a speaker at the February – March 2011 TED “Rediscovery of Wonder” conference in Long Beach, California. Her talk was titled, “If I Should Have a Daughter…” The description was:

If I should have a daughter, instead of Mom, she’s gonna call me Point B … ” began spoken word poet Sarah Kay, in a talk that inspired two standing ovations at TED2011. She tells the story of her metamorphosis — from a wide-eyed teenager soaking in verse at New York’s Bowery Poetry Club to a teacher connecting kids with the power of self-expression through Project V.O.I.C.E. — and gives two breathtaking performances of “B” and “Hiroshima.

I can’t wait for the videos from our TEDxOKC conference to be put online so I can see them again and share many of them with you. Enjoy Sarah’s powerful message from TED earlier this year. Her full profile is available on the TED website. Behold: The power of spoken word poetry, passionate people and inspirational ideas!

Technorati Tags:
conference, oklahoma, power, project, ted, voice, tedxokc, sarah, kay, sarahkay, v.o.i.c.e., inspiration, oklahomacity

Spoken Word Poetry, Project V.O.I.C.E. and Sarah Kay at #tedxokc originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on April 8, 2011.

Oklahoma legislature made a line item with incentives several years ago for AP offerings

OK pays fee subsidies for students who qualify for free and reduced lunch
- also offer fee subsidies for students who take multiple exams: They receive $25 off EACH exam they take

We offer AP Training through College Board
- most AP consultants are current classroom teachers

Schools get $100 for every score of 3, 4 or 5 on an AP test as an incentive too
- that money comes back into your district for chemistry supplies, maps and globes, new calculators, etc.
- money comes to your school, not a tech center (because tech centers are other state agencies, the money has to be paid to a school district)

We have 4 types of AP grants
- we want to start programs across the state
- FIRST GRANT IS $5000 for materials and equipment
- second grant for materials and equipment can be obtained after several yars
- are vertical team grants: 6th through 12th grade for $25,000
– that money is to bring consultants in, to pay stipends to teachers for overtime, to get training, etc.
- AP Training grant: can come to have your entire faculty come for training (middle schools eligible)

photo © 2008 Cory Doctorow | more info (via: Wylio)
Benefits of AP programs
- AP teachers teach kids how to survive in a notes and lecture environment
- teachers help kids learn strategies

With majors we have a big push for STEM: Science, Technology, Engineering and Math

Kids more likely to complete college level work if they complete it in high school

AP or concurrent enrollment is a big question
- AP is a national curriculum, we are teaching the same curriculum they are in New York, Boston, Atlanta, Denver, etc.
- Colleges see that and know it’s an AP course taught by an AP teacher, it meets the same level of

I’m not against concurrent enrollment, I think we can live together

Leadership development for your teachers is great
- provides funding and time for teachers and students to become leaders
- some students can have double majors because of the AP credits they earn in high school

MY COMMENT: COMING ON THE HEELS OF MY PRESENTATION ABOUT DIGITAL LEADERSHIP, IT’S INTERESTING TO THINK HOW THIS DISCUSSION AND PUSH FOR AP MODEL COURSES JUXTAPOSES AGAINST PROJECT BASED LEARNING

I work in gifted education: AP is one program you can use to serve your gifted students
- however, not all AP students are technically qualified as “gifted students”
- AP is for ANY and ALL students willing to enroll

more complex, nightly assignments

Look at PSAT scores
- there are indicators you can use to identify students who might want to enroll in AP

We know statewide, we don’t even begin to tap the number of kids who have the potential to do well in AP

We will give you seed money to get started
- you need to offer pre-AP courses

You already have honors classes, it’s not a big shift to change those to AP courses
- you want to change the expectation, you are GOING to take that AP class and AP test

The state pays for your teachers to get trained, sometimes that does involve a sub

Your same ethnicity and ELL percentages in your school should be represented in your AP participants

You need to educate principals, teachers, and parents about why they should want their kids in AP classes
- you need to educate kids too

As soon as I heard AP students are more likely to graduate in 4 years, I got on the AP bandwagon
- there are not many parents who want to pay for that extra year in college (the ‘victory lap’)

What’s good for the best is good for the rest
- a rising tide raises all ships

Benefits for your school (here’s your advocacy ammo)
- provides a challenging academic environment for motivated students
- rewarding PD for teachers (by current practitioners)
- demonstrates schools commitment to high standards
- enhances academic reputation of your school district
- adds points to your API

If you have at least 1 student who scores above a certain level on a test you get more points according to a formula

Students CAN take tests without being enrolled as a formal student in an AP test
- remember the College Board will take your money anytime

I have a listserv to share information, send me an email and I’ll get you on it

From a participant: Remember teachers can do vertical teaming when teaching AP courses

Pre-engineering and bio-medical academies are now included at several tech centers, those include several AP class offerings (Calculus, Physics, Chemistry, etc)
- kids in those classes don’t have to ask, “Why am I learning this?” It’s hands on and contextual
- remember as long as the student registers for the test for YOUR school, you’ll get the API points not the tech center

photo © 2009 Hector Alejandro | more info (via: Wylio)
Now hearing from Sara Smith, director of gifted education for the Oklahoma SDE
- sara_smith [at] sde.state.ok.us
- what does the law say about gifted education, what do you need to do to be in compliance with state gifted education law

2 ways to identify gifted students
- category 1: top 3% on any nationally standardized test of intellectual ability (an IQ test, it has nothing to do with achievement, state tests: tests verbal, quantitative, etc)
- category 2: multiple criteria
– law is very specific about the areas that are identified, but it does NOT specify HOW you determine this (it’s a local decision: can use parent or teacher referrals, achievement test scores, etc.)
— creative thinking, leadership, visual and performaing arts, and specific academic ability
– you need to have the category 2 criteria specifically defined

MY THOUGHT: IT WOULD BE GREAT TO HAVE A WEBSITE WHERE DIFFERENT SCHOOLS SHARE THEIR DIFFERENT CRITERIA USED FOR CATEGORY 2 QUALIFICATION. I WONDER IF THIS EXISTS NOW? IF NOT, I WONDER WHO WILL BUILD AND NURTURE IT?

Funding
- your district receives funding for every student who qualifies AND you are serving
- you have to be serving that student to receive funding (that’s a benefit to the school district)
- you can use gifted money to purchase assessment materials to get more students qualified

Never think you can NOT serve kids in your district who are qualified, category 1 and 2 qualified students

Local advisory committee
- law says the district superintendent must CALL the first meeting (not say supt has to attend)
- by Sept 15th board members must be appointed
- members are appointed by local school district and must be representative of the local community (ethnicity composition of the committee should match your community)

All your district contacts know about the Annual Report on Gifted and Talented Education, but make sure your financial secretary knows too

GT monies are received through state aid formula
- it’s not a line item amount like AP
- every penny you spend on GT must be coded to OCAS program code 251 (this permits required tracking)

GT Child Count Report due by Oct 15th each year
- that info is used to analyze students identified and being served, who is your district contact (if a legislator calls, this provides that info)

Program Auditing is laid out in law
- 25 random schools are audited each year
- looking for documentation about how students are IDed and served, documentation of tests (what you have to keep on file)

Reasons district might be audited
- large discrepancies of identified students can be a red flag
- I always call first on situations like this
- category 1 should be about 3% of your school populations
- last year we had some schools in 20%, 30% and 40% of total student populations identified by category 1 (there is no way that is happening, this is a red flag)
- unusual budget reports can also be red flags for an audit

Gifted Educational Plan
- all districts have plans on file
- that plan includes how students are identified and served
- what are staff members doing
- what are the roles of different educators / staff members
- lays out you WILL train your teachers

THIS MAKES ME THINK I SHOULD OFFER PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT ABOUT SCRATCH SOFTWARE EXPLICITLY AS GT TRAINING. OF COURSE SCRATCH SHOULD BE OFFERED ALL STUDENTS, NOT JUST GT STUDENTS, BUT THIS MIGHT BE ONE WAY TO ENCOURAGE USE OF SCRATCH AND PROMOTE GREATER AWARENESS / ADOPTION IN OKLAHOMA. SCRATCH HAS BEEN MY #1 FAVORITE THING TO TEACH PRESERVICE EDUCATION STUDENTS THE PAST TWO SEMESTERS.

How are you serving GT students throughout the day, not just in pullouts
- do you have differentiated curriculum that is shaking up your regular curriculum
- your teachers should NOT be ‘teaching right down the middle’ – this leaves out your low and high kids
- take advantage of Advanced Placement Summer Institute (APSI)

THIS MAKES ME THINK WE HAVE GOT TO PROVIDE FUNDED PROJECT BASED LEARNING PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT OPPORTUNITIES IN OKLAHOMA, LIKE WE HAVE FOR AP NOW. HOPEFULLY WE CAN DO THIS AS COMMON CORE STANDARDS ARE ADOPTED.

Technorati Tags:
education, leadership, oklahoma, sde, ap, advanced, placement, test, qualify, gifted, gt, talented, law, department

Advanced Placement Incentive Programs and Gifted Education Requirements in Oklahoma originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on April 6, 2011.

1. Tool kit
2. Audience
3. Style Formation
4. Skills-Based Instruction
5. Vulnerability

Andrew B. Watt here…

Over the last few months, I’ve made a shift in my online footprint, from being a blogger to a video-maker. It started as a foray into video work but it’s become a part of my classroom process, homework review process, and online activity. Wes asked me to write a bit about how this came about, what I learned from doing it, and how the toolkit works for doing it.

Tool kit

In terms of both software and hardware, my tool kit is pretty basic:

• JingPro, available from TechSmith, is the key to the operation. Without that, at $14.95 a year, I wouldn’t have the ability to make videos at all.  It does hold me quite severely to the 5-minute time limit, which is good: short enough for a kid to review during a homework session, long enough to get into some detail if I work quickly.
• Jing works by photographing or video-ing what’s on your screen.  I’ve used Pages, Microsoft Word, Safari, and other programs as my stage, but the main one is Mimio Notebook — the software my school gave me for running the Mimio smartboard in my room.
• An Apple MacBook;
• D-maps.com — The guy at D-maps is a Frenchman who gave me permission to use his maps, as he does to anyone who wants  them.  For © reasons, I borrow images from Wikipedia labeled as public domain, but I’m leery; I want clean data to work with wherever I can.

Process

What  to say about process?  I find an error or a writing problem in a student paper… then I type it up, and I make a movie.  If there’s a content area which I feel the textbook hasn’t explained well, I make a movie.  If there’s a disconnect between what students write and what’s in the book, I make a movie.

I post first draft of the video; I don’t know any editing techniques yet. (If I say three bone-headed statements in a single video, I cancel those and start again.)  I don’t write scripts, but I try to have a plan in mind, unlike my podcasts at gravitysgrace.net.  I planned to make a video for each William Strunk and E.B. White rule in the Elements of Style, but moved toward a freeform approach.  When I started, it was helpful to my process to draw the diagrams as I spoke and recorded the video; now I try to do as much set-up ahead of time as I can, using the undo and redo functions to create some animations.  I thought about doing this with slideshow software like Keynote or PowerPoint, but resulting videos were clunky.  I tried to use Animation-ish, which I like, but integrating tiny clips like this one into larger pieces is beyond my current abilities.

Audience

My blog gets [after literally years online (first at LiveJournal, then at WordPress, and at Diaryland before either of those)], about 30 hits a day unless I say something radical.  YouTube started out slow, and then I had a video reach 1,000 hits.  Since then, I’ve gotten about 10,000 hits on my videos.  Most of them have gotten 9-10 views, but a surprising number of the 90 videos have over a hundred views — a much larger percentage of the whole than the number of blog posts with a hundred views.

The real surprise is the importance of search on YouTube. More than half of my viewers aren’t from my school. They’re people who are finding my video through searches.  That suggests a radically different model than blogging — I pick up blogs to read the same way you do, by deciding that I like someone’s writing or situation.  Yet people look for videos on writing help or world history by specific keywords.  They’re looking for information or advice.  The related awareness is subscription numbers — It’s taken my blog three years to reach 15 regular subscribers (i.e., recorded RSS feed followers), but 25 subscribers started watching my YouTube channel in the last six months.  Some of them are almost certainly scam/spam artists, but it seems to be easier to attract a video following than a writing following.

Style Formation

I think my videos suggest that I watched too many CommonCraft videos. Those are silly but fun, and they’re professional and playful at the same time.  I’m teaching sixth and seventh graders, so I’m trying to keep them relatively light in form and figure.  Yet I’ve had college professors tell me to my face that my videos are important, because their students don’t know how to write or how to communicate in this way.

I think I’m also opening up a larger playing field.  I know that the Khan Academy video series is out there, and that there’s a lot of controversy about whether this video-based education model is the way to go.   I know that when I start to teach in my classroom, I may get interrupted three or four times in the course of my lesson…  If I start up the video player and the projector,  on the other hand — I get silence while the lesson plays — I can help the kid who’s missing a pencil — I can answer a question quietly — and I can move right to the practice part of the lesson.  Does this make me replaceable?  Perhaps.  Does it worry me?  Not yet.  I think I’m better in the classroom than on the screen alone, and the videos are closely connected with the brand of Andrew B. Watt, not the school I work for.  It’s an unusual change, I think, for a teacher in middle school to step out of the shadow of their institution.  It makes me more vulnerable, but freer in a sense as well.

Skills-Based Instruction

Blogging was reflective, but it didn’t really help my teaching style improve directly.  The YouTube video series is much more about direct instruction.  One of the first examples of this was a video about sentence structure. Another video, about the Indian Monsoons and their effect on trade routes, is also a big hit, not just with me but with people in India.

Because there’s a worldwide audience, I find I’m much more careful about speaking what I believe is true.  I don’t want to get slammed by people around the world for saying wrong things about their country… but I also welcome the opportunity to show students the comments the videos are drawing, and showing them that I’m capable of being wrong.  My students thought the guy who thought my video was boring was funny.  They assured me that they thought the video was useful, even if this guy thought it was dull.

Vulnerability

I think the last points I want to make are about vulnerability and openness.  A lot of students are watching these videos, apparently, because there are a lot of re-watches.   People are getting useful ideas from the videos, and understanding things about writing and about history from them.  Even though I’m responsible for my students’ learning, now it’s possible that I’m responsible for some of your students’ learning, too.  Even though I’m continuing to speak to my students, I’m trying to be conscious that I’m speaking to a larger audience than just the kids in my own classroom.   Does it make me a better teacher? Time will tell.

Shifting from Writing to Videography originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on March 25, 2011.

You know, stories are how we assign meaning to our lives and to the world; we live in this universe, and what does it all mean? Stories are built to explain and also to inspire and to control a lot of what we see. The werewolf and the witch trials in the 16th and 17th centuries were largely about controlling aberrant behavior. But the stories we tell are designed to do all of those things, and whoever tells them ends up writing history and shaping the way we see and understand the world, whether we are talking about mythology or journalism.

A very small section of the world tells most of the stories, and most of that section is very narrow: It’s mostly white, it’s mostly Western and overwhelmingly male. If you look at op-ed pages, they run about 85 percent male. If you look at television pundits, that’s about 84 percent male. If you look at Congress, it’s 83 percent. And if you look at Hollywood writers, producers and directors, it runs about 85 percent male. I think fewer than 10 percent of top-grossing films have female directors. Does that sound about right?

photo © 2008 Aurelie et Herve | more info (via: Wylio)
We live in an unprecedented era for “empowering digital witnesses,” as well as anyone who wants to share their voice with others. I reflected today with my “Technology 4 Teachers” students, after hearing a Pecha Kucha presentation about comic literature, how different the reading landscape is for my 13 year old son than it was for me in growing up in the 1980s. His number one favorite thing to read now is Harry Potter fan fiction, and I’ve never read a single story on the site. As of this evening, there are over 400,000 stories there – all about Harry Potter characters. This just blows my mind. I’ve looked at some of the stories he’s read, and frequently look over his shoulder to check things out, and we’ve had conversations about the themes and propriety of those stories on several occasions. (This is an ongoing dialog which doesn’t have an endpoint.) This “landscape of available stories” has changed SO radically, SO fast, that I don’t think I’ve had time as a parent or educator to adequately reflect on, comprehend, and take action on what this should mean for our family or our society.

Catherine explains in the article why it matters GREATLY who gets to tell the stories we read, hear and watch, and why it’s critical we exert intentional decision making over the stories we choose to consume. She opines:

That [the lack of female writers and directors in Hollywood] dramatically shapes the stories we get. It doesn’t just shape the fairy tales that we get, it shapes the reality that we get, the important conversations of our age. It also affects whose brains we get to hear from. We are missing a huge percentage of the the world’s brains and brainpower. That is one reason why I study stories and why I love this particular story and, Catherine, why I think it’s so great that you’ve reinvented this story in this way. You’ve reinvented this story in a way that I highly doubt a man would have. The versions of this story that have been told by men are typically very, very different, and why not? Why would that be surprising? But the versions of this story that the entire world knows best are versions that have been told by men, and the social lessons of those stories are very precise and very clear. They are hugely about obedience and chastity, and the popular interpretation is: Don’t speak to strangers.

These ideas juxtapose personally for me today with the thoughts Michael Wesch shared this week at the Heartland eLearning Conference in Oklahoma, both in his keynote and his breakout session, “The Visions of Students Today.” Michael talked about the vital role media plays in transmediating between people and ideas. My son’s brain is being shaped right now by the words he reads on his iPhone from the Fan Fiction website, and it’s vital we have ongoing conversations about that. On the one hand, it’s fantastic we have such an amazing opportunity to access voices which in previous millennia wouldn’t have had access or permission to publish for a global audience. Now, no one’s permission is required. The tools of publication are readily available for many on the affluent side of the digital divide. On the other hand, this is a challenging environment for us as human beings, seeking to define our identities and construct meaning for our lives in an ocean of choices. Michael Wesch, as a cultural anthropologist, really got me thinking more about meaning making and digital stories in his presentations yesterday.

I’ve had an idea (call it a “slow hunch,” to use the parlance of Steven Johnson) that Storychasers has a role to play in the identity formation of teenagers in our communities today. Not everyone is going to be an athlete, a cheerleader, or in the band. Even if you DO participate in those activities and shroud yourself in any of the available identities in the 21st century middle school or high school, there is SO MUCH room for creative choicemaking in today’s identity landscape. The choices which are available to youth today are not only amplified by the broadcasting of mainstream media, they are also potentially amplified by the narrowcasting of social media and YouTube. The potential volume of diverse voices today in this leveled landscape for publishing is astounding to contemplate.

Stories matter. Are you empowering students as well as teachers in your community to become “fully media literate” as effective media PRODUCERS? As you consider that answer, consider hosting and/or attending a Storychasers workshop. We all need to learn as well as practice new ways to “talk with media.”

photo © 2008 Evan Bench | more info (via: Wylio)

Catherine Orenstein on the Power and Importance of Female Storytellers originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on March 9, 2011.

The Visions of Students Today video was 4 years ago

I don’t think we’re very far along with media literacy today
- things are pretty grim right now

terms quiz:
fair use
codec
html5
net neutrality
more…

about 0% of kids out of 400 knew these terms, which are essential to full media literacy today
- reality is most people in our society don’t know those words
- this is an interesting situation: the dominant means of communication in our society today are not well understood

Mozilla through the MacArthur Foundation gave us #25 for the #VOST2011 project
- trying to get students around the world to contribute videos
- we are going to remix those with our own ideas about the media landscape
- original idea was to create a 5 min video
- now, however, so many students have a vision for their own 5 min video
- we may put them together in a single documentary

The Visions of Students Today – Call for Submissions

the original video was translated into several languages, on ABC News, lots of social media and mainstream media buzz

creativity

have received hundreds of submissions so far
- some from Europe, Belgium especially
- class in the Philippines started to dump lots of videos

“The Visions of Students Today” 2011 Remix One (trailer)

Hands Not Spoons – VOST 2011

Model in the class in the past has been students do their own 5 minute videos and we piece them together as a larger documentary

Trailer for “Boxes” student video
- walls may become less relevant as 2 million people are interacting in the air around us

Other ideas: GenMe study
- case study on “3 Cups of Tea”

Learners move through stages (see WikiPedia article on Women’s Development Theory)
- receptive learners (learning is about aquiring knowledge)
- subjective learning – break with authority, reason to question authority, you start questioning everything, nothing is true. all opinions
- procedural knowing (every discipline has different procedures for saying what is true: aesthetics in Art, etc.)
- constructive or committed learning: you recognize their are procedures which help you manage uncertainty and knowledge / information

each one of our students has a “superpower”
- Charles Taylor, ethics of authenticity

Belenkey 1986 receptive knowers
- see WikiPedia article: Women’s Development Theory

One student focusing on ideas of Dennis Littky on College Unbound

1957 Sputnik
Woodshole conference: get together with Jerome Bruner in 1962
- bureacrats thought academic experts were going to give them a list of things students needed to konw to graduate from school
- Bruner ran with this and created book, “The Process of Education”
1964 John Holt How Children Fail
- late 1960s: TEaching as a Subversive Activity by Postman, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Death at an EArly Age by Kozol

Postman: Dewey’s idea if students learn what they do, what are they doing here in this classroom sitting (passive)

Postman book: Teaching as a Conserving Activity (I HAVE NEVER READ THAT ONE)

Seaman High School in Topeka was built without walls, and then

Postman said the 1960s revolution failed because
- war in Vietnam was ending
- stagnating economy by 70s
- utopian hype / difficult to implement
- back to basics movement

We have lots of parallels to that today in our society / culture

Back to Basics critique of new media literacy
- say it’s pandering to students
- neglects basic literacy skills
- difficult to implement

Call back to them
- many students LOVE multiple choice exams
- basic literacy goes far beyond this traditional model

Parkour
- Look at structures and see possibilities instead of obstacles / things that constrain us
- interesting way to look at our schools and educational environment

VOST2011 will probably hire an HTML5 programmer, because you can have video speak to / other elements on the webpage
- when something on the video is addressing a topic or link, that will be highlighted on the right side

Mozilla wants us to go nuts with the functionality of the site
- so whenever someone contributes a video their twitter ID comes up with their latest tweet
- that can get distracting though, so we’ll have to see…

Technorati Tags:
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The Visions of Students Today by @mwesch #heartlandconf11 originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on March 8, 2011.

Jessica is a 1st grade teacher at Lansing Elementary School. Dan is the district tech director.

The handout from today’s session is available on the MACE Moodle.

There is something about the touch environment that lets the kids interact so much easier with digital content

It has been very invigorating in our K-2 classrooms to
- when you put 2 or 3 students together you are encouraging collaboration
- very different dynamics than putting each child with headphones on their own iPod Touches
- in many cases kids prefer the iPod Touches by themselves

Those who can interact and create are the ones who will be most successful in our society

Story from church of 2 year olds in the cry room: Interaction

The key piece for the iPad is it’s SO user friendly
- no fiddling with the mouse, software updates popping up, etc.

We had “mini-computers” (netbooks) in the classroom, but there were always things that would come up that would require teacher intervention / help
- this has not been the case with the iPads

Daniel: “Teachers teach kids, computers don’t”

Jessica: I read “The Daily Five” this summer and decided to go 100% differentiation
- this is REALLY hard to do!

We started with 3 iPads in the classroom

I have different folders of reading apps organized by levels, so students can get

Story Before Bed app: Lets me read a book to my kids, and customize how I want pause, ask questions, etc
- is a fee to sign up
- full year fee
- this app

KSU just published a study on fluency and the importance of kids recording themselves reading at all levels, so they can set goals
- iPod Touches are also GREAT for recording kid voices

I now have students picking the stories they want, and recording themselves recording
- recording is created on a regular computer with a webcam

You can sign up to buy 25 or 50 books
- $40 for 25 books, and I can record those books as many times as I want
- the books are also leveled

Confidence in early reading is HUGE
- my lower readers, when they record a book and their classmates offer compliments, leads to BIG boosts in confidence

the company started for military families so parents deployed to other places can still read to their kids at night

I teach centers for 120 minutes, which is a long period of time
- yes, kids are off task sometimes: Remember, just because kids are quiet in the room doesn’t mean they are engaged (it might just mean the teacher is in control)

We work a lot on internal motivation and individual goal setting
- when kids feel vested toward a goal they usually work toward it

Word Work, Phonics, Spelling, Math Skills
- we work on all these things at different times in our schedule

It’s amazing how motivated my kids are by these apps

My kids (1st graders) have played chess, learned the basics of the game,

Tangrams
- use both left and right side of the brain
- less cleanup with the app and you don’t lose any of the pieces!

Creativity
- we are so driven by testing, we often don’t take enough time to teach creativity and give kids chances to be creative in class
- something as simple as a facemaker

Tunetastic is a $3 app and something I’m very excited about
- this app really spells out what it takes to create a story, by helping students create a cartoon
- talks about the story arc (rising action, climax, resolution, etc)
- this app actually helped my teaching about story writing and telling get better, I had never taught about the story arc like this before and my kids immediately picked up on this

We use a pottery application, letting kids do things virtually that we can’t do with students

Story Buddy app is very user friendly ($3), StoryKit is free
- both have advantages

After students finished their books, Jessica emailed them to parents
- PDFs were created from Story Buddy
- Toontastic does let you share directly from the app via email

MY THOUGHT: IF YOU CAN SHARE BY EMAIL, YOU CAN POST ONLINE VIA POSTEROUS!

iPad Envy has been a problem with this project

Video on the iPad is HUGE: So as soon as you get video capabilities on your iPad, don’t get a 16 GB version (you will want / need more storage space)

Here’s the full list of apps shared by Jessica as the handout for her session (I’VE ADDED ITUNES LINKS FOR MANY OF THEM, AND WILL ADD MORE LATER…)

Favorite iPad Apps
Teacher Tools
• Free App Tracker (free)- Lists all the current discounted or free apps
• PowerTeacher(free)- allows you to access PowerTeacher from iPad
• Dropbox(free)- allows you to save at school computer and access on iPad
• On This Day(free)- Tells you important historical information about dates
• Discovery Ed( free)- allows you to access your United Steaming account
• Google (free)- voice activated search engine
• AR Finder ($2)- find the level for most books
• eCove General (free)- teacher tools such as Bloom’s checklists and hand raising counters
Student- Language Arts
• Story Chimes ($1-$2 each) – stories for children to listen to or read themselves
• iReading ($2 each)- more stories to listen to or read
• A Story Before Bed ($30 yearly subscription)- read stories to your class using webcam
• Hangman(free)- traditional Hang Man game
• Story Kit(free)- make your own electronic book
• StoryBuddy ($6)- make your own electronic book
• Wordventure (free)/Mad Lib (free)- grammar practice
• Word Quiz (free)- record your voice giving spelling test and student’s type answers
• AccelaStudy (free)- vocabulary practice
• Miss Spell (free)- commonly misspelled word practice
• Chicktionary (free)- use letter to make words against the clock
• Free Spelling Practice Apps- Graffiti, Dragon Dictation, Draw, PegLight, Sketchmania, PuzzleBaby ($3), Glitter Draw, Glow Draw, Audio Note, Whiteboard ($5), Light Signals, ASL-American Sign Language ($1)
• Teach Me Kindergarten and First Grade ($1 each) – sight words, math skills, phonics, tracks progress
• Time Reading K-12 ($2)- Fluency stories leveled K-12, tracks progress
• Sentence Builder ($4)- match the words to pictures to generate and read
• Story Builder ($4)- record your answers to the questions asked on photo to hear your own story
• Tales to Go (Free)- huge listening library with no tape player mess
• Sock Puppets (free)- plan a story, act it out and record the voices
• Voices 2 ($1)- record students reading to practice fluency then change their voice 30 different ways
• Read Me Stories (free)- books read out loud with words, adds a new book each day it is used
• Textropolis (free) – build a city by piecing together words
• Grammar Up (free)- practice reading tests 10 ten grammar areas
• LAZ Level Library ($7each)- sets of 12 books on given level. Reading A-Z Levels AA-Q
Math
• Coin Jar ($1)- practices estimation and coin counting
• Tell Time ($2)- practices analogue time skills
• Bubble Clock Time ($1)- pop the bubbles to practice telling time
• Math Spin (free)- addition facts
• Make Change ($1)- practice in giving correct change
• UnderSea Math ($2)- addition and subtraction practice
• Pizza Fractions ($1)- comparing fraction practice, 4th grade
• Motion Math ($1)- fun ball dropping game to practice fractions
• Kids Math 1st through 4th grade ($2 each)- leveled math practice
• Easy Chart HD ($1)- gather and easily graph information
• Pattern Recognition Prek-1st ($1 each)- make, name and continue patterns
• Everyday Mathematics by McGraw Hill ($2 each)- fun games to practice facts, and fractions
• Rocket Math (free)- practice money, shapes, and facts in outer space with rocket designed by you
• Sum Stacker ($1)- build stacks to equal correct totals, can practice with number words, Spanish, roman numerals, dice, etc.
Strategy & Creativity
• Faces iMake (free)- design faces using imagination
• iChess Lite (free)- play a game of chess with partner or against computer
• Four In A Row (free)- Connect Four
• Tangram Pro ($1)- great for both the left and right side of brain
• Cut the Rope ($1)- fun problem solving
• Lego Creations (free)- visual and spatial
• Lemonade Tycoon (Free)- build your empire one glass at a time
• RoboFree (free)- plan how to move your robot to the right ending spot
• Monster Mix and Match ($2)- promotes critical thinking, creativity and problem solving, design monster for fun writing assignment
Social Studies and Science
• United States Puzzle Map ($1)- race to beat the best score on puzzle of USA, has other maps, too
• Stack the States ($1)- answer trivia to play a Tetris like stacking game with the states
• Google Earth (free)- maps
• Planets (free)- space
• Science Glossary (free)- user friendly and easy to read
• Science Facts (free)- for the brainy fact finder, the info will amaze
• Solar Walk ($3)- explore space with amazing pictures that will capture anyone’s interest
• Geo Walk ($1)- explore the world through amazing images, just click the city
• Star Walk ($3)- hold up to the sky to line up the stars and see the constellations.
• Magic School Bus ($8)- Explore the ocean with interactive book, really neat!
• Brain Pop (free)- watch a new educational movie a day
• Oregon Trail ($1)- figure out how to survive while traveling west

Special Education
• Proloquo2go ($190)- assistive communication that includes augmentative and alternative communication, easy to use.
• Model Me Kids (free)- videos for modeling social skills
• Language Builder ($4)- record ESL students talking about the given photograph
• E Touch English Lite (free)- great for building ESL vocabulary
• eCove SPED (free)- timers, checklists, counters and scales.
• English for Kids (free)- teach English using this Rosetta Stone style leaning game
• Play2Learn ($2)- available in several languages, click pictures to hear the word

Technorati Tags:
app, edapp, education, ipad, mace, mace11, primary

iPad: A Tool for Differentiation (in a primary classroom) #mace11 #edapp originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on March 4, 2011.

Reading IS a big part of learning, but it’s not the most important part. Education is not about simply reading and consuming content: It’s also about students CREATING knowledge products which permit them to reflect their own understanding (or misunderstanding) of ideas and concepts. We need digital learning devices in the hands of our students which permit them to put aside pencils and paper, and CREATE using digital tools and not simply consume digital texts. Did you notice the WORKSHEETS which students throughout this video were using? That’s because eBooks do NOT represent “the learning revolution” which we need to support in our classrooms. eBooks like the Kindle may allow students to consume some types of rich media, but they certainly do not (at present) provide the robust content creation possibilities of iOS and Android mobile / tablet devices, or laptops / netbooks.

Certainly digital texts have benefits over printed/analog versions, but buying an eBook reader for students is like buying a stream train without any railroad tracks. You can’t fully realize the benefits of digital learning without the ability to readily interact and CREATE content, just as a steam locomotive is hopelessly crippled without tracks and a connection to the railway network.

photo © 2009 Jack Vinson | more info (via: Wylio)

One important issue raised in this video, which is not mentioned by the reporter, is CIPA content filtering requirements for schools mandated by eRate. Misconceptions about eRate abound in schools today, and some of these are highlighted in the project “Unmasking the Digital Truth” and campaign, “Balanced Filtering in Schools.” While schools are NOT required to block all video sharing sites and interactive websites by CIPA, they ARE required by eRate rules to specifically:

…operate “a technology protection measure with respect to any of its computers with Internet access that protects against access through such computers to visual depictions that are obscene, child pornography, or harmful to minors…”

In this FoxNews video, one of the teachers at the Florida school adopting Kindle eBooks extols the virtues of students being able to directly access the Internet over the local 3G cellular network. This access is available both at school and outside the classroom. From an accessibility standpoint that sounds great, but what about CIPA content filtering? Technically speaking, is the school now at risk for losing their eRate funding (at a minimum, at least a 40% discount on all telecommunications and Internet connectivity bills) if audited because they are NOT providing mandated content filtering? Perhaps.

photo © 2009 Marieke Kuijjer | more info (via: Wylio)

Did you also notice the creators of this FoxNews clip egregiously manipulated the video, misleading viewers to conclude full-motion videos can be watched on today’s Kindle eBook reader? I’m guessing the news reporters had some of their staff videographers create this effect in post-production because it looks cool, but it’s vital to recognize this media manipulation can lead to significant misconceptions on the part of the public. The Kindle eBook readers I’ve used to date CAN’T display web video like an iPad, iPhone, iPod Touch or Android tablet. Unfortunately, this “news report” from a mainstream media source attempts to convince the public they can.

As Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner state in their superb book about learning and schools, “Teaching as a Subversive Activity,” we all need to continually develop our own “crap detectors.” On page three of the opening chapter, titled ‘Crap Detecting,’ they wrote:

One way of looking at the history of the human group is that it has been a continuing struggle against the veneration of “crap.” Our intellectual history is a chronicle of the anguish and suffering of men who tried to help their contemporaries see that some part of their fondest beliefs were misconceptions, faulty assumptions, superstitions, and even outright lies. The mileposts along the road of our intellectual development signal those points at which some person developed a new perspective, a new meaning, or a new metaphor. We have in mind a new education that would set out to cultivate just such people– experts at “crap detecting.”

It’s unfortunate this FoxNews video is full of– in the words of Postman and Weingartner, “crap.” It’s wonderful, however, we have communication platforms like blogs to point out the specific, misleading falsehoods it contains.

We DO need to embrace digital tools for communication and learning in our schools and homes. I’m not biased against eBook readers in general: We have a first generation Kindle in our home and my wife loves to read on it almost every day. I AM biased, however, against the idea of imposing a 19th century model of learning on a 21st century learner. It’s a waste of money to purchase a $150 eBook for a primarily read-only educational experience, when the same amount of money could purchase an iPod Touch with eReader capabilities PLUS fantastic content creation options like ReelDirector, iMovie, StoryKit, StoryRobe, Cinch, iPadio, AudioBoo, and more.

Here’s a proposed litmus test for classroom digital devices in the 21st century: Do the devices in question allow students to become Storychasers, or simply story consumers? We need to make the shift from media consumers to pro-sumers. eBooks don’t fit the bill. Unfortunately, this FoxNews video segment misses that point and is intentionally misleading as well.

As 21st century educators and learners, we should demand and do better.

Hat tip to Darren (“Right on the Left Coast: Views From a Conservative Teacher”) for sharing this video link.

Technorati Tags:
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Manipulated FoxNews Video Shows Why eBooks are the WRONG Choice for K-12 1:1 Environments originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on February 14, 2011.

Story Patch allows students (or users of any age) to create PDF stories including text and graphics/photos in three basic ways:

1. Answer a series of questions, have the app create the text of a story for you, and then as the user add appropriate graphics from the provided graphics library.
2. Create an original story with text you enter onto different pages, and add images from the provided graphics library.
3. Create a story using original text as well as original images you either create as artwork within the application or add from the iPad’s photo library. (Other art programs like Brushes can be used to create and save images in advance, or photos can be added.)

Throughout our morning and afternoon of iPad story app experiments, Rachel published her work utilizing email. The following diagram (created with the free version of Skitch) shows this two step process: She emailed her final product from the iPad to post@oursite.posterous.com, and Posterous not only posted the content to our free site on its domain but also cross-posted it to our family learning blog, “Learning Signs,” which is powered with WordPress. (also free.)

Rachel’s first story, “Going to the Zoo” (direct PDF link) followed method #1 above. She answered some questions posed by Story Patch and had the program create the text of a ten page story. She created her second story, “The New Puppy,” (direct PDF link) followed method #2. She created the text herself, but used the provided image library for all the story’s graphics except for 1 zoo photo she imported from my Flickr photos.

Story Patch was easy to use and navigate. Rachel did need some help figuring out how to edit her page order and add images, but after a two minute introduction she was fully self-sufficient on the app creating her story. After she finished, I helped her share both stories via email to our family learning blog utilizing Posterous. If you have an iPad or other iOS device and are NOT yet utilizing Posterous to share media, you really should check it out. Every iPad app I’ve used which supports sharing supports emailing content. Posterous is a wonderful, free website tool which does a great job facilitating the sharing of rich media. See the official Posterous blog post from July 2010, “Autopost. Now Simpler than Ever. (Videos)” for more about configuring cross-posting to WordPress as well as other sites/services. Posterous is 100% free and 100% awesome.

After helping Rachel create these PDF story versions, I wanted to find a way for her to add voice narration of her reading each page using the iPad. Since Story Patch does not support audio recording currently, we needed to:

1. Convert the PDF file of her Story Patch story into separate JPG images.
2. Import the separate story images onto the iPad.
3. Use another iPad app to add audio narration and then share out the final video or webpage that app created.

To convert her Story Patch PDF into separate JPG images, I turned to Zamzar. Zamzar is a free, web-based conversion utility. I downloaded her PDF story to my laptop from our family learning blog, where it had been cross-posted, and then (without paying or creating an account on ZamZar) I uploaded the file and requested it be converted to JPG format and emailed to me. After a few minutes I received an email message with a link, and was able to download a zip file from the Zamzar website including all seven story images.

The next challenge was transferring these images to the iPad’s photo library so they could be utilized with other applications. For this I turned to the $3 Photo Transfer app which I’d already purchased recently. It creates a local server on the iPad to which users can connect from the same wifi network with any web browser and upload or download images. This was slick and worked fast, all eight images uploaded in less than 15 seconds.

Now that Rachel’s story images were saved on the iPad, it was time to experiment with three different applications for audio recording story narration. In my November 2010 post, “Mobile Digital Storytelling with StoryKit, Storyrobe, and SonicPics,” I shared a five minute screencast overview of these three programs. Today, it was great to see and hear what a seven year old thinks of using these three programs to narrate the same story.

Story Kit (free, from the International Childrens’ Digital Library) was Rachel’s favorite app to use for audio narration. As she described in our twelve minute post-project debrief/podcast, it was easier for her to separately record each page’s narration. On multiple occasions she deleted her initial attempts and tried again until she was satisfied with the result. This was the third app we tried, but definitely her favorite. Although designed pixel-size wise for the iPhone and iPod Touch, Story Kit works great on an iPad as well in “doubled image” size.

You can link to the ICDL’s hosted version of Rachel’s story to view and listen to it, or use the iframe embedded version I’ve included below. Click the icon of the speaker to play each audio clip. Rachel sized and positioned each image on each page of her story as desired, and also placed the audio buttons after recording her narrations.

The first program we used, and our least favorite for this story narration from Story Patch, was Story Robe. The main problem with Story Robe was it cropped the top and bottom off Rachel’s story images, which made the text at the top impossible to read. Story Robe creates a MP4 video file when you export your final project, and hosts it for free on their server. Link directly to Rachel’s StoryRobe version of “The New Puppy” or link to it from our family learning blog.

The second program we used, and my favorite overall, was the $3 app Sonic Pics. It did not crop Rachel’s Story Patch story photos, and its interface is both faster and easier to use than StoryRobe IMHO. Link directly to “The New Puppy” in the M4V format Sonic Pics creates, hosted by Amazon S3 courtesy of Posterous. That link is also cross-posted to our family learning blog.

Here’s our full debrief of today’s iPad story creation and story narration learning experiences. Rachel recorded and published (by herself with my verbal assistance) this podcast using the free Cinch app.

Overall, we were both really pleased at how easy and flexible Story Patch is for creating and sharing stories with text and images. Hopefully in the future it will support direct export of story images to the iPad’s photo roll (eliminating the steps we had to take today with ZamZar and the Photo Transfer app) and also possibly support built-in audio narration. It’s a great app and well worth the $5 investment. That’s a small price to pay for the creative storytelling and sharing apps like this can empower!

Technorati Tags:
apple, blog, book, family, howto, ios, ipad, iphone, ipod, ipodtouch, literacy, share, sonicpics, story, storyrobe, patch, storypatch, record, storykit, posterous

Options for Recording Stories on the iPad: Story Patch with Story Robe, Sonic Pics, & Story Kit originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on February 10, 2011.

Story Patch is a beautiful new application now available for the iPad that allows your children to tell stories in a fun and intuitive way. Story Patch includes hundreds of illustrations and an easy to use interface that makes storytelling a breeze for kids. If you have a child that loves being creative, take a look around and we think you will agree that Story Patch will make a great addition to your software library.

This two minute video is a demo of StoryPatch.

Hat tip to Toby Price for sharing this app via his LiveBinder, “Apps for kids with developmental delays.”
Have you used StoryPatch? If so, what are your impressions?

photo © 2010 Robyn Jay | more info (via: Wylio)

Technorati Tags:
app, apps, edtech, education, ipad, reading, storytelling, writing, story

Create iPad Stories with StoryPatch originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on February 9, 2011.

A variety of options are available for classroom blogging, and I’ve linked several of these on the “Text” page of the TalkWithMedia.com website. In Spring 2009, I had my approximately 45 students in two sections of “Technology for Teachers” at the University of Central Oklahoma set up their own, personal blogs on Blogger.com. I tried to aggregate student blogs in several ways so students could “find” each other and comment on peer blogs. These methods included creating a “Google Reader bundle” of our blogs (to which students could readily subscribe) and also creating a NetVibes portal for our class. Dr. Michael Wesch at Kansas State University uses a Netvibes site as a “project basecamp” for his students. (If you haven’t seen his announcement for this semester’s #VOST2011 project, take a few minutes to view his introductory video. Wow.) For my students last Spring, they did a great job with their Blogger sites but found it frustrating that they couldn’t readily “find each other” in the blogosphere, even with the Netvibes and Google Reader resources I provided.

To remedy that shortcoming, last fall when I taught “Computers in the Classroom” at the University of North Texas for pre-service teachers, I decided to utilize a class blog (as a “team blog”) instead of having students setup individual blogs. This proved to be a GREAT decision, from the standpoint of everyone in our class being able to more readily “find” and comment on peer posts. I setup our class blog on the website 21classes.com, which unfortunately was NOT free. I paid $7 per month for the account. It worked ok, but for some reason it was not compatible for video embedding with Internet Explorer on Windows. FireFox, Safari, and Chrome worked fine, but not IE. (This provided a very practical reason to encourage my students to ditch IE and embrace an alternative web browser.) I definitely want to encourage my students to continue blogging on their own following our class, but I found the benefits of “blogging together in a shared space” with a class/team blog outweighed the potential benefits of having students setup individual blogs initially for our class.

This Spring semester I’m again teaching two sections of “Technology for Teachers” at the University of Central Oklahoma. I’m using class/team blogs for each class, but to learn the benefits as well as drawbacks of using different tools we’re using Kidblog.com for one class and EduBlogs for another. Four weeks into the semester, we have 67 published posts and 75 comments on our KidBlog site, and 60 posts with 67 comments on the EduBlog site. (Each section has a different blog.) These are a few of the differences I’ve noticed so far between KidBlog and Edublogs:

1. Password management works differently on both sites. For KidBlog, I can’t enter an email address for my students, so they can’t recover their own account password via email. They also can’t readily change their passwords, but I can as the teacher / site administrator. In class the second week I ended up letting all my students temporarily become admins on the site so they could change their passwords, but that’s not a workable solution for a K-12 student class blog. Edublogs lets students individually manage their accounts and change their passwords, as well as use an email address for password recovery.
2. KidBlogs automatically creates ‘contributor’ links to everyone’s blog posts on our site. The themes available on the free EduBlogs sites don’t offer this feature. (Or I haven’t found it yet.) I’ve started to create a contributor list on our blog using the WordPress “blogroll” link option, but it’s unnecessarily time consuming to have to do this manually.
3. The homepage of KidBlog is great for a class/team blog, since it shows the titles of the most recent 25 posts. The EduBlogs WordPress theme options for a free account can’t do this. Recent posts can be shown as a sidebar widget, but I really like the KidBlog homepage interface better. I also like how it shows comments on different posts, making it easy to identify recent posts which haven’t received comments yet.
4. EduBlogs lets users create their OWN blogs, in addition to joining a class/team blog like the one we are using. This isn’t a readily-available option for KidBlog. Several of my students have been confused by this and initially posted on their OWN EduBlogs site rather than posting to our class EduBlog site. We’ve worked through these issues, but these problems didn’t happen with my section using KidBlog.
5. KidBlog has native support for posting via a 3rd party blogging client like Mars Edit which uses XML-RPC. EduBlogs doesn’t support this on their free version, you have to pay and upgrade to the “pro” version to use this feature. This isn’t something any of my students probably care about, but since I compose 99% of all my blog posts in Mars Edit (including this one) it’s an important feature to me.
6. I find the presence of “pro version” options/links on my free EduBlogs site which are not available on the free version a bit irritating. I understand EduBlogs wants to show these as an enticement for the “Pro” upgrade, but I’d rather not have them as part of my dashboard if the options are not available. I realize complaining about this is like a homeless person complaining that the free lunch they are eating isn’t hot enough. I’m thankful EduBlogs does provide a free blog option, and I know the monetization scheme they are using is very positive since it will hopefully ensure their continued financial solvency / existence in the future. (Like VoiceThread.com.) I still feel compelled to mention this in a comparative review, however. The cleaner interface of Kidblog (which provides all available functionality free) feels better to me at this point than the free EduBlogs version.
7. There are not ANY ads on Kidblog sites. Free EduBlogs sites have ads.

One of the most important skills I’m hoping my students will learn this semester is how to effectively write blog posts with hyperlinks and embedded media. Today we had an “open lab” meeting for Q&A with students in both my sections, and I created / recorded the following two screencasts during our discussions to review the processes for linking and embedding videos on both KidBlog and EduBlogs.

This screencast demonstrates how to create a link and embed a video in a post on a Kidblog site. Run time is 11.5 minutes.

This second screencast demonstrates how to create a link and embed a video in a post on a free EduBlogs site. Run time is 8.5 minutes.

I shared both of these screencasts on my T4T Class FAQ blog. (On Blogger)

If I hadn’t been recording these screencasts with students I probably could have made them both shorter and more concise. At is was, however, having a screenrecorder available (Screenflow for Mac – a GREAT $99 software product) made it easy to record these on the fly. Afterwards, I did minor post-production editing adding some video effect zooms as appropriate. I LOVE using Screenflow when it doesn’t make sense or isn’t practical (as it wasn’t today) to use Screenr.

One of the reasons provided by EduBlogs for upgrading to a paid/pro account is to embed videos in posts. When you use the VISUAL post view, “iframe” tags for video embeds are stripped out on free EduBlog sites. If you stay in the “HTML” view, however, and publish your post from the HTML view without going to the VISUAL view, embedded videos like those shown above CAN be posted with a free EduBlog site. This is NOT as user-friendly as the GUI tools available for embedding video on Pro accounts, but it does work. This is the method I’ve taught my students to use in “Technology 4 Teachers” this semester.

EduBlogs runs a modified version of the multi-user version of WordPress, and embedding rich media content can be tricky with WordPress. I’m not sure if more recent versions of WordPress have changed this requirement, but at one point users had to disable the default visual post editor in their profile to be able to post embed code. I’m delighted it’s possible to still embed videos in a free EduBlogs site, since I consider this a “core competency” for hyperlinked writing and I want to let me students EXPERIENCE the powerful things which can be done with free blogging tools this semester.

If you work with pre-service education students or are a pre-service education student, what are your views about class blogs versus individual student blogs? If you’re a classroom teacher, which option do you prefer for students at the grade/level(s) you teach? Both options have benefits as well as drawbacks. Do you have a favorite blogging platform for a class/team blog? Is that answer different if the blogging students are pre-service education students?

Technorati Tags:
blog, edtech, education, team, technology, wordpress, preservice, kidblog, edublog, edublogs, 21classes, web2, literacy, howto, tutorial

Individual vs Team Blogs for PreService Edu Students (Comparing KidBlog & EduBlogs) originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on February 4, 2011.