One of the best parts of DVD movies are the commentaries by directors, actors, costume designers, and others involved in the creation and production of films. A few years ago, Kevin Honeycutt and I were talking about student video production and came up with the idea of a “Director’s Commentary” or an “Actors’ Commentary” video assignment. The idea is for students to watch their video together, and record the audio of their discussion reflecting on what took place, what they learned, the “backstory” they want to share about different video elements, etc. They could follow a teacher-created rubric to “cover their bases” when creating the commentary audio. While I’ve wanted to share this idea and promote it ever since, today’s the first time I’ve actually created one of these “Actors Commentary” videos. In this post, I’ll share some lessons learned and suggestions for classroom teachers.

My 3 kids (who are on fall break) and I created, “Actors Commentary: The Hobbit In Five Minutes” today. The video track of this is identical to the 4 minute, 19 second “The Hobbit In Five Minutes” project we created in July 2011, but the audio track is different. We used my Sony digital audio recorder to watch the original video together, with the computer’s audio muted.

Prior to actually creating this “commentary video,” I mistakenly thought YouTube supported swapping or exchanging an audio file from MY computer in an existing video. This is NOT the case.

As several contributors in this YouTube Help forum post explain, the purpose of Audio Swap in YouTube is to basically salvage a video which has been taken down because of copyright violations and permit a user to still keep it online with copyright-approved music content. The ONLY options provided for a YouTube Audio Swap are choosing pre-selected and pre-defined music clips for which YouTube has obtained licensing permission from the artists and/or recording companies. You CANNOT upload your own audio directly to an existing YouTube video and swap it out. To do this, you must use a video editing program on your computer and make the audio switch.

Fortunately, iMovie software on a Mac makes this process very straightforward. I bet many readers have been reticent to embrace “the new iMovie” since Apple updated it from its timeline version (iMovie ’06) several years ago. I’ve had my doubts about the new version too, but was finally convinced the new version is better because of the realtime editing and effects features. There are three basic steps to swapping a new audio file into an existing movie you’ve created in iMovie to create a “commentary version.” I did this today with iMovie ’11.

First, create a new iMovie project. From the FILE menu choose IMPORT, then MOVIES. Select the exported / final movie you want to use for this commentary. (If you’re downloading from YouTube, my favorite, free browser-button tool to use is PWN YouTube. I use this within Google Chrome frequently.)

Second, drag your imported video from the Clip Library (bottom of the screen) to your project area. With the entire clip selected (double click it) choose the CLIP menu, then MUTE CLIP. It’s possible to extract the clip audio and delete it, but muting the clip works well (and with ‘minimal clicks’) for this purpose.

Third, drag your recorded audio file from your computer’s hard drive (your Finder) onto your iMovie project window. Make sure you drag the file as shown below, so it drops next to your video clip instead of on top of it. The entire background of the project window should turn GREEN, which means your file will import as background audio.

That’s it! Now you’re ready to share / export your video and upload it to YouTube.

I’ve created a new category for “Actors Commentary” videos on Share: Playing with Media, and added this example as a new post. Consider asking YOUR students to create an “Actors’ Commentary” video during the next video project they complete in your class. When they publish it, please share it using the CONTRIBUTE form on Share: Playing with Media!

This was a lot of fun to do, and I’m sure our family will have fun listening to this version as well as the original in the years to come. Playing with media can be quite engaging!

Technorati Tags: audio, edtech, imovie, learning, pbl, playingwithmedia, project, school, student, teacher, swap, commentary

Have Students Create An Actors’ Commentary Video originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on October 27, 2011.

Control, apparently, is not the answer. People who need certainty in their lives are less likely to make art that is risky, subversive, complicated, iffy, suggestive or spontaneous. What’s really needed is nothing more than a broad sense of what you are looking for, some strategy for how to find it, and an overriding willingness to embrace mistakes and surprises along the way. Simply put, making art is chancy– it doesn’t mix well with predictability. Uncertainly is the essential, inevitable and all-pervasive companion to your desire to make art. And tolerance for uncertainty is the pre-requisite to succeeding.

Two particular sentences in this paragraph stand out for me: “What’s really needed is… an overriding willingness to embrace mistakes and surprises along the way.” What’s PBL if not a willingness to allow students to create, to discover, to “drive their own learning” and at times, and make mistakes on their way to “learning?” The final sentence stands out for me as well: “…tolerance for uncertainty is the pre-requisite to succeeding.” Are we comfortable with uncertainly? Are we willing to embrace the ambiguity which naturally is attached to projects which are open-ended and not fully defined at the outset?

Just as these dispositions are essential for those who create and seek to create ART, I contend these dispositions are essential for good teaching and good teachers. We cannot truly be “guides on the side” if we’re trying to direct every “turn of learning” for students like a traffic cop in the center of a busy intersection. We must leave the door to student choice open. This does not mean “anything goes” and a complete lack of boundaries. Rather, it means students have freedom to move within the confines of a project… and the choices they are allowed to make really matter in determining the direction and quality of their own learning.

I’m just 21 pages in, but already I can tell I’m going to love this book.

Technorati Tags: art, creativity, learning, student, teach, teaching, making, create, philosophy, freedom, choice, pbl, centered

Keys to PBL and Student Centered Learning originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on September 6, 2011.

Going to share some lessons learned, taking kids backpacking for the past several years
- I’ve taught for 14 years, coached, student council advisor, etc.
- I love teaching kids, I love our state
- I’ve taken 7th graders on these trips for the past 7 years

Good solution to stress: taking a trip for adventure-based learning

I have learned to NOT let students bring their own dogs
- now my dog is the only one that gets to go
- even with practice we always have kids with lots falling out of their backpacks, off their shoulders

There is a lot of student repoire which is built in these trips

Why should I do an adventure trip for the kids?
- finally be able to answer the question: When am I ever going to use this?
- motivates students to learn and perform
- sharing a passion has power to improve your students quality of life
- improves classroom and school climate
- improves student / teacher and parent / teacher rapport
- good community PR
- it’s fun!

In the 7 years I’ve done this, I’ve received more thanks from parents and kids than anything else I’ve done
- stories of the trip get passed around among the generations

Results?
- I don’t have a graph of test score improvements
- I do have lots of great stories testifying to the impact of this

Climate within my class started to change, especially as it related to the trip

I promised the school board after this trip was approved, I promised to share with the school board the impact of the trip
- this had a big impact with kids who weren’t bought into the trip

Favorite story: Andrew’s moment in the sun (future valedictorian)
- applying his presentation knowledge about heat exhaustion on the trip

Another story: Austin who was not interested in class / school
- he loved fishing
- he worked his tail off to go on the trip
- he ended up helping other kids on the trip, showing them how to fish, building the campfire
- he dropped out at age 16, it may not have changed his life, but it made a connection and we still talk about the trip when I see him in the community

Other kids ask me to borrow backpacks
- happy parents can be your best ally
- can make things a lot easier

Technology portion of the trip

This will all be on the CSPD we bite

Key components
- 3 to 5 letters to parents
- outline the trip
- kids are required to pass every assignment to go on the trip
- communicate early and often
- gear list in 2nd letter
- 3rd letter is final details

Kids often don’t buy into the idea school will get them anything
- kids who don’t see the connection for their learning
- also has immediate consequences for failure
- kids need to recognize how to set goals and work hard
- hardest thing I do each year is talk to the kids and parents who don’t’ get to go

Technology aspect of this project
- we used Google Docs this year
- start with a mini-research project
- have students research two topics and jot down two interesting facts
- others have to respond in a different color to others, then the doc is shared back with me
- as soon as the students start collaborating and interacting, the dynamics in the classroom change

Research project is main aspect
- kids brainstorm what we might need for the trip
- can use Linoit or Google Docs

We write business letters asking for funding for the trip
- in my letter I explain we are really just looking for $5
- kids getting a response

We now write to DSEF (Darby School Excellence Funds)
- kids see writing as power
- rough and final drafts for those letters

Research presentations
- we used Google Presentations this year
- let students work at this at home, PPT not required
- 1 video from an expert was required in their presentation
- next year I’ll also require them to include a video they film

We do thank you letters to the business
- personal touch
- what did you get out of the trip
- what’s neat about all their assignments: they have immediate value to the kids (receiving money, seeing the impact of their presentation applied on the trip, etc)

bdufresne [at] darby.k12.mt.us

Possibilities:
- great for co-curriculuar collaborations, get the PE teacher involved!

You can take almost anything that is a passion for you and tie it to the curriculum
- it doesn’t have to be backpacking, but that’s my passion
- any adventure can apply!
- large or small, your students will appreciate them all

Research is the easiest means to apply any trip to your curriculum; however, as a co-curricular unit you can really run wild and share the workload
- take 2 minutes and think of a passion you have and how you might be able to apply it to your classroom

This really comes down to authentic learning

MY COMMENT: THIS INSPIRES ME TO WORK ON OUTDOOR CAMP THIS YEAR FOR CLASSEN SAS!

Technorati Tags:
#wildtech, learning, montana, wildtech, adventure

Adventure Based Learning by Brian Dufresne #wildtech originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on August 8, 2011.

I recorded a short video today in the library using my iPad2 and iRig mic, showing some of the features and capabilities of these great student learning spaces!

What are the collaborative learning spaces in your local school library and public library looking like these days? Perhaps it’s time they had a facelift! You might consider taking some notes from the work of the great learning space designers at Texas Tech!

Thanks to Karissa Greathouse, the amazing Blackboard instructional designer and support specialist at the TTU Teaching, Learning and Technology Center, for showing me these great learning spaces today! Thanks also to a visiting student who agreed to serve as an impromptu videographer for me!

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Collaborative Learning Spaces for Students at Texas Tech originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on May 13, 2011.

Scratch resources from my Fall 2010 undergraduate course, “Computers in the Classroom,” are available on wiki.powerfulingredients.com/Home/cic/resources/scratch.

Cross-posted to Learning Signs.

Technorati Tags:
creativity, free, fun, learning, scratch, software, mit

Learning about Scratch Basics (a podcast interview with 7 and 10 year olds) originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on December 23, 2010.

Access the Yarmouth student Art Ning on http://yhsartdept.ning.com. Melissa uses a Google Site to post assignments, provide curriculum links for students, and serve as a learning portal for many of the resources students use to support their learning both inside and outside of class. In the video, it’s very interesting to hear Abbie contrast the technology use of the Maine students to the students in Beijing.

Yarmouth has been engaged in a 1 to 1 laptop learning program, as part of the Maine Learning Technology Initiative, for the past eight years. For additional background, be sure to see my December 4th post and video, “Technology Integrators are essential for 1 to 1 Laptop Learning and Technology Immersion.” Both of these videos were among several I took following the 2010 Christa McAuliffe Technology Conference in Manchester, New Hampshire a few weeks ago. My daughter, Sarah, and I were fortunate to be included in a tour of Yarmouth High School led by students primarily for an international delegation from Sweden which is considering a similar initiative to MLTI.

Kudos to Abbie and her teacher, Melissa Noack, for their fantastic work collaboratively learning about art and culture – AND their willingness to share their lessons learned with the rest of the world!

Technorati Tags:
art, china, cmtc10, collaboration, culture, maine, ning, photo, share

PhotoShop, Art, and Ning Collaboration with Students in Maine and China originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on December 12, 2010.

Alice has been in instructional technology since 1985 when she met Seymour Papert in Dallas
- inspired to do her Master’s degree at Lesley University
- started as a kindergarten teacher, worked at the Greenhills School in Dallas
- taught overseas for 12 years
- started tech programs in Cali, Columbia, Mogadishu, Somalia, and Daka, Bangladesh
- came back to the states in 1997
- most important thing I want you to know about me is: I’m a teacher
- I’m a computer geek, definitely
- I’ve been an instructional integrator all the time I’ve been in Yarmouth, it’s my 12th year
- I work with teachers and kids about how to integrate technology into lessons and learning

I’m going to be talking about how these tools fit in
- there has to be a purpose for using a tool

Resources for this session:

https://sites.google.com/site/cmtcteachertoolkit/home

When I’m working with teachers, I don’t just show tools
- so what I did today

When Angus King considered giving all students laptops in Maine, he did a lot of thinking about global collaboration

35,000 students in the state have the same device (all 7th and 8th graders)

When it got to 2003, you could buy in and purchase your own laptops
- our high school did that, phased in year by year starting with 9th graders

We are able to tweak the “image” of software programs we have on our laptops

We have done a lot of talking in 8 years about moving to this new kind of learning
- what do our classrooms look like now that all our students have a device?
- now it is the norm to use laptops everywhere, for everything

What’s happened in this process
- teaching and learning is changing in front of our eyes every day
- we don’t have a plan in place that says specifically, “Next week we will be on the creativity standard”
- we are continually tweaking and improving our practice
- every teacher creates a portfolio
- that lends itself wall to reflecting on and changing our practices to promote student learning and creativity
- we know there is a different kind of learner sitting in our classrooms now

Our staff is at a very wide range of skills when it comes to technology skills
- we’ve realized we need to give more professional development for teachers
- our PD is more differentiated today more than ever

PD is not just done “by me,” it’s done together with students and teachers
- teachers who need help with iMovie

iMovie ’09: I haven’t learned it because I haven’t used it much yet. But our kids have. So they are the experts on that skill.

ISTE NETS 1: Facilitate and Inspire Student Learning and Creativity (examples)

Every teacher is required to have a “minimum online web presence”
- contact info and a place for parents to get assignments
- we use FirstClass for that, but we are also a Google Apps for Education domain so teachers can do that with a Google Calendar

Sample Assignment: Portfolio of Work, Creating your “online presence”

Example: Maddie’s Art Portfolio
- teacher gives a structure, but doesn’t tell them exactly how it must look

Google Apps has changed how we work as a community
- it is so easy to collaborate and share now
- by clicking the SHARE button, teachers can either

Example project on native American stories: Class time (with VoiceThread for Education)

Think about an assignment you’ve created in the past, and digitally tweak it
- similar to what was done in the past, but students are allowed to have some digital creative “process” in it
- the teacher didn’t say, “You must do an iMovie”
- the task was to create a product for a specific purpose focused on specific content

There are lots of moviemaking tools online now, Aviary is one

We have a YouTube channel now to showcases student work: www.youtube.com/YarmouthHS
- student projects are often predictable
- I brainstormed with the teacher, and we decided to challenge the students to create their videos as if they WERE the artist
- Example about Edward Hopper

People are now favoriting our High School YouTube channel, because they like the work which is shared
- that ups the ante for student work

We had YouTube blocked for a long time, and then we realized, “What’s the point? Kids are
- we should use it as a channel to push work out
- You should consider creating a YouTube channel for your class
- that way you can take student work and embed it on a wiki or Google Site, and share it with parents, grandparents, and others

Kids like sharing with Prezi: a non-linear presentation tool
- works well when kids are narrating

Animoto is fabulous

Education version of Animoto lets you create class accounts

We do a unit on digital citizenship, 9th graders create / produce products around the question, “What does it mean to be a digital citizen? How does that relate to our school’s core values?”
- kids go through a series of scenarios
- have you seen the sock puppet videos
- we break kids into core value teams
- kids come up with a product around internet or cell phone safety

Tools used by students for the digital citizenship project are client-based (downloaded software) and web-based

We then share this out in a film festival

ISTE NETS2: Design and Develop Digital-Age Learning Experiences and Assessments (examples)

We still do bell work, but it looks like this: Why are these the top 3 news articles on Google News?
- using Wikispaces as the project backbone, getting an RSS feed from Google News embedded into the page
- kids take 10 minutes to put together and share with their group why this is important
- kids now send links to this teacher to related news articles all the time (kids continually sharing, saying “did you see…” or “did you know…”)

Current events are done by more than one person: collaborative current events / presentations
- students create presentations collaboratively, NOT in class, outside of class

Example project of a biology teacher who was NOT a technology user recently
- Biology Taste Test
- Data from the project
- Project Rubric
- Project Assessment
- all done with Google Docs, all done collaboratively in groups, all shared with the teacheer
- with groups of 4, this means the teacher has 20 projects to grade at the end (not 120 projects) at the end
- Google Apps domain has enabled this, it is truly changing the practice in our schools

We have 90 minute classes and an every-other schedule

Public Policy Project
- students are making a compelling presentation to someone who might be in a position to make a governmental change, and then they DO send and share it with them

We are so invested in our Art Ning we are paying for it this year (so we can keep doing group work)
- Edu2.0 is another website just like Ning, but FREE and very school friendly
- Edmodo works too, but it is more relevant for younger students

Teachers and students are really getting into using Screencasting
- example: Jing-created tutorials about Adobe PhotoShop
- Jing is similar to Screenr (but Screenr is web-based)

As a teacher look at Quizlet: Allows you to create online, interactive flashcards

Now ISTE NETS 3: Model Digital-Age Work and Learning (examples)

Senior Math Class learning portal example: This is a ‘landing space’ for students to engage in their digital work / learning

It’s very important that EVERYONE has access to these resources and tools

I work between 4 computers and a phone
- so having my bookmarks online lets me get to my links at anytime, anyplace
- lets me have my library of links available
- I can send a URL of links to teachers
- I use Diigo

YoLink: we’re just starting to use it for research
- highlights words you are searching for, and lets you put words from a webpage directly into a Google Doc
- great tutorials are available on the YoLink website
- YoLink Education site

Example tutorial: YoLink Share with Google docs

Readability: strips out ads and gives you JUST content

Evernote: Allows me to take notes on my phone, computer, etc.
- can tag notes

If you don’t have ways for kids to share documents outside school, Dropbox allows you to do this for free and access files from any machine
- If you invite more friends to DropBox, it gives you more space free

Browser add-ons: Huge time saver
- Read It Later
- After I find links on Twitter, I click Read It Later it makes a list for me
- that is what I’d do if I have an iPad

ISTE NETS 4: Promote and Model Digital Citizenship and Responsibility

- NetVibes Summer Technology Course
- Google Site Summer Technology Course and blog posts
- Teacher’s Guide to International Collaboration on the Web

ISTE NETS 5: Engage in Professional Growth and Leadership (examples)

I would not be standing up here today if it was not for Twitter
- if you are not using Twitter, really think about giving it a chance

Alice on Twitter: @alicebarr

Technorati Tags:
1to1, alicebarr, cmtc10, edtech, iste, laptop, learning, nets, technology, immersion, yarmouth

The 21st Century Teachers’ Toolkit by Alice Barr @alicebarr #cmtc10 originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on December 1, 2010.

Both StoryKit and Storyrobe are free, SonicPics is $3. Check out the links below for example, “finished” stories created with each tool. My daughters helped me with some of these today!

1. StoryKit example: Touring Suzhou, China (by Wesley – an explanatory post is also available)
2. Storyrobe example: Fall KSU Football: Family Time! (by Wesley, posted to YouTube and embedded on our family learning blog via a Posterous cross-post generated by the iOS email message which follows posting a video to YouTube from the Photo Gallery)
3. Storyrobe example: Animals in the Zoo (by 6 year old Rachel, posted to our family learning blog via a Posterous cross-post, created with email from Storyrobe)
4. SonicPics example: Fall Trees (by 10 year old Sarah, posted to our family learning blog via a Posterous cross-post, generated by an email from SonicPics after uploading to YouTube from within SonicPics)

For more information about these applications, visit their respective websites:

1. StoryKit: en.childrenslibrary.org
2. Storyrobe: www.storyrobe.com
3. SonicPics: www.sonicpics.com

Many thanks to Allanah King, Jill Bromenschenkel, and Tony Vincent for letting me know about these apps and encouraging me to give them a try. Definitely check out Tony’s fantastic presentation for the 2010 K-12 Online Conference, “Project Based Learning in Hand,” for many more tips and suggestions about using these applications (and more) with your students in digital storytelling projects.

Last Friday in St Paul, Minnesota, at the “Co-Teaching and Collaborating” Conference, I led a cohort of teachers focused on collaboration and digital storytelling. We used brand new iPod Touches with Storykit to record 5 photo “Fairy Tale Charades.” It was great fun! Thanks to Curby Alexander for this activity suggestion! Check out some of the results on the “5 Photo Stories” Posterous blog, 5photos.posterous.com. If you want to contribute your own “5 photo stories” to this project, you can email all five photos (attached to a single email) to post [at] 5photos [dot] posterous [dot] com. Submissions are moderated, which means I view and approve them before they show up “live.” Be sure to use as the subject line of your email the title you’d like for your 5 photo story blog post. The Flickr group “Tell a Story with 5 Photos for Educators” has 72 examples of 5 photo stories and is also open for new submissions.

I love mobile digital storytelling! I hope we can create a “phase 2″ Storychasers workshop this summer which will include the use of StoryKit, Storyrobe and SonicPics on iPod Touches as well as other great iOS apps for Storychasing!

Technorati Tags:
ios, iphone, ipodtouch, k12online, k12online10, mobile, story, storykit, storytelling, storyrobe, sonicpics

Mobile Digital Storytelling with StoryKit, Storyrobe, and SonicPics #edapp originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on November 14, 2010.

Carl is @anderscj on Twitter and writes the blog, Techno Constructivist.

My August 2006 post, “Doug Belshaw on John Holt and authentic learning” references some of these ideas about unschooling.

Technorati Tags:
learn, learning, school, video, youtube, educator, anderson, carl

Carl Anderson on Learning and the Purpose of School (video) originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on November 13, 2010.

Brian shares SO many elements of fantastic learning in this video, it’s hard to know where to begin. This video is a great one to share with faculty at your school at a faculty meeting to spark subsequent conversations. What did we see Brian DO that was right for kids? How did he structure a learning context which was authentically engaging for students? How did he weave the use of technology tools like blogs, wikis, videoconferencing software, and student laptops to help his students connect with an authentic audience and share their individual voices with the world? How did the assignments and learning tasks Brian’s students completed meet state standards? Why do we need to foster these kinds of learning experiences in our classrooms TODAY, and how can we do that?

The lessons Brian shares in this video were NOT easy to teach. Project-based learning, challenge-based learning, or passion-based learning is NEVER easy. It takes a LOT of time. It takes lots of planning. And it takes lots of passion. When it is done well, however, it can lead to unforgettable learning experiences and the kind of “deep” skill development for students which can’t help but “stick” for a lifetime.

Brian Crosby is the kind of teacher all our children deserve, and we all should learn a great deal from him. Project-based learning (PBL) is not an activity at school that should only be reserved for the “gifted/talented” (GT) kids, or kept in the closet until state tests are over in late spring. PBL is something in which we should engage year-round. It takes time. It takes hard work. It takes passionate, committed teachers. And it bears fruit sweeter and more impactful than any other learning context in our schools today.

photo credit: Deanster1983

The video “Inclusion,” from which Brian included a short clip in his TEDxEd presentation, has been downloaded over 500,000 times to date. Follow Brian on Twitter and read more of his inspirational (as well as challenging) ideas on his blog, “Learning is Messy.”

Take a few minutes to watch Brian’s inspirational presentation in Denver. Share it with other educators and parents you know. Then go grow some PBL fruit.

Technorati Tags:
based, blog, education, inspire, internet, learning, pbl, project, school, skype, teaching, web2, brian, crosby, messy, TEDx, TEDxED, leading, bie, edutopia, inclusion, wiki

Passion-based learning in action: Brian Crosby at TEDxDenverEd originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on July 27, 2010.

Part 2 of 2: This podcast is a recording of a presentation by Wesley Fryer on June 16, 2010, in San Antonio, Texas, at the summer administrative leadership conference for Northeast ISD. This was a 2+ hour presentation, so the recordings have been separated into two parts. See the podcast shownotes for links to referenced videos and resources. (Audio from shared videos has been edited out of this recording.) The session description was: Much of the world has gone digital, so must learning at school. Creativity is vital, and good leadership matters. Stagnant, accomodation-level technology integration makes technology investments in our schools a waste of money. School leaders can and should encourage teachers to use digital learning tools in transformative ways to open new doors of opportunity for students as well as parents. By focusing on creating, communicating / sharing, and collaborating, principals can help develop a shared instructional vocabularly with teachers which is focused on student engagement. Without creation, there can be no creativity. How will you let your students create? How will you give students choices? How will your students teach the curriculum? These are essential questions to ask together with teachers, as we seek to effectively (and legally) “talk with media / pictures” and leverage the constructive power of digital media tools for learning inside and outside the classroom.

Show Notes:

1. Part 1 of this presentation shared as an audio podcast
2. Referenced videos and links
3. Presentation slides and videos on SlideShare

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Podcast351: Leading Schools with Digital Vision in a Bubblesheet World (part 2 of 2) originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on June 21, 2010.

Presentations from the past three days were also Ustreamed live and archived. Check them out! I’m quite honored to be included as a speaker with this distinguished and august lineup!

Tuesday Dr. Helen Barrett spoke about digital portfolios.

Wednesday Dr. Sylvia Martinez focused on project-based learning.

Today Dr. Gary Stager presented on 1:1 learning.

Technorati Tags:
1to1, based, education, learning, pbl, portfolio, project, school, technology, workshop, california, eportfolio

Live and archived Ustream recordings from the Castilleja Summer Learning Institute originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on June 10, 2010.

This podcast is a recording of a presentation by Steve Wyckoff at the June 2, 2010 iConnect, iLearn Conference in Colby, Kansas. The title of Steve’s session was, “Crisis in the School: Redesigning the Delivery Model.” Steve relates how ESSDACK (The Educational Services and Staff Development Association of Central Kansas) hosted a summit last April for schools to study different alternatives for redesigning educational models focusing on project-based learning. I titled my text notes from Steve’s presentation, “Helping kids connect to their passions and become remarkable: SAVING money shifting to Project Based Learning.” Educators in Erie, Kansas, (USD 101) have found that by shifting to a project-based learning model students can be more engaged in their learning, while teachers shift their roles to be the “facilitators” rather than just the “deliverers” of the curriculum. This model can prove LESS expensive than the traditional school staffing model. Steve explains how.

Show Notes:

1. Steve Wyckoff’s blog: What’s Become Clear – Real School Change: Questioning Assumptions About Education
2. Post by Steve: Educational Reform: Are We Wasting A Good Crisis
3. April 2009 ESSDACK summit: “Crisis in the Classroom: Turning Crisis into Opportunity for K-12 education“
4. My text notes from this session: “Helping kids connect to their passions and become remarkable: SAVING money shifting to Project Based Learning” (includes Ustream video of the presentation)
5. iConnect iLearn Conference Ning

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Podcast349: Crisis in the School: Redesigning the Delivery Model by Steve Wyckoff originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on June 6, 2010.

The initial few minutes of this preso were also archived, but Kevin doesn’t start until 2:30 into the presentation. Connectivity issues caused this recording to “break” into two parts, as happened with my keynote in the morning.

“With all of the new tools we can bring to bear in learning, it’s still all about the relationships we create with kids.”

How can we connect kids to a bigger world?

Did you make a mistake during puberty?
- Can you Google it?

I have a use lease for our laptops at home
- My son has to create something worth sharing at least once per week

There are more honors students in India than there are KIDS in the United States
- they are literally and figuratively hungry for the jobs your kids will want
- kids shouldn’t just ‘snack on the web’

What are you building with the most powerful learning tools in human history?

In the future the person who is not networked competing against the person who IS will be like Cro Magnon Man competing against Homo Sapiens

What’s a network of supportive peers worth in your back pocket on your worst day?

I’m amazed my Art Snacks “Great White Shark” video has been viewed over 24,000 times. (essdackartsnacks.ning.com)

Anything you can show someone how to do works on YouTube

Ask this: What would you build for your Grandkids?

I videotape these with my iPhone

It took crazy teachers to save me in school, who loved their subject areas so much

Rooms are often setup in “the custodial arrangement”
- we know the room setup in most classrooms: students in the front row are policymakers
- students in the back row are bystanders

No kid in school should have anything worse than a 2nd row seat
- with a laptop, I can put every student on the front row
- I can change the rules of the game

then I cracked the code: The next right answer is the next dark word in the textbook chapter

Agree or disagree: “Empowerment comes from being trusted to attack learning according to your own strengths!”

What are some ways we could and do let kids learn differently?

We should attack digital tools like we were dumpster diving for our kids.

What are some creative ways we could and do let kids learn differently?

We marry tools in education. (file cabinets, overhead projectors, etc.)
- we need to think creativity instead

Lulu.com – kids as authors… today!
- example “Revere’d Writing” – Minnesota school publishing best student work in paper format using Lulu.com

Don’t use a digital tool professionally before you play with it personally

Technorati Tags:
creativity, edtech, learning, school, technology, tools

Tips and Tricks from Kevin Honeycutt #icil2010 (Colby, Kansas) originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on June 2, 2010.

ESSDACK in Hutchinson hosted a summit titled, “Crisis in the Classroom: Turning Crisis into Opportunity for K-12 education” in April 2009. All the panels from that summit are available as free, online videos. This presentation is based on much of the content from that summit.

I think Erie, Kansas is one of the most innovative schools in the entire nation (USD 101)

Steve Wyckoff’s blog: What’s Become Clear – Real School Change: Questioning Assumptions About Education

- are we wasting a good crisis (post by Steve: Educational Reform: Are We Wasting A Good Crisis)

We need to change our focus in schools
- we should work to inspire every kid to identify what they are so passionate about that they become remarkable at it

The 3 words I focus on:
- inspiration
- passion
- remarkable

had 2 boys at their school who converted a truck to run on nitrogen
- a girl who worked with a geneticist in bovine science

Teachers validate student work
- kids keep track of the standards they are mastering

1st project kids do is teacher defined
- after that they are student defined

Lessons learned
- you can save a LOT of money if you go project-based
- test scores have remained stable (good)
- student engagement has gone way up

Students at Erie High School don’t say “boring” now when they describe school, if they are in the PBL track

If we keep doing what we’ve been doing the way we’ve been doing it, the only solution to move forward is MORE MONEY

Community reception of this change has been mixed

Good book: “The Innovator’s Dilemma”
- your best customers will drive you out of business

I have observed we are scared to talk about “the main course” in education today (changing the core of what we do)
- our focus on preparing kids for college makes no sense today (the Regent’s curriculum)
- we do it because we’ve always done it

Many of our “top kids” are getting PBL-type interaction at home from parents

MY REFLECTION: THIS MAKES ME THINK OF THE BUCK INSTITUTE AND THEIR PBL CURRICULUM FOR TEACHERS (MID-DEL PUBLIC SCHOOLS IS BRINGING IN BIE PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT TO LAUNCH THEIR 1:1 INITIATIVE THIS SUMMER.)

Erie used EdVisions out of Minnesota

The focus of most schools today is just “how do we cut” rather than thinking creatively about how we can do things differently, better, AND save money

Thoughts on testing in schools
- think of driving
- you took two tests when got licensed: one was written and one was a driving test. Which one was meaningful to you?

PBL is about going through guided experiences with adults
- in Erie they are building a new high school
- team of kids
- consultant from Durango, Colorado is the identified expert the students are utilizing

MY THOUGHT: WE NEED TO SEND A STORYCHASERS TEAM TO ERIE!

I have spoken to every pre-service education student at KU in the past 9 years
- I share with them that “doing the same thing that was done to you in school” is the wrong thing
- never had more than 6% of kids report they regularly experienced “flow” in core content classes (were so engaged they lost track of time)
- then I ask them: how many of you had your teachers convinced you were authentically engaged? (lots of hands in response to that)

Kansas State Board of Education last month formed an “Education Commission”
- I was asked to serve on this
- my sole mission and message is: We should focus on helping kids become REMARKABLE, not focusing on test scores
- helping kids identify their passion

Our kids should be driving the car
- most faculty fervently believe we should “expose” students to their content

Our kids don’t need to be exposed to Shakespeare to be successful in life
- our kids need to be prepared for the workforce

If the GenEd curriculum is not relevant, then why do we mandate it?

Business world consistently says kids do the worst at COMMUNICATION
- we require that a lot of kids in schools, what does that say about how we teach?

What’s the difference between covering, studying, and learning in our schools
- most of our kids NEVER study (they might do that for their hobbies, like fishing)
- kids memorize, but we rarely see them studying and learning

Why I like the Kansas Career Pipeline:
- anything that helps kids self-analyze and identify their passion are good

Our teachers should help kids connect with their passions
- takes 10 years and 10,000 hours of deliberate practice to become an “expert” at something
- even if you change your mind, once you get those habits in place they can transfer elsewhere

Kids should leave school with a “life plan”

Lots of kids I talk with at KU are NOT passionate about teaching
- coaches are passionate about working with kids after 3:30, many are NOT passionate about working with them before that time

Many of my coaches when I was a principal had the skill set to REALLY

finish the sentence, “They need to know _____ in order to _______.”
- do that for Shakespeare
- something about math? building bridges

Many of our coaches teach kids things “in order to…”
- our role models stand and talk like I do / am now

I think we typically use tech
- to entertain kids
- to help them remember the stuff that doesn’t matter
- hope they will use it in the real world

Kids at Erie High School are REQUIRED to have a cell phone
- that is the way they communicate with their community mentors
- Skype is open to EVERY kid

Does this present challenges for their tech guy? Of course. But it’s not about the tech guy. It’s about the kids and their learning.

Every kid at Little River High School has a laptop
- we had every kid login to the Kansas Career Pipeline
- I started showing them some of the things they could find: salaries, occupational fields, more…. You could have heard a pin drop in the room (engagement by the kids was so high)

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change, education, learning, project, reform, pbl, based, steve, wycoff

Helping kids connect to their passions and become remarkable: SAVING money shifting to Project Based Learning originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on June 2, 2010.

It’s the end of term, so it’s time for students to turn in their final projects. What does this project turn-in process look like for many classes? Something like this.

If I was king, all the students at our college would be required to have their own laptop computers, and all projects like this would be turned in electronically. The university has a license for WebCT/Blackboard, and many faculty use it, but (according to the university staff who conducted my orientation session in January) most simply post their syllabus online.

photo credit: cheesy42

Times need to change. We need 1:1 computing NOW in our K-12 schools and in our universities. As Alan Kay says, “The predominant technology defines the predominant learning task.” When everyone doesn’t have a wireless computing device, it’s hard to ask everyone to work paperless. It’s time to move all our universities and schools into the 21st century. To do this, we’ve got to work more digitally with ideas and information than we ever have before.

photo credit: One Laptop per Child

Welcome to OLD School Assignment Turn In originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on May 5, 2010.

To foster and establish a wide community of practice further developing a culture of improving learning environments for the region’s students. To facilitate ICT initiatives that create regional capacity and are aligned with the expressed needs of the community. For educators within the region to feel more connected with each other.

My wife and son were in our living room with me for this ten minute Skype connection, and afterwards we all reflected how amazing our world is today. Ten or twenty years ago who would have thought we could start the day with a short phone conversation, for free, over fiber optic undersea cabling with someone living literally in TOMORROW on the other side of the planet? My wife’s comment was, “Well, that’s the world YOU live in.” My thought was that it’s the world we all CAN live in, but due to multiple factors not everyone does.

This morning was week 14 of my “Technology 4 Teachers” class at the University of Central Oklahoma, and our theme was “synchronous conferencing.” In my first two-hour class Jeff Utecht was kind to Skype in and visit with us from Bangkok, Thailand. Bangkok is 12 hours ahead of us in Oklahoma, so Jeff was about to retire for the day as well. It was great to have him share a little about Thailand and some of the opportunities available for international teachers. For educators interested in possibly teaching overseas, Jeff recommended the websites for International School Services as well as Search Associates. Both help with international teacher placements. Fortunately Jeff does not live downtown in Bangkok, as Kim Cofino does, so he and his wife have not been directly affected by the ongoing protests there. Kim has not been able to get home for several days. Jeff explained a little of the political situation, and it’s certainly complicated. It was great for my students to hear from Jeff, and actually participate in an international Skype call with someone across the Pacific Ocean.

During my second two-hour class today, Kristin Hokanson skyped to us from Philadelphia and not only discussed the ways she’s helped teachers and students at her school use Skype, but also some of the important advocacy work she continues to do in partnership with Renee Hobbs and others at the Temple University Media Education Lab. Some of Kristin’s teachers and students were able to participate in an interactive videoconference with author Dan Pink, organized by Karl Fisch. She discussed the value of classroom-to-classroom collaborations, as students present to and for each other, and the ways students can develop collaboration skills working with peers in other locations. Kristin’s message on copyright and the use of images in the classroom focused on “intellectual property” and the overriding purpose of copyright law, which was/is to encourage creativity. This is the message of the excellent music video produced by the Temple Media Education Lab, “What’s Copyright?” We are using this as part of our copyright discussions in Celebrate Oklahoma Voices.

I started off both my classes today with the video, “Inclusion” by Brian Crosby, shared as a referenced video link in his outstanding K12Online08 presentation, “Video-Conferencing It’s Easy, Free and Powerful.” This powerful video can meaningfully frame conversations about the the power (both actual and potential) of synchronous conferencing technologies in the classroom. That’s how we used it today.

At the end of our lesson, I shared the first five minutes of Silvia Tolisano‘s phenomenal K12Online09 presentation, “Around the World with Skype.” Silvia’s presentation (also available in Spanish) and her “supporting documents” blog post are chock-full of instructional examples of how synchronous conferencing is being used transformatively in classrooms around the world.

It was quite a morning of Skype connections! Many thanks to Jeff Utecht, Kristin Hokanson, Brian Crosby and Silvia Tolisano whose live as well as asynchronous contributions made this morning’s learning opportunities for my T4T students much richer and more engaging! The edited lecturecast from today is uploading now to our T4T Blip.tv channel, and should be available / encoded in an hour or so. (When it’s finished in the morning I’ll embed it here in case you want to check it out.)

Week 14: Synchronous Conferencing

All lecturecasts as well as student-written “scribe posts” for the Spring 2010 “Technology 4 Teachers” class are available on our T4T Shared Learning blog.

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collaborate, conference, education, intellectual, k12online, k12online09, learning, oklahoma, property, skype, uco, video, k12online08, videoconference, copyright

A morning of Skype connections originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on April 21, 2010.

I’ve been wrestling with a question for months now, and perhaps you can shed some light on the answer for me. Why did Apple remove the ACOT (Apple Classrooms of Tomorrow) research documents from its main website, if those “research results” were intended to help inform educational decision makers about the potential value of educational technologies through the dissemination of valid, reliable research results?

Apple Classrooms of Tomorrow (ACOT) research was conducted in the 1980s and 1990s, and was at the time the longest longitudinal study of classroom technology integration conducted by anyone. The research was funded by Apple, and Apple certainly stood to gain financially from research findings which pointed to the positive impact which appropriately utilized technologies could have on teaching and learning inside as well as outside the classroom. ACOT2 (Apple Classrooms of Tomorrow – Today) is a “next generation” research effort by Apple, which ostensibly seeks to carry on the successful research model and results of the original ACOT program which spanned ten years, from 1985 through 1995.

Here is what mystifies me: If ACOT2 is legitimate research which should be respected on a par with academic research published in journals not affiliated with commercial vendors, why are there not ANY linked references back to the original ACOT research on the ACOT2 website? Why does it appear Apple has removed/deleted all the original ACOT research reports from its corporate website? This seems very strange, and even fishy.

The published report, “Changing the Conversation About Teaching, Technology, & Learning ~ A Report on 10 Years of ACOT Research” was published at some point on http://images.apple.com/education/k12/leadership/acot/pdf/10yr.pdf and www.apple.com/education/k12/leadership/acot/pdf/10yr.pdf. Those links are now broken. The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine grabbed copies of the first PDF URL in 2006 and 2007, and the second in 2003 and 2005. Those dates do not necessarily reflect the only years during which this document was available online at those addresses, however. A Google search for the document title reveals it is still available as part of Marco Baeza’s old student portfolio for his Internet Masters of Educational Technology degree from Sacramento State. It appears Baeza’s archived copy was not authorized or sanctioned by Apple. I haven’t spent hours looking for it, but other than Baeza’s link and the Wayback Machine’s copies, I can’t locate this document online anywhere else. This seems REALLY strange.

A Google Scholar search for “Apple Classrooms of Tomorrow” yields over 20,000 results today. This reflects the authority and legitimacy with which ACOT research has been regarded by many. One of these websites includes archived copies of the periodic ACOT published research results. This is an example of ACOT Report #8. (PDF) Again I am mystified why Apple would remove these “research documents” from their own website.

The current Apple “Resource” page for Teachers & Professors does not include ANY references to original ACOT research, or links to any ACOT research materials. There IS a link to the “ACOT2 White Paper,” but again no link to original ACOT research publications or findings.

I think many of the ideas expressed in the ACOT2 documents are superb and needed. We absolutely need to rethink formal education, classrooms, and learning environments. It troubles me, however, that Apple has apparently jettisoned its “past research” (ACOT 1) in the publication of this new and updated, ACOT 2 framework. Why would legitimate academic or scientific researchers do this? They wouldn’t, which leads me to question the legitimacy and validity of both the original ACOT research as well as the ACOT2 research initiative.

The other thing which troubles me deeply about Apple’s ACOT2 initiative is its “Challenge Based Learning” framework. Project-based learning and problem-based learning are pedagogical approaches which have a relatively long history, particularly when compared with the short history of educational technology. EduTopia’s website portal for “Project Based Learning” includes a rich assortment of videos and other resources which clearly establish the academic history of PBL. In its ACOT2 initiative, rather than state something like, “Educational experts and researchers at Apple endorse and support project-based approaches to learning,” the Apple Challenge-Based Learning website states:

To address the need to create new ways of engaging students to achieve, Apple worked with educators across the country to develop the concept of Challenge Based Learning. Challenge Based Learning applies what is known about the emerging learning styles of high school students and leverages the powerful new technologies that provide new opportunities to learn to provide an authentic learning process that challenges students to make a difference. Challenge Based Learning is an engaging multidisciplinary approach to teaching and learning that encourages students to leverage the technology they use in their daily lives to solve real-world problems. Challenge Based Learning is collaborative and hands-on, asking students to work with other students, their teachers, and experts in their communities and around the world to develop deeper knowledge of the subjects students are studying, accept and solve challenges, take action, share their experience, and enter into a global discussion about important issues.

Just as many of the ideas included in ACOT2 are great and ones with which I agree personally and professionally, many of the ideas embodied in “Challenge Based Learning” are on target. I think its disingenuous and unfortunate, however, for Apple to “lay claim” to the core concepts and principles of project-based learning as it has been developed for decades by numerous educators as well as researchers.

Perhaps it’s silly of me to worry about questions like these, but integrity is very important and I find it lacking in both of these situations regarding Apple. Why did Apple take down all its original ACOT research from its website, and by a lack of hyperlinks dis-associate itself with the body of recognized educational technology research which was ACOT? Furthermore, why is Apple attempting to rename “project based learning” as “challenge based learning” and give itself corporate credit for coming up with this pedagogical approach, when it is patently obvious “they” are not the originators of the concept and method?

My only conclusion is that for Apple today in 2010, it’s all about selling stuff– Whether you’re working for Apple Education or working in an Apple Store. It’s not about a learning revolution. It’s not about fundamentally changing education, it’s about trying to simply shift educational decisionmaker attention to Apple products so that quarterly profits can go up yet again.

I can’t fault Apple for being a corporation. They ARE a corporation. I always thought Apple stood for values which were far bigger and more important than “just” profits, however. I’ve even heard Apple leaders say as much in the past.

I guess when you get really big, some basic things can change.

I miss the old Apple, and the friends I thought I had who used to work for that old company.

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apple, change, edtech, leadership, learning, research, school, technology, acot, acot2, valid, reliable, study, report, scholar

Questionable Apple Behavior Regarding Original ACOT Research and Challenge Based Learning originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on March 19, 2010.

1. One in three (34%) texting teens ages 16-17 say they have texted while driving. That translates into 26% of all American teens ages 16-17.
2. 48% of all teens ages 12-17 say they have been in a car when the driver was texting.
3. 40% say they have been in a car when the driver used a cell phone in a way that put themselves or others in danger.

These statistics should get our attention, but in many cases they don’t. Different organizations are attempting to leverage the power of online video to stop this dangerous behavior. Public service announcements (PSAs) which show (in some cases) graphic depictions of violence are controversial and raise questions about the propriety of using shocking images to motivate people to change their unsafe behaviors.

photo credit: indyplanets

In August of 2009, MSNBC published the article, “Is PSA about texting while driving too graphic?” about a video originating out of Gwent, Wales. Some versions of the video have been pulled from YouTube for terms violations. This version, “PSA Texting while Driving U.K. Ad [HD]” is still available. WARNING: This video includes a graphic depiction of a multi-car accident in which several actors are killed.

The state of Utah has launched its “Zero Fatalities” campaign which includes the following fifteen minute video, also aimed at changing teen and other adult drivers’ behavior with respect to texting while driving.

Oklahoma librarian Whitney Allen created the Ning project website, “Don’t Text and Drive” to focus student attention on the issue of texting and driving. Students from Indiana, Washington, Michigan, and Oklahoma are currently participating, and more are invited to join.

In her K12Online09 presentation, “Digiteens: Digital Citizenship by Digital Teenagers,” Georgia teacher and noted edublogger Vicki Davis (CoolCat Teacher) showcased several PSA videos created by her students, including one persuading others not to text and drive.

What do you think of PSAs like the Gwent, Wales, video which are graphic and disturbing? MADD (Mother’s Against Drunk Driving) received criticism in the 1980s and 1990s, as I recall, for using graphic images at times to bring attention to the problems associated with mixing alcohol and driving. When you see videos or images like these, it is hard NOT to pay attention. Where do we draw the line when it comes to attention-getting PSAs, however? How is YouTube drawing that line? The stakes are high, so perhaps the line should be at least a bit beyond the range where we are “comfortable” watching a video. We SHOULD be disturbed by the violence and destruction which results from both drinking and driving and texting while driving, and be motivated to change our behavior if we have done these things in the past.

Technorati Tags:
video, youtube, text, texting, driving, violence, psa, gwent, wales, controversy, project

PSAs to stop texting and driving originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on March 9, 2010.

A few weeks ago I tweeted EduTopia staff and asked for their best recommended video on project based learning. They recommended, “Project Learning: An Overview.” (9:46) The video description is:

Seymour Papert, a distinguished professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is among a growing group of scholars who support project learning. Read a short introductory article or watch a brief introductory video.

What are your favorite resources (including videos) which support PBL, in addition to BIE and EduTopia?

Technorati Tags:
change, leadership, learning, project, school, transformation, pbl, based, bie, edutopia

Great Project Based Learning Resources from the Buck Institute for Education and EduTopia originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on February 11, 2010.

Clicking on a different part of the interactive body map displays related statistics, like these about the brain:

Searching online activates more brain regions than reading printed words.
On average, multitaskers spend 11 minutes on a project before switching to another, typically changing tasks within a project every three minutes.
It takes about 15 minutes to return with full attention to a serious mental task after you responded to an e-mail or instant message.
Video gaming in moderation can help develop improved pattern recognition, more systematic thinking and better executive skills.

Website articles are filled with links to references and additional materials. Browsing through the available videos, I found the following two particularly compelling.

Todd Oppenheimer, author of “The Flickering Mind,” argues that computer classes should be treated like “shop class” in our schools. Work habits are KEY, and schools MUST help students acquire these skills. (1:06)

In Marc Prensky’s interview montage titled “Education 2.0” by the digital_nation producers, he asserts students want to engage in interactive, hands-on collaborative projects which have a focus on changing their communities and changing our world. While I’m not a big fan of Prensky’s digital native / immigrant dichotomy I do agree with his endorsement of project-based, engaged learning in this video. (4:31)

Thanks to a Facebook post this weekend by Marco Torres, I learned about “What’s Your Issue:”

A Global Initiative and Competition for the next generation of leaders and social entrepreneurs – Seeking global thinkers 14 to 24… For 2010, we are looking for 3-minute videos with Issue & Solution format. Express your issue and propose an innovative solution-project. Winners presented to Obama administration, on Best Buy screens across the planet, and at VIP reception and Awards Ceremony hosted by Sony Pictures in Los Angeles

This sixty second YouTube spot summarizes the project and contest. If you have any of the “digital natives” Prensky is talking about in the previous video clip in your classroom or household, you might give them a heads-up on this contest.

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digital, education, interactive, learning, map, nation, oppenheimer, pbs, students, technology, native, natives, frontline, digital_nation, prensky

Interactive Digital Native Map and the What’s Your Issue Videography contest originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on January 31, 2010.

Podstock is organized by the amazing folks at ESSDACK in Hutchinson, and is the brainchild of the creative Kevin Honeycutt, among many others.

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conference, creativity, education, kansas, learning, podstock, school, technology, podstock10, podstock2010, wichita

Save the Date! PodStock 2010: July 16-17 originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on November 9, 2009.

Multicultural education is very important, but sometimes classroom activities are limited to just learning about holiday customs and foods in different countries. As we study other parts of the world, we should strive to PERSONALIZE and HUMANIZE learning by making direct connections with others in different contexts. Global Voices Online is one of my favorite websites to use when researching other countries to read individual blogger perspectives about and from those countries. Use the drop down menus at the top of the website to select a country, region, or topic of interest.

If you’re looking to make a direct connection with teachers and students in another country, utilize one or more of the following free websites and learning communities to find a partner classroom: ePals, Teachers Connecting, the Center for Interactive Learning and Collaboration’s Collaboration Center, the Global Education Collaborative, Global SchoolNet’s Projects Registry, and Classroom 2.0. The K-12 Online Conference is a great place to make connections as well. These links are provided on my workshop wiki, “Connecting and Collaborating with International Teachers Worldwide.”

Students benefit when they are guided to understand that learning does not have to be limited to a purely cognitive, isolated and disconnected experience. Service learning:

… is a method of teaching, learning and reflecting that combines academic classroom curriculum with meaningful service, frequently youth service, throughout the community. As a teaching methodology, it falls under the philosophy of experiential education. More specifically, it integrates meaningful community service with instruction and reflection to enrich the learning experience, teach civic responsibility, encourage lifelong civic engagement, and strengthen communities for the common good.

The National Service Learning Clearinghouse contains a wealth of resources you can use to start and support service learning initiatives in your classroom and school. If you’re involved in a service learning project, consider empowering your students to become Storychasers. Storychasers can use digital and social media technologies to “tell the story” and “chase the story” of their service learning project, heightening awareness and realizing the project’s objectives with powerful communications technologies.

While local community service and action is vital, it is also important to help students understand their decisions and actions can have a global impact. Kiva is an outstanding project to consider joining as an individual and as a classroom to make a real difference in the lives of others through fundraising and providing entrepreneurial loans. According to Kiva’s about page:

We Let You Loan to Low Income Entrepreneurs: Kiva’s mission is to connect people through lending for the sake of alleviating poverty. Kiva is the world’s first person-to-person micro-lending website, empowering individuals to lend to unique entrepreneurs around the globe.

If you join Kiva and make a microloan, consider joining Karl Fisch’s “Shift Happens” Team on Kiva. See Karl’s December 2008 posts, “Give Until It Feels Good: Join Team Shift Happens on Kiva” and “Kiva Update and a Not-So-Modest Proposal.” Students can help determine which country and what person to which they’d like to make a loan, and then track over time the progress of that person in reaching their entrepreneurial goals.

Once the person to whom you and your class have made a loan repays that amount, your “investment capital” is then freed for you to make another loan to someone else. This project can not only help students in your class make more personal learning connections to people in other countries, it can also help students learn about economics and how their actions can make a positive difference in the lives of others fighting poverty, by supporting entrepreneurs. The fact that your class can periodically log in to check up on the “progress” and status of Kiva entrepreneurs to whom you loan money can also add to the potential value and impact of this activity.

A final classroom project idea less focused on “changing the world” through service learning and activism, but none-the-less potentially exciting for students as they expand their geographic worldviews, is to create a classroom “travel bug” and set it loose amidst the world’s geocaches. According to the English WikiPedia:

A Travel Bug is a registered trademark of Groundspeak, Inc. used to describe a dogtag used in Geocaching. It is moved from cache to cache, and its travels can be logged on the geocaching website (www.geocaching.com). Each travel bug tag is printed with a unique PIN, which is needed to post a log online. Some tags are fastened to an object, such as a plastic figurine, before they are put in a cache.
Travel bugs are tracked on the Groundspeak-owned website Geocaching.com, but there are a number of other tracking sites such as Geotag Tracker or Traveler Tags that log other trackable items.

After participating in Beth Goodwin’s ACTEM 2009 workshop last week (“Geocaching In and Out of the Classroom”) and hearing how much fun her own students have had creating geocaches in historical sites of interest around Wells, Maine, I realized that “travel bugs” would make a great classroom project as well. You can choose the “mission” or destination for your travel bug, and that can be directly related to your geographic studies in the classroom. Geocaching can be fun as well as educational, but the learning can be taken to another level through the creation and release of “trackable” items like “travel bugs.”

We need to take global awareness seriously in our families, classrooms, and communities. Silvia Tolisano‘s K12Online07 presentation, “Travel through Space and Time,” is a great professional development session which emphasizes the importance of global awareness and also provides more concrete suggestions for classroom projects that can enhance students’ global literacy.

Technorati Tags:
activism, classroom, education, geocaching, global, learning, project, school, service, awareness, projects, travelbug, entrepreneur

Global Awareness, Community Service and Classroom Project Ideas originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on October 19, 2009.

Thanks to the hard work of many teachers and parents, 148 sixth graders from Classen School of Advanced Studies (a public magnet school) in Oklahoma City Public Schools spent a VERY memorable 4 days together in “outdoor school” this week learning about geology, meteorology, hydrology, fossil hunting, and much more in the best science classroom of all: The great outdoors! Here are a few highlights and reflections from our week of outdoor camp.

Water and rain played a big role in our week, but thankfully it did not impede any of our major activities. On our “three falls” hike, we had to ford or otherwise walk across streams (on rocks or logs) six different times. This was a novel experience for MANY of the students in our group, and probably some of the 28 adults who were sponsors and chaperones. It reminded me of backpacking on the west coast of New Zealand’s South Island, where (in the summer of 1987) I spent many hours hiking up river valleys and crossing streams. No, the topography of the Arbuckles does not equal New Zealand– but few things can beat the opportunity to experience the challenges and thrills of the great outdoors firsthand, wherever you may live! Many of Alexander’s classmates at Classen may never get a chance to hike in New Zealand, but now they can all proudly say they’ve been hiking– a LOT– in Oklahoma’s Arbuckle mountains!

Our activities were organized on a “matrix” schedule designed by Mr. Ed Holtzberger, who has been taking Oklahoma City Public School students to outdoor camps for several decades. I really can’t praise “Mr. H” enough, along with all the other teachers from Classen SAS who made this week possible. While my son has had a variety of previous outdoor experiences thanks to his involvement in Boy Scouting as well as our own family camping trips, it was phenomenal for him to be able to experience “outdoor school” with his new Classen classmates and be exposed to so much contextually-rich, experiential learning in one of the most beautiful parts of our wonderful state. I wish every student could be so fortunate to have a “Mr. H” working MANY, MANY extra hours to provide an outdoor school experience for so many students and parents. It was a week I’m sure we’ll never forget.

Our first scheduled activity was boating on the waterfront, in rowboats and canoes.

For the majority of boys in our cabin (14 in all) this was their first experience paddling or rowing on a lake. No one capsized, but we did have some high stress levels when a caterpillar dropped down onto the life preserver of one of our students! From his reaction, you’d have thought a crocodile had his leg in his jaws! Lots of memorable experiences were had by all, and many of the most memorable were not expected or predicted! When you get a group of students, teachers and parents together in an environment like this with a flexible schedule for learning, amazing things are bound to happen — and of course, they did!

The archery range was definitely a favorite of many of our students this week. Again, many had never had an opportunity to shoot a bow and arrow previously. The archery range was always open for use during free time, and just required a parent to supervise and manage the range when students used it. I think our cabin group shot at the archery range at least 4 – 5 times this week, to include a final trip this morning after they finished packing and cleaning up our cabin.

A big highlight was learning about fossils and actually finding them. Most of the fossils we found were crinoids, estimated at 400 million years of age. It’s pretty amazing to find something that old yourself in the dirt, hold it in your hand, and have permission to take it home (up to four per student) so you can show your family as well as examine them further.

Snakes and other creepy/crawly animals and insects are always a sure way to get the attention of young people, and Mr. Preston did a great job sharing his knowledge and collection of snakes with our kids. Some students were able to hold snakes. Usually each one would ask as they received the snake, “It won’t bite, will it?” to which Mr. Preston would truthfully respond, “Now I didn’t say that…” (No one got bit, however.)

Mr. Preston’s presentation on “skins and skulls” was one of my personal favorites. This next photo is Alexander with Mr Preston, with Alexander holding a black bear skull (which has molars as well as carnivore teeth, since it’s an omnivore) and Mr. Preston holding a wolf skull, which just has flesh-tearing and eating incisors since it’s 100% predator.

In this next image, Mr. Preston compares a wolf skull (on the left) with a much smaller coyote skull (on the right.) What a difference!

Here are two of my favorite images from the week: This is Mr. Holzberger teaching the kids on the fossil hike about the age of our earth. This is an image of an amazing science teacher, teaching in what must be one of best science classrooms in the world for geology: the Arbuckle mountains!

In this activity, students took 1 step for every 100 million years of earth history, and Mr. Holtzberger had different parents stop and remain at different key times in geologic history. This was a great method for trying to help others visualize just how HUGE geologic time is, especially compared to our short, human history.

I really enjoyed leading some optional geocaching activities for campers and parents on both Wednesday and Thursday. These were the GPS units we used: Five Garmin eTrex units and my Garmin eTrex Legend.

Our groups found four of the five geocaches hidden by Camp Classen staff around the camp. They used small Pelican cases for their geocaches, and each was secured to the ground with a metal wire and stake to prevent it from “walking off” with a camper or an unsuspecting muggle.

One of the caches had not been properly closed by the previous finders, and the effects of water as well as bugs made a clear visual aide for making the point to our students: Be sure to securely close the geocache after you sign the find log!

I could recount more experiences and memories, but I’ll close by again noting how VERY appreciative I am to Mr. H, Mrs. Carlton, and many, many others who made this week’s outdoor school experience possible. Alexander and I are quite proud to now call ourselves Classen Comets, and we’re likely to never forget this week’s experiences in the Arbuckles with his Classen classmates in the Class of 2016!

Technorati Tags:
camp, learning, okcps, oklahoma, oklahomacity, school, outdoor, classen, classensas, sas, arbuckles, arbuckle, ymca

In Praise of Outdoor School, Ed Holzberger, Classen SAS and Oklahoma City Public Schools originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on October 9, 2009.

This podcast is a recorded presentation from the Podstock 2009 conference on May 1 in Wichita, Kansas, by some of the most innovative elementary teachers you could ever hope to meet. Linley Voboril, Tamara Padfield, and Kimberly Herron presented this session titled, Get Out of Your FUNK, Cut the JIVE! Make Your Classroom Come Alive!!! The official conference description for this session was: Get your students totally psyched about Social Studies by seamlessly integrating technology into your classroom. We have weaved Google apps, Voice Thread, iMovie, podcasting, and many other 2.0 tools into content to make learning seriously groovy! [end of description] Linley’s bio on the conference website stated: I am a fifth grade teacher at a very progressive district in Inman, Kansas. Our fifth and sixth grade classrooms are the recipients of back-to-back Technology Rich Classroom grants for the past two years. As educators, we have worked hard to seamlessly weave technology into existing curriculum and develop new, exciting activities to accompany that. As a teacher of 17 years, ranging from kindergarten through 6th grade, including special education, I feel empowered by technology. The excitement to share and learn with other educators has impacted my instruction in numerous ways. I received my undergraduate degree from Kansas Wesleyan University and my Master’s degree from Wichita State University. I have had the privilege of teaching 13 years in the McPherson school district and four years at Inman. [end] Kimberly noted in her conference bio: The utilization of project-based research, cooperative learning, computer software and web 2.0 tools. These tools enhance the educational experience of her students helping them achieve both academic and personal growth. [end] I thoughtlessly placed my recorder for this session right next to the projector fan, so there was a lot of background noise in this original recording. I attempted to use Apple’s Soundtrack Pro to remove a lot of the background noise, but the results are just marginally better. Please accept my apologies for the uncharacteristically poor quality of this audio recording – but realize the IDEAS these teachers shared are fantastic!

Show Notes:

1. My text notes from this session
2. Partial Ustream archive of this session
3. Kimberly Herron’s MobileMe website: Herron’s Happenings (6th grade)
4. Tamara Padfield’s MobileMe website: Padfield Publications (5th grade)
5. Linley Voboril’s MobileMe website: Voboril Vibes (5th grade)
6. Technology Rich Classroom Program (Kansas Department of Education)  – A Ning website
7. VoiceThread
8. Mixbook
9. Skitch
10. Study on “Blood on the River” with VoiceThread
11. Google SketchUp
12. Podstock Ning
13. Podstock Southwest Ning

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Podcast330: Get Out of Your FUNK, Cut the JIVE! Make Your Classroom Come Alive!!! originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on September 30, 2009.

In this 40 second clip, Deputy Head of College Peter Lasscock explains “rapid prototyping” and how the technology design lab at Discovery College utilizes it with students. This is the same technology Weta Workshop in New Zealand used to design weapons for the film trilogy “The Lord of the Rings.”

In this 40 second clip, Paul White of the English Schools Foundation in Hong Kong uses a map of the MTR (Hong Kong subway system) to explain our journey across the city from Discovery College (in Discovery Bay) to Renaissance College. This involved a LOT of subway bus changes!

This 53 second clip shows us boarding one of the subways on our journey Wednesday.

In this 1.5 minute clip, Deputy Head of Renaissance College, Dylan Hughes, explains the instructional philosophy of the school’s innovative “Red Door” program, or Creative Media Room. The project utilizes creative/digital arts experts from industry working directly with teachers and nominated groups of students to develop capacity to effectively utilize digital tools in project-based learning. The project’s Ning website is invitation-only. The core services of The Red Door involve:
PLANNING

Work with teachers during the planning of units. Consider and select appropriate digital tools and resources. Plan and organize relevant resources, time frames, and skill workshops. Make and/or locate suitable resources for teachers and students.

IN CLASS SUPPORT

Work with small groups of students to develop core skills and knowledge about digital tools. Develop efficient and effective knowledge transfer practices using a train the trainer model.

PROFESSIONAL LEARNING

Provide ready made workshops for students, teaching staff, support staff and parents. Conduct software research and reviews for new software and hardware items. Share these findings with relevant curriculum leaders and coordinators. Promote sharing of online resources.

Technorati Tags:
@21chk, hongkong, integration, school, schools, technology, video

Interviews and subway videos from Hong Kong International Schools (Part 1) originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on September 17, 2009.

Julie Lindsey: I covet the learning connections and networks which I make now as a result

Darren Draper: I use the Internet as an extension of my brain

Steve Hargadon
- is this a passing fad or a sea change? How big of a change is it?

David Jakes:
- it has potential to be a sea change, but if we just focus on tools it won’t amount to much
- citing article “Have you considered the Internet as literacy, as a context for reading, writing and communication”
- those things are timeless and we understand as
- better to talk about a new context to read, write and communicate, rather than talking about “web 2.0 tools”

Chris Lehmann:
- the notion of a collaborative, participatory culture is definitely out of the box
- no one is going to give that up once they’ve realized/experienced it

Sylvia Martinez:
- first step is to define web 2.0
- dictionary would say: a very specific way webpages handle entry and access
- what we have done is expanded the definition
- that is dangerous because we’ve expanded the meaning, to the point now that it can be meaningless

Darren Draper:
- evidence pointing to the idea it’s not a passing fad: this panel
- we have public and private, U.S. based and international

Steve Hargadon:
- audience, is it here to stay or passing fad?

Audience: “Here to stay”

Steve: “Cool.”

MY THOUGHT: HOPEFULLY THAT IS NOT THE INTELLECTUAL DEPTH OF THE CONVERSATION WE ARE GOING TO HAVE HERE. (I.E. WEB 2.0 IS COOL. WITH THE PANEL HERE I KNOW THAT WILL NOT BE THE CASE, THIS IS GOING TO BE A GREAT CONVERSATION

Chris Lehmann:
- we need a defined pedagogical conversation about this

Jakes:
- should focus on the skills: writing and collaboration, not the tools
- the tools are going to come and go

Julie Lindsey:
- web 2.0 has changed how people change their strategies for instruction in the classroom
- allows you to communicate, collaborate and create at different levels
- is transforming what we can do in the classroom

Darren:
- web 2.0 focus can bring in sharing, collaboration, and digital citizenship which may not be on our state core curriculum standards yet

Jakes:
- we are having those conversations throughout our school community
- we focus on intersection of literacy and technology, and what that means
- I like to ask, “What does it mean to be well educated in the 21st century?”
- we have moved away from information fluency, information literacy
- what does it mean for instruction when we are focusing on what it means to be well educated today?
- what changes does that invite/require in curriculum and assessment?

Lemann:
- transformation is taking ideas from Dewey, Connectivism ideas from Siemans, is a new paradigm
- what do these things mean for how we teach and learn?

Darren:
- interesting that I learned about Michael Jackson’s death via Twitter first
- our students are learning with these tools NOW whether we like it or not
- it makes sense to integrate and implement those technologies in the ways we teach

Sylvia:
- we have to fill the vacuum with appropriate ways to use these tools, or students will fill the void with inappropriate ways
- we need to point out the glib ways web 2.0 tools are sometimes “claimed” to be used (SMARTboards are not web 2.0 tools)
- ask “how is that student centered?” and “how does that empower the child?”
- web 2.0 can enable that renegotiation of the relationship between students and teachers

MY THOUGHT: AREN’T WE TIRED OF SAYING “IT’S NOT ABOUT THE TOOLS YET?!”

Vicki Davis:
- why do we need to have a Ning workshop to use Ning?

I AGREE WITH THAT. CELEBRATE OKLAHOMA VOICES IS A GOOD EXAMPLE OF USING TOOLS CONTEXTUALLY TO ACCOMPLISH A TASK.

Workshop on “here’s how to use this tool” is less powerful than a workshop on “here is a core value of our school, and here is a way we can/are using tools to accomplish that” is better

Question

Jakes:
- what do you do when the walls around you become permeable
- this is a climate and culture issue
- how comfortable is the school letting students step outside those walls as they produce and publish content
- connections for schools begin locally
- learning community begins first, not just in a social way but also in an academic way

THIS REMINDS ME OF THE GORE-TEX CLASSROOM ANALOGY I DEVELOPED AWHILE BACK. GOOD METAPHOR.

Chris Lehmann:
- our kids need mentors. badly. We need to be and provide mentors for our kids

Sylvia:
- you can’t convince others with words about the value of web 2.0 tools
- there is not a way to fight this in terms of trying to fight liability fears directly
- best way is to make these models of success as visible as possible

I ABSOLUTELY AGREE. AMPLIFYING SUCCESSES IS THE KEY. EXAMPLES ARE THE KEY.

Jakes:
- this is a school community issue
- this involves a group we don’t talk with often: the kids
- recently asked adults at a panel about how many have recently had conversations with their kids about what they know, are doing, etc online

Lehmann:
- simple things we don’t yet do: it’s mind boggling every school in America doesn’t have a listserv of all parents to send out the daily announcements
- we wrote a Moodle hack so parents could go to our website and find out the homework each day
- at EduCon conference we have students
- give students small reasons/steps to come into the school
- going from “I grew up in this community” to “my kids at school are talking to someone in Belize” is a huge leap

Sylvia:
- sometimes the horrible, legal AUP is the only thing we send home to parents
- messaging of technology has to be positive, constant, to the students
- if you are not bringing your students in as allies, you need to
- if kids are going home with the message you want to send, that will trump your AUP every time

Darren:
- asking what kind of efforts we are doing to try and teach our parents

THAT IS A GREAT QUESTION. SOMEONE SUGGESTED DOING SMALL, SHORT COFFEE CHATS FOR PARENTS AT SCHOOL VIA THE PTO/PTA.

Julie:
- we have a teaching parents Ning
- helping parents make informed decisions

Chris:
- At SLA we have a culture of laptops up / laptops down in class, we have talked about whether we need to do that at times in faculty meetings
- what do we want our kids to be able to do, and what tools can harness their ability to do those things?

Sylvia:
- to assume that kids don’t already have a backchannel in their heads already is a mistake
- having kids communicate about what they are doing, and the classroom experience, is a way to harness some of those energies
- often kids are buzzing in their heads and much of formal education is going over their heads now

Very impassioned comments by a participant (name I don’t know)
- point was: find tools LATER AFTER you set your goals
- disagree with the message “you have to use blogs, you have to use wikis”

Someone else: we are putting up walls now with laptop screens

Lehmann:
- we are focused on teaching communication skills, students are communicating with each other, organizations in our local community
- last year was “Change the World” project, last year was “Change Philadelphia” project, based on “think globally, act locally” mantra

Sylvia:
- this today is not a classroom, this is an experiment

Julie:
- I have seen this (backchanneling) work extremely well in classrooms, in conferences (for Flat Classroom conference), in different languages

Vicki:
- when you have a backchannel you need to have a moderator

THIS IS A COMMENT I MADE IN THE BACKCHANNEL:

I really push back on this idea that “we should never talk about the TOOLS.” It is ok to talk about the tools at times. We start with an awareness level knowledge of tools, move to a personal use, then go to the instructional level of use, both taking other’s ideas and inventing our own. It is a process. It is ok to talk about the tools. We shouldn’t feel guilty talking about the tools, esp with people who are not familiar with them AT ALL.

Jakes quoting Lehmann: “What is the worst consequence of your best idea?”

Technorati Tags:
#necc09, collaboration, necc, necc09, technology, web2, schools

Classsroom 2.0: What Is Web 2.0′s Role in Schools? originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on July 1, 2009.

Several distinguished educators will offer actual examples of 24/7 learning approaches to educational practice. Can these technology-based, best practices inform your classroom teaching?

Presenters are: Michael Searson, Kean University with Judith Beaver, Andrew Gardner, David Gibson, Kevin Jarrett and Elaine Wrenn. MY THOUGHTS AND REFLECTIONS ARE IN ALL CAPS. FOR MORE RELATED TO THIS SEE MY APRIL 2008 PODCAST, “Transformative Project Based Learning in a 1:1 Laptop Initiative: 10 Years of Lessons and Best Practices at Punahou School in Honolulu, Hawaii”

Comments from Judy Beaver, Punahou School in Honolulu, HI

Looking a lot at language acquisition and Marzano’s strategies for our intensive summer PD
- using Garageband
- when the kids heard themselves, they raised the bar and challenged themselves to try again
- focusing on how to reach kids that are hard to reach
- using Kidspiration to record ideas/answers to questions
- using tech to capitalize on student’s natural observational skills
- outside: what do they see, hear, smell, feel
- using cameras to capture what they experience, using those photos as prompts for later writing

Research shows providing audio books for students really helps
- students who were groaning at reading time, are now groaning when it is over

After school literacy is a part of our normal year programs
- not a sustainable program year after year
- these are kids whose reading level is not up to grade level
- Using “Read Naturally” and Lexia

Now have a Robotics program that has moved from an after school program to an elective
- the teacher reports he sees very different uses for robotics programs in the during-school versus after school

Also have an “Entrepreneurs in Residence” program
- last year 2 of the entrepreneurs in residence are film directors, and together they put together a school film festival

Student travel opportunities
- also have opportunities for faculty travel that have greatly impacted our learning in classrooms
- this summer is the first time we partnered with summer lab school to offer credit for student
- working with Earth University in LeFlore, Costa Rica
- focus on observations and developing research questions, and sharing those with the University
- outfitted students with iPod Touches, GPS units, photo here is a “practice hike” in Manoa
- doing a Google Earth project prior to their trip to Costa Rica

Next comments from David Gibson

What would happen if we didn’t have a school anymore, we just had the web?
- would students work for several months in a collaborative project
- yes, thousands of kids do and have gotten involved with projects like this

www.globalchallengeaward.org

Core units involve students and adults
- our goal is to reach high school students worldwide through the web, who are interested in having an experience collaborating together in global teams focusing on a single problem: solve global warming before you go to college
- many of them have very good ideas, many of which are globally scalable
- we use open ended problem solving, leverage advanced technologies, applying knowledge, designing and implementing climate change solutions

We organize activities into things that look like webquests and then organize those into tracks
- we are trying to get a key concept out of kids that they want to turn into a project and a business plan if possible

Students decide and take actions based on interests
- spread awareness: take action / design a solution
- schedules, collaborators, and products
- game and simulation-based online learning experiences
- work is evaluated by scientists and educators

this will be the largest data set on the supply side
- project was student initiated
- students can take it to the level of a global business plan
- projects being done by 14 year olds

We use a lot of games and design our own
- we have A CD coming out in July
- very interested in having more students, we have about 4000 now
- we’d like more adults aware to support student success

We have final products
- my background started in performance assessment
- critical feedback from the scientific community also at the end

Global challenge bridges informal and formal learning
- easy to implement with flexible units of study
- self-directed, open-ended, problem-based, guided inquiry
- interdisciplinary
- action-oriented, authentic, community engagement

4 ways to bring us in:
- curriculum enhancement
- elective courses
- independent studies
- productivity centered service learning

Have linked up to state and national standards

Comments on “Game Design and Social Networking: Learning Outside the Walls”
- Andrew Gardner
- works as 3rd – 5th grade technology integrator at the School at Columbia
Twitter: agardnahh

I had a university background in game design
content question: what interests students?
context: what do we provide to facilitate communication, collaboration and continued conversation away from school?

PLAY really interests students
- playing out their social situations
- so we wanted to give them something somewhat play-oriented

How are we going to let them connect outside of schools: with new media tools

Gamestar Mechanics
- Afterschool
- GLS conference: Games, Learning and Society, associated with Arizona State University
- Gamestar Mechanic is a web-based game that teaches you about game design, game design principles
- social network powered by ELGG

Institute of Play in New York

At my school we have our own social network we host on our own site, our own Flickr, our own YouTube, (based in Drupal)
- all walled-garden applications we run ourselves

GameStar Mechanic: Five core design elements you have to “fix”
- rules
- core mechanics
- components
- space
- goal

We are seduced by goals, we need to have some

When you are in Gamestar Mechanic, you become aware meta-cognitively of these complex, interconnected pieces
- this is a very authentic way for getting kids thinking with a “systems approach”

Gamestar Mechanic was in beta and went down, so we went to Plan B
- deconstructed the turn-based game: Ayiti: The Cost of Life
- we deconstructed the game and physically created an alternative

New Media Server: 100% open source

newmedia.theschool….

Social network
- academic context not social
- accountability
- documentation
- communication

Now comments from Westley Field

Skolaborate: global project
- 40 schools from around the world
- collaborating with a variety of tools, virtual worlds, meetings
- exploring how you can engage students in learning, change your practices
- creating global curriculum

showing map of our virtual world

anyone can contribute curriculum and content, we end up creating units together

in our virtual world we have rules and structure
- kids said they didn’t want structure and rules
- so we created a “Lord of the Flies”

Kids will say they want structures from adults

future strategy: start looking at structures you have in place that are holding you back from the future you want
- need to get rid of those which are obstacles

Unexpected outcomes
- when kids are given freedom from their avatar: students are more disconnected from their Avatar
- less peer influence in the virtual world for students, they seem to share and follow their own ideas

Now comments from Kevin Jarrett
- media and journalism/newspaper club
- school struggled last year to use iWeb and publish a newspaper
- my thought was: why should kids be held back by technology
- I proposed to the education foundation that we use web 2.0 tools and

The T-Bird Times: The Northfield Middle School Newspaper / Multimedia Club!
- http://tbirdtimes.org

Kevin did an animoto on the way here, just showed it:

Find more videos like this on The T-Bird Times

Kids did an interview with Bob Webb, who knows the history of their school

Find more videos like this on The T-Bird Times

Did with a Flip camera, public version of “When September Ends” in the public domain, and Windows Moviemaker

My question is: When do our kids have chances/times to learn these things and do these things?
- they do NOT during the regular school day
- this is why after-school programs like this is so important

At end of they year, student used website Wix to create websites with a Flash-based drag and drop interface

Now entire class is producing animoto videos

Tools used by Columbia for open source walled garden apps:
- Elgg
- JetPhoto (For photo sharing)
- Drupal (for YouTube, also powers school website)
- Blogs (use mostly Blogger, don’t use home grown blog much)
- also use iWeb for student blogging
- Google Docs also used

Technorati Tags:
education, school, technology, afterschool, innovation

Best Practices for Encouraging Learning 24/7: Models that Work! originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on June 29, 2009.

Choose the right tool to get the job done
- we have used VoiceThread and Mixbook a lot more this year

Study on “Blood on the River” with VoiceThread
- teacher-created Voicethreads, recorded markers throughout, asking students to make predictions throughout the book or make a reflection on what we had just read
- collaborated with another classroom via our Polycom videoconference unit

Kids used free Mac program Skitch to create their icons/avatars in VoiceThread

Kimberly Herron’s MobileMe website: Herron’s Happenings (6th grade)

Tamara Padfield’s MobileMe website: Padfield Publications (5th grade)

Linley Voboril’s MobileMe website: Voboril Vibes (5th grade)

Seamless integration was a big goal for us when we went 1:1 in our classrooms
- engagement is the key
- hands on learning experiences like dissecting owl pellets have been big for us as well

Colonial Commercials project
- we used the green screen feature using PhotoBooth on our Macs for the first time
- with Leopard or newer you can do it
- got a big piece of green material

Had the “Granite Awards 2009″ project this year
- gave kids rocks and they did many different kinds of tests
- big assembly, like a fashion show for rock re-enactment, with music, DVD created

End of year 6th grade project: Virtual Museum for 6th graders with Google SketchUp
- awareness of audience really led kids to realize they could not plagiarize, copy/paste others ideas
- easybib and bibme.com are great for formatting bibliographies

link is on my website to the Ancient Civilizations project
- Project directions included different roles for each group

Students were assigned into 8 groups of 5.  Each group consisted of a/an      Author – wrote an elementary level book on government and social classes using mixbook.
Geologist – created a hands on and online game about the daily life, resources, and landscape using Smarttech Notebook.
Cartographer – Created a map of civilization, located 3 architectural locations researched by architect in Google Earth, and created flight tour of locations inserting map pic and weblinks in Google Earth.
Archaeologists – Created a podcast in Garageband of 3 artifacts researched relating the artifacts with the civilizations culture and religions.     Architect – Created a webpage using iWeb telling about the architectural structures and resources used to make them relating their importance in the culture and religions of the civilization.

Biomes Project

Letters to the President Project
- students asking for a law to stop people cutting down the rain forest trees
- story of a student who is normally not a fluent reader in front of the class, asking to record his letter on his own with his Macbook so it could be included in the teachers’ keynote presentation, the student asked to do this, and his audio file was fantastic!

IT WOULD BE INTERESTING TO JUXTAPOSE A LETTER LIKE THIS WITH A DISCUSSION WITH STUDENTS IN BRAZIL, DISCUSSING DEVELOPMENT, HEATING AND COOKING IN VILLAGES WITHOUT ELECTRICITY, ETC.

Recognizing the importance of role models in the classroom
- started a community connections project
- contacted local leaders and
- started as a lunch once per month
- talking about “8 keys of success,” part of the Quantum Learning Model, also Boys Town social skills
- Bently (our tech integrator who has been with us for 2 years) suggested doing this as a geo-caching activity, students went to see and visit each community mentor who talked with them and gave them something, quotation, information – was a great way to start the school year

Had a veteran note writing project
- Veterans were so touched by students taking time to contact them
- Christmas letters to Veterans

Now planning a “Got Canvas?” project on going green
- our platform is reusing canvas shopping bags
- our research has been very eye opening on usage of plastic bags
- key is reduce: not just about recycling
- we spent an hour picking up trash in our community
- 5th grade field trip yesterday was to the dump / landfill: with all this background knowledge the kids had was so eye opening, how much we waste
- McPherson Kansas produces 100 tons of trash per day! (200,000 pounds of trash, every single day!)
– is that not just staggering?!

We are really excited to not only see what happens at the end of this year with this, but also what the 4th graders coming up next year as 5th graders will want to do
- if you can get kids involved in things like that, where they are passionate, you are going to change their lives

Technorati Tags:
#podstock09, podcasting, technology, inman, kansas, essdack, pbl, project, based, learning, elementary

Get Out of Your FUNK, Cut the JIVE! Make Your Classroom Come Alive!!! originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on May 1, 2009.

Here are all Dyane’s links on telecollaboration projects: http://podstock.wik.is/Links_on_Telecollaboration

Dyane’s slideshare from today:

Most important thing: it needs to have a real world connection
- we use technology (should) because we can’t do it otherwise
- I believe if you want to make a connection

7 kinds of classrooms

intercultural exchange

data collection projects
- great place to start
- not as overwhelming
- the collection of data is not the higher level thinking part: it is what you DO with the data!
- the global grocery project is one that has been around a long time, now a web search can get that

Tooth Tally Project (meant for 1st grader)
- kids tally tooth lost during the year
- great because there is not too much for the classroom teachers to manage individually

herebirdy project
- kindergarden project, data collection
- kids are learning to read graphs, how things are changing over the seasons
- teachers moving data over to the wiki each day, so the data was live
- teamed up with the Great Plains Nature Center here in Wichita

CIESE.org (The Center for Innovation in Engineering and Science Education) has lots of data collection projects

Now: Intercultural exchange
- Cultural Exchange Box is one of the most popular
- started by a teacher in Israel
- Friends and Flags is similar but on a hiatus

Digital photography is the key for intercultural exchange projects
- audio projects and tools: Skype, VoiceThread

be careful with seeds: Australia doesn’t allow any seeds to be sent (including sunflower seeds)

Another example type: Travel Buddy Projects
- originated in Australia
- created to increase
- find travel buddies (stuffed animals)
- Community Helpers Around the World was our project, we got a grant to support this
– 4 different elementary schools involved
– had an elephant, tiger, others
– buddies were to travel, we had 32 classrooms around the world on 6 different continents

Lots of travel buddies on trampolines all over the world!

Only requirements we had were: take the buddies and do the journaling
- with these guidelines, the magic happened
- example of a travel buddy learning Maori dancing with students in New Zealand
- another met a movie star in the Czech Republic!

Also did “There’s No Place Like Home” projects with travel buddies
- took the Wizard of Oz theme
- what is great about YOUR state?
- we’ve all had death by PPT experiences with state projects
- this was a year long project involving all 4th grade students, with 32 other American classrooms, to discover what makes each American region unique
- same requirements: take photos, send some of this data
- most requested buddy was “wicked witch” – she went to see “Wicked” in New York on Broadway, went to a Hannah Montana concert, in Arizona was compared to the witch character they have in their Native American culture
- Toto went to Disneyland (I am a former Disney cast member)
- Tinman met the governor of Vermont

What do you do while the buddy is away?
- it is meant for discussion
- originally we just used email
- now we have skype, documents on wikis, animoto to make slideshows of the week
- now using Etherpad for synchronous projects

Now Interpersonal Project Examples
- you are an expert, I’m an expert, and we exchange info
- we did “Being Green” project with an Australian school, focus was “is our planet getting warmer,” can we get our communities thinking about living more green
- kids were struggling just like scientists on whether global warming is happening
- everyone agrees

Other interpersonal project examples
- Movie in the Making
- Prince Caspian Project
– become a collaborative project for teachers, sharing resource for teachers on lesson materials for those teaching about the novel

Next example type: Student Publishing Projects
- involve student creativity
- students publishing their own poetry, art, video, writing, etc
- Four Lines of Sight project for 2nd grade, 80 classrooms around the world joined us for this:

This global 2nd grade project had a simple question. If I gave each student the exact same 4 lines on a sheet of paper, what would they create? The students could rotate the lines in any direction and use any art medium to elaborate on the lines. Over 300 2nd grade students participated and added their work to our virtual art gallery.

You could see similarities between students in the same classroom, but many of the projects blew you away with their creativity
- our webserver was so full with images on the district but they made me take it down
- we chose images so language would not be a barrier for the students

Cyberdictionary has been around since 1997 (Fairy Tale / Folk Tale CyberDictionary)

Monster Exchange Project – it is:

Monster Exchange is designed to encourage the development of reading and writing skills while integrating Internet technology into the classroom curriculum. Classrooms from a variety of schools worldwide are paired together; the students in each classroom are split into groups, each of which designs an original picture of a monster. The students must then write a description of the monster. The partnered classes then exchange their descriptions via e-mail and the Internet. These students are then challenged to use reading comprehension skills to read the descriptions and translate them into a monster picture. The true challenge involves creating a redrawn picture as close to the original picture as possible without looking at the original and using only the written description of the monster.

SchoolTube has great opportunities for students to be collaborative, lots of GREAT content there now
- examples of projects by students who may not feel they are very strong in writing, in math, and other things, but they are able to use multimedia to teach concepts to other students
- SchoolTube contests!

Project I am planning to launch next year: The Adventures of Paperclip!

Are you ready to jump in and try one of these?
- if you are designing one of these, what do you need to think about?
- do your kids already study different cultures or geographic locations?
- would kids benefit from collecting data and sharing it with another class?
- are there any issues such as the environment or animal protection your students would be passionate about?
- do you have any museums, zoos, or other resources nearby that could partner with you?
- would they be interested in discussing a book or selecting the Caldecott winner with other classes?

Disney involved in helping kids learn about PSA writing (Public Service Annoucements)
- going on the Disney Radio Channel
- kids had to get excited about this!

you need to create a plan
- project milestone
- set up a project calendar: deadlines, beginnings and endings, etc
- more…

Step 3: find your partners
- places on Ning now have project collaboration
- Use Global SchoolNet listserv, generally has a good response
- use Twitter and Plurk
- reach out to your PLN!
- International Travel Buddy List Serve

Step 4: get resources

Step 5: Jump in and Watch the Magic Unfold
- remember chocolate always tastes good!
- had “Violet Crumble” from Australia, it is a Nestle product not sold in the US, amazing!
- kids become emotionally connected to what they are doing: they will research more, they will love it, and they will remember it

Dyane’s blog: http://mrssmoke.onsugar.com

Kids who go on trips with their families on a vacation: they have to take their travel buddy, take photos, and blog about it!
- see the guest blog post, “Travel Buddy Projects Part II” for more on this approach

My only barrier is my imagination getting out of hand!

only budget issues come in with travel buddy projects
- we do have some teachers in the world who are not tech saavy: we’ve had some who didn’t know how to do email attachments, others are really impressing us!
- give all the resources on your website, including the parent letters
- sometimes finding partners is a challenge

Getting started: Global Schoolnet registery of existing projects is great
- contacting local museums is good
- can also trade 1 elementary school to another within the district
- get a hold of tech nerdy people, may have an approved blog or wiki
- if you have all your ducks in a row, generally when you bring curriculum that is ready, tech people will work with you

Empowered Desktop this year is changing, will be adding wikis
- this is a Kansas-only web resources
- other teachers in other states can’t use that tho

During school Dyane worked at Toontown at Disneyworld as a 1 semester internship, it was a GREAT experience, very intercultural / international
- inspired a project “Is it a Small World After All?” project that Dyane started
- had students from Arab and Western countries in Ning, all dialoging

May the Force Be With You!

Technorati Tags:
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Getting a Global Perspective – The Power of Collaborative Projects by Dyane Smokorowski originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on May 1, 2009.

Last night, my 8 year old recorded episode #1 of the ICS, demonstrating how to cook banana bread from a recipe she found online. I recorded this using my Sony GC1 Net Sharing Cam, and Sarah edited the final video (6 min, 56 sec) herself using iMovie ’09. This was Sarah’s first experience to use iMovie and she found it (of course) exceptionally easy to use. She created a song with “magic Garageband” and used it as background in her movie for the mixing sequences which she sped up. (Garageband includes royalty-free loops, so songs you create with the program can be shared legally online with others.)

Nice work Sarah! I uploaded the video to EduBlogs.tv for her. (For free) It’s posted both on our family learning blog and on the International Cooking Show wiki.

Do you have budding chefs in your home or school who might be interested in contributing a video recipe to the ICS project? Feel free to join us, and invite others to do the same!

Technorati Tags:
banana, bread, cook, cooking, video, wiki, project, collaboration

Episode 1 of the International Cooking Show originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on April 14, 2009.

Last night, Alexander asked me to review his paperwork for the week and sign his folder. He was particularly proud of a very challenging social studies test which he’d aced, as well as a writing assignment he completed: A time-capsule letter to a future student at his school in 10 years. After reviewing all his papers and grades, we spread them all out on the floor of our living room. Several of these documents were multi-page, stapled together. This is a week’s worth of worksheets from his school, sent home this week in the “Thursday folder.”

Alexander and his sister DO attend a wonderful school, but in many ways it defines “a worksheet school.” The students DO participate in wonderful musical programs, participate in memorable class-wide events like the re-enactment of the Oklahoma land run, and participate in living history museums. They also have time each day for recess, which is more than the Texas school we left three years ago provided for students in grades three and above. (That was due to high-stakes testing pressure – The school was “exemplary” but they still didn’t have time to let 9 year olds have recess during the day.)

At our current Oklahoma elementary school, “learning evidence” from the week is communicated to parents almost exclusively via the “Thursday folder” and the worksheets it contains. Our school is very common in following this procedure in Oklahoma. This is what kids do in most schools today in 2009: worksheets. This is how most schools communicate with parents about the “learning” their children are allegedly doing in class each day: by sending home worksheets.

My problem with this situation? It’s twofold. First, many of these worksheets are stupid, irrelevant, busy work. Second, worksheets tell me VERY LITTLE about the things my child understands, perceives, knows, and wonders about. Worksheets are almost useless to me as a parent interested in the learning activities and developmental progress of my child, compared to alternative forms of assessment. It’s good to see how Alexander’s writing skills are developing, including his handwriting. But it saddens me to see worksheets like this which he’s spent HOURS in some cases completing.

There are SO many more valuable ways to spend heartbeats than completing word search puzzles. This is busy work, and I think assignments like this contribute very little, if at all, to meaningful learning experiences for my children inside and outside of school.

Included in the assortment of worksheets sent home this week in the Thursday folder were several pages about science and the unit on light they’ve been studying. I asked Alexander if he’d done any experiences during the unit on light. He said yes initially, but further questioning revealed HE had not done the experiments, he had watched the teacher demonstrate some things in front of the class. He had not formulated ANY hypotheses and tested them with experimentation and observation. How is my son supposed to learn the scientific method and become the engineer he aspires to be, if his school does not provide him with REGULAR opportunities to learn the scientific method by PRACTICING the scientific method? (David Thornburg’s message from CoSN09 burns in my mind when I ask these questions.) The answer? Like many things (including writing with social media and learning about hyperlinked writing) it’s up to us as parents to teach these things at home. What about other kids whose parents are not focused on these issues? Who is going to “turn these elementary age kids on” to science? If we really care about STEM, why are we not insisting on a hands-on approach to science in our schools which involves regular experimentation instead of endless note taking and worksheets?

Alexander recorded this short, 90 second video explaining about his Thursday folder and demonstrating what happens at the end of Thursday night after we’ve looked at the pile of worksheets: They get thrown into the trash can. (We did save his social studies test he was so proud of, however, and put it on the fridge.)

I dearly wish our school district was willing to embrace the constructive potential of social media to help students “show what they know” and more meaningfully document their journeys of learning with images, audio, and video than anyone can ever do with mere worksheets. After Alexander shared his “time capsule” letter with me last night, I asked him to quickly record it onto a short, three image VoiceThread for which he selected the photos. This took five minutes for us to do together, and I posted it to our family learning blog. His grandparents in Kansas were able to listen to him and watch this today, and told us on the phone they loved it. They hadn’t realized he’s planning to major in robotics at Kansas State in college! I hadn’t either until I read his essay. Without this technological documentation of his learning, there is little chance his Kansas grandparents would have EVER seen, read, or heard this letter. Thanks to technology sharing tools like VoiceThread, however, they did and now you can too. This is extremely important and valuable stuff to Alexander and to our family. And, it’s free to do.

We need to get digital tools into the hands of ALL our students in grades three and up as soon as possible, as well as our teachers. This morning I had a chance to briefly examine a $200 Lenovo S10 Netbook owned by James Deaton, and I marveled at the size, capabilities, and price point of this device.

Hat tip to Dawn Danker for taking the first photo in this series of me with the netbook.

When are my own children going to be able to use technologies like these IN SCHOOL here in Oklahoma? The clock is ticking. They’re learning plenty about how to use technology tools here at home, but we have much more limited opportunities to digitally create, collaborate, and communicate compared to what could be accomplished during the school day.

I have my fingers crossed that our state’s educational technology stimulus money will be used in an innovative way to empower students in a few more Oklahoma school districts (in addition to Crescent, Howe, and Lowery) to learn in 1 to 1 environments.

Meanwhile, we’ll continue to watch the stream of worksheets come home each week in the Thursday folders.

Technorati Tags:
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The Thursday Folder and Worksheet Measured Learning originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on March 27, 2009.

Different models are suggested for inquiry units. These are stages or steps for one model discussed by a teacher at our table:

1. immersion (provocation, exploration phase, building relevance)
2. questioning
3. plan
4. gather and sort
5. create and share
6. take action

At one school, they are doing two inquiry projects per year
Examples of take action for an inquiry project focused on “our community” (making our school a better place):
- for a primary class, it was to bring flowers into the school
- for a senior class, it was to improve the library
- another class painted the doors on the changing rooms of the gym

leads to engagement and ownership
- lots of context

ICT can be linked to these activities
- taking photographs of things around the school
- photographs of staff members

One teacher said her school had just gotten data projectors, so it had not been reasonable to use a mind mapping software like Inspiration

Sharing can be photocopying

Next topic in a classroom: What makes you a New Zealander? (Kiwiana)
- sharing was a concert the class gave for the school
- Sent an email home asking for email addresses of friends and family who are Kiwis and live abroad, asked them to email back the things they miss about or from New Zealand living away from the country, then shared those by reading them to the class, looking at the map for where those emails come from

Discussing using a “suite” for ICT (computer lab) when teacher must book the room and move the class there
- consensus was this is not very “natural” and teachers prefer a COW (computers on wheels) which can be right in the classroom

Teacher sharing her use of PhotoStory with primary-age children creating artwork, working with a partner
- 6 year olds
- parent who had been helping was insisting on the children getting everything PERFECT
- the teacher actually sent the teacher away
- lots of discussion about how important it is that student-created and published work is AUTHENTIC and is not so “doctored” by adults that it doesn’t represent the true voice of the child

Discussing value of audio recording
- some of kids, particularly younger boys, who have more trouble drawing and adding them

Can drop audio into Kidpix

Many kids come to school and still want to play
- there are curriculum elements which involve learning through play that

Kids are so curious and it is so important to not turn them off with the curriculum and mandated tasks

Plasticene is a commercial material similar to play dough
- can be used for sculptures and stopmotion movie making
- I told some background of the fine arts camp class I taught last summer for primary kids on stopmotion
- If I was to do that again, I think I would share some picture books and give the kids choices about the story which they wanted to create / illustrate

Discussing handwriting and keyboarding
- suggestion of using a piece of yarn down the middle of the keyboard to help focus on

Teacher who is taking photographs throughout the day to document what kinds of learning was taking place
- providing those photos to parents, gives parents something to talk about with their children
- I mentioned some schools who are asking older children to help with this kind of process: taking photos, publishing them to the web, sharing the link with the teacher to put on his/her class website
- I think anything we can do to help catalyze conversations with children and parents about the learning and activities which have happened at school are vital
- teacher who shared that many parents have negative feelings about

Teacher who has two blogs at school
- 1 for independent writing (completely independent, teacher has had absolutely nothing to do with the editing – this is a new blog that has not had additions yet this year – here is their writing blog from last year)
- another class blog: try to share photos of artwork, class activities

Laptops on a COW
- some kids are not allowed to take them out of the COW (cart) at all
- other kids are taught how to take them out, open them up, login with their class userid and password
- kids being able to plug into the Internet
- lots of kids want to print
- the instant feedback of printing is very exciting for them

Expert that came to school, teacher wanted to be able to publish books with the children
- he spent hours trying to do it and couldn’t
- was very frustrating for the teacher
- this was several years ago

I think book publishing and sharing

Discussing wordle.net
- possibility of putting a class blog into Wordle and then using that as a way to see what kids are writing about

Childrens’ personalities can really come through via their handwriting
- story of coming across a recipe written in her mother’s handwriting

PD on finding karaoke and YouTube, like MamaMia “Dancing Queen”

also have Nursery rhymes with karaoke on YouTube

Great for reading and dancing!

Discussing administrative support for PD and ICT
- so important to keep feeding information / sharing information back with your board members

Websites for primary resources:
- BBC Kids UK
- BBCkids Canada
- Skrbl – www.skrbl.com/99197652
- Webnote – www.aypwip.org/webnote (online tool for taking notes)
- Rachel Boyd has great list of resources
- dltk-kids.com
- Tumble Books – eBooks for kids
- Lookybooks
- Netvibes
- Rainforestmaths.com
- Sparklebox – visual time tables for the wall (free after registration)
- Poisson Rouge – Red Fish Soup – Games for Children (English and French)

One school that is using a delicious account for all teachers, sharing links and resources

Class blog: http://bellevue8.blogspot.com

Great story of older children at school pairing with younger ones, taking them to a place at school and sharing a game they like to play, taking several photos of it, then the kids together create a visual story with text telling the story of that game

Good idea for CORE-NZ: Help facilitate teachers sharing “wish lists” of equipment that would be good for their student age levels and content areas

Technorati Tags:
learningatschool, Learning@School09, L@S09, #lats09, technology, learning, elementary, assessment, education, newzealand

Discussing the importance of good questions and inquiry with Kiwi primary teachers, YouTube karaoke originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on February 26, 2009.

Erin is teaching at a year 7 and 8 school where all students have laptops (Fairfield Intermediate School)
- previous school we had about 4 computers in the entire

Health started with ICT back in ’95
- was pretty raw back then
- has been a primary school principal for about 8 years
- worked for TKI
- now a facilitator for a cluster, working with different schools and integrating ICT
- last year had a laptop class

Today we are looking at what you CAN do in the classroom to get children talking to each other (and not just children)

Site for today: http://collaborativelearning.wetpaint.com

Last workshop I went to was about Google Applications
- lots of “what if” conversations in the room about how you can use technology in the classroom to communicate

What is collaboration?
- cooperative learning vs collaborative learning
(from the presentation wiki)

students also joining in today via Google Chat and Skype from Hamilton, NZ

Now discussing use of ePals to find classrooms for collaboration

Classroom examples

Example of students in New Zealand and Australia teaching each other
- http://littlelanguageexperts.wikispaces.com
- kids used Flip video recorder

ICT provides opportunities that children don’t have normally

Our Nation project wiki
- http://collaborativelearning.wetpaint.com/page/Our+Nation
- kids created their own tribe, had to make their own rules, what were the going to take
- kids using collaborative documents to come up with policies and artwork about their history
- student work is shown on the Our Nation wiki

Question on Wetpaint wiki requirement for students to be over 13
- students have their own account approved by their account
- have parents joined as well
- use the wiki as an electronic portfolio as well

Also at times use a classroom account for Wikispaces

Next Example: Small World

Small-World was a space created for a unit of work based on Globalisation and how it effects all of us as individuals. Two classes (a Year 5/6 class from Canterbury, NZ and a Year 7 class from Hamilton, NZ) worked together to discover what it meant to be a young person in the 21st Century. Students were given the following task:

Project wiki for student collaboration in Small World Project: http://small-world.wikispaces.com

Also used Edmodo for a educator twitter-like environment
- can create groups of people on Edmodo
- have given code on main toolbox page of our presentation wiki

Good list of embedded videos which are inspirational and challenging

Recommendation: decide on a username you’ll use for many of these web 2.0 sites
- use a password that you do NOT use for your online banking sites

THAT IS VERY GOOD ADVICE!

MY QUESTION TO ERIN: HOW DID KIDS LIKE EDMODO VERSUS OTHER COMMUNICATION TOOLS
- In her past classroom with only 4 computers the kids really liked it. In her current 1:1 environment, she anticipates students will like Google Chat more than Edmodo because of the instant communication aspects

Edmodo was a different way for us to come up for these kids who were 1000 km apart to collaborate
- Edmodo support is very quick to respond to questions and needs

We used Skype as well
- all these tools are listed on our “Making Connections” page

It is good protocol to use your same userid for your online identity

Authentic audience for students is very powerful and important

Google documents have been very important

Google Apps for Education: can sign up and everyone at your school with your school email addresses can use those Google Applications
- there is a company that will do this for you (WatchDog) – set up your Google Domain

People on Diigo are on Twitter so that support is very quick/fast/responsive

Using Glogster.com to create webpages as homework that are portals to their websites

We do back up our website, within Webpaint under Settings there is a tab for BACKUP and you can EXPORT MY CONTENT

Parents love that I post the homework up to our class wiki

Technorati Tags:
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Collaborative Learning Using Web 2.0 Tools by Erin Freeman and Heath Sawyer originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on February 26, 2009.

Howe students in Mrs. Parks’ class won the 2008 national KC3 contest for their student-led virtual field trip to Spiro Mounds, a local archeology site. Tammy Parks was the keynote speaker in November 2008 for our statewide Oklahoma Distance Learning Association conference. Her presentation “Humanizing the Learning Technology” is available as an audio podcast. My text notes from Tammy’s session “Student-Created Virtual Field Trips: Howe Public Schools Live and On Location!” from this past week at the Oklahoma Technology Association’s annual conference are available. I will be publishing the audio recording of that session here later today.

Tammy Parks is one of the most innovative educators I have met to date. She is blessed to be supported by visionary administrators and a cadre of others including both teachers and students. The families in Howe, Oklahoma, are blessed to have Tammy as a teacher in their school, and we are fortunate (wherever we live) to be able to learn and be inspired by her continued work with students using technology in richly engaging ways.

For more about the KC3 (“Kids Creating Community Content”) Project, visit the official project website. Also, see my notes from Jan Zanetis’ presentation “Beyond the Virtual Fieldtrip and the Collaborative Project… KC3: A National Challenge” at the Missouri Distance Learning Association’s conference in July 2008.

A video about the 2008 KC3 Project is available on TeacherTube.

The KC3 project is jointly sponsored by Tandberg and the Center for Interactive Learning and Collaboration (CILC.) The CILC’s Collaboration Center is super place to find collaborative projects to join and to announce your own projects you’d like find other students and teachers to join in.

I have additional links, resources, and ideas about virtual field trips on my wiki page “Videoconferencing Collaborations and Virtual Field Trips.”

Hat tip to Lance Ford for sharing the link to the news video of Friday’s virtual field trip at Fort Smith. Hat tip to the students in Howe, also, for pulling off this GREAT learning opportunity for lucky students in Vermont!

Technorati Tags:
howe, virtual, field, trip, videoconference, videoconferencing, tammy, parks, tandberg, kc3

Howe Oklahoma Students lead virtual field trip at Fort Smith, Arkansas originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on February 14, 2009.

Howe PS has 475 students PK-12.

Talking today about a virtual field trip that Tammy’s high school journalism students have created as part of an international contest.

It makes a big difference when students are doing a project for the entire world to see
- another level of excitement and interest
- much different than just doing a worksheet that doesn’t go anywhere

Audience members report their uses of videoconferencing
- virtual field trips from content providers, getting language classes,

I teach broadcast journalism
- started as a video production class 2 years ago, started with 2 students and a news cast “CLE Live: Camera, Lights, Education!”
- 1 student was the news anchor, another was the producer
- started from there, streaming local news episodes live

When I started
- like a convergence journalism class
- kids do print stories, news broadcasts, web-publishing

I helped lead a media workshop at OU last summer
- learned how to create stories using audio and video
- we have some great programs developing in our state
- are some wonderful programs like McAlister, Tulsa Union, others with broadcast programs

Video can be used in ANY classroom
- it can bring any subject to life

Celebrate Oklahoma Voices is a great project for documenting stories from our communities

We say we are “live and on location” because now we have a Tandberg Mobile Commander
- the last few years, we have just done stories on our small campus

Due a severe weather warning Monday, our field trip was rescheduled for this upcoming

“Tell me and I forget, show me and I remember, involve me and I understand” – Old Adage
- kids get more involved in their learning and actually have to teach what they learn to other students
- this is my 3rd virtual field trip to create with students
- the level of learning in these projects is far beyond what they learn in other contexts
- they retain a lot of knowledge, this is very authentic

New t-shirts have been created for CLE LIVE! this year
- we will be at the Oklahoma state capitol next week for “Technology at the Capitol” day (on Monday, Feb 16th)

Now we have about 40 students in CLE Live! who produce about 3 programs/broadcasts per week

Casey England was the first broadcaster at Howe

[NOW SHOWING A GREAT NEWS CLIP ABOUT HOWE SCHOOLS AND TECHNOLOGY AT THE CAPITOL DAY FROM 2007. I WOULD LOVE TO SEE THIS ON YOUTUBE, COV, OR ANOTHER VIDEO SHARING WEBSITE]

Last year our kids created an old-time style radio show using Garageband
- kids write scripts, created authentic sound effects, recorded everything in GarageBand, changed their voices, more

met people at Oklahoma Horizon, news program that runs out of Career Tech program at OSU
- that led to an internship for Casey, she graduated last year from OSU with a degree in broadcast journalism

Marco Torres, a wonderful teacher from California is a mentor to me
- taught in a school which had a lot of dropouts, brought in video production
- says video production can give kids a reason to come back to school the next day

We do not have a selection process for my class: we have students across the entire range
- project based
- differentiated
- students are learning collaboration and presentation skills

If you don’t have a class and project like this going in your class, get in touch with me and others who are doing this

What we are doing Monday at the state capitol
- a virtual field trip from the Capitol: “Historical Art, The Capitol Crown, and The Legislative Process: A Virtual Visit To The Oklahoma State Capitol Building”
- we are going to attempt to do a virtual field trip from the capitol on Monday (Feb 16th)
- some students are presenting the intros of each topic from Howe, who have a basketball game that night
- students on-site are going to cover art on the 4th floor rotunda
- hoping to show that off live

Going to interview some of our elected officials
- if you have some anxious 4th graders and videoconferencing equipment, talk to me and maybe we can bring your classroom into this videoconference as well

The focus on this presentation is Content Creators: Communicators and Collaborators
- the buzz we’ve heard at this conference about collaboration and creating groups fits right in here with virtual field trips
- we have done collaborations this year through Skype as well as H.323 videoconferences
- have done some collaborative exchanges: we’ve exchanged Google Earth files, students in Vermont have made placemarks in Google Earth and exchanged those with files created by our kids in Howe, Oklahoma

Kids Creating Community Content (KC3) project

kc3.cilc.org

Last year students did a VFT about a local archeology site, Spiro Mounds
- this year they opened it up to middle school and high school students
- so this year I have two teams: one middle school team of 8th graders and one high school team of 9th graders

Premise: What is in your backyard that you can share with others?

No matter where you live in the world your community is unique. What can others learn from your area, your citizens, your natural or agricultural resources or your local and national treasures? What can you share with others that will enhance their view of your culture, your country or your heritage and our world? This standards based project seeks to tap into the creative nature of students as you look at your community with new eyes and explore ways to share your findings with others using videoconferencing and technology as a resource.

Last year Hawaiian and Canadian students were interacting, seeing students in Canada come in from recess with snow on them, Hawaiian students responding to them– very real world connections

Tommy Beardon on Stamford, Texas, is really the king of virtual field trip creation
- did one on cotton

When we started our project, I called their teacher and asked to “lurk” in their videoconference, got to learn from what they have done,

Most of these videos are out on TeacherTube

Last year I won a trip to Alan November’s conference BLC in Boston, presented with Jan Zanetis of Tandberg

KC3 Project Interview

Here is the RSS feed for all 18 recorded FLV presentations from KC3 2008

Title of VFT is “Indian Territory, Western Lawmen and Outlaws: Tales from the Courthouse of ‘Hanging Judge’ Parker” is high school project
- content is geared to 6th grade
- focusing on forts, outlaws, and Judge Parker

JHS project is titled “Trail of Tears, Frontier Forts, and the notorious ‘Hanging Judge’ of the Wild West: Tales from the Fort Smith National Historic Site”
- focus on Trail of Tears
- content geared to 4th graders
- then they are also talking about the federal court system that was established there in the late 1800s

We have been working on this for six weeks, this is very time intensive
- our kids also create a Moodle classroom, an online learning community
- students are in the Moodle as administrators, creating content
- we have pre-activities, supplemental enrichment activities

We will be leaving at 6:30 am on Friday, field trip

that content will be out on a website for you to see:

We take a lot of virtual field trips
- no bus, no fuss field trip
- we are 2-3 hours away from anywhere big, so virtual field trips made a lot of sense to us
- Virtual Field Trip Michigan State University Museum, Sense of Adaptation for Howe Third Graders
– it was fabulous, very dynamic, kept students’ attention, the museum sent out materials in advance, students drew before and after

I have also been on some very bad virtual field trips, someone talking to the same powerpoint slides for 15 minutes
- there are GREAT ones out there as well!

Howe Broadcast Journalism students attended a Virtual Field Trip to News Channel 5 at WLAC, the CBS affiliate in Nashville where they met the news anchor and an investigative reporter

We hired a Spanish teacher who now teaches Spanish to 7 different iTV sites, using Moodle, laptops, also using Rosetta Stone as curriculum which is self-paced

Virtual Field Trips in the past
- Great Barrier Reef
- Rock-n-Roll Hall of Fame
- COSI – Center of Science and Industry (Gadget-works is great)
- Radio/TV Museum, etc.

Peer-to-Peer critiques: other broadcast students connect with Tammy’s students, talk about how they can improve

Student Created VFTs

I also have started “Collaboration 2.0 project”
- right now on the CILC Collaboration Center there are about 130 projects: teachers wanting collaboration partners
- after posting this, I received about a dozen emails from teachers and schools that wanted to work with us

We try to do at least 1 collaboration per year off-

Are any of you doing collaborative projects with other schools?
- [IN THIS ROOM OF 40 PEOPLE, NO ONE RAISED THEIR HAND THAT THEY ARE DOING A COLLABORATIVE PROJECT NOW. WOW. THIS IS THE REALITY. WE HAVE SO MUCH NEED TO PROMOTE, SUPPORT, AND ADVOCATE FOR CLASSROOM COLLABORATIONS.]

Also received an email from Sean Wallace in Irasburg, Vermont, who teaches Science and computer technology to 6th, 7th and 8th graders.
- from that connection, we are sharing our virtual field trip on Friday with them

Last year we also worked with a school in New Jersey
- did a skype video exchange
- the Jonas Brothers are from Wyckoff, New Jersey
- their experiences are so different from our kids: access and familiarity with the subway, things in the big city, etc.
- Our interaction

Alan Duke works with CNN
- I met him at conferences in the past, he is a journalism guru
- my kids were struggling with writing between the sound bytes of the story
- I reached out and contacted Alan at CNN, he said they use Skype, so we used Skype to bring him into our classroom

Did an interview this year with a student in Hawaii
- one of my students have interviewed three of the national organizational presidents

[SHE IS SHOWING A VIDEO INTERVIEW WITH ANDREA FORD DISCUSSING HER INTERVIEWS WITH NATIONAL HIGH SCHOOL PRESDIENTS

We use WireCast to do our live productions
- we started with very low-end cameras
- we are always beating the bushes for grants
- last year we added a lighting kit

Some schools in the state have $60K studios

Darren Kuropatwa says "Don't think of a tool I need to learn, think about what can I do now that I couldn't do before."

"What Can I Do Now That I Couldn't Do Before?"
- interview anyone from the world
- collaborate on a geography share with a classroom in a different region in OK and HI; VT and MO
- don't jsut read about a career choice; bring the profession to your classroom (Marty with SDE)
- hold book talks with other students/classrooms
- debate science hot topics such as stem cell research
- peer to peer test prep (EOI, AP, ACT, reviews, etc.)
- Speak to a student in Darfur about Genocide and Human Rights

I AM THINKING USING VIDEOCONFERENCING WITH DEBATE CLASSES WOULD BE GREAT. I MIGHT SUGGEST THIS TO THE DEBATE TEACHER AT CLASSEN SAS AND SEE ABOUT HELPING FACILITATE THIS.

Last year's VFT dates back to thousands of years ago: "The Mound Builder, the Myth, The Legend: A Tale of Historic Treasures"
- for grades 5-6
- our kids had studied about Spiro Mounds in their textbook
- my kids were on fire about the history and what they learned about this area

2009 Putting it all together
- practiced using IVC equipment
- reinforced NO TALKING HEADS: as engaging as possible
- invited local media to support student achievement
- my advice to the students is to HAVE FUN, everything else will come into place
- celebrated successes, Lunch at Garfields, food motivates!
- we have documented our learning outomes along the way

This year getting equipped to work with Park staff
- Tandberg Educator MXP, had pre-visit from the classroom
- Full multimedia integration with SMART symposium
- ability to record content ot the Tandberg content server
- Bridging capabilities for multi-site connections in both IP and ISDN
- 100 MB connection to state internet service provider (OneNet)
- 2 Tandberg Prifle MXP 3000 - HD VC (2009 VC) - Tammy has this in her classroom
- 1 Tandberg Edge 85 - HD VC (2009 VFT)
- Tandberg's Mobile Commander (2009 VFT)

Now showing video from ODLA 2009 of Tandberg Mobile Commander explained by Chris Renfrow

Tandberg Mobile Commander - Chris Renfrow

VFT Enhancements
- hybrid VFT with Moodle
- syncrhonous and asynchronous chats
- hands-on activity
- pretest and posttest

Last year integrated a Howe basketball tshirt throw over video (showed the video)

Kids really realized last year doing their VFT how hard it is to be a teacher!

Lots of added value in the collaboration process
- one of the participants in KC3 last year had students who had never seen a cow before

All ties back to ISTE NETS

This project won ISTE recognition

Link from Roxanne Glaser and Janine Lim "20 Days to a Better VC Coordinator"

we are the only Oklahoma school this year in KC3

Contact info:
- IP 156.110.227.71
- tammyparks [at] mac [dot] com
- www.howeschools.org

Technorati Tags:
vft, virtual, field, trip, virtualfieldtrip, oklahoma, tammy, parks, tandberg, learning, school, kc3, distance, distributed, video, videoconferencing

Student-Created Virtual Field Trips: Howe Public Schools Live and On Location! originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on February 11, 2009.

How do we broaden students’ perspectives so they are empowered to participate in a global community?
- professor Teresa DeBacker’s comments

1- Psychological answer
- appeal to college students in particular by meeting them where they are
- they are forming their identities
- we need to model values that are consistent with a global perspective
- appeal to adolescent/young adult idealism
- you (and people like me) can make a difference

We know young adults are very idealistic about the possibilities of changing the world for the better
- we need to offer them practical opportunities
- OU Cousins Program is one example (take local students and make them cousins with international and other visiting students)
- Short-term study abroad opportunities
- long-term immersion opportunities

Now developing a six week program with a university in Puebla, Mexico
- focus is on intense language study as well as issues of interest to educators
- live with family for six weeks
- daily classroom instruction and structured conversation
- spanish-speaking tour guides on outings

Cultural exploration
- afternoon sightseeing and recreation
- weekend excursions
- dance and cooking workshops
- weekly cinema with discussion

topics for educators
- Mexican culture
- Mexican education system
- rural and indigenous education
- economic and social context
- poverty and migration
- importance and significance of work

education.ou.edu/spanish_immersion/

What can we do

Now comments from Jennifer Robinson, National Board Certified Teacher and French Instructor and Classen School of Advanced Studies in Oklahoma City Public Schools
- memo of understanding with france, MOU signed 2 years ago
- this is a wonderful way to bring international perspectives to the classroom
- OKCPS has skype blocked right now
- we have tried large videoconferences, but my vision
- are working on a wikispace now
– entirely different from blogs
– completely protected, only members can see it (parents, administrators, and students)

[THE WALLED GARDEN]

Students have written about the elections, MLK holiday, holiday customs, strikes in France
- write about Manga, Music, lots of things
- very meaningful learning, it is something I can control better and faster than handwritten notes

Wikispaces is free, available, and my French counterpart loves it!

Fulbright Teacher Administrator Program
- took me to Fance last year
- there are short and long term programs, 1 and 2 way programs, internships, lots of opportunities

Now comments from Barbara Thompson, Honorary Consul to France
- Barbara has received the France’s Chevalier of the Legion of Honor
- just returned from travels in the UK and New Zealand
- other countries place much more emphasis on second and third languages
- are only 2 schools in Oklahoma which offer an International Baccalaureate Program (Booker T Washington and Classen SAS)

Everyone in Europe was eager to discuss our election and the economic downturn

What can we do to encourage international connections?
- can be as simple as tracing a tomato in the grocery store to its point of origin in Chili
- learning another language is one of the best ways: be immersed
- human brain learns languages at early ages, this is a proven fact
- hire a second language teacher
- develop a partnership with another country
- begin with emails, use sites like wikispaces, and other educational exchanges

March of 2007, very successful partnership signed with Oklahoma and Pickart (?)
- more than 24 public and private schools are now partnered
- these are partnerships all over the state
- Eisenhower Elementary started with 5th graders going to Amien (?) and French students come to Tulsa

Oklahoma State School Superintendent Sandy Garrett led a visit last year to France

I recommend you develop a global curriculum at your school
- at my granddaughter’s school (not in Oklahoma, in Washington DC) they select a different continent each year
- this is called the global curriculum
- each grade selects a country
- at the end of the year they have museum night and the students are the guides
- this is called “A Global Curriculum”
- this is something you could learn how to do
- this is a great way to bring the world into your classroom

The promotion of international awareness is our worthy goal

Now comments from
- my perspectives are based on my experiences the past 8 years teaching students in Thailand

2 main things we need to do:

1- More person to person interactions
- we can do that with collaborative research
- more programs like Dr DeBacker talked about, that requires more infrastructure and funding
- at the K-20 level we can really grow is having students engaged in collaborative coursework
- example: studying contaminated groundwater, have our students interact and collaborate with others in Bangkok
– students can collaboratively come up with a design to solve that problem
– big issues: culture, language, also interesting pragmatic issues like the 12 hour time difference

2- Philosophical issue
- we need to teach students more about the culture in which we are in, Western culture
- how did we get here, who are we?
- that can help us take an in-depth look at the journey we’ve been on
- our culture is not a single strand that has evolved by itself, it has been influenced by so many other influences around the world

How many of you realize that after the fall of the Roman Empire, most of the Greek writings were lost
- those were rediscovered in Arabic during the Renaissance
- many people don’t realize this
- we need to understand how cultures are intertwined, how we are different but also similar

Facilitator comments
- appealing to students’ idealism is very important, hopes for a more peaceful and secure world
- challenging students to dream and DREAM BIG!
- empowering students with responsibility for action

Best way to help stereotypes disappear, to establish human connections to people in other cultures

BOY I SURE AGREE WITH THIS

The importance of partnerships is key
- hearing the persuasive voice of a teacher, a colleague, a friend who have benefited from these experiences and interactions

Building the human skills are absolutely necessary

OU has an international students’ speaker’s bureau
- students go and make presentations for others

suggestions from panelists
- state should provide funding for opportunities
- example is 2 colleges in Thailand and Oklahoam that want to co-develop an environmental engineering program
- resources and opportunities

Debra Dawson from SDE
- there is a mandate on the books now for an awareness program K-3
- and a mandated foreign language program, districts have to pick ONE language and go forward with this
- this is an unfunded mandate from the state
- Through technology free language learning opportunities are available too
- fear so often grips us in oklahoma, we need your help in overcoming that fear

France funds many of these student exchanges, there is also

MY THOUGHTS: WHAT A GREAT SITUATION FOR BLENDED LEARNING
- THERE IS NO NEED ANYMORE FOR AN ENTIRE SCHOOL DISTRICT TO SELECT A SINGLE LANGUAGE
- STUDENTS SHOULD BE ABLE TO TAKE MULTIPLE LANGUAGES
-

Feb 13th there will be a global education conference at UCO

Technorati Tags:
global, education, k20, ou

International Education Partnerships: The Need for a Global Perspective originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on January 29, 2009.

Please share your thoughts!

Technorati Tags:
#necc09, necc, necc2009, educon, educon21, technology, education, conference

How should EduCon influence NECC? originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on January 29, 2009.

Some of Chris Lehmann’s comments from the webcast:

EduCon works because people come with lots of goodwill, and expectations to participate and not just be passive
- diversity of voices in the panels was superb

SLA’s District didn’t like Ustream, so conference moved over to Mogulus this year
- student tech team is in the process of putting those recordings up
- of the 70 panels, about 55 of them are taped
- they are putting all of them up online
- are not quite at the point of setting up discussion groups around each one, but they are not yet there

Bud Hunt‘s comments
- inspired by EduCon, Bud and others in Littleton, Colorado, are hosting a similar event on Saturday, Feb 21st
- http://colearning.wikispaces.com
- Takeaways from Educon 2.1
– the importance of relationships and trust in communities
– reminder of what a school can feel like when it’s about people and learning, not just about numbers
– it’s great to be arguing community / discussing community with diverse folks

Chris’ comments
- every group of kids is potentially a remarkable group, the question is whether or not they can be (are enabled to be)
- Sunday’s panel particularly included a very divergent group of voices (Gary Stager vs KIPP reps)
- next steps: who can rally the troops?

comparing NECC to EduCon
- no vendor focus (at EduCon)
- no product focus (at EduCon)
- This really helps conversations to focus more on learning than on tools

MY THOUGHT: I WONDER IF THE REASON NECC PRESENTATIONS ARE MORE TOOL FOCUSED THAN LEARNING / INQUIRY-BASED TEACHING FOCUSED IS BECAUSE EDUCATORS ATTENDING TEND TO BE LESS FAMILIAR WITH THE TOOLS?
- As Susan pointed out in the chat tonight, the focus on accommodation-level technology use is very common at NECC, where EduCon is much more focused on inquiry-based approaches, constructivist / progressive approaches
- As Chris pointed out, the focus on inquiry-based, progressive approaches to education and learning is stated from the outset for EduCon. This is very different from NECC and most other conferences.

Chris:
- the small size of EduCon is also a big element in its success
- want to keep the size to 450 – 500 participants

Paul Allison
- Emphasis on the purpose of schooling on Saturday night and the focus on educational politics Sunday morning were really unique too

Question of how the dynamics of EduCon could positively influence of NECC is a little like the small schools movement
- NECC is so big, a big part of what makes EduCon work is that it IS small

Paul:
- the welcoming nature of EduCon and the EdTechTalk community is terrific, hopefully this will continue

Chris mentioned during his comments that they (at SLA) are not ready quite yet to put up discussion groups around each of the EduCon sessions
- I AM THINKING EDUCON IS RIPE FOR A GRANT TO FACILITATE THAT TYPE OF ARCHIVAL AND AVAILABLE PD AROUND THE SESSION CONTENT

Here is the archive of Sunday’s panel discussion at EduCon 2.1:

Technorati Tags:
educon, educon21, edtechtalk, teachers, education, learning, inquiry, leadership, conference

Reflections on EduCon 2.1 via an EdTechTalk Webcast originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on January 28, 2009.

This week, as we’ve had snow and ice in parts of the Midwest, the weather has been a little more visually exciting to follow on my iPhone. The other morning, Rachel asked to see my iPhone during breakfast so she could check the weather. She was SO excited to report:

Dad! It’s snowing in Manhattan! It’s going to snow in Manhattan three days this week!

I didn’t snap an iPhone screenshot of that moment, but I did take a snap later of the weather in Manhattan, Kansas. This location is significant to Rachel because one set of her grandparents (my folks) live there, and she has traveled there for holiday visits several times in the past. She has personal experiences and schema attached to this location, therefore the incidence of SNOW and cold temperatures there has special meaning and significance for her.

If you have an iPhone or iPod Touch, you can create screenshaps of any application or webapp by simultaneously pressing the home and sleep/wake button. This saves the image to your Photo roll, where you can sync it with your computer, email it or directly upload it to a photo sharing website like Flickr.

Rachel lives in Edmond, so the weather in our city is usually the first one she likes to check. When she checks the weather on the iPhone and becomes our family forecaster, my wife and I ask her to share the temperature as well as the predicted temperatures for today.

As she flicks through different cities, we ask her to share the name of the city she’s viewing along with weather details. Sometimes we’ll ask her a specific question, “Hey, what’s the temperature right now in Lubbock?” (Where her other set of grandparents live and she’s just visited recently.) As a young five year old, this provides great, real-world practice for reading two digit numbers as well as recognizing different city names. Rachel will start public kindergarten next year, but that hasn’t stopped us from starting her numeracy and reading literacy development early. Opportunities to have conversations like this provide countless learning signs throughout the week. My wife and I believe that even though our children attend public school, we still have vital roles to play as homeschooling parents. Essentially we recognize that we’re all learning constantly, and whether we’re in formal or informal learning contexts we need to take time to have conversations and share our perceptions and ideas together.

The iPhone weather image below from Gainsville, Texas, shows a wintery mix of snow and rain. This was very exciting to Rachel to report on this week. She loves to be the announcer of REAL news to others in our family. This not only develops her numeracy and reading literacy skills, but also her self-esteem as her ideas and announcements earn the attention and focus of others in our family. As she learns to accurately read numbers and words aloud, she experiences supported success in these activities which further builds her motivation to continue reading and sharing. Weather often is interesting and relevant, so being the “news reporter” for the weather can have a real value in family conversations. This is important for a five year old.

This use of the iPhone weather application a very basic use, but it’s worth mentioning because I know many primary age classroom teachers discuss the weather with students as a part of their morning circle time. If a teacher or teacher-aide has an iPhone or iPod Touch, it could be great to teach and allow students to use and access the weather application to report on current as well as upcoming conditions in different places.

A great deal of learning takes place in conversations. In conversations we learn about individual perceptions, knowledge and skills. The iPhone weather application allows us to talk about “greater than” and “less than” comparisons of weather, read the days of the week, and engage in a basic process of gathering and reporting on real-world data outside the home and classroom.

Is it colder today in Edmond or Manhattan?

How warm is it going to be on Wednesday in Edmond?

How many days is it going to rain in Shanghai this week?

Are these skills on which we test students in our classrooms, reading and interpreting data in tables? Of course. It can be even more fun and engaging, however, to analyze real-time data which has personal meaning and significance for students, than the often irrelevant data which we find on tests and worksheets.

Students in all of our classrooms need to be engaged in ongoing collaborative projects with students in other parts of the world. It is critical that we help our young people develop into global citizens with global awareness, which extends far beyond simplistic memorization of goegraphic place locations or country names and capitals. We need to help our students build friendships with others from diverse countries and cultural perspectives. When we have a friend in another country, whether or not we’ve met that person face-to-face we never look at that country or the people from that country the same. Helping students develop their own senses of and dispositions toward cultural respect, understanding, and tolerance is VERY important. Children often learn intolerance and disrespect in the school hallways and on the playground. The world isn’t fair, but we need to strive to bring values like fairness, respect, and understanding into our relationships, conversations and lives.

If we want students to CARE and really learn about a topic, we have to take the importance of schema and motivation seriously. Your students may not care about the weather in Shanghai today if they don’t live there, and if they don’t know anyone who lives there. If you engage in a sustained collaborative project with students and teachers in Shanghai, however, exchanging email letters, VoiceThread comments, and even live videoconference conversations, levels of background knowledge and motivation to know and learn about Shanghai would be quite different in your classroom.

Make it a priority to facilitate global connections with your students. Start small. Connect with other teachers in educational networking environments like the Global Education Collaborative, Classroom 2.0, and the K-12 Online Conference. Find an ongoing project already registered via ePals, the CILC’s Collaboration Center, or GlobalSchoolNet. Foster international connections and collaboration for your students. Make personal connections with teachers in other places, and via those “virtual rails of communication” bring your students along to share and learn together.

Those types of connections can make learning about the weather in another location take on entirely new levels of significance and meaning.

Technorati Tags:
iphone, collaboration, videoconference, cilc, globalschoolnet, epals, project, learning, pbl, numeracy, literacy, reading, weather

Numeracy and Reading Development with the iPhone Weather App originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on January 28, 2009.

Explain in detail what is going on with oil and gasoline prices these days.

Want to supplement lessons relating to oil and gas economics with some current, high quality videos? No need to subscribe to a commercial video-on-demand service or ask your school librarian to reserve a video on DVD or VHS for you. The December 8, 2008, 60 Minutes special “The Oil Kingdom” is available online for free viewing, featuring (among other things) interviews with high ranking Saudi officials.

Part 1 is 12 minutes and 33 seconds long, in which “Lesley Stahl meets with officials in Saudi Arabia and takes a tour of its vast petroleum facilities, which are gearing up to produce even more oil.”

Watch CBS Videos Online

Part 2 is 11 minutes and 30 seconds long, in which “Lesley Stahl takes an inside look into the world of Saudi Aramco, the world leader in crude oil production and the country’s sole source of wealth and power.”

Watch CBS Videos Online

More videos about “oil prices” are available from CBS online. The same day this 60 Minutes special aired, I challenged K-12 administrators gathered for a leadership retreat in Austin, Texas, to address this question about falling gasoline prices. The VoiceThread we created as well as PollEveryWhere survey is linked from my post that day, “Why are gasoline prices going down?” Here are the current results for this survey, with 119 respondents to date:

In addition to having your students use PollEverywhere and other tools to conduct their own original research on this topic, you might have them analyze the results of the poll above. The results to date (which I have archived to Flickr) reveal some basic misconceptions on the part of many respondents about how oil and gasoline prices are determined in the United States and on global markets.

One of the best things about this assignment is it’s highly complex and far from clear about what “the answer” is. It’s also fairly compelling since gasoline prices are both directly relevant to students’ lives and those of their families, and involves very interesting geopolitics.

Last November I wrote the post “Ideas for student research and digital stories in 2008: Controversial topics,” in which I provided multiple project idea examples. The Wikipedia:List of controversial issues page continues to be a great place to find research topics which can meet the five-fold criteria I outlined in that post:

1. Select a topic which isn’t a cut and dry issue: Something which cannot be fully understood on a factual basis by simply reading a single article in WikiPedia.
2. Select a topic with clear connections / ties to mandated standards and curriculum guidelines for your students.
3. Select a complex topic which is multi-faceted and you may not completely understand entirely yourself.
4. Select a topic about which students can interview local experts or other individuals to learn more information as well as solicit different opinions.
5. Select a topic which can include a “local action” step of what students and other listeners/viewers of the digital story can DO THEMSELVES to get involved and take action on the identified issue.

Steve LeVine’s blog “The Oil and the Glory” is a good resource for up to date analysis and links on geopolitics relating to petroleum prices and competition. (It was my source for the above videos from 60 minutes.) A search for “oil” on the website GlobalVoicesOnline.org also yields relevant reports from the field relating to petroleum. (Of course there are also references to “oil paintings” and cooking oils, but those results are interspersed with plenty of references to petroleum issues.)

In addition to researching oil prices and politics, the Guantanamo Bay detention camp remains a very important issue and topic to explore as well as understand. Spiegel Online’s December 23, 2008, article “The Last Days of Guantanamo: An American Nightmare Could Soon End” is a good source on this topic, and the WikiPedia article for Morris Davis is a good idea/resource lead. It will VERY interesting to see how the Obama administration will handle this situation. As a U.S. citizen committed to human rights not only for the residents of our nation but also everywhere in the world, I look forward to U.S. political leadership which will end the abominable travesty of justice which Guantanamo has been and continues to be under the administration of GW Bush. For more of my thoughts on this issue, see my post “POWs, Geneva Conventions, Guantanamo, and the Supreme Court” from 21 Oct 2004 and “Thoughts on President Bush’s State of the Union Address” from 2 Feb 2005.

Consider allowing and encouraging your students to create digital stories which address their research findings and analysis. For ideas and inspiration, check out Frank Guttler’s post “A Thousand Words – Storytelling and Editing” from December 21st. (Thanks Matthew Needleman for the heads up on this post.)

Technorati Tags:
oil, politics, petroleum, video, saudi, arabia, prices, economics, guantanamo, levine, oilandglory

What’s going on with oil prices these days? (Challenge your students in 2009 to find out) originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on December 26, 2008.

photo credit: sideshow_nyc

Technorati Tags:
assessment, evaluation, video, project

Tips for digital story evaluation originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on December 9, 2008.

The Tech-Ease website and resources are part of the the Educational Technology Clearinghouse by the Florida Center for Instructional Technology. I heard Luis present at NECC 2008 with Shannon White in their session, “Where in the World is… GeoRSS for the Classroom,” but had not seen all these resources they have published to the web and via iTunes. WOW.

The website links here are deep and wide in terms of rich content. Their website “No Strings Attached: Wireless Laptops in Education” includes:

Over 100 videos taped in Florida schools… This website features exemplary models of technology integration across Florida, including lessons from the school districts of Bradford, Broward, Collier, Hardee, Hernando, Hillsborough, Leon, Manatee, Pasco, Pinellas, Polk, Seminole, St. Johns and Walton counties. Please see the credits page for further information.

I love the way many of the videos on the site utilize B-roll video footage of the teacher discussing the lesson, and A-roll footage of students working together collaboratively on their projects. This lesson example on The Roman Empire uses this video format:

Did I mention all these screencasts, PDF files, videos and other resources are available completely FREE to anyone, whether or not you live and teach in Florida?!

Great job Luis and the Florida Center for Instructional Technology!

Technorati Tags:
technology, integration, howto, tutorial, video, florida, videos

Fantastic screencasts, PDF tutorials, and tech integration video examples from Florida originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on September 17, 2008.

Welcome to episode 9 of the Technology Shopping Cart Podcast, a podcast (and now live webcast) where educational innovation thrives on the food of creative ideas. This episode features a conversation with Heather Chirtea of ToolFactory, Vicki Allen, Karen Montgomery, and Wesley Fryer about podcasting, digital storytelling, mobile podcasting labs, mobile flip video labs, “ushering” technologies which encourage teachers to extend their journeys of learning with educational technologies further, and “manifest destiny” for educational technology use in our 21st century classrooms. Of course we also include a variety of “geek of the week” websites, resources and tips, which includes a discussion of the superb “Global Nomads” organization which facilitates engaging videoconferences for students on a diverse array of subjects. Check out our podcast shownotes for links. We are tentatively scheduling our next live webcast for Friday, September 26th, 2008 at 10 am US central time to discuss challenges and pitfalls of integrating web 2.0 technologies in school districts. We’re asking some special guests from Missouri to join us who are in the trenches of IT and have some interesting perspectives to share. Whether you joined us live or catch the recorded version, we welcome your feedback, comments and suggestions as always!

Show Notes:

1. Tech Shopping Cart Wiki resources for this show
2. Digital Wish
3. Mobile Podcasting Lab (Digital Wish / Toolfactory)
4. Flip Video Mobile Lab (Digital Wish / Toolfactory)
5. Podcasting Grant Program from Olympus and Toolfactory
6. Toolfactory
7. Global Nomads
8. Loopt
9. drop.io – share files to the web by phone, email, web, widget or fax
10. Jog The Web
11. Phonevite
12. Textmarks
13. Amazon Buys Shelfari – 26 August 2008
14. CaseLogic SLR Camera Backpack (Heather’s favorite)
15. Our Ustream text chat for this episode is available, which includes referenced links.
16. Using a Mac, how to webconference using Ustream and skype (thanks Ryan Gordon)
17. VickiWiki: Presentation and Workshop Curriculum of Vicki Mongomery
18. Gomeric Hill: Blog of Karen Montgomery
19. Thinking Machine: Presentation and Workshop Curriculum of Karen Montgomery
20. Vicki Allen on Twitter
21. Karen Montgomery on Twitter
22. Wesley Fryer on Twitter

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Podcast278: TechShoppingCart Podcast09: Digital Wishes, Flip Video Labs, and Manifest Destiny for EdTech originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on September 5, 2008.

In this podcast I share 45 minutes worth of brainstorming on the subject, “Given all the resources, administrative and parental support needed, how would you imagineer the ideal K-6 classroom learning environment?” Imagineering is a term I associate with Walt Disney and Disneyland, where creative and capable individuals come together to both imagine and engineer new worlds together. Carol Anne McGuire asked me last week to share some ideas with her along these lines, and prior to our conversation later this week I did some brainstorming and created this podcast tonight to clarify some of my thoughts. In the podcast shownotes you’ll find a link to the eighteen different ideas or suggestions I offer in this recording, as well as Stephanie Sandifer’s excellent  wiki for “Designing the 21st Century Global Learning Environment.” As always I welcome your comments and feedback on the ideas of this podcast.

Show Notes:

1. The 18 bullet points I used as an outline for this podcast
2. Creating, Collaborating, Communicating: These “3 C’s” are the key and can be a basic focus of learning tasks, included in project rubrics
3. Walt Disney Imagineering (from WikiPedia)
4. Ed.VoiceThread (accountable environment for students and teachers to create VoiceThreads for school with individual accounts)
5. Consider setting up a “Team Curiosity Blog” to which both students and teachers can post using a locally-hosted copy of WordPress. What are you curious about today? What are you wondering based on things you’ve read, seen, or heard?
6. Create school-wide wiki as a free gold wiki for education using PBwiki (Back to School Challenge)
7. Register your school and students for a free Think.com social networking account(s) – Now part of ThinkQuest
8. Stephanie Sandifer’s excellent  wiki for “Designing the 21st Century Global Learning Environment”
9. My notes from Stephanie’s facilitated session at EduBloggerCon2008 in July 2008 in San Antonio
10. Ideal 21st century learning is not…
11. Phil Schlechty’s excellent book “Working on the Work: An Action Plan for Teachers, Principals, and Superintendents”
12. Habits of Mind (EssentialSchools.org)
13. Camera recommendations from the StoryChasers Wiki
14. Alfie Kohn’s book “The Homework Myth: Why Our Kids Get Too Much of a Bad Thing”
15. Revisiting VoiceThread – TTT112 – 07.09.08 (Teachers Teaching Teachers podcast with VoiceThread co-founder Steve Muth discussing best practices with VoiceThread)
16. Kevin HoneyCutt
17. StoryChasers (main learning community website)
18. Powerful Ingredients for Digitally Interactive Learning
19. XTimeLine
20. Apple Classrooms of Tomorrow Research (ACOT)

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Podcast276: Imagineering the Ideal K-6 Classroom Learning Environment (Part 1) originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on September 1, 2008.

We discussed different flash-based video cameras, the pages and resources which have been added to the project wiki since our last meeting, more ideas for finding classroom partners for StoryChasers, and additional items that need to be added to the Project wiki. These include a page about curriculum alignments, some screencasts providing tutorials about the project, and a short and sweet project introduction page for interested educators. We’ll be working on adding these elements in the next couple of weeks, to include narrative text that can be used as a “template” for teachers writing local mini-grants for “digital backpack” equipment for their classroom. Check the “recent changes” page of the StoryChasers wiki to view the latest updates.

We will NOT have another StoryChasers meetup next week or for a couple of weeks, but will likely touch base near the end of September. If you have not already, please join the StoryChasers learning community and stay tuned for more updates! My goal is to have the wiki and site ready to announce on various listservs and project registries in the next two weeks. (Early September.)

Technorati Tags:
storytelling, video, school, education, project, collaboration, storychaser, storychasers

StoryChasers Brainstorm 4 originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on August 27, 2008.

This podcast is a recording from our third online brainstorming session for the StoryChasers project on August 21, 2008. I was joined by Cheryl Lykowski, a 5th grade teacher from Michigan as well as James Sigler, a 3rd grade teacher from Missouri. We will convene a fourth brainstorming session (and hopefully our last one before formally announcing the project and sending our invitations to others to participate via the CILC and ePals) next week on Wednesday, August 27, 2008 at 9 pm Eastern / 8 pm Central time. Please join us if you can! Also please contribute to our project wiki, and join our learning community on our main website if you have not already. Refer to our podcast shownotes for these links as well as a link to the text chat transcript. The website description of StoryChasers currently reads: Storychasers is a multi-state (and potentially multi-national) educational collaborative empowering students and teachers to responsibly record and share stories of local, regional and global interest as citizen journalists. Where STN (Student Television Network) participants may focus more narrowly on student broadcast news productions, Storychasers has a broader focus on not only student-created news broadcasts, but also student-created documentary films and live event coverage (webcasting). Storychaser media productions can be shared as live broadcast events or recorded, asynchronously shared audio and video files.

Show Notes:

1. StoryChasers (main learning community website)
2. StoryChasers Project Wiki
3. StoryChasers Project Entry Points
4. Text transcript for this online meetup (includes referenced links)
5. Ustream Video and Audio from August 6 brainstorm
6. Audio recording of July 30th skypecast brainstorm
7. Johnny Kaw (WikiPedia)
8. Cheryl Lykowski’s Classroom 2.0 page
9. James Sigler’s discussion of videoconferencing the classroom on “It’s Elementary” from May 2008

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Podcast274: StoryChasers Brainstorm #3 from 21 August 2008 originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on August 23, 2008.

I will be implementing a Federal EETT grant this year with some of my 5th grade teachers (science). Part of that grant communication component is going to be the development of a online learning network. Originally, I had planned on using Ning. Now I hear Wesley mention that he feels Drupal has some advantages over Ning. I’m curious as to what people feel some of the advatages are of using Drupal over Ning?

This is a GREAT question, and relates closely to some questions Miguel Guhlin asked in response to a post I shared titled “How can our school set up a team blog for teachers?” In that post I was outlining options for using either WordPress or Blogger as a platform for a teacher team blog, which at some point might also include students. This question of “Drupal versus Ning” focuses on the type of learning community is similar to the “WordPress or Ning” question, because Ning is included in both questions and it is important to differentiate not only platform functionality, but also the goals and purposes which are served (or can be served) through each environment.

Before I answer Miguel’s question, I want to point out several things. First, my own experiences creating and managing learning communities up to this point have been limited to using Ning, Blogger, Joomla, Drupal, WordPress. The last three I mentioned are all open source projects, Ning and Blogger are not.

Blogger and WordPress are designed to have more narrow functionality: Blogging. Both Ning and Drupal have been designed for different purposes, but both are well-suited for people who want to create and facilitate online learning communities. Joomla is a great tool, but from what I’ve read, heard and experienced it is less oriented toward learning community building than Ning or Drupal.

In a comment to my post about platforms for teacher team blogs, Miguel asked:

1) How easy is it to backup a Ning you’ve created if you decide to walk away from Ning?
2) How easy is it for you to setup a Ning on your own server if you do decide to walk away?
3) Does Ning have an education only location that at least has the obligatory “.org” label so that it won’t be blocked, unlike the “ning.com” that is in some districts?
4) How many administrators can you setup on a Ning?

These questions get to the heart of some differences not only between Ning and WordPress, but also Ning and Drupal. As an open source project, the content within a Drupal site is much more portable and flexible. You can’t work with data in Ning directly on the backend site, like directly in mySQL, as you can with Drupal. Drupal is more complex to setup and configure, but is MUCH more flexible. Particularly because you have open access to your data, Drupal is the more flexible platform if at some point (as Miguel says) you want to pick up your and move it elsewhere.

I don’t think you can “set up a Ning on your own server,” to answer Miguel’s second question. You can register a custom domain and have your Ning site resolve to that domain, but the Ning itself and its data will reside on the Ning servers from what I understand.

Ning does NOT have an “education only” location that is treated more generously by school content filters. Many schools I work with here in the midwestern US block all Ning sites, and we’ve had difficulty getting school IT folks in some cases to just unblock our Ning subdomain (http://celebrateoklahoma.ning.com) for our statewide oral history project. In some cases content filtering systems apparently won’t let a subdomain be unblocked, in other cases IT people don’t know how to do this, and in others they simply don’t want to. In terms of the administrator question, I think you can setup as many administrators as you want on a Ning, but there are some features which are ONLY accessible by the person who created it initially.

I think the biggest differentiator, in addition to needing your own server or commercial host to run Drupal, is that you need to be willing to do some tweaking and configuring if you opt for Drupal that involves using ftp to upload modules, configuring them, and doing more technical back-end stuff than you need with Ning. Ning is setup so just about anyone can create and manage a website. Drupal requires developers to be directly involved. That developer can be YOU, but the question is whether or not you want to be or get that “geeky” to tweak configurations, modules, etc.

The Drupal Education Group is a good resource to consult when looking at Drupal for specific education settings. If you are wanting more of a learning management system to be used in student courses, you certainly want to consider Moodle instead of Drupal. My post from June “Moodle as ‘the killer app’” has a great conversation thread discussing Drupal versus Moodle, and John Jones’ presentation on Drupal from mid-June in Wichita (available as a podcast) is also a good resource on this discussion I can point you to.

Technorati Tags:
drupal, ning, opensource, moodle, education, contentmanagement

Drupal versus Ning for Learning Community Websites originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on July 31, 2008.

I also have run into trouble joining a Skypecast from my Macintosh computer, which is running the latest version of the OS X operating system (10.5.4) as well as the latest version of Skype for Mac: 2.7. When I try to join a Skypecast on my Mac using either the Safari or FireFox web browser, I see the following message designed for Windows users:

At this point, it appears that Mac users cannot join Skypecasts. MAJOR PROBLEM. Fortunately, I have access to a WindowsXP computer that I can use for this evening’s skypecast, but I’m guessing there may be some educators out there on Macs that may not be able to join. If that is the case for you, I offer my sincere apologies. I would NOT have scheduled this event as a Skypecast if I knew it wouldn’t be accessible to both Mac and Windows computer users. Instead I would have probably tried to arrange to use an Elluminate room, have tried Flashmeeting, or have reached out to the great folks at EdTechTalk to find an open day and time on their calendar. This also may throw a crimp in my plans to record the call– I am setup to record skype calls on my Mac but not on a Windows machine… Time to do some scrambling. Hopefully I’ll be able to record the call, and if I do I will post the recording here later.

It’s been awhile since I’ve hosted a formal “skypecast” (as opposed to just a multi-person audio conference in Skype) but as far as I know these are the steps you’ll need. Remember the skypecast will begin this evening, Wednesday July 20th, at 7 pm US Central time.

1. Set up Skype: If you have not already, download and install Skype. Be sure you have a RECENT version. Currently version 3.2 is required for Windows users to join Skypecasts, as far as I know version 2.7 for Mac users. (It is free but you’ll need administrative rights to install new software on the computer you are using.) Log in with your userid and password to
   Skype. Make sure your microphone is plugged in and working.
2. Website log in: Log in to the main Skype website. You’ll need to be logged in to join the Skypecast when it begins.
3. At the start of the Skypecast (7 pm US Central time tonight) click on this link to visit the Skypecast page. Click the link “Join this Skypecast” which will appear once the Skypecast start time has passed. On a Windows computer you should be presented with a dialog window which asks for your permission to launch an external application (Skype) and you’ll need to click yes to authorize that. Then you should be in the Skypecast. We’ll do introductions for at least the first ten minutes, so if you join late that is fine.
4. Be ready to participate! Depending on the number of participants we have, we may have everyone’s mic on or mics may be muted to minimize background noise. If mics are muted, you’ll want to click the button in the skypecast window which shows the names of all the people online to virtually “raise your hand” and ask to speak. In Skype 3.2 for Windows, this is a button in the Skype window which says “Ask for the mic.” As the skypecast moderator, I’ll unmute participant mics individually so you can speak and have the floor! We should also have a skype chat window available which can be used as a backchannel to ask questions, share ideas, and further challenge everyone’s multi-tasking abilities! I’ll do my best to keep up with the backchannel, but it certainly can be challenging to both read text chat and talk about an idea at the same time.

Again, here’s the link to join the Skypecast in an hour. Hope you can make it!

I’ve posted a basic agenda / outline for tonight’s skypecast to the Storychasers website. This is just a suggested guideline, we can deviate from this if needed.

Technorati Tags:
skype, skypecast, storychaser, storychasers

Technorati Tags:
skype, skypecast, story, storychasers, storychaser

How can I join tonight’s skypecast? originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on July 30, 2008.

This podcast includes interviews with Scott Swanson, the Strategic Technology Coordinator at the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy in Aurora, Illinois, recorded in March and July of 2008, as well as April Hope, a 2008 graduate of IMSA and Scott’s current intern. They discuss the activities of IMSA students in forming the first OLPC (XO Laptop) High School Student Chapter, their experiences working in and supporting a one to one laptop learning initiative with tablet PCs, and their responses to conversations at EduBloggerCon 2008 prior to the NECC conference in San Antonio in July. The first conversation with Scott in this podcast was recorded at the COSN conference in Washington D.C. in March 2008. Many thanks to both Scott and April for sharing their thoughts, experiences, and perspectives!

Show Notes:

1. Illinois Math and Science Academy Chapter of OLPC
2. Website of Scott Swanson
3. Photo of Jim Gerry and Scott Swanson at COSN 2008
4. The Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy in Aurora, IL
5. One Laptop Per Child

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[tags]necc,necc08,necc2008,math,science,imsa,illinois,olpc,xolaptop,tablet,tabletpc,edubloggercon2008,ebc08[/tags]

Podcast268: Conversations with Scott Swanson and April Hope about the first OLPC High School Student Chapter, 1 to 1 Laptop Immersion with Tablet PCs, and EduBloggerCon 2008 Student Reflections originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on July 29, 2008.