Category Archives: The Teachers

What I’m Reading Now

Some wonderful things to read:

Solution Watch – young blogger takes on web 2.0 online applications and websites that are great tools for students and teachers!

K12 Online Conference – The best conference I never attended. There are tutorials, podcasts, articles, videocasts, keynote speeches and a ton of great, thought-provoking material all over the world and you can take part and never leave your living room!

Sun Associates Best Practices in Educational Technology Integration

Great stuff at all three of these sites. I’ll still be reading tomorrow!

What the heck is web 2.0?

I found a great definition for the “social” web on the NetSquared conference blog site. With all the buzz about web 2.0 which I have never really understood, this make sense to me.

“the social web is ‘the adaptation of internet tools for human interaction, communication and activism.”I’ve recently started reading “The World Is Flat” by Thomas Friedman. Every once in awhile a book comes along that seems to polarize people and the opinions I have read range from thinking it is brilliant to thinking it is total garbage so I had to see for myself.

I’ve just begun it and it is already interesting. In some ways the playing field is being leveled. The ease of communication and collaboration between people over any distance because of the internet makes it possible for many projects to be outsourced to many different places at once. A guy in India can work on one aspect while someone in Britain another and so on. This is pretty cool but the flip side means that people with angry and evil intentions can also use the same venue.

The playing field needs to be leveled in ways that can never happen on the internet though. The student with poor reading skills can’t get anything more out of the web than he can a book. The child with little parental guidance in real life will not have the skills to discern between helpful sites and sites that are anything but. We can’t improve our personal relationships through technology and no matter how good our intentions are, the virtual world reflects the real world and while there are wonderful positive things on the web there are some terrible things as well.

How does this new landscape translate for the student sitting in your classroom that isn’t getting enough to eat or lives in a home where violence and drugs are a normal thing. I guess I’ll have to finish the book but I have a feeling that those questions won’t be answered.

About K12 Online Conference

There is an interesting event happening online. It is an online conference.

“The “K12 Online Conference” is for teachers, administrators and educators around the world interested in the use of Web 2.0 tools in classrooms and professional practice! This year’s conference is scheduled to be held over two weeks, Oct. 23-27 and Oct. 30- Nov. 3 and will include a preconference keynote. The conference theme is “Unleashing the Potential.”

The starting point can be found here and the agenda can be found here. I’ve listened to most of the keynote and while I’m a little behind getting started it is very interesting so far. David Warlick uses the analogy of being on a train and everyone on the rail facing the same way. In a traditional conference the speaker is in front and everyone is facing the same way (on a rail!) and everyone is in the same place at the same time. Education has traditionally been the same way. This type of conference allows for “side trips” and the speakers and attendees hold ongoing conversations all happening from different places in different times.This is the read write web at it’s best. Everyone learning from each other and adding their unique viewpoints, reading, reflecting, and sharing their thoughts. I hope to squeeze as much out of this as time and computer access allows and blog about it here. Hope to “see” you there!

Open Office for Macs!

I am taking a little time to do some reading. The laundry is piling up and the dishes need to be washed but it will all be there tomorrow so here goes.

There was an article about Open Office soon running natively on Macs. I’m looking forward to it. I have always liked Open Office because it is something students can put on their home computers when they can’t afford the big expensive office suite and save their work so that it is compatible with said office suite. I should mention that teachers can put it on their home computers as well. There are no site licensing issues to worry about.

I have been able to use it on laptops running Linux and ported to OSX but now I won’t have to worry about porting it. It’s a shame more software isn’t this versatile.

I still have the other office suite running on computers at home and at work but I find myself using it less and less. It’s a habit I am working hard to break. If I am going to promote it I need to learn it well enough to teach it.

There is resistance to using it widespread and I don’t know if it is a matter of people being afraid of trying something new or an attitude of thinking that it must not be as good if it doesn’t cost anything, or a combination of both.

A quote from a DIGG comment “you would think schools would ask for programs to be made in other OS’s.” I would think software companies would want to make their programs in other operating systems. Oh wait – Open Office already does that – hmmm….

Tech Fair is Over

I was honored to do a morning and afternoon session and there were some good questions, great participation, and a few people who created their own blogs. If I’m honest I think I was better in the morning than the afternoon – more energy. The afternoon group didn’t seem to have as many questions. I have added a link on my wiki to a bloglines tutorial for those who are interested. I walked both groups through the process of setting up an account but I did not provide a handout for this part so if you need something to refer back to you can try this link.

The only drawback to TechFair is that the presenters are busy presenting and so can’t attend other sessions. I would really like to have sat in on the Elmo presentation and the MySpace presentation. We are going to have to start recording in video or at least in audio. It would be great to podcast some of these sessions. With the proximity of several school districts it would be fun to have one big event over several days and have folks from other districts present as well.

Monday I co-presented with our awesome librarian on email, copyright issues, lab scheduling, computer repairs, and library resources. I created the first part of our slides in OpenOffice using a laptop that runs Ubuntu. I saved it as a .ppt file and sent my part to our librarian who was able to add her slides without even knowing that it hadn’t originated in Powerpoint. I have had no problem tranferring documents back and forth between Microsoft and Ubuntu and so far I am very pleased with Ubuntu.

Interesting Times

I read a post by David Jakes that likened all the fuss about blogging being the way we will change education as one big taffy pull.

I get excited about new things whether it is software, gadgets, a new book by a favorite author, and yes – blogging. I don’t see it as the answer to all the things that are wrong with education.

I see it as an appropriate tool to enhance what is right with education. It is a fairly new tool and like anything new, we will experience growing pains and we will change it and mold it according to what works for us and it will eventually evolve or be discarded for the next new tool.

That’s what technology does. It changes. Change isn’t inherently good or bad. That’s why we have to constantly learn, test, evaluate, and adjust.

Our young people constantly dive into the pool without always checking the depth of the water. We can’t always stand on the side waving a warning they will find relevant if we refuse to go into the water ourselves.

Kathy Sierra has a post that talks about the space between the notes – where the music is. The important pause, the time to reflect.

“But real learning takes place between exposures to content! Long-term memory from learning happens after the training. The space between the lessons and practice is where the learning is made permanent. If we don’t leave that space, new content keeps rushing in to overwrite the previous content, before the learner’s brain has a chance to pause, reflect, and synthesize the proteins needed for long-term memory storage. “

I’m glad that there are people like Mr. Jakes who caution us to stop and look around as we try to navigate the ever-changing landscape of technology. I’m glad that there are people like Kathy Sierra who urge us to take time and space to reflect on where we have been and where we are going. I’m also grateful for the folks that urge us to wade in and get our feet wet.

We live in interesting times….

And So It Goes..

We may well be going back to the hospital Monday. Dale stayed home three weeks this time with one week of no antibiotics but he is having pain and fever again. I have packed just in case and had time last night to save a bunch of webpages to my jump drive. I will load them on my laptop so I can continue working even if I don’t have internet access. I have been getting my presentation on blogging together and this week I will work on suggestions for rubrics to facilitate assessment. I have completed handouts for reasons for reading blogs and reasons for writing and some basic instructions on using a feedreader to subscribe to blogs. I think the first step in getting teachers interested in using blogs is to show them some great examples and get them reading.

It’s funny to think about it now that I am so excited about blogging in education but the blogs that hooked me from the very start were not anything to do with public education. I began reading WaiterRant on a regular basis. There is some adult content there but I love his storytelling ability. The next was Creating Passionate Users and I never fail to get a boost of enthusiasm and excitement there. There are others on my blogroll that I read all the time and several are education oriented and I have learned so much from them and will continue to do so but in all the excitement of this tool for learning I will remember that like books, sometimes you just need to read for the pure enjoyment of it.

It’s been a very emotional week for me. The shock of walking in and seeing (or NOT seeing to be more accurate) my lab had been broken in to, and then the panic mode of realizing that Dale was showing signs of infection again, my son leaving for a two week trip – I’d like to borrow a cup of boredom from someone. If anyone out there has some to spare – please send it! If you are bored and want to make a trade we can talk…

Hard Lesson Learned

I am a very disorganized fly-by-the-seat-of-my-pants kind of person. I am constantly fighting this side of my nature. Today I learned a hard lesson. I went in to school to try to get some work done and as soon as I walked in I realized something was not right. Someone broke in and took some of the nicer equipment from the lab.

I just this year gave in and ordered a large flat screen monitor for myself. I hate to spend budget money on something that only benefits me but a good part of many of my days is spent staring at spreadsheets and I was having a lot of headaches. My computer, monitor, and mouse were gone. Also gone was the data projector, an older digital camera, an older but larger computer that the lab had just inherited, plus a couple of older laptops. I haven’t gone through my desk yet and may not even remember some smaller items. The laptop cart door was pried open and so were my desk drawers.

It seems like whoever did this didn’t have anything out for me personally. All my pictures and some wooden things I had painted and had sitting on my computer were all just set aside. Nothing was actually torn up except what was needed to gain access. I am thankful for that.

What hurts is that money that could have been used to upgrade out-of-date equipment will now have to go towards replacing what was stolen. My dreams for this lab are for the benefit of all our students and staff. I wish for cutting edge technology that will help our students get ready for the outside world, allow them to express their creativity, and furnish tools that instructors can use to enhance lessons. I am so sad that this happened. In the big picture it may not seem like much but in my little picture, my second home was broken into and things entrusted to my care to help others use were taken with no thought of how others might be affected.

If this stuff were to show up on my front porch in the middle of the night I would not look any further and I would know that the person or persons who took it realized that in the long run they were hurting every student at the school and felt bad about it. I know it isn’t realistic to hope for that but I will pray about it.

In the meantime I am slowly realizing that now I have lost many of my email addresses and documents I have saved that pertained to the lab and other aspects of my job. I also lost four years worth of stuff that I can’t begin to remember never mind replace. I will probably keep anything important on a laptop that goes with me from now on and I may ask Santa for an external hard drive that I could back up everything to and store somewhere safe. I also have learned that I should password protect anything and everything. I will clean out files on a more regular basis so I can remember what I have, and I will not let this make me not trust people.

Do We Guide Them Or Just Hope For The Best?

Students on the internet mean students will get off task sometimes. I live with two high school students. They belong to me. One of the hardest parenting responsibilities with teenagers deals with how much to let go and how much to hold on. Once your child gets that drivers license you realize how little control you have over their time and how it is spent. Once they walk out the door and get into that car – they drive off to 1. the place they told you they were going, 2. for the length of time they old you they would be there, and 3. for the purpose they told you they were going (and of course they go no where else). You also trust that all those driving lessons and talks about safety on the road will be taken to heart. I know my child would not get distracted tuning in the radio or finding the perfect song on his mp3 player while he was driving and I know he would not get frustrated with the slow driver in front of him and hotrod to get around them. Okay – you can stop laughing now. My point is you have to trust them because you have no other choice. They are moving away from you as a parent and making their own choices which hopefully will be ones they can live with in the long run. This prepares them for living their own lives. We as parents have already given them the skills they need (we hope) and now we just guide when they will let us and pray that we haven’t left out that one important thing that we should have taught but didn’t.

The same thing goes for our students and technology. If we don’t teach them – what choices will they make and who will then be responsible?

Vicki Davis puts in succinctly:

” Zero tolerance for mistakes is limiting our growth

I also think that the legal system in America will hold back our schools from giving such liberty to students. We will bleed on the cutting edge, however, we’ve create a zero tolerance for allowing mistakes to happen. Kids should be informed up front of expectations and consequences. Their behavior should be monitored vigilantly. When they do not meet expectations, they should experience consequences. Thus, we create net citizens who realize that their actions on the Internet have consequences.

The Trapeze Artist Metaphor

If our students don’t understand that there are consequences to their blog postings, it would be like a trapeze artist who trained with nets until he was 18. Every time he fell, he landed in the soft net. When he turned 19 and went to a circus, no one told him that there was no net. So, he was unafraid of the consequences of falling. And when he fell, it did permanent damage. He knew how to use the tools but did not understand consequences of making mistakes.

Conclusion

We need to teach effectively. We also need to create good New Net Citizens.”

We have the gift of an opportunity to reach far into the future as well as making the present much more pleasant. The concept of blogging doesn’t work if it doesn’t happen in the context of a community. If I was the only one who ever read this (and sometimes I think I am) then there wouldn’t be much of a point to it. I could keep a journal on my computer using any wordprocessor and add to it whenever I take a notion. To me the point of blogging is to network with others, to have an ongoing learning learning experience by reading, writing, commenting, and receiving feedback. It means that we become inspired by reading others thoughts and as we process what we read, we filter it through our own experience and viewpoint and write the results of that process. If we leave no room for mistakes then we leave no room for learning.

Timely Information

Vicki Davis has an article about Myspace on her blog – good stuff to know.

“Amazingly, THERE IS A WAY to remove things from Google cache. And with the National Association for College Admissions’s recent article on Myspace in College Admission, this will be a great thing for you to teach students to do after they clean up or delete their myspace accounts.”

Vicki has also been blogging the NECC 2006 conference and has tons of great information. I have enjoyed wandering through her notes and links. The same process during SXSW in Austin is what hooked me on blogging to begin with. I read everything I could find that was being blogged at that conference and discovered some of my favorite bloggers and web designers. At that time I was in the process of becoming a beginner at Cascading Style Sheets and while I am still definitely a beginner at least I know where to go for resources when I have time. Vicki is a great resource on blogging in education. Blogging is a great way to share conference notes with the folks back home who were unable to go. I hope that next year we will have some teachers blogging from TCEA!

Blogging is like Shopping

Reading blogs online seems a lot like shopping for clothes. Guys may not get this but ladies will. Sometimes you can shop and shop and see things that are sort of what you are looking for but not quite. You see things in other store windows and continue to roam around finding almost but not the perfect outfit. Then there are those times when you walk in and there are multiple items that would be perfect and they are “gasp” all on sale for half price! That’s the feeling I got this morning. I have been searching the internet for resources to put together the quintessential presentation on blogging in education. I want to wow everyone, generate enthusiasm, and have them walking out the door talking excitedly about the plans they have for blogging with their students, already making mental lists of uses that will take them far beyond the starting point I give them!

Presenting to groups is not my strong point. I am better at one-on-one instruction, so I plan to have very clear material and step-by-step instructions as well as some wonderful examples to show to try to make up for that.

This morning I read a post that really shows what the end product can be. Konrad Glogowski has a post about his eighth grade students blogging that shows how an instructor can use blogs to share what they are doing and how students can be blogging as a unique learning and research experience. Read the post to see why I am excited.

The teacher describes how his students are researching separate topics and learning from each other’s research and how it relates to their own. Other students reading and commenting on each other’s blogs created debates and caused each student to build on his own topic.

Instead of students simply responding to a teacher-directed topic they have moved on to become researchers and are motivating each other to continue the learning process. To me this is exactly what we want to see happen. This is my ultimate goal.

Technology Academy

A group of us spent the last three days discussing technology integration and planning the tech fair for fall. It was a fun time and I think some good ideas came out of it. We have begun a wiki of resources for online technology integrated lesson plans. I think this wiki will grow as we all learn and get a little more comfortable with the collaboration process. I will eventually put a link to it on my blog.
I’m very excited to be presenting on blogging this fall. I am fairly new to blogging myself and lately I have been realizing that more of the public is peeking in. It inspires me to try constantly to improve the content. If people read and comment there is almost an implied contract that you as the author promises to have articles worth reading. It also causes me to rethink blogging as a whole. Who is your intended audience? Do you write for yourself or to share with others? Up til now I have posted on whatever was most on my mind at the moment and so as I look back over my posts it looks as though I have two entirely different blogs mashed together. Matbe I need to have a separate place to put personal stuff. I will spend a little time looking around and some other folk’s blogs with this thought in mind and try to decide if I want to change the way I have been approaching this. If anyone has any thoughts on that please share.

Don’t Use Powerpoint As a Weapon!

I was reading some articles about PowerPoint today on Presentation Zen and stumbled on a few good things to remember. First was one I had heard before – the 10-20-30 rule. Ten slides, twenty minutes, thirty point font. Someone asked Guy Kawasaki at a presentation what to do if you have to use an hour for your presentation and he said not to worry – it would take forty minutes to get the projector to work with your Windows laptop. How true!

The second article had to do with design and the author described the rule of thirds. You divide your slide into vertical and horizontal thirds. Position text and images along these invisible lines for a more interesting design. Use the image to draw the eye to your text. He had some great examples.

I’d like to see our students better educated in the proper use of PowerPoint. When I see students attempting to put an entire term paper on a presentation I ask them to pretend they are driving down the highway reading billboards. Would they be able to read their slide do 50 miles an hour without causing a ten car pile-up? If not they probably have too much information.

Another problem some students have is getting past playing with the bells and whistles to gathering the actual research done and putting the information on their slides. I tell them to imagine they have been asked to bring a Birthday Cake to a party. You don’t frost and decorate a cake before you bake it so the same principle holds true with presentations. Make the cake and then using good design ideas – decorate it!