Category Archives: The Teachers

Some Mid-TCEA Conference Reflections

I have been enjoying TCEA but some of it has just been a blur trying to rush from one presentation to the next. I’ve been to some that were specific tutorials for Flash, iMovie, iPhoto and tomorrow I’m looking forward to iDVD and GarageBand.

It has been wonderful to learn some new tricks and also to drool over the lab set up for the tutorials – 25 bright, shiny iMacs.

The highlights for me have been listening to the new vocabulary that permeates the discussions on technology integration and the changes that education is going to have to address if we are going to give our kids the skills they will need for tomorrow. I hear the terms web 2.0, read/write web, conversation versus static webpage, community building, collaborating, social networks, and mash-ups.

Over all it would seem that while we are working hard to integrate technology, students are already way ahead of us. Computers, cell phones, mp3 players are as much a part of their daily environment as the microwave, dishwasher, and tv remote have become part of ours. They already ARE integrated. We are the ones running along behind.

But educators are catching up. The debates are all over the web and while many districts still block blogs as a matter of course, others are doing the blogging themselves. More and more districts are moving into the 1:1 computing venue.

I went to hear Dr. Mary Ann Bell speak on Fun and Free Internet tools and the links that were shared were mostly Web 2.0. She also touched on the subject of how many of these sites may be blocked at the district level.

When I was in school I never really thought of teachers as rebels but these days it seems that more and more are trying to help bring about the changes that we all know will have to come eventually. I was encouraged to hear all who spoke of teaching “literacy” included ethics. So many adults are confused about what is permissible and valid on the web. It’s easier for us to blanket block things than it is to learn to utilize them properly but at what cost? Our kids are already collaborating on MySpace, communicating with Instant Messaging, playing games online connected to multiple players in different geographic locations, recording audio and pictures on their phones and accessing the internet to share those files from the same phones. They think we just don’t get it, and maybe we don’t – but we’re working on it.

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Wes Fryer at TCEA

My notes on Wes Fryer’s presentation – The Case for 1:1 Computing

I will add the link to the podcast when he puts it up on his site.

Share a vision

Some great tools for saving clips from the web and accessing for presentations
Flickr creative commons
Google notebook

Journey we are on these days has incredible speed
1:1 learning
online podcast 15 minutes on school 2.0

silver bullet? There is no panacea that solves all the problems in education
1995 “prisoners of time” document
http://www.ed.gov/pubs/PrisonersOfTime/Dimensions.html

many things need to change
years from now people will be sitting around n nursing homes laughing about the debate way back on laptops in the classroom

the new phones (iPhone) more powerful than the computers that took us to the moon.

www.uthtv.com

20th century was a read-only culture
21st century will continue to have read-only content but there will also be read-write
need to learn to use blogs to cultivate student writing safely

three main things
1. Majority of jobs in future will not involve a factory
2. Digital curriculum rocks!
3. Need fro RW & RO
4. Education (“v” and “t” words
5. Constructivism and constructionism

Who opposes this?

What changes your mind
Relationships and conversations

Echo chamber (in blogosphere this is hanging out with just people who agree with you)

“the Rise of the Creative class and A Whole New Mind – books to read

How are we paid – not based on how our kids do
We are paid by seat time
Bell defines learning – starts and stops
Learning doesn’t happen according to a fixed schedule
School controlling the time and place where you learn
You have to come to this place, at this time to learn

What will it take to thrive in 2065?
Sir Ken Robinson http://cjournal.concordia.ca/journalarchives/2005-06/oct_27/005225.shtml
Conference

With all the technology we have – we have no idea what the future work place will be like

Teach kids to do jobs that haven’t been invented to solve problems that haven’t been thought of

Not like a factory where you do a repetitive task, closely monitored

Robotics, building a robot, writing a program – constructionism
Thomas Friedman we are going to have to able to be flexible and be able to learn and unlearn

Who is going to solve the aids crisis, who will rid us of dependency on fossil fuel

Cooperation instead of competition with China and Pakistan

Presentation on Did You Know? http://thefischbowl.blogspot.com/2006/08/did-you-know.html

Dan Pink author A Whole New Mind

Why the right brained folks are going to rule the world

We need to value creativity the way we value literacy
In a one to one environment where all students are able to pull down the world,

Wes fryer value add to the district is when he can take ideas and remix them and add productivity

Create
Evaluate
Analyze
Apply
Understand – describe, explain
Knowledge – remember

Critical thinking

Self directed work ethic (this is how students will get staff development in the future at work)
(online courses)

eMints.org

Wes Fryer

http://www.speedofcreativity.org/

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TCEA and David Warlick

My notes on TCEA session Navigating the Digital Information landscape: The New Basics by David Warlick

Redefining literacy in the 21st Century. David’s goal for the presentation – get all the way through without mentioning technology. Session is about information (synonymous with technology)

Web2.0 document handout is a wiki – David uses his wiki handout to show use of a wiki.
Can be edited and updates as people edit it.
Can add blogs after attending presentation through editing wiki
2.0 conversation as opposed to old web – library

Future – What do we know about the workplace? Picture of an office in the future
Information age – last ten months more and more people have given up the telephone that sits on the table for the one that you can carry around in your pocket.
After conference go home and go to grocery store – more men with cell phones
We have made the decision that we want our communication something we can carry with us
(cuts table phone out of picture
5 exobytes information generated in 2003 but only 0.01% got printed
Cut paper out of picture
Webcams cut chairs out of picture
In future we may be wearing our technology – jacket in Europe marketed by levi straus – built in mp3 player, headphones, gps, phone rings gps toe rings
Cut computer out of the picture
Almost nothing left of the future office. This is about what we know of the future we are preparing our children for – almost nothing.

What do children need to be learning today to prepare for the future

Conclusion – stop integrating technology – integrate literacy
Teach our kids how to teach themselves

The three Rs are the same literacy taught in the 50s – we need reading. How to teach students to be able to validate information

Wikipedia has warnings about info that may be inaccurate – do newspapers and text books?

We have been taught to read whatever was handed to us by someone we trusted. Our kids are reading online – anyone, anywhere can publish. We have to teach literacy to be able to read text but also skills for exposing truth,
Example how many planets in solar system? Look in text book and Pluto is included – wikipedia has already been updated. It was updated in less than a minute.
Wikipedia and books – not a competition. Understanding what your library and the web is really good at and teaching student how to decide how to make a decision about which is appropriate at a particular time

Other skills

– Find information
– -decode it
– critically evaluate it, and
– organize it into personal digital libraries
We don’t replace literacy – we expand it

Arithmetic – all children need to understand the language of numbers
2 things have happened – solving a problem now is maybe a thousand numbers digital

Raw data – columns and rows of numbers from all over- searchable databases
Example data on earthquakes in a certain year range.
Highlight data, past into excel
Everything goes into first cell’
Convert text to columns – wizard finds column breaks and formats
Can tell it not to import entire columns
Imported info – made a graph scatter plot – showed a map of earthquake activity – world map tsunami
Arithmetic expands into employing information – raw material
Keyboard (piano) number generator
Compose music – process information

Writing – long tail (need to research this some more – many definitions out there)
Anatomy of the long tail
New media industry – rhapsody amazon netflix
Counted up number of products each sold and number of each product sole – created a graph which they expected to see but at the point where you couldn’t make money there was a long tail that showed ones that couldn’t be sold. (according to their larger percentages)This tail goes on because there is a new digital market for artists
Rhapsody makes 20% of revenue from the long tail – point being that anyone can make money on the internet selling their book, art, whatever. Maybe not enough to completely pay the bills but you could write and market a book that would sell enough to pay for kids college tuition (which David Warlick as done)

6.7 gig over the internet in 58 seconds – more than 200 sets of encyclopedia Britannica or 4 hours of dvd quality video
how do you get your message through in that storm of information – have to successfully compete with media for kids attention

writing expands into expressing ideas compellingly

sfett video student created a video showing corporations that use child labor and sweatchops – very powerful music with images and facts done by a fifteen year old as an alternative to writing a paper

writing – quality of information expression translate to video multimedia music communicates powerfully

need to teach the thread that stitches the other expansions together – ETHICS
information flows today without containers – not in pages in books. Nothing to keep it form growing larger and larger
teachers and librarians used to be gatekeepers – they stand at the gate not realizing that the walls are gone. We need to teach our kids to become their own gatekeepers –
ethical use of information should be an integral part of any literacy discussion

redefine literacy and integrate that

computers are now the pencil and paper of their day

David’s son – image with ipod, hooked into playstation, playing collaboratively online and instant messaging at the same time. We see this as technology – son would say this is information , he wouldn’t say a word about it being technology (youth everyday normal environment)
We need to be thinking less about the machine and more about the information

Why this is important – we are notinvesting in the next century- in our classrooms

china will surpass us in broadband by 2006
US has fallen to 21th in household broadband
US will be passed by slovenia in 2007

1983 nation at risk report
education reform has been happening ever since

in industrial age the curriculum didn’t change – now the world is the curriculum and it changes everyday.

“we will have achieved education reform when no teacher thinks they can teach the same thing the same way every day”

http://landmark-project.com
http://davidwarlick.com

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Online Class Solution

Before I cruise down to Austin for TCEA I want to catch up on a project I’ve been involved in. Some students are beginning to take a foreign language class online. This is a first time situation and as I have absolutely no knowledge when it comes to speaking a foreign language they are truly on their own as far as content and being accountable.

My part has been helping them learn the procedures that will allow them to complete the class. They have had to learn how to login and use Blackboard and an online workbook on Quia. They have also had to learn how to use recording software and save their recording mp3 to their folder. They then have to attach it as a submission on Blackbboard.

After the initial giggling over having to record with others in the room, they picked up on the procedure quickly. I’m cheering for them to do well on this experiment and I’m a little anxious about abandoning them for the week while I attend the conference. They are using free demo software called Audio Wizard. In the demo version you are allowed three minutes of recording time and it is very simple to use. They click one button and a box pops up that allows them to name their file and designate where to save it. As soon as they click save they are recording. They click one more button to stop recording. Another button lets them play back the recording and make sure it is just how they want before they submit. If they don’t like it, they just click remove from disk and start the process over again.

They stay in contact with the instructor via email so they recieve feedback and can ask questions. The submissions are graded and the grades are then up on Blackboard where they can also see announcements and future assignments.

I plan to stay in touch with them and the instructor by email while I’m at the conference so for us this is breaking new ground. It will allow us to stay connected and for me to offer some long distance support even if it is mainly moral support!

DSL Troubles

I finally took the plunge. After 5 years of dial-up I signed up with DSL. I got all my equipment in the mail, managed to hook everything up, and all the laptops in the house work great but I can’t get my PC Desktop to work with it. I think it may be the ethernet card which hasn’t been used since we bought the computer. I can use laptops running Linux, OSX, and Windows XP but no desktop. I’m typing on the Linux laptop right now which is hooked up directly to the ethernet cable and it’s chugging along fine. It’s nice to be able to stay on the internet and use the phone at the same time and it is definitely faster so it will be worth fixing the desktop to work with it. It’s also nice to be able to sit in the comfy recliner with wireless.

It will be nice to be able to email home while I’m at TCEA this year. Last year I didn’t have a laptop and I’m looking forward to blogging at the conference and staying in contact at home too. I have my list of presentations I want to attend and I already don’t know how I’m going to take time to eat! I especially want to attend some of the presentations on GarageBand, IMovie, and PodCasting and of course Blogging. I’m also looking forward to putting faces with bloggers I’ve been reading over the past year.
I’m in a last minute rush trying to get two classes of students comfortable with the procedures they need to complete lessons online. I feel like I’m abandoning them but I know I will return recharged and enthusiastic so the payoff will be worthwhile.

One group records online and saves their recordings as MP3s. The other group has to use cassette recorders and as I read the instructions I thought to myself “how old school”. I’m starting to sound like the kids.

Conversations about NCLB

There is a post over at Tech Chick Tips about NCLB. The post points to other blogs that are having ongoing and thought-provoking conversations that discuss the good, bad, and ugly. Watch out – if you get started you will find it hard to stop. Wow – I’m still reading and every blog I read leads me to another one. I knew this was a hot button issue but I hadn’t really searched to find out what conversations were happening in the blogosphere.

I am not actually a teacher myself. I do tech support, electronic gradebook support, schedule the lab, and a pile of other things mostly dealing with computers, but I hear the conversations in the halls. I am in and out of classrooms and have actually uh… extended repair time on a computer so I could stay and listen because I was so enthralled. Those are the kind of classes I want for my kids. The classes that anyone could walk into and want to stay.

I once read a book called “Zen And The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance”. The main character in the book spends much of his life trying to define quality. Maybe the cycles and trends in education don’t matter as much as the quality of what happens in the classroom. I think that there are people who become teachers because there is nothing else they could do with their lives – they are born to it. You know the ones I am talking about – you may even be one yourself. If they were in any other profession they would still be teaching.

Years ago my kids were taking part in a youth service at our church and invited their teachers (who attended other churches) to come see them. Both teachers came and after the service I saw them in the parking lot. One was showing the other a cool new way she had learned to teach multiplication. That’s the kind of teacher I’m taking about. You don’t hear them complain much about any kind of changes in legislation – they just keep teaching. They don’t whine about having to go to staff development, they just show up and end up helping all the people around them.

I think most of the teachers blogging about NCLB are those kind of teachers. They are taking the time to “think through blogging” and educating everyone who reads their posts by challenging us to think and reflect as well. The questions shouldn’t be what is wrong with No Child Left Behind. They should be how can we fix it.

I  highly recommend dropping by and clicking through to some of the links and doing some reading.

Podcasts Can Educate

This year I have been introduced to podcasts. Wikipedia defines podcasts as “media files that are distributed over the internet using syndication feeds for playback on mobile devices or computers.”
For some time I have been enjoying listening to podcasts through iTunes on my MacBook. Yesterday CNN had an article on one of my favorites – Grammar Girl’s Quick and Dirty Tips for Better Writing. Grammar Girl was created by Arizona Technical Writer Mignon Fogarty who takes one topic and explains it on each podcast.

Today’s topic on her website is “lay” versus “lie” Grammar Girl reminds you –

Eric Clapton, and his song Lay Down Sally can actually help you remember the difference between lay and lie… [record screeching sound] because he’s wrong.

To say “lay down Sally” would imply that someone should grab Sally and lay her down. If he wanted Sally to rest in his arms on her own, the correct line would be “lie down Sally.”

Now I can improve my grammar while laying my mp3 player on the seat next to me in the car or when I am lie on the couch! Please don’t blame Grammar Girl or my high school English teacher for any errors on this blog – the errors are all mine.

For more educational podcasts you can check out Open Culture – There is an entire library of podcasts on all kinds of subjects.  Happy Listening!

Cell Phones in School

Some students were discussing their cell phones this week and asked me to look up a particular phone on the internet for them. They compared features and discussed prices and when I expresses shock over the three hundred dollar price tag on the phone they had me search for I learned that many of them carry two and three hundred dollar phones around with them. Though cell phone use is against the rules at school they can be carried for use after school as long as they are kept out of sight.

That night I was reading an article by Vickie Davis at Cool Cat Teacher blog about students surreptitiously recording teachers and those recordings ending up on YouTube and other places on the internet.

It was just a few years ago that I was involved with a church where some angry members brought a tape recorder to a meeting (that was open to anyone) and had everyone up in arms because of the statement it made. At least that was out in the open. If she had been a part of this cell phone generation she could have just clicked a button on her phone and no one would have realized what was happening.

In post 911 paranoia times we have given up some of our rights for a false sense of “Homeland Security” If we have freedom to make choices we also have to use responsibility in making them and also be accountable for the outcome. By giving up freedom we are in effect saying that we want someone else to be responsible for making decisions for us. Responsibility is elusive to teach. You can teach that actions have consequences but that’s more a law of physics. Taking on responsibility is an inner response to a situation. I hope we have not gotten so complacent or maybe just lazy that we aren’t willing to teach responsibility by modeling it.

As Vickie makes the comparison – our kids have toys that would be better suited to James Bond movies and they know how to use them. They have the freedom of the how but do they have the responsibility of the when?
Even though the year 1984 has long passed I think the era has just arrived. There really is no such thing as privacy anymore. I wonder what George Orwell would think.

Preparing To Blog TCEA

I am reading an article on blogging a conference by Josh Hallett and since I am planning to blog the TCEA conference in February I found the article to be useful. His suggestions are broken down into hardware and software and they include a laptop, connectivity, a digital camera, and voice recorder. I have the first three covered but I’m going to have to think about the voice recorder. I don’t have one at this point and I’m not sure how useful it would be. The presentations can be spread out and if you are wanting to make it to one on the other side of the convention center there is no time to do anything but run. They are 45 minutes long and often crowded so time and space are limited for dealing with equipment. I see myself struggling with tangled cables, camera, laptop, notepad and pen. I don’t think I could manage a voice recorder too.

The software Mr. Hallett lists includes an offline blog editor, a Flickr account for pictures and Flickr upload software. Also included are FTP software, audio editing software, and Technorati to track other blogs about the conference.

Because of the short time frames of the presentations I plan to use free note-taking software on my Mac Book called Journler. I like the application for it’s simplicity of use. I don’t want to spend a lot of time learning how to use the software – I just want to take notes. and Journler fills the bill for me.

There is wireless at the Hotel so I plan to edit my notes and upload at night. That will also give me time to edit photos (if I manage to get any) and get them uploaded to Flickr. I haven’t used the digital camera with the Mac Book yet, nor have I uploaded to flickr from the Mac so I will do a trial run on both before the conference.

Other parts of the post deal with assembling your blogging team, planning, and prewriting parts. I am going to try to at least start an outline of the presentations I want to attend and that way I can plug in the actual information when I get there. I hadn’t even thought of that and though I know there can be last minute changes and there will also be some presentations I want to go to but won’t make, I can have plan A and plan B ready so I will be working on that over the next few weeks. TCEA does a wonderful job on their website of letting everyone know what is happening and when. There are links to all the presentation and after the conference most of those links will include downloads of the handouts.
There is much more to Mr. Hallett’s article and if you are planning to blog a conference I would recommend his article and doing some planning in order to get the most out of your time and to help share with the folks in your organization who are not attending.

Happenings!

A friend and colleague has started a new blog. It’s called Paris Reads and will catalog the books she reads throughout the year. She is the librarian at our High School and I am looking forward to her recommendations! You can click on the link in this post or find her in my “Friends” blogroll.

I’d really like to see a community of local bloggers grow. We have varied interests but share a geographical commonality and concern for our community.

Coming up in February is the TCEA Conference in Austin. This will be my second time to go and my first with a laptop so my plan is to blog from the conference. I hope some of my fellow conference attendees will do the same and tag their posts so everyone can find them. I am particularly excited about listening to Keynote speaker Erin Gruwell of “Freedom Writers” fame.

New Blog for Computer Lab

I have finally gotten started on a blog for the 406 Project Computer Lab. The link is on the sidebar and I have a feed for the weeks schedule on it. It just has a welcome post and the calendar feed so far – I haven’t even done anything to personalize it. I hope to add pictures and articles and am looking forward to seeing how blogger grows throughout the next year. I tried to use google calendar with it and couldn’t get the feed to work so I ended up using an online calendar called kiko. I would have thought since google now owns blogger that it would be simple to integrate and it may work eventually but I spent a half hour trying with google and it took ten minutes with kiko including signing up for a free account.

This is one of the things I hope will improve with time. I like that google has added more control over viewing and commenting so I’m sure more improvements are on the horizon. If you check out the Blogger “known issues” page you will see quite a few errors related to using Internet Explorer 7.  Who knew?

In the meantime I am looking for suggestions on what should be included on the lab blog so let me know if you have any ideas!

Leadership

Mr. P’s Blog pointed me towards an article in USNews about leadership. I find the subject fascinating personally because while I have ideas, I don’t have leadership qualities. I am uncomfortable in the spotlight and I lack self-confidence. You would think that realizing you don’t have self-confidence would be a step in rectifying that situation but it doesn’t seem to be true in my case.

What makes someone a leader? It can’t just be self-confidence because there are plenty of folks I have met that were oozing self-confidence but lacked the things that make me want to follow someone – imagination, compassion, creativity, honor.

Of all the leaders listed in the article, the one that I found most interesting wasn’t one person, but a group – the staff of the New Orleans Times-Picayune.

These folks who were dealing with their own personal losses due to hurricane Katrina, who had no cell phones or email to communicate with, came together no matter what their postion before the storm and kayaked, convoyed, walked and did whatever they had to to keep the paper going. They continue to do so while dealing with insurance claims, rebuilding their own homes, family members still scattered around the country and the quote at the end of the story speaks to the heart of it for me.

“Cooperation is teaching employees that they all have leadership roles to play. “Leadership is not necessarily connected to important-sounding titles,” Leadership is not necessarily a function of how smart you are. It is more correlated to impulses of courage and responsibility and accountability.”

Maybe leadership is more about people being placed into situations where their best becomes who they are.  I think leadership is also dependent upon good followers.  People have to be able to discern good leadership and be willing to give their best in whatever their position is.

We complain about our country’s leaders, our community’s leaders, and the leadership in our places of employment but if we are not willing to make the effort to be involved in every part of the process that puts these people in position and then be willing to extend support to keep them there and to keep these entities moving towards the goals that we feel are important then we lose the right to complain if those goals are not reached.

Followers are just as crucial as leaders and they have to be a partnership. I’m okay with not being a leader, but I hope I am a good follower.

Holiday Season Starts and Learning GIMP

I managed to do some Christmas shopping this weekend. The stores were crowded, too warm, and made me remember why I wish I would get an earlier start on my shopping. We went to the Christmas parade and watched the high school bands and Santa. My daughter played in one of the bands and we picked her and her friend up afterwards and took them to ring bells for the Salvation Army. Kinsey was at a debate meet and brought home two medals. I am proud of him and I am so glad that he had the opportunity to do something he enjoys and excels at and got recognition for it. Everyone needs that from time to time. The tree is up and I made a pot full of homemade soup. All in all a nice peaceful weekend. No great excitement but there is something to say for a chance to refuel every now and then.

I ran across some tutorials for GIMP which I have been trying hard to love. I have a lot of experience with PaintShop Pro and found it difficult to make the switch. I found some tutorials that walked you through the creation of a graphic step-by-step. I learn best by doing so those are my preferred kind of tutorial. I have a long way to go before I reach the level of proficiency I need for web graphics but at least I made some progress. The graphic wasn’t anything useful – just a cloth textured background and a circle that appears glassy and raised. Still it allowed me to get familiar with a few tools and it wasn’t totally ugly.

If I hadn’t had the time to refuel I wouldn’t have gotten focused enough to find the appropriate tutorial and complete it. Completing the tutorial gave me some confidence and a little excitement which will motivate me to learn more. GIMP seems to be a powerful piece of software but it lacks the community that has existed in the past for PaintShop Pro. There were groups and literally hundreds of tutorials and plenty of folks willing to share their expertise. There was something for every level from complete beginner to expert. I would like to see more of that sort of thing with GIMP. There is a community of Open Source users but they seem to be limited to people who are fairly comfortable with computers and who have that need to learn new software and the time to do it. I have seen a few books on using GIMP but walk in to any bookstore that carries computer books and you will usually find several choices for PaintShop Pro and PhotoShop and often several for different versions.

What makes one software package attract writers and usergroups while another that is just as good and often cheaper (in the case of GIMP free!) remains in the shadows by comparison? It took me a long time to get started and I know partly because I don’t like change. I wanted GIMP to act like PaintShop Pro and everytime I sat down to work with it I would end up frustrated. It wasn’t the software’s fault – it was my inability a adjust to the difference. What changed was that I found instructions that struck a familiar chord and provided a kind of “rosetta stone” that helped unlock my mental block.

In learning about GIMP I also learned something about my own learning style. Maybe when I understand GIMP a little better I can put that piece of information to good use and create some tutorials of my own.

Thinking About Creativity

It’s the week of Thanksgiving and I am on vacation. I’ve been doing a lot of “stream-of-consciousness” reading on the internet. One article about something leads to another about something else and so on….A couple of good reads on GapingVoid – one on creativity and one on Idea Amplification. Another good read about Constrained Creativity on by Kathy Sierra on CreatingPassionateUsers.

Hugh MacLoud Talks about how the actual manfufacture of a product is incidental to how they make us feel about the product. He mentions three companies – Apple, Starbucks, and Nike. The attractiveness of these companies is not that they make a wonderful product (though I’m personally partial to Starbucks and Apple) but that they promote the belief of our human potential and that’s what we buy into because that is what we all want to believe in. In a related article he says “The market for human potential is infinite” and “the soul cannot be outsourced”.

The article on creativity is a list of suggestions he expands on and because it is a thoughtful list of what has worked for him it includes some very practical advice – such as keeping your day job – along with some just plain inspiring ones such as “Merit can be bought – passion can’t” and “Don’t try to stand out in the crowd – avoid crowds altogether”.

Kathy sierra’s article “Don’t Wait For the Muse” tells us to do something! The ideas will follow. “You can’t try things if you’re waiting for the muse to show up”

As I read Thomas Friedman’s “The World is Flat” I worry about the jobs that are being outsourced. I also think about the wealth of creativity we have in this country and wonder what we need to do for our students to encourage growth in that area. I want to be able to say that the “company” or industry that gets me excited and makes me believe in the potential of humanity is education. Creativity takes energy and energy comes from passion. We have to be willing to try new things sometimes even when we are running low on energy. Trying new things will allow us to experience the creativity that comes from the learning process and I believe that is how we can keep our passion alive. Passion and creativity are the greatest gifts we can give our students.

Setting Up a Classroom Blog

I have been searching for a way for teachers to ease into using blogs for classroom activities. We do not have student email at this time and so I wanted to come up with a way for students and teachers to blog without it being complicated. This is what I have come up with for a beginning.

Setting up the blog:

Go to http://learnerblogs.org/

Register a blog for yourself.

  • There are some tutorials you can go through if you like.
  • You can come to the lab and I will help you set it up.
  • You will be the administrator and monitor all comments.

Create a rubric

Create a post that your students must respond to.

You can also require students to respond to one other student’s comment on the post Some suggestions for comment requirements:

  • Comment must relate to the post.
  • Comment must not contain any inappropriate material
  • Comments must not contain instant messaging language, must use proper grammar, correct spelling and punctuation.

Before you have your students post their comments spend some time discussing what you feel is appropriate and what you expect. You can show them some examples of some educational blogs (see me if you need some links to use) to illustrate how this can be done.

Create a spreadsheet of student names and elements from the rubric and anything else you want to base your grades on.

  • Open your spreadsheet and check off the elements as you read the student comments.

This is a starting point that that will allow you to use a classroom blog using student comments. If you want to include some posts by the students you as the administrator will have to post for them. They could write their post and save it to their folder on the server and I can retrieve it and send it to you so you can post it to the blog. I can point you to some class blogs for some examples of how other teachers have utilized blogging with their classes. I would appreciate any suggestions out there.

All of this information came from other sources. In particular I want to thank http://mhetherington.net/blogs/ and http://anne.teachesme.com/

Maps Are Fun

A friends’ blog had a link to a site to make a map of all the places you have travelled and it looked like fun so I did two – one for travels and one for all the places I’ve lived.

I’d especially like to go to the northwest and to D. C. someday.


I’ve also been to Ontario, Canada, Mexico, and Great Britain. Here’s where I’ve lived


create your own visited states map or check out these Google Hacks.

It would be fun to have students research where certain crops are raised or states with certain types of industry are found and have them blog on their findings and use this app to create a map to go with their research blog entry.

hmmm…the main column of my theme is too narrow to show the entire map.  I guess I’m going to have to get more intentional about creating my own theme.

My Tech Meeting Shares

Four Links To Share


World History For Us All
http://worldhistoryforusall.sdsu.edu/dev/default.htm“World History for Us All is a comprehensive model curriculum for teaching world history in middle and high schools.”This curriculum:

  • offers a treasury of teaching units, lesson plans, activities, and resources.
  • introduces educators to an integrative approach to world history, culture, and geography.
  • presents the human past as a single story rather than unconnected stories of many civilizations.
  • helps teachers meet state and national standards.
  • helps students relate the histories of particular regions to world history as a whole.
  • enables teachers to survey world history without excluding major peoples, regions, or time periods.
  • helps students understand the past by connecting specific subject matter to larger historical patterns.
  • draws on up-to-date research in comparative, cross-cultural, and global history.
  • may be readily adapted to a variety of world history programs.


World History for Us All is a national collaboration of K-12 teachers, college and university instructors, and educational technology specialists. It is a project of San Diego State University in cooperation with the National Center for History in the Schools at UCLA. World History for Us All is a continuing project. Elements under development will appear on the site in the coming months.”

ZohoWriter

http://www.zohowriter.com

  • “Create, format, & edit documents online with a powerful WYSIWIG editor
  • Access & share your documents from anywhere using just your browser
  • Lock your documents while in shared mode
  • Post to your blogs (Blogger/Typepad/LiveJournal) from within ZohoWriter
  • Export your docs in word, pdf & sxw formats
  • Periodic auto-saving of your documents to prevent data loss
  • Spell check, tag your documents for ease of use”

K12Station Educational Site of the Day
http://www.k12station.blogspot.com

A Blog featuring educational websites.

30Boxes
http://30boxes.com
An online calendar with features for color coded multiple calendars.

  • “organize your day and your web stuff
  • share the things that you want to share (like parts of your schedule on your blog or myspace)
  • follow your buddies’ myspace, flickr, webshots, livejournal, heck, any personal blog”


Some Great Online Applications Part 1

Vicki Davis pointed me to these articles by Brian Benzinger. I have spent some time looking over some of the online apps mentioned on Solution Watch and thought I would add my two cents on some of them. Some were already familiar to me and some were new. The one I found most intriquing was Mayomi – an online mindmapping tool. I signed up for a free account and spent some time looking around. I think the idea is great but the site is all flash and kind of wonky to me. The interface while pretty is not the most intuititve nor is the search capability.
When I tried to create a simple mind map of the colors from primary to tertiary I couldn’t figure out how to get several forks added to one keyword. I think this site will need a little more work before it is easily usable.

Another site for making diagrams on-line is Gliffy and this one seems more user friendly and fun to use. You can copy, paste, and undo. Gliffy allows you to save, publish a read-only version of your drawing, or invite people to collaborate with you. You can choose shapes, colors, connectors and fonts. It seems fairly easy to use with most of the terms and tools familiar. You can export your completed diagram as an image file in several different formats so you can print it out, insert it into another document or presentation.
Competitious has an interesting application. You can create a graphic representation of the features of different items. It would be interesting for a government class to research platforms of different candidates, or an English class to make a graphic representation of characters in a book. Students can also save “clippings” from sites they research on the web.

These were all I had time for today but there is so much more out there. In part two I will look at some of the online word processors and note-taking programs.