Adventures in Educational Blogging

I've Moved My Blog!

2010-01-24T16:31:00.003+08:00

I finally moved this blog to my own domain and into Wordpress. I first tried moving it to Wordpress.com. Wordpress did an amazing job of moving over 200+ posts and 400+ comments with the click of a button. If you are thinking of switching platforms, I think it is worth it. However, be warned that while it left my YouTube videos intact, it stripped out my Google Forms, Vimeo videos and a few other things.

Today I was talking with Kim Cofino who told me it was easy to set up Wordpress on my own domain. I already knew that on my own install, the media would not be striped out. Since I already have a domain hosted with BlueHost, I gave it a try.

It was incredibly easy. All the media came with it. I could have been done, but of course I had to start mucking around with themes, get Akismet blocking the spam, and other things. I haven't made it all pretty yet, but I need to work on other things, so I am stepping away from the dashboard for the time being.

I haven't figured out how to redirect an RSS feed yet, so please point your browser to my new blog, or change the feed to feed://www.ssedro.com/blog/?feed=rss2.

Thank you for reading my blog. I appreciate your visits and your comments.

P.S. If you are in need of a domain, give BlueHost a try. I've been hosting a Moodle and a mailing list there since early 2006 and they have been great to work with, constantly giving me more space, faster servers and easier controls. My Wordpress installed with the click of a button, and updates are just as easy.

What Tech Tools are You Using to Support Writers?

2010-01-23T23:07:00.004+08:00

I am preparing a three-part workshop for elementary teachers to familiarize them with different tech tools they could use to support their students as writers.

I am just getting started planning it. I know I will share some tools currently being used by teachers at my school. For example, one teacher has her students posting their poetry to a discussion board in Blackboard. I am amazed by the depth of the comments the classmates are leaving for the poets.

Another teacher is using Google Docs for working on mechanics and writing skills. The children follow a link from his website and then join in the activity, such as expanding a sentence, writing a better ending.

One class has research and then storyboarded movies on cyberbullying. Another uses Movie Maker to have the children create illustrated movies of their poems.

We have teachers using VoiceThread to create student book reviews. Others using Shelfari for students to recommend books to classmates. (NOTE: Most of these were not my ideas. We have a great staff so I am constantly learning from them.)

This will be a three part workshop that should show increasingly more advanced uses with each new sessions. I would very much like to crowd source it. Please complete the survey below to tell me your ideas for using tech to support, enhance, nurture student writers.

I know the survey doesn't work well with this Blogger template. Yet another reason why I need to move to WordPress. Please hit return any time you are in danger of typing off the page.

The last question is optional. However, if you give me your name I will be able to thank you in the credits of my presentation.

When you are done, please scroll to the end and press the submit button.

Thank you.

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Using Twitter to Get Real-Time Info on Situation in Haiti

2010-01-13T20:42:00.007+08:00

About an hour ago I was trolling the headlines for information on the devastating earthquake that hit Haiti today. The reports were not yet very informative other than that this is a huge disaster which caused much damage and loss of life.

Research done, I was about to turn off the computer for the evening when I saw the following tweet from Clarence Fisher:

I clicked on the usernames and began to read. And read. I was especially moved by following the picture that unfolded from @troylivesay's tweets. He is now up to 964 followers. I wonder how many he had prior to today.

Go ahead and give this use of social networking a try. If you don't already have a Twitter account, go to http://twitter.com/troylivesay and read his tweets there. Let the on-the-ground descriptions combine with what you hear from traditional news sources to give you a more complete picture. Let the tweets put a human face on the news.

A Video to Start Your Year

2010-01-11T09:39:00.001+08:00

I've seen links to this video zooming around the Twitterverse all weekend so I finally took a look. If you haven't seen it, it is worth your time as well.

A Bit of Toast for My Substitute Teacher

2009-12-01T15:41:00.004+08:00

One of the challenges of being a technology integrationalist is leaving realistic lesson plans for a substitute. Many of the subs do not feel confident enough in their tech skills to accept a sub job in a tech class. This is true even at the elementary level where I teach.

I want both the students and substitute to have a productive, enjoyable day when I am absent from school. I want the students to continue with our planned lessons whether or not I am there to teach them. I have finally found a way to do that.

The idea grew out of a past ISTE article that detailed how a team of high school teachers had turned their classroom upside using podcasts. They began to podcast their lectures in advance of the lesson being taught. Students viewed the podcast as homework and then came into class ready to discuss the lecture/demonstration and to complete the lab work. It gave them more 1:1 time with individual students, and student achievement was growing significantly.

That project is beyond the scope of what I am able to do in my classroom at this time, but the idea of podcasting my lessons in advanced seemed like the answer to the lesson plans for substitutes problems.

Most of the time, I need a way for the substitute to show the students how to do something on their computer. This lends itself nicely to using one of the online screen recording programs that are available online.

Chris Betcher makes many instructional screencast tutorials so at his recommendation I decided to try ScreenToaster.

Setting up a ScreenToaster account was quick, free and easy. After a few rehearsals, I was ready to click the big record button and create my screencast. My first attempt was done on my Lenovo X200 tablet and it was not able to render the video and the audio fast enough, so the audio lagged behind.

Free online screencasting tool

For my next attempt, I created a tutorial for my staff. I opted to create the screen recording without audio, and to then go back and record the audio as the recording plays back. ScreenToaster makes it very easy to do this. This method worked better. It kept the audio synced with the video.

Free online screen recorder

When the video is finished, you have the choice to download the video or to upload it to various places. I choose to upload it to ScreenToaster's own site. This free option allowed me to save the video in a higher quality format that if I were putting it into You Tube. I felt that was important since a tutorial isn't much use if the screen recording is too blurry or pixelated to read.

When the videos is published, it can be viewed on the ScreenToaster website. You are also provided with an embed code so you could embed the video into a blog or other online tool. I run the video's URL through a URL shortening site such as TinyURL so that I have an easy URL to add to my lesson plans.

So far, both uses of ScreenToaster seem successful. Today will be a big test as my substitute will be using it two different screencasts with three different classes. I am eager to read her notes and to see the progress the students made.

I haven't used any other screen recording applications lately so I cannot say how ScreenToaster compares to the other options available. I do wish ScreenToaster gave an option to do some editing of the video before you post it, even to clip the ragged ends of the video but I have not found any editing tools in ScreenToaster. You can strip out the audio and try again if you don't like how it sounds.

Are you using screencasts in your school or classroom? What screen recording software have you tried? Which would you recommend? I'd appreciate hearing of your experiences and recommendations.

A Better Model for Tech Professional Development

2009-11-11T20:29:00.003+08:00

Last year my principal recognized that our schedule lacked time for tech professional development. There were few built in times, and teachers have so many commitments that they rarely can attend offerings after school.

We had just moved to a new professional development model that required staff to be in some sort of training every Monday after school. Each month those Mondays were devoted to staff meetings, collaborative project meetings, or departmental meetings. This year, she took one of those monthly meetings and devoted it to optional technology workshops and asked me to develop the model.

Right from the start, she and I knew that a one-size-fits-all model didn't work because our staff's skills varied so from one person to the next. We also knew from reading research and from experience, that one-shot workshops tend to lack impact.

To provide differentiation and avoid the one-shot problem, we created a number of three-part series workshops. Each series had an introductory workshop labelled 101, a developing-level workshop labelled 201, and more advanced workshop labelled 301.

For the most part, 101 workshops gave an introduction to the topic and suggested ways it could be used. 201 workshops were more hands on. 301 workshops were largely work times where the participants could create their own resources or projects with someone their to offer assistance as needed.

For the first term of workshops, we wanted to focus more on teacher proficiencies than on technology integration. Thanks to a number of talented teachers stepping up to teach their colleagues we offered the following workshops this semester.

AV - using our Vado cameras and our digital voice recorders, using that media in projects

Interactive Whiteboard - helping teachers create start using the new ActivInspire software to create their own IWB resources

OneNote - using Microsoft Office OneNote 2007, a program that is used extensively by our admin team

Web Presence - helping teachers create an easy to manage web presence to use with their class (e.g. a blog, a wiki)

Wikis - what they are, how to use them with your students, how to start one

All of the workshops were optional UNLESS someone lacked a skill they needed to do their job. Teachers were free to to attend any workshop as long as they had the pre-requisite skills. If a teacher already had basic skills, they could skip the 101 level and join for the 201 level. Likewise, if a teacher took the 101 level workshop, they were not required to take the 201 and 301 levels.

Although the workshops were optional, 31 (out of 55 possible) faculty members attended workshops on the first Monday. By our second Monday, we had people from central administration also attending the workshops. We will hold the third session next Monday.

Not all workshops were equally popular. Some had a strong showing for the 101 level but then had fewer people at the 201 level. Ideally we would have pre-surveyed staff to gauge interest, but the start of the year was so busy we didn't want to ask them to do one more thing at that time.

On post-workshop surveys staff consistently stated that the workshops were just right in terms of level of difficulty, amount of information and usefulness. A number of teachers indicated that wished they could clone themselves so that they could attend more than one at a time.

Equally importantly, many teachers went back to their rooms and put the knowledge to use. We could tell this was happening because they would ask for support during the month, or they arrived at the 201 workshop full of questions that arose from their classroom experiences during the month.

In preparation for semester two, we sent out an optional planning survey asking which (if any) of this term's workshops they would take if it were offered again, and which of the possible new workshops they would be interested in attending. It also asked if they had other topics they would like to see offered. Based on that survey, we will repeat a few workshops on one of our late start in-service days during semester two.

Equally informative to me was that fact that on the first day the survey was open, 31 staff members completed it. That tells me that despite being very busy people, our staff continue to value these workshops and want a voice in the topics offered.

Have you found a technology professional development model that works for your staff?

Looking for Blogs Written by Grade 5 or 6 Students

2009-11-11T20:26:00.004+08:00

One of my fifth grade classes will start blogging soon. As they learn about blogging, I want them to visit well-written student blogs so they can learn what a blog is and how to comment appropriately.

If you know of student blogs that would meet these requirements, I would appreciate you leaving me their URLs in the comments.

Thank you.

My Favorite iPhone Apps

2009-11-01T16:37:00.022+08:00

At long last, 32 GB iPhone 3Gs are available in Singapore. I've had mine just shy of two weeks and am loving it. I received an iPod Touch last summer as part of a deal when I purchased a new Mac so I was already familiar with the operating system.

Here is a list of apps I am finding especially useful.

Todo. My previous post discussed how I was using this program in conjunction with the web-based Toodledo. Both are still working very well for me. I love having my task list always with me, and still being able to enter tasks via the keyboard when I am at a computer. Toodledoo is free. Todo is not free.

Instapaper - This program started as a web site with a browser plugin. The idea is that when you find something online that you want to read at a later time, you click the plugin button and the page is harvested and saved in your free Instapaper account. The premise is good, but I very rarely find myself online thinking, "Gee, what should I read now." Enter the iPhone app. You can sync the iphone app with your account on the website. That downloads the articles to your iphone for offline reading. I used this a bunch on my Touch since I'd often find myself in a place without wifi with a bit of time on my hands, such as in a taxi or eating lunch. However, I didn't maximize my use of this app until I found the next app...

Twittelator Pro - This is a robust Twitter client. For me, it's best feature is its integration with Instapaper. My PLN on Twitter is constantly posting links to great blog posts. In the past I ended up following the links and then bookmarking them with www.diigo.com but I rarely remembered to go back and read them. Now I find I prefer to access Twitter from my iphone. I am constantly sending Twitter links to Instapaper. I feel like I am finally back in touch. And with my Twitter PLN vetting the sites for me, it is all quality reading. This is a paid app.

Tweetie 2 - Although most iphone Twitter clients can check more than one account, I find it more convenient to keep my personal account in a different client than my tech account. Tweetie 2 is a quick app with a clean and clear interface. I like that DM discussions appear in an iChat-style of window. Tweetie is also a strong desktop client. It might be Mac only. The iphone app is a paid app.

Shopper - As you would guess, this is a program for storing shopping lists. I've made lists for different places such as the shops across the street, the nearby mall, downtown, etc. When I am at those locations, I check the list and often find items I had forgotten I needed. This app does much more than I need it to do, such as allowing you to share lists with others. It has worked well for me because it is quick to use and it is easy to add new items. This is a paid app.

1Password - I had this on my Mac and now I also have it on my iphone. The desktop program plugs into your browsers adding a button. When you visit a site that requires you to login, you can click the button and it will log you in. I also use it to store my passport details, my work permit, and other important numbers. The program can also be used to generate strong passwords.

The desktop and iphone versions can be synced across a wireless network. The iphone version doesn't plugin to Safari. Instead, you access sites using 1Password's own browser. It is handy so you don't have to try to type your logins on the iphone keyboard. Both are paid apps.

Evernote - For a while I kept a Zoho wiki as a catch all for information I needed to access at home and away. However, adding information to it was a bit tedious since I need to login, make a new page, etc. Evernote is a web based notebook for storing any and everything. You can use it at the web site. You can also download the desktop client (Mac, Windows, Linux and probably others) and access your notes from there. I have it on my Mac at home, my Windows XP machine at work, and on my phone. It syncs my notes across all my computers and with the website. Given time, the program even reads your images and can search text in them. The iphone app gives you another way to access your information. Unfortunately, you need to get online for it to do so which meant that on my Touch I often couldn't access my notes when I needed them. Now with an iPhone that is a non-issue. The app, like the website, is free for basic use.

Gym Buddy - This app stores my workouts. It has workouts and exercises already in it. It also allows you to add your own. That process is a bit tedious and has a few quirks, but the program has lots of really useful features such as workout timers, calendar and history. It is easy to edit the reps and the weights. I am finding it very useful.

When I switched from my Touch I was dreading having to enter my own exercises again. Then I poked around the app and found it could backup to your computer using SyncDocs, an Open Source project from SourceForge that lets you sync without any configuring. It was incredibly simple to use and all my exercises, workouts and logs transfered cleanly. This is a paid app.

Of course I am using Fring and Skype. A friend told me he purchased a Skype In account with a number in his home area code. Friends and family back home can dial a local number and reach him. As a result, they call more often. Since my friends and family very rarely call me, I'm thinking of giving it a try. Both Fring and Skype are free iphone apps, but a Skype In online number has a fee.

MPR Radio - I may live in Singapore, but I find I miss listening to the news back home as I get ready for work. Then we found this app which makes it easy to stream our local public radio station. Now if only there were a way to block out the pledge drives. Of course, now that I am listening again, I need to support the station financially. But after I do that, I can switch over to using the Public Radio app until the pledge drive is over. It doesn't really matter if "All Things Considered" is streaming from Minnesota, Boston or Chicago. Both apps are free.

Stanza - This ebook reader is well designed. I love that built into it is access to many free sources for ebooks. It seems each time the app updates there are more sources. It also links you to paid sources. In either case, the books download into the program. It is highly customizable in terms of font size and style. You can lock the screen so the orientation doesn't keep switching if you are leaning or laying down. It has a built in dictionary. You can add bookmarks. It remembers where you left off in each book you are reading. This app is well worth paying for. The only feature I see that it lacks is the ability to mark up the text. I don't need that since I use it for pleasure reading, but the more scholarly readers may need that.

TripIt - I've been using the free TripIt website for the past year. I love that the site can suck in my hotel reservations and airplane tickets, combining them into one neat itinerary. It will even print maps to help me find the hotel. I love being able to send my family a tidy itinerary with all my contact details for the entire trip. Now there is a free iphone app. It makes it easy for me to check my itinerary any time a question arises. On my Touch I needed to let it sync with the website when I had wifi available. After doing that the information was available offline.

Packing - To get ready for those trips, I now use Packing. As you would expect, the program helps you pack for your trip. There are numerous apps with similar features. I choose this one because it allows you to easily add your own items. I was amazed to realize that quite a few of the apps in this genre didn't allow that. I also like that it has the option to only view the items left to pack or the items already packed. It also lists handy tasks that need accomplishing that you might forget, such as storing valuables, shutting off appliances and other handy reminders. This is a paid app.

myBatteryLife - is a paid utility. It tells me the % of battery left and then goes one step further. It lists how that % translates into talk time, internet on 3G, internet on Wi-Fi, video playback, and audio playback. Rechargeable batteries are usually good for X number of recharges before their ability to hold a charge decreases too much. Ideally, you should run your batteries down rather than keeping them always topped up. That keeps the batteries in good shape. I am finding that based on the phone's own icon, I would think I should charge it, but then myBatteryLife shows me that it is really still at 60%.

Mental Case - As a specialist teacher, I work with around 340 students. Unfortunately, I am not especially good at remembering names. Last year I started using Flashcard Exchange and it helped but creating the cards was tedious. This year, I purchased Mental Case for my Mac and for my Touch. Mental Case makes it really easy to create different types of flash cards. I loved that using Mental Case I could screen capture the students' photos out of Powerschool. I made flash cards for an entire grade level in an hour. Then I used Wi-Fi to sync the stack onto my iPhone. Now I can practice when I am in taxis or waiting for a meeting to start. The desktop version can import from the Flashcard Exchange website in csv format, meaning text will transfer but images will not. Mental Case is a paid app on the iphone.

Maps - is a built-in app but I find it so useful that I wanted to mention it here. Last summer I used it often on my Touch. When I had Wi-Fi it could figure out where I was, and then route me to where I wanted to go. If I had to go somewhere new, I would do the searching when I was home and then the directions were saved on my Touch. Once when I was out, I was able to sip from an unsecured network to grab directions. When we were driving from Chicago down to Bloomington (and back) it gave better directions than the GPS we were using. It directed us right into the driveway of the rental car station. I have only used the driving directions but it also gives walking and bus directions. Now that I have an iphone, it can save the day even when we don't have Wi-Fi available.

I have many other apps on my iphone, but these are some of the ones I use most often, or that I thought might be of use to educators. I'd appreciate hearing about the apps you are finding most useful on your Touch or iPhone.

Managing My Tasks

2009-08-05T16:49:00.009+08:00

For years, I've used Life Balance to manage my tasks at home and at work. It is made by Llamagraphics, a company with a good philosophy towards life and work. I started using it back in the mid-1990s when I bought my first PDA, a Palm Pilot.

It has served me well so as I transitioned from my aging Palm Zire 31 to the ipod Touch, I purchased the iphone version of the program. It syncs beautifully with my MacBook Pro via wifi and has many other features I like. However, I couldn't get it syncing with my Windows XP computer at work. Further investigation reveals that the problem lies in a blocked port.

I could throw myself on the mercy of my tech director and beg to have that port opened for me, but since I am a tech coordinator, I know that is not a great solution. In a school our size, that model is not compatible with a stable and secure network. Therefore, despite my investment in money and time, I began looking for another solution.

A good starting place was this article at Lifehacker. It showed me a few of the available options and brought to my attention a syncing solution - find an iphone app that syncs via the web with an online app. That would get me around my port problem. It would also allow me to enter new tasks from the Touch or from a computer whether I was at home or at work.

Two features I really liked in LifeBalance were the subtasks and the places. Subtasking made it easy to plan and track a project. Places helped me work smarter by reminding me to pick up the dry cleaning when I was at the grocery store next door.

Applying this filter to my search, only a few programs had subtasks, places and a web app. I settled on Todo by Appigo. It is powerful and customizable. It uses color and icons well to convey a great deal of info without cluttering the screen. It allows subtasks in the form of projects. It also allows checklists so you can whip out a shopping list without having "bananas' end up on your list at the same level as "file taxes."

Todo has a number of sync options. In addition to syncing via iCal (and Outlook with a third party add-on) it syncs with Remember the Milk and Toodledo. Both are web-based task management applications.

I chose Toodledo because I liked the interface better and it is highly customizable. It also allowed me to sync with their free account. However with Toodledo, I can only sync subtasks if I have their $14.95 per year pro account. Fortunately, they let you try the pro account for free for a week to see if it works for you. (Remember the Milk requires a paid pro account to do any syncing at all.)

So far it is working well. Despite my best attempts to trip it up, it is syncing cleanly. I did find I had to switch views in Toodledo to see the subtasks in the way I was expecting. Fortunately that was easily done.

Already I am appreciating being able to use the web app at home and at school. When I am out running errands at work, it is great to have my list with me and to be able to add items on the fly as people grab me in the halls with a request.

Do you use technology to tame your to-do list? What technology do you use? How is it working for you?

Can This iPod Mini Be Saved? Yes!

2009-07-02T10:17:00.005+08:00

I'm having a happy moment - I just replaced the battery in my ipod mini.

This is the ipod that I swim with, but one day this spring, I neglected to close the waterproof case before entering the pool. Took me half a length to figure out what was wrong. By then, the ipod had drowned. At first the display would show but the click wheel didn't work so it wouldn't play. It wasn't very interested in charging, either. Eventually the display disappeared as well, but I was hoping that was due to dead battery, not forever dead ipod.

Kent went right to the internet to research what to do. I also sent out a few tweets requesting advice. Based on what we read, I put it directly beneath the air conditioner so the condenser do its thing. We also gently blow dried it, but it didn't look good. However, people online said to give it lots of time.

I don't remember how long we waited, but I think it was after a few weeks that the ipod showed signs of convalescing. One of our attempts to charge it made the Apple logo appear on the screen. However, both the charger and the ipod became hot which I figured was a Bad Thing. We let it rest some more.

A week or two later, Kent was able to plug it into a computer and add music it it. However, the click wheel didn't spin so you could only play what it wanted to play and you couldn't adjust the volume.

At long last, (I think it was approximately two months after the accident) the click wheel began working again. The battery also quit heating up. However, the battery life was very short. Kent did some research and found that replacement batteries were easy to come by, so I brought the ipod back to the US with me when I made my summer visit.

I've been home in the USA for two and a half weeks. I listen to the mini on my Logitech speakers and in my car using the FM digital transmitter I've had for years. Both devices charge it while I listen to it. I can also use it for approximately 30 minutes on its own before the battery is completely dead and the ipod loses its memory. The ipod had made such an amazing recovery that I decided it was worth investing in a new battery.

I did some research online. Originally I was going to get a more powerful battery that would last longer. However, those are thicker than the old battery and a few people wrote that cracked the display or crushed the circuitry when they reassembled the ipod.

Based on that information, I opted for a replacement battery the same size as the original. After reading more reviews, I went with the Sonnet Technologies' Battery for iPod. I ordered it from Amazon.com for around $21.00. It came with a Phillips screw driver, a flat head screw driver and a prying tool. Reviewers had warned that the prying tool wasn't up to the task of getting the end cap off, but since Kent had already opened the ipod numerous times, that part of the process wasn't so hard.

Although the battery came with an instructional CD-ROM, reviewers hadn't found it terribly helpful, stating that better were to be found on You Tube. I Googled "How to replace an ipod mini battery" and found a great tutorial in the Modmyi.com forums that was created by ifixipodsfast.com. It was clear, showed each step, and was full of helpful tips.

After watching it through, I grabbed my ipod and watched again, stopping the video as needed. I didn't notice the time when I started, but I suspect it took only ten or fifteen minutes from start to finish. It was a great feeling when I turned it on and the Apple logo appeared on the screen. It is charging right now. I hope this gives me more time with this trusty device.

So, despite my lack of experience doing this sort of thing, I recommend it to anyone with an aging ipod mini. Of course, you do this replacement at your own risk. I hope it goes as well for you. Let me know how it goes.

Photo by Jason Prini.

Good Bye Web Pages, Hello Web 2.0!

2009-05-29T12:34:00.005+08:00

I've been caught in the typical blogger's irony; we only have time to write when there is nothing to say. That clearly has NOT been the case for the past few months. My superintendent called for an IT Summit so we spent two very educational days looking at all things tech in our school. My students are at their capable, end-of-year best as they work on final projects. My teachers have outdone themselves with great tech integration, and we are looking at a new, and hopefully more effective professional development model for next year.

However, I'm not going to write about any of those topics. Instead, I want to look at our move away from mandatory teacher websites.

Currently, in the primary and intermediate schools, teachers were required to have a web page. In years gone by, this took a ridiculous amount of their time considering its minimal impact on student learning. A few teachers really excelled and it because a hub for the classroom. For most, it was a true burden; something that weighed them down.

A few year ago, the tech coordinator worked with the web manager to create a basic template. Other than needing the class photo inserted, everything that was required was on that page. Teachers never needed to touch it unless they had a desire to do so.

At the same time, we switched from Microsoft FrontPage for hosting teacher web pages, to Contribute. A further change was using JAlbum to generate web photo galleries. Teachers drop a folder of photos into the correct place on the server and Voila! In an hour or two they appeared in the online photo galleries.

Teachers loved the ease of this and the size of our photo galleries soared. At first the quality level was low and the volume was high. That has evened out a bit with time. Now those photo galleries also host student-created movies and podcasts. It has worked well and the photo galleries receive far more visitors than the teacher web pages.

Now we are going to make the next step and do away with teacher web pages. Other than grandfathering in one teacher who has an extensive website tied closely to his curriculum, the rest of the teacher websites will go away at the end of this year. There will no longer be a requirement that teachers have any web presence besides their photo gallery.

For those teachers who do want more of a web presence, I will work with them to find a platform that best meets their needs. For some it will be a blog. One of our art teachers has already made that leap and is making good use of a Wordpress blog. For others it will be a wiki such as those being used so effectively down in our primary school. Still others may create a Ning. In any case, we are moving away from static web sites to more dynamic, interactive tools.

We will have one blog platform and one wiki platform that we support. Teachers are welcome to use any blogging or wiki platform, but we will only support those two to for practical reasons. In the primary they have gone with Wetpaint as their wiki platform. The COPA laws have not been a hindrance for them because students are either working as a whole group with the teacher on his/her account, or they are working at home with their parent using the parent's account.

For our division, the decision is trickier since our students are able to work autonomously and are more likely to edit maliciously. We would prefer to use Wetpaint since our staff is familiar with it from our conference sign up wiki. We also prefer its looks and its features. However, the inability to create accounts for students under 13 years of age is a big stumbling block. It may drive us to Wikispaces with their very student-friendly accounts and good customer service.

Wisely, my principal is not mandating that teachers have any web presence. Teachers are very busy and for some, none of those tools fit their teaching style and needs. I suspect others will end up using many different web tools with a blog for communication, a wiki for student projects, and other tools, such as Voicethreads pulled in where appropriate.

I'm excited to see these changes roll out. I hope teachers are relieved to be released from web sites. I think it will lead to more thoughtful and powerful uses of online platforms. These platforms invite student and parent participation. I'm glad to see us officially joining the Read-Write web.

Where is your school in this process? Have you chosen an outside host for blogs or wikis? Which did you choose? Why?

Conference Registration Made Easy Using a Wiki

2009-04-06T15:58:00.011+08:00

Strengths and Goals Conferences
In the fall our classroom teachers have three-way conferences. They meet with each student and their parents to discuss the child's strengths and to set goals. On that same day, if parents or children wish, they may also schedule a conference with any of the specialist teachers (e.g. art, Chinese, computers, library, music, P.E.)

Sibling and some support student conference are pre-scheduled. After that point, most teachers assigned conference times to the rest of their families and sent home the letter informing families of their scheduled time.

The system worked reasonably for classroom teachers, but not as well for specialists since families contacted the classroom teacher, who then contacted the specialist, who then contacted the family. It often took many phone calls.

Enter the Wiki!
In an effort to improve that process, we decided to try using a wiki so that parents could schedule their own specialist conferences. We decided to use a private Wetpaint wiki. We choose Wetpaint because it isvisually attractive, easy to use, the table feature works well, and private wikis can be accessed with a generic password account. We did not register it as an education wiki so ours had ads along the side but they were no problem since this wiki was not being used by children.

When users visit the wiki, they are greeted with a login screen. A few key users, like myself and the principal had their own account for administering the wiki. Beyond that, I created a generic teacher account and a generic parent account. At first, the teacher account and the parent accounts had the same level of access, but we decided to raise the teacher's level so that they
could lock their page if needed.

The design of the wiki is simple. The front page contains basic directions and links to each teacher.

Clicking on the teacher's link takes you to their schedule. Clicking on the EasyEdit button allows them to add their name to a timeslot on the schedule. Clicking Save records their changes and returns them to the web page.

(Note: When I shrunk my browser window to fit more into this image, the table formatting on the schedule changed appearance.)

Originally, only the specialists were taking part, but as the process moved forward, 18 classroom teachers and a few of the support teachers decided to join the pilot.

Before the wiki was opened to parents, teachers entered the sibling conferences onto their schedule. Our school pre-schedules sibling conferences to ensure those families have back-to-back conferences for their children. Teachers also entered in the pre-scheduled support students conferences to ensure that the support teacher was able to take part. Support families were asked to NOT move their child's conference without contacting the classroom teacher to ensure that the support teacher would be able to attend.

For support teachers with pull-out classes, families were not able to sign up directly for the conference due to confidentiality issues. Instead, the schedules showed which slots were open and which were already reserved, making it easier for families to find a time that worked for them when they contacted the support teacher. One support teacher reported that this was the first time ever that he wasn't double-booked between his push-in and pull-out student conferences.

Concerns and Solutions
We had many concerns at the start of the pilot. The biggest was that allowing families to add their names to the schedule actually meant they could change ANYTHING on the page. The wiki did not allow us to someone lock parts of the page while leaving the other parts available for editing. Someone could intentionally or unintentionally delete large parts of the page. Since we were using generic logins for convenience sake, we would not even know who did it.

Fortunately, Wetpaint (like most wikis) has a robust history section. You can roll the page back to any previous revision. If someone messed up a page, we could roll back to a point where it still had most of its data. As a further safeguard, we asked the instructional assistants to print out their teachers' pages each day during the sign up period so we could refer to them if needed.

Another concern was simultaneous edits of the same page. Fortunately, our testing showed that if two people were editing the same page at the same time, when they tried to save, it warned them. It gave them the option to overwrite or cancel. We told them to cancel and try again. Even if they chose to overwrite, Wetpaint seemed to be cancelling.

Still other concerns were that someone might accidentally delete someone else's name, leaving that space erroneously open for a third person to sign into. Our directions at the top of the page told families what to do if they accidentally delete someone's name. It also let them know we were printing the schedule each day so we could check our records to see who had that slot previously. Fortunately, we only received one report that a name had been deleted, and further research showed that was erroneous; the parent had originally signed up on the wrong teacher's schedule.

A final concern was that some families would be intimidated by the technology. The letter that went home told families that they could still contact the teacher via email or phone, but warned that the slot they wanted may be gone by the time the teacher got to their message.

Training
In the month before the wiki opened to parents, I held training session for the teachers and instructional assistants so they could learn how it all worked, and so that I could help them if they needed to change the schedule, since making changes to the table was the trickiest part of this entire process. I created a handout that they could take away with them. It was also stored in our tech help One Note so they could refer to that as needed.

Both trainings went quickly and well. Most participants were surprised at how easy it was to use.

Timeline

January: Set up wiki. Many meeting with my principal to revise the design and the directions.

February: Train specialists and support teachers, train instructional assistants, solicit classroom teachers to pilot the process

Early March: Train the classroom teachers. Enter the pre-scheduled sibling and support conferences into the classroom schedules. Letter sent home to families. Open the wiki to families.

March 16 -17: Strength and Goals Conferences

Results
We were surprised that the sign up process went so smoothly. We expected confusion, mistakes, and technical problems. Fortunately, we had almost none. One teacher reported that everything went so smoothly that she didn't need to make a single phone call to parents. The biggest problem was families with multiple children mixing up their own conference times, but that had nothing to do with the wiki (and probably everything to do with busy families.)

We are in the process of surveying participants. With most of the surveys in, the response from teachers, especially specialists was overwhelming supportive. Using the wiki made the schedule process easier and in some cases, much quicker. They reported that some families who knew each other, even arranged time swaps since they could "see" the entire schedule. Other teachers reported that during the sign up week, they could see some families changing their own time repeatedly as scheduling conflicts arose. The wiki was able to accommodate their needs.

Among the families, the response was also strongly positive. One parent asked, "You aren't going to take this away from us, are you? All teachers should have to use it! It was great!" Of the 10% who did not like it, most wrote a comment regarding that it worked well, but they aren't comfortable with technology.

All in all, using a wiki to schedule strengths and goals conferences was a success. We are discussing whether or not to require it next year. The primary school is not looking at using it because their teachers prefer being able to schedule the conferences without giving families a choice so that they can maximize their own effectiveness as teachers, scheduling the challenging conferences for when they can best direct them.

Are you using technology to allow families to schedule conference times? I'd like to hear about it.

Not Only is the Jury Still Out... Court Isn't Even in Session

2009-03-08T21:25:00.002+08:00

This is my third year at my current school. I arrived when the IWBs did. That first year I found it difficult to lead the charge because I was trying to figure out a new school, a new country, and Windows after many blissful years in Mac Land.

I thought all would be different my second year because...
- I finally had a board of my own.
- I wasn't quite so new.
- I'd been doing my reading and gathering resources.

Well, it turned out, my lab was closed most of the year and the room I taught in could accommodate the IWB or the children, but not both. And while my reading was helpful, it only took me so far. Our wonderful trainer that we brought in, Jenny Black from Tanglin Trust School, could show me excellent examples of the boards being used for higher order thinking, but I was unable to transfer those examples to my tech class.

So now we are in year three. My admin is comfortable putting boards in the rooms of teachers who want them, and has been helping me find time in next year's calendar for more training. I have a few teachers doing great things with the board. It is integral to how they teach. They aren't using it as an expensive mouse. The kids are at the board doing work. The work is captured and saved to the CMS where they can refer to it as they work on their homework. Many other teachers are using flipcharts created by a teammate. It is better than not having the board, but it is not disruptive, not leading to the revolution.

Given this history, you can see why, when someone asked me recently to explain why IWBs are so essential, I was unable to do so. It is not that I'm convinced they aren't essential, it's that we are still mostly using them in old ways to do old things. We get glimmers of new ways, but just glimmers as we scurry here and there under a pile of worthwhile but large initiatives. We spend time feeling bad we haven't put more time into IWBs.

But of course, that is just more doing old things the old way. I suspect that as long as we look at the in-service model for transformation, we'll never get there. Too often, in-services are dead ends. We need instead to look more at the Understanding by Design model, and look at where we want kids to be and work backward from there. Training staff is important, but I've found kids learn tech skills best when I don't teach them as separate skills, but embed them into projects. The point then isn't the skill, it is the project, and we get a two-for-one type of deal.

Can we do the same with IWBs and other potentially disruptive technologies? Can we quit holding in-services to get teachers up to speed, and instead, start with where we want kids to be and then pull in the tools that best help us get them there?

I don't know. I think it might work better for some. Others probably won't feel comfortable to make the shift. They'll keep wanting direct instruction, waiting until they are good enough at it to use it. Of course, they never get there.

What do you think? Could this model work better? How would you start it? I'm interested in what you have to say.

Need IWB Resources for Chinese Teachers

2009-03-01T18:43:00.003+08:00

Help!
I'm really struggling to help our elementary Chinese teachers use their IWBs to powerfully impact student learning. They've seen people using them to present Powerpoint presentations, and they are correctly unimpressed.

I've looked through the blog posts from IWB Challenge participants and I learned a bunch from them, but my teachers are needing to see and use ready made charts.

I've check Diigo groups. I've searched Promethean Planet and found a few flipcharts that helped them. But I need more. I need to innundate them with ideas, or put them in touch with an active group. Making this more challenging, is that they don't teach writing. They are a speaking and culture class.

If you have any suggestions of where I can find the resources I'm seeking, please leave me a note in the comments.

Thank you in advance.

OneNote

2009-02-26T19:33:00.005+08:00

Last year, our school began using OneNote. It is part of our Microsoft Office bundle. One of the tech coordinators started playing with it, found it useful, and soon we were using it as a team.

OneNote is a virtual notebook. It has pages. Those pages can be in sections. You can even create subpages and subsections. Information is easily moved from one section to another, or one notebook to another. Pages can contain text, graphics, audio and other items. Items can be flagged and they show up in your Outlook to-do list. Pages can be as long as you need them to be.

Adding information is easy. No need to create text boxes. Just click anywhere on a page and type. Need a table? Just start typing the top rows contents. Tab each time you want a new column. Hit enter to go down to the next row. A full range of formatting options are available such as bullets, highlighting, strikeout.

You can add your ready made documents, such as Word documents as a link (and it appears as an icon on the page) or as a printout. In the latter case, the entire document appears on the page.

OneNote has a powerful search feature. You can search that notebooks or all of your notebooks. The search feature will even search photos. For example, if you had a photo of a business card, it could find the person's name in the photo.

Notebooks can be private or shared. If you store them on a server, you can still work locally when you can't access that server. The notebook will sync with the server the next time it is connected. If the notebook is in Sharepoint, it will even update when you work on it from home.

OneNote is proving to be a powerful tool for collaboration. We can all work on it, and it keeps all our pages synced. At a basic level, think of it for agendas and minutes. However, since more than one person can edit a page at a time, it is good for drafting documents and polishing them. Anything that needs a wiki-like environment could work well in here. However, there is no history, no ability to roll back to an earlier version.

At our school, use of OneNote has grown tremendously this year because my principal saw the power of it and began using it extensively herself. Now departments and committees that meet with her regularly each have their own OneNote notebook.

Here are a few of the ways I'm using OneNote this year.

I'm a tech integration teacher. This year I set up my lesson plan book as a OneNote notebook. I met with each teacher to plan the semester. I gave each teacher read only access to the notebook because I didn't want someone to add information for the next class and me not notice it in time. I can work on it from home or school. Access it from any room in the building, and I no longer need to give paper copies or even electronic copies to my principal; she just subscribed to the notebook.

I created a Tech Help Notebook full of step-by-step directions. For teachers who are comfortable trying new things as long as they have directions, this has worked well and they haven't needed to wait for me to come help them.

Budgeting. I created a tab for each department. As they contacted me during the year with requests, I'd click the "Send to OneNote" button in Outlook and then move it to the correct location. As I did research on requests, I'd paste in information from the web and other sources.

The Tech Coordinators meet weekly and our notebook has headings such as agenda and minutes, computer builds, policies and forms, and tabs for current projects.

All is not perfect, of course. We have found that notebooks need to be kept under 5 MB or they are prone to synchronization problems. OneNote occasionally has caching problems. OneNote is only available for Windows, not in the Mac version of Microsoft Office.

There are many other programs that offer similar functions. For example, Circus Ponies makes Notebook. Evernote is available online.

If you would like a good, quick demo of OneNote, watch it online here.

Vast Numbers and Useful Examples

2009-02-06T21:21:00.004+08:00

The news surrounding our economic crisis, including the US stimulus package and the bailouts of the banking and auto industry, have us flinging around huge numbers that are difficult to grasp. That's why I appreciated an article that appeared in my newsreader today from CNN.

In the article Numb and Number: Is trillion the new billion? Christine Romans uses the following examples from Temple University math professor John Allen Paulos to give meaning to million, billion and trillion.

"A million seconds is about 11½ days. A billion seconds is about 32 years, and a trillion seconds is 32,000 years," Paulos said. "People tend to lump them together, perhaps because they rhyme, but if you think of it in terms of a jail sentence, do you want to go to jail for 11½ days or 32 years or maybe 32,000 years? So, they're vastly different, and people generally don't really have a real visceral grasp of the differences among them."

I find this type of example much more comprehensible than the others I've read, such as a stack of bills reaching 1/3 of the way to the moon.

I don't know that as a computer teacher in an elementary school I'm going to get to use this example in the next few days or months, but I know it will help give meaning to the news as I read it.

How do you make large numbers accessible to your students?

The Weight of Unread Posts

2009-02-01T19:07:00.004+08:00

I just spent a few hours and now my Google Reader lists zero unread posts instead of 1000+. I will not claim I read all closely; it was an exercise in skimming, and in some, such as TechCrunch, blantant marking all as read.

I wonder why I feel so much lighter now that there are no longer 1000+ posts waiting for me to read them. After all, it is MY blog roll. No one is forcing me to read them. And if the weight of the unread ones is pulling me down, why don't I delete them?

I probably do need to prune my blog roll, and occasionally I do lop a few off that no longer speak to me. However, I find I am still adding. Most of what I add are not edublogs. My blog roll now better reflects some of my hobbies and interests outside of education and technology. I'm also reading more news sites via RSS now that I let my newspaper subscription lapse.

The same is true of my podcast subscriptions. I'm spending less time listening to educational ones, and more time on my hobbies, news, science, and audio books.

Part of me really misses being as in-the-know as I used to be when I read lots of edublogs. I loved being part of the discussions. I didn't always have anything to add to it, but it let me see ideas evolve over time in the community. It let me be an early adopter of new technologies and that has served me well, making me comfortable with them before I need to be using them on the job, and letting me "see" where things were going.

It also saved me a lots of headache. For example, reading someone's post about what did and didn't go well with their class Voicethread project allowed me to avoid the pitfalls and build on the strengths. It gave me answers to my questions and to ones I hadn't yet anticipated.

Another part I miss is the substance. Facebook has been great for catching up with distant friends. Twitter is amazingly good at just-in-time answers. But neither has the depth of extended thinking. Neither makes me think in the ways a good blog post does. Neither informs my practice nor challenges me out of complacency.

I do notice that many prolific bloggers are blogging less. I don't think that means the blog will die any time soon. I hope it means that posts will be more thoughtful. I'd much rather read one good post a month from someone than having my feed reader filled up with posts that are nothing more than lists of the sites they added to Delicious.

I'm seeing I do value edublogs. I appreciate what they add to my life and my work. I guess what I really need to learn is to not let the unread ones get me down.

How has your blog roll or blog reading habits changed in the past year?

Return of Service Notice

2009-01-26T11:14:00.000+08:00

Dear World,

We, the United States of America, your top-quality supplier of the ideals of liberty and democracy, would like to apologize for our 2001-2008 interruption in service.

The technical fault that led to this eight-year service outage has been located and the software responsible was replaced on November 4, 2008.

Early tests of the newly-installed program indicate we are now operating correctly and are fully-functional as of January 20, 2009.

We apologize for any inconvenience caused by the outage. We look forward to providing full service and hope to improve in years to come. We thank you for your patience and understanding.

Sincerely,

The United States Of America

(A friend sent this to me. I haven't found its origin yet. If you know it, please let me know.)

Movtivators and Demotivators

2009-01-11T14:01:00.005+08:00

From the title, you might think this was going to be a post of some substance. WRONG! Instead, I want to quickly highlight a fun web tool you could use with students.

The website is Motivator from Big Huge Labs. It allows you to use a photo from your computer, Flickr, Photobucket or a URL, and turn it into a motivational poster.

I can see using FlickrCC images to allow you to create posters of character traits, themes, decision-making, vocabulary. The list goes on and on. You do need to register to upload images or link to a Flickr account. I think you can enter a photo's URL without registering.

Registration is free but requires an email address. I did not test out linked Gmail addresses to see if they worked.

If you aren't very fond of this type of motivational poster, check out the demotivational posters at Despair.com. If you've ever been part of ISO 2000 or a school accreditation review, you may especially appreciate this poster.

99 Things Meme

2008-12-26T10:51:00.004+08:00

I saw this on Doug Johnson's Blue Skunk Blog, along with is very intriguing adaptation of it. Here's my stab at the original meme...

THE 99 THINGS MEME

Things you’ve already done: bold
Things you want to do: italicize
Things you haven’t done and don’t want to - leave in plain font

1. Started your own blog.
2. Slept under the stars. (Can't unbold this for some reason. I haven't done it but I've slept in a family stilt hut in northern Thailand, with the pigs and chickens walking around below us.)
3. Played in a band.
4. Visited Hawaii.
5. Watched a meteor shower.
6. Given more than you can afford to charity.
7. Been to Disneyland/world.

8. Climbed a mountain.
9. Held a praying mantis. (andwatched my cat play with them in the condo in KL)
10. Sang a solo.
11. Bungee jumped. (But I've helped kids on a rope course for hours.)
12. Visited Paris. (But I've been to Kathmandu.)

13. Watched a lightening storm at sea. (How about from an airplane? I've done that often.)

14. Taught yourself an art from scratch. (How about knitting and swimming? I retaught myself both.)

15. Adopted a child. (Adopted an abandoned animal.)
16. Had food poisoning.
17. Walked to the top of the Statue of Liberty. (Walked to the top of Batu Caves and up to Namché Bazaar in the Himalayas.)

18. Grown your own vegetables. (Supported organic farmers, grown plants with kids cared for U of MN corn fields.)
19. Seen the Mona Lisa in France. (Seen prehistoric cave drawings in Thailand.)
20. Slept on an overnight train. - from Cairo to Luxor in Egypt.
21. Had a pillow fight.
22. Hitch hiked.
23. Taken a sick day when you’re not ill.
24. Built a snow fort.
25. Held a lamb. (I've held a piglet, and they are not easy to hold! And I've bottle fed a calf.)
26. Gone skinny dipping.
27. Run a marathon. Nope, but I've biked across the state three times.
28. Ridden a gondola in Venice. Nope, but I've ridden an elephant in Thailand.
29. Seen a total eclipse.
30. Watched a sunrise or sunset.
31. Hit a home run.
32. Been on a cruise.
33. Seen Niagara Falls in person.
34. Visited the birthplace of your ancestors.
35. Seen an Amish community.
36. Taught yourself a new language.
37.Had enough money to be truly satisfied.
38. Seen the Leaning Tower of Pisa in person. I've seen the pyramids in Egypt.
39. Gone rock climbing.
40. Seen Michelangelo’s David in person.
41. Sung Karaoke. (unfortunately)
42. Seen Old Faithful geyser erupt.
43. Bought a stranger a meal in a restaurant. Bought a homeless person a meal.
44. Visited Africa.
45. Walked on a beach by moonlight.
46. Been transported in an ambulance. (I don't think so, but my Red Cross certification is up to date.)
47. Had your portrait painted. (No, but my sister has taken great portrait photos of me.)
48. Gone deep sea fishing. (Nope, but I've snorkeled on the Great Barrier Reef.)
49. Seen the Sistine chapel in person.
50. Been to the top of the Eiffel Tower in Paris.
51. Gone scuba diving or snorkeling.
52. Kissed in the rain.
53. Played in the mud.
54. Gone to a drive-in theater.
55. Been in a movie. (I've directed a few plays.)

56. Visited the Great Wall of China.
57. Started a business.
58. Taken a martial arts class
59. Visited Russia.
60. Served at a soup kitchen. (I've delivered Meals on Wheels.)
61. Sold Girl Scout cookies.
62. Gone whale watching.
63. Gotten flowers for no reason.
64. Donated blood.
65. Gone sky diving.
66. Visited a Nazi Concentration Camp. (Visited the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C.)
67. Bounced a check.
68. Flown in a helicopter. - Through the Himalayas no less!
69. Saved a favorite childhood toy.
70. Visited the Lincoln Memorial.
71. Eaten Caviar.
72. Pieced a quilt. (Nope, but I can knit a sock!)
73. Stood in Times Square. (I've stood in Tienanmen Square.)
74. Toured the Everglades. (I've ridden on the Mekong.)
75. Been fired from a job.
76. Seen the Changing of the Guard in London.
77. Broken a bone.
78. Been on a speeding motorcycle.
79. Seen the Grand Canyon in person.
80. Published a book.
81. Visited the Vatican.
82. Bought a brand new car.
83. Walked in Jerusalem. (I've walked and talked with landmine victims in Siem Reap, Cambodia. I've chatted with young Buddhist monks in Luang Prabang, Laos.)
84. Had your picture in the newspaper.
85. Read the entire Bible. (I've read most of it. The book of numbers nearly killed me.)
86. Visited the White House.
87. Killed and prepared an animal for eating. (I did have to cut the head and feet off the last chicken I purchased in the grocery store.)
88. Had chickenpox.
89. Saved someone’s life.
90. Sat on a jury.
91. Met someone famous.
92. Joined a book club.
93. Lost a loved one.
94. Had a baby.
95. Seen the Alamo in person.
96. Swum in the Great Salt Lake.
97. Been involved in a law suit.
98. Owned a cell phone.
99. Been stung by a bee.

How about you? Consider yourself tagged.

Movie Trailers for Books

2008-12-09T22:15:00.002+08:00

One of the projects I enjoyed the most this term was the book talk videos created by one of our fifth grade classes.

The unit began in the classroom. The teacher showed the class a number of movie trailers and challenged the students to figure out what strategies and movie devices were used to capture their attention, hold their interest, and make the viewer want to see the film.

Next she had her students select one of the books they have read so far this year and she sent them to me. I introduced Flickr and the idea of Creative Commons license as opposed to regular copyright. This discussion also introduced the concept of tags and reviewed the correct actions to take if their search should pull up inappropriate images.

From there, they went into Sharepoint to open a copy of our photo sources form. The directions on this form are more than a child is likely to read, but we knew some children would be working at home and wanted to give enough information that parents could successfully support their children on this step of the project.

Most of the students seemed to really enjoy using FlickrCC to find their photos. Finding photos to fit their story or the mood they were trying to create was a good challenge.

As you could predict, many students forgot to complete step 8. Fortunately, most of them did remember to paste the photo name and URL onto the photo sources form, so it was easy to locate the photo again and save it to their computer.

When they had all the photos they needed, students went into Windows Movie Maker to create their movie trailer. This program is easy to learn and offered enough control for most of the projects. We were fortunate that many of the students in this class had become adept at using it last year when their fourth grade teacher had her class create movies of a poem they had written. These students were our experts as we began this fifth grade project.

I don't necessarily agree with the claims that most of my students are digital natives, but I do think they are media natives. They have a great deal more experience than I have with watching videos. They clearly drew on that experience to craft their movies. For example, one student selected a theme song for each of the main characters and she'd play the appropriate theme each time that character was in the trailer. Another student showed a succession of photos, each photo visible for less time than the previous one, to build tension.

As is common with upper elementary students, most focused on some aspects of story telling and cinematography while ignoring others, but I think these first attempts at creating book trailers are very well done.

We have them posted on our school website. We have dropped them into our web photo gallery which was easy and made them accessible to our families, but it doesn't allow you to see the title of the book. We had thought of putting the videos into YouTube but the class didn't feel ready for that step. You are welcome to view the videos here (until they are taken down when the web server begins to fill).

There is no way to leave comments in the web gallery, but if you leave comments here on this blog post, I'll forward the positive/constructive comments to the children.

Search-Cube

2008-11-15T21:14:00.005+08:00

Has anyone used Search-Cube with kids? I can see that it might work really well for them when they are doing research. It is powered by Google, but instead of returning pages of hits as text, it gives you a virtual 3-D cube of hits as thumbnails. You can use the arrow keys to rotate the cube to view all the hits. Hovering over a thumbnail pops up a larger copy of the image. Clicking on an image opens that site in a new tab or window. Here is a search-cube of hits for a search of the word knitting.

Uploaded with plasq's Skitch!

Now generally I'm not a proponent of having elementary kids use Google. Their media literacy skills are such that they can't scan a list of hits to quickly determine which hits are relevant and which are from reliable sources. I much prefer vetting sites in advance.

However, there are plenty of times when I do turn to Google with a child, usually when they come to me with a question and I don't know the answer. I wonder if being able to "see" the hits rather than read their text would help them more quickly find hits that meet their needs.

Or, it could be more problematic and distracting. I remember years ago a child was researching prairie fires. I was sitting with him and in addition to the relevant hits, the Google search brought up hits for a music group and a mixed drink, both of whom were called Prairie Fire. I can imagine this child being easily distracted by rock group photos. I can also imagine them more often "seeing" inappropriate things.

What do you think? Would you use it with kids? Do you think it would be more useful to them than a straight Google search?

Tech Ideas for Elementary Music

2008-11-14T09:29:00.016+08:00

The invitation was pure gold; the elementary music department asked for an hour of my time on the inservice day, to teach them about new technologies that they could use in their instruction. What tech coordinator would turn down an opportunity to work with the willing?

I really struggled with the agenda. It wasn't a how-to session, but I knew that getting them actively involved would be more engaging and more powerful. However I only had an hour before they had to rush off campus for an inservice in Little India.

I was tempted to show them Animoto, but it is so slow that I had to give up that idea. I also decided to steer away from good music websites since they are skilled at finding those on their own.

I started the inservice telling the music teachers, that I knew lots of tech tools that could enhance their curriculum, but I didn't know how to teach music. It was up to them to find ways to make use of these tools as they saw fit. To my delight, they did that all hour. In the end, here was my agenda. In green I'll give a quick explanation of what was discussed.

When to use tech

Tech As Problem Solver: work more effectively, efficiently
Tech As Enhancer, do things not possible without it, take lessons to next level, collaborate

Blackboard
Our school has Blackboard. You may have used it or something like it if you have taken an online course that required you to take part in asynchronous discussions. All our classes are automatically set up in Blackboard, thanks to a script that runs to pull data from Powerschool.

Discussion Boards: Allow for discussions to continue outside of class. Allow you to hear from every student. Often children who don't talk much in class are very willing participants in written

Voiceboards: Like discussion board forums but with sound! Teacher can upload music. Students can record themselves talking, singing, playing an instrument. Student posts can be listened to by entire class or made private so only the teacher can hear them. Already in regular use by high school language classes, the elementary music teachers saw many ways they could make use the voice boards, especially with their grade five instrumental students.

VoiceThread

I discovered that the link you see when you have found a thread by searching, does not get you back to that thread later, so the links below may not work for you.

I showed them an thread of a Norman Rockwell print. Each student had left a comment to interpret the painting. http://voicethread.com/?#q+norman+rockwell.b5990
I also showed them a very simple one of pictures of musicians playing stringed instruments. The children had each made a comment such as "Violins are made of wood." http://voicethread.com/?#q+music.b66062

Wikis

Wikis in Plain English: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-dnL00TdmLY
Parent wiki: A parent has set up a wiki to make it easy for parents to sign up to bring the snacks to the boys varsity basketball games. She used Wikispaces and did not protect it with a password, so it is possible, but not likely that someone could maliciously edit it. Other than one parent accidentally adding extra cells.
Class wiki: http://mrcarroll.wetpaint.compage/Any+Words+of+Wisdom+for+the+New+Class%3F
Conference wiki: This password protected wiki is something we might use to facilitate parents signing up for optional spring conferences with specialist teachers. The music teachers cheered and immediately and saw ways to extend its usefulness. http://sasconferences.wetpaint.com/

You Tube
We didn't have time to discuss YouTube. I wanted to show them how it can be used for finding clips of ethnic music to support the diversity aspects of their curriculum. Can also find examples of instruments and their sounds, and other useful clips. If they view in Internet Explorer, the RealPlayer plugin will download the clip to their RealPlayer library so that their lesson is not sabotaged if our internet is slow or not working.

Voice Recorders
Like a thumb drive, these stick MP3 recorders are highly portable. They could be used to record a guest lecturer, to record ensembles, to let the class hear how their performance pieces are sounding.

Flip Video Camera

One of my music teachers has been using the Flip video camera to record voice students. For example, possibly she signs along with the student and then they burn that clip to a CD so the student can practice with it at home.
Another use was to have each stings player go to another room to record their performance piece. That allowed her to observe it outside of class, share the video with parents at conference time and offer suggestions for how to help the child improve their playing.

This session flew by. The teachers were great fun, enthusiastically trying out and discussing uses for each tool. An added bonus was that instead of preparing a Powerpoint presentation, I created the agenda in their shared department One Note notebook. They were happy to see they could go back later and explore the links I'd used, such as Wikis in Plain English again on their own.

What did I miss? If they invite me back, what other hardware and software tools should I show them? They already use Music Ace, Groovy Music, Finale Notepad. They already have iPods on which they create playlists for their lessons. They already have data projectors and wireless mouse and keyboard sets. What other tools would positively impact student learning?

Lest We Forget... Never Again

2008-11-12T18:29:00.005+08:00

It's already November 12 here, but I'm still going to take this chance to observe Veteran's Day. Every year on this day I find myself shedding tears over the sacrifices made, knowing that even those who come back have paid a terrible price.

In Flanders Fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

Thank you.

Credits:

Poem In Flanders Fields by John McCrae

Poppies by Tony.M
Arlington Cemetery by theohiosource

A Thing with Feathers...

2008-11-08T11:50:00.000+08:00

I first moved overseas in the summer of 2001. With the exception of the 2005-2006 school year, I’ve been overseas ever since. For all of that time, and to an increasing degree, I’ve tried to keep my nationality a secret. When people asked where I was from, I’d say, “I live in Malaysia,” or “I live in Singapore” because I felt my nation did not represent me.

With each passing year of the President George W. Bush’s presidency, I felt more disenfranchised, more ashamed of my country’s actions at home and especially overseas. I don’t expect that any administration will carry out my policy wishes to a T, but this current administration seems to be diametrically opposed to both my political views and my values. It’s policies on the environment, education, and regulating companies, just to name a few, seem to me to be crafted to reward the administration’s friends in the short term while destroying the nation’s infrastructure. It’s foreign policy was a disaster on every front, making the world a less safe place and destroying other nations’ willingness to collaborate with us for a common good. In short, its policies seemed to build upon and strengthen our worst traits, our greediness and our egocentric-ism.

But this is an age of “miracle and wonder.” I was on my lunch break watching elementary kids rush down the halls yelling, “Obama is President!” I watched Senator McCain’s concession speech and was moved to see in it a return of the person I had respected before this campaign.

I was teaching again by the time President-elect Obama gave his acceptance speech. But thanks to YouTube, I was able to watch it in its entirety this morning. I sat here, stroking the cats as tears ran down my face to again hear an administration speaking my values.

– tonight we proved once more that the true strength of our nation comes not from our the might of our arms or the scale of our wealth, but from the enduring power of our ideals: democracy, liberty, opportunity, and unyielding hope.

-President-Elect Obama’s acceptance speech

Admittedly, those are just words. More importantly, I heard a politician admit that things are a mess, and the only ways to fix them require hard work, sacrifice and time. I am truly astonished that the American people had the wisdom to hear that and vote for him anyway. As a nation, we have an embarrassing history of avoiding people who speak those truths. Maybe we, as a nation, are finally growing up. Maybe things have gotten bad enough that people are willing to accept some responsibility for the problems and the solutions.

I can only hope. And that is a big step. It’s been a long time since I felt hopeful about our nation. As I see people around the world rejoicing in this election’s results, I feel hope that America has another chance. I feel thankful that the present administration has become so unpopular that people around the world seem willing to consider the possibility that with a change in regime, we may become someone they can tolerate. If we are very fortunate, as a nation we may become someone they can respect.

I do not expect smooth sailing. The nation is a mess. The world economy has crashed into recession. We are embroiled in two wars. Further complicating this are the huge campaign donations that President-Elect Obama accepted from corporate America. He is further fettered by the current administration which seems willing to let him start now, as long as he is willing to make certain concessions. The forces in place to prevent change are strong. They will constantly try to preserve the status quo.

But there is this hope, this thing with feathers that perches in my soul. For this moment, that is enough.

A Good Thursday

2008-10-30T19:49:00.003+08:00

Today was a good Thursday.

First off, the rain stopped before we had to walk to work.

Next, my first hour class really enjoyed their lesson. They worked hard, and remembered what I had taught them earlier, so they didn't need lots of support. I was able to work one-on-one with kids who needed special help.

Then I had chicken rice porridge, a breakfast treat only served in the canteen on Thursdays. While I ate, I talked with my friend Eric, who I hadn't been able to eat lunch with all week. We came up with two possible web solutions to a problem for my principal.

From there, I met with the math coach. I was able to solve all her current computer problems and help her with some workflow issues. And then I met with members of the Chinese Department and helped them learn to do what they wanted to do with their website.

My third graders in the afternoon were adding Halloween clip art to their project. They were enchanted with the results. They kept beaming at their printouts. Then they played gleefully with our drawing program, Kidpix.

My last class was full of ah-has! as basic web page coding clicked for them. At the end of class, we couldn't get them to leave! They were so excited and working so hard. To the rest of the world the pages at this point would look pretty plain, but to the kids who created them by writing the codes themselves, the pages are full of wonder.

Next, I managed to solve a navigation problem with Sharepoint, making Kent really happy. Then he managed to temporarily fix his neighbor's computer. She hadn't backed up her files all year, and the hard drive appeared to have failed. He got it back up long enough for me to help her back up her files.

After school, I had the first voluntary meeting with some of my interactive whiteboard teachers. It was an after school meeting late in the week, but when they all started talking about what they had been doing, answering each other's questions, showing each other things they'd tried, they all became very energized. One of the happily asked if we were meeting again next week and looked truly disappointed when I told him we only meet once a month.

On top of that, some earrings I ordered through Etsy arrived and they are high quality and lovely. I will get lots of use out of them.

And now, I am home and hope to have time to do a bit of work and then knit.

Life is Good.

Current Multimedia Works in Progress

2008-10-27T12:32:00.002+08:00

Although this is the first term that's I've met with each teacher to collaborate on a tech class semester plan, I'm increasingly enchanted with the results. Here are just a few of the projects that are in the works.

Need a Good Book?
Jeff Scott, a fourth grade teacher, worked with me to create a voice discussion board full of book reviews. His students wrote a synopsis of the book they were reading and then selected a "golden passage", a passage that they felt gave a good taste of the book. They rehearsed reading the passages, focusing on the reading skills he'd been focusing on in class. Then they were ready for me.

The first week I introduced students to Blackboard, our CMS. They learned to find their way around and to use the Wimba Voiceboard module that we have installed.

The next week, they went into the book review voiceboard. They created their own post. They put the book's title in the subject line. In the body of the message, they typed their synopsis. Then they used the voiceboard's recording tools to make an audio recording of themselves reading the gold passage.

Now the students are enthusiastically using the voiceboard to find good books. They keep a log of books they want to read and they are eagerly using the voiceboard to find good books to add to their list. The project is now independent. The students will be able to come in any time and add another post. Jeff is not sure how often he will require them to post.

Book Trailers
Jemma Hooykaas has her fifth graders immersed in higher order thinking to create movie trailer style book teasers. She worked closely with me to design the assignment and create the rubric. She worked with the students to select their books. I created a movie resources form to help them gather their photos and record the photo information for their movie credits.

Jemma started students using a storyboard form she created. Students were challenged to identify the tone and important elements of the book they read, and then to find images to set the tone and represent those elements

I taught students about Flickr and Creative Commons. I introduced the FlickrCC image search engine. I modeled how to use that website and the form I gave them to gather their photos and record important information about the photos to include in their credits.

This past week, students were to bring in their photos so we could use Windows Movie Maker to create the movies. As we expected, not all students had all their photos, but this gave us time for individualized instruction as needed.

One exciting discovery was to see how much some of the students remembered about Movie Maker from last year. All of those students worked on a powerful Poetry Cafe project last year with their homeroom teacher and they are now our movie making experts.

This coming week, I'll show students how to access our school library of royalty-free music to set the tone of their movies.

The final products will either be posted in our school web photo gallery or on our school's YouTube channel.

There are other great projects in the works. I'll try to write about them soon.

Blog Awards

2008-10-27T11:45:00.003+08:00

Doug Johnson over at the Blue Skunk Blog honored me with a blog award. Now I have the good fortune to be able to award it to seven other bloggers.

I suspect Clarence Fisher has already received this, but I don't remember seeing it on his blog, so here goes. Remote Access is one of those blogs that I find myself reflecting on days, even months after I read the posts. They often come up in conversations with others. I appreciate that be blogs so regularly, giving us an ongoing view into his classroom. We see his projects and his ideas evolve over time. He reads widely and thinks deeply. Enjoy!

Technology in the Middle is Patrick Woesnner's blog. It covers a good range of topics, from helpful utilities and websites, to notes from classes, to curricular projects.

Betchablog is a place where Chris Betcher connects Best Practices to every day use. He's a skilled podcaster, and he also makes video tutorials, so don't miss those parts of his blog.

Kathy Sierra's Creating Passionate Users is no longer being written, but it is still online and worth reading. She is a computer programmer, author, horse trainer, and artist. Her ideas for creating passionate users apply not just to software, but to education and life, and her graphics are powerful and fun.

Dr. Scott McLeod's Dangerously Irreleveant blog is anything but irrelevant, He is a university-level lecturer and researcher who is now working to get education students and administrators up to speed.
Dan Meyer's dy/dan blog's tagline is "Working hard to make it look easy." He fascinates me with the way he draws on technology to bring the world to his math class.

Stephanie Pearl-McPhee's Yarn Harlot blog has next to nothing to do with education and a whole lot to do with knitting and book tours and good humor. Check out her recent post on an unfortunate (but hilarious) coffee episode at an airport during her recent book tour.

You will notice that two of those blogs aren't education blogs. I think it is important that we read outside out fields, both for our jobs and for ourselves.

Amplifying Possiblities

2008-09-14T17:03:00.003+08:00

We are less than a month away from the pre-conference keynote of this year's K-12 Online Conference!

Uploaded with plasq's Skitch!

The K-12 Online Conference invites participation from educators around the world interested in innovative ways Web 2.0 tools and technologies can be used to improve learning. This FREE conference is run by volunteers and open to everyone. The 2008 conference theme is “Amplifying Possibilities”. This year’s conference begins with a pre-conference keynote the week of October 13, 2008. The following two weeks, October 20-24 and October 27-31, forty presentations will be posted online to the conference blog (this website) for participants to download and view. Live Events in the form of three “Fireside Chats” and a culminating “When Night Falls” event will be announced. Everyone is encouraged to participate in both live events during the conference as well as asynchronous conversations. More information about podcast channels and conference web feeds is available!

An anthropological introduction to YouTube

2008-09-14T16:51:00.005+08:00

Just as I'm thinking about the hows and whys of connecting elementary children to the larger community, I read injenuity's blog post about Michael Wesch's presentation to the Library of Congress regarding an An anthropological introduction to YouTub e.

Wesch's videos are always thought provoking and this one will give you and interesting view of the impact YouTube is having on our cultures and ourselves.

Moving Towards Tech Integration and Students as Contributors of Content

2008-09-14T16:00:00.004+08:00

We are making progress. In the past, my colleague and I wrote a semester tech plan and brought it to the staff. Most teachers approved it as written. A few would ask us to work on other projects with them.

This term, I am meeting with each of my teachers to create a semester plan. In most cases, this isn't the deep, rich collaboration I envision since my class provides them with prep time, but it is a good start given time constraints. It means I no longer have every class in a grade level on approximately the same lesson. I'm looking at 15 potentially unrelated preps a week, but since I was a classroom teacher for 11 years, I'm used to far more preps a week than that.

None of this would be possible without the teachers being willing to work with me. They each either gave up a prep time or met with me after school. This may not sound like much, but our school is a fast-paced place and they are all involved in many projects, meetings and conferences beyond their regular planning for lessons and assessing their students. With so many tasks competing for their time, I am appreciative of their generosity.

I'm happy that what I'm doing with the students is more closely integrated with the classroom curriculum, and that this process allows me to help the teachers see ways to teach with technology. In some of our plans, they will book time beyond my class to work on the projects. Other teachers will team teach with me some of the time. For other classes, the entire plan is contained in my weekly class.

Ideally, I want to move towards the type of integration and collaboration that Kim Cofino blogged about here>and here. That change requires a different staffing model. My principal has made a staffing request for next year, but their are many competing requests so we will have to wait and see if it is funded for next year.

As happy as I am with the progress made, I keep mulling over the words of one of my teachers. As we finished the semester plan, she lamented that it wasn't very Web 2.0. She attended the Learning 2.0 conference in Shanghai last year and embraced the need for teaching 21st century skills instead of the old consumer model of information.

She's right. While many of the semester plans do allow students to create content, show their learning in new ways that involve higher-order thinking, there is not much connection with the rest of the world. Except for a few YouTube videos and VoiceThreads, there isn't much in these plans that connect our students with the world outside of our school. Does there need to be in an international school where the children are sitting in class each day with other international children? Does there need to be at the elementary level where so much of what we do with technology is still new to them?

My first response is, "Of course!" However, I need to think more about the whys and hows. If you are using Web 2.0 tools to connect your elementary students with the larger community, what drives you? Why do you personally think it is import? I'd love to hear what you have to say.

What Do You Want in a Flickr CC Search Engine for Schools?

2008-08-17T09:46:00.005+08:00

Glenn over at History Tech blog has been using Compfight to find CC images in Flickr. Like me, he discovered that the safe search isn't really safe enough for student use, so he contacted them. The good folks at Compfight are considering creating a truly school-friendly Flickr CC search tool and are asking for input.

For the elementary students I work with the ultimate Flickr search engines would have the following attributes.

Light, not resource intensive because schools often have old computers and slow networks.
Basic interface, Compfight is brilliant because it is such a clean interface, nowhere for the children to get lost or distracted. Kids are instantly successful.
Large thumbnails. 8 and 9 year olds tend to like words and pictures on their screen to be big. They make their fonts size 18 and put extra space between words to make them easier to see, not just to fill the page. Compfights are a good size. FlickrCC is a bit small. I'd include fewer images to make the thumbnails a bit bigger.
Split screen like FlickrCC. On one side we see thumbnails of the hits. On the other side, we see an individual image, its URL, photographer's name, and links to the other sizes of the image. I like FlickrCC but it is missing a key feature, the name of the photographer. According to Flickr, to use the CC images, you need to credit the source by listing the name of the photographer and provide a link back to the image. FlickrCC lacks that and as a result, my wee ones are having to navigate through multiple pages. That is really tough for some of them. Being able to grab URL and photographer's name off one clear page before they go to get a larger or small size of the image would be much easier for them.
Open links in a new tab. If a child needs a larger size of the image and follows that link, it should open in a new tab so that after they download the image, they can close the tab and they are right back at the search engine.
Safe Search. No filter is perfect. Some photographers are wily in how they tag their photos. However, one that blocks 95% of nudity, sex, and violence would be great. A second grade girl who types in kitties doesn't want a screen full of sex kittens. Naked toddlers, victims of floods standing amidst the ruins of their home with only rags on their body aren't the problem. It is the art photos of nudity and the pornographic ones that are making our searches problematic. We haven't had a problem of accidentally pulling up pictures of violence in Flickr, but we don't want to start having one either.
Free. I am currently working overseas at a private school. I have a budget and could pay for this feature. However, most of my career has been in the public schools in the US and then it was only me on a teacher's salary paying for things we needed. I could do it because I don't have children of my own, but many teachers couldn't pay anything.

What would you like to see in a school-friendly search tool for the Creative Commons section of Flickr? Give Compfight your feedback by posting on Glenn's blog or by contacting them directly via the link under the About button at the bottom of their site. And drop by Glenn's blog for a good read and to thank him for taking the initiative to start this discussion with the Compfight folks.

Need Ideas on Ultimate Intro Flipcharts

2008-07-26T07:22:00.004+08:00

In a week, my staff returns for a week of workshops and then the start of teaching. 14 of my staff will have a Promethean IWB for the first time. Between now and our Back to School Night in mid-August, they will be in a huge number of inservices not involving IWBs. I'm having trouble finding a time to do more than show them the most basic tools. However, parents will want to see the board in use at Back to School Night.

I'd like to set my teachers up to look great and feel confident. Since I haven't figured out how to add hours to the days, I'm thinking I'd like to create a few flip charts for them. The first would be a flipchart that they could all use with their students to help the students learn to use the board. It should be fun, engaging, and help to meet some of the teacher's first week's of school needs, such as community building, formative assessment or the establishing of routines.

The second flipchart would be a specific to each grade level. It would include a few activities to use with parents that showed how the board will be used to teach some of the content their children will be learning during the year. For example, it could have a container activity where participants recycle the fractions that are not equivalent to 2/3. Another activity could involve using the transparency feature with two photos of glaciers to create a time lapse effect to show their melting retreat. Another could be a self-checking vocabulary matching idea. And so on.

Searching the newly remodeled Promethean Planet, I was suprised to not find what I needed. I did find a few good resources to use with my teachers. You will need to create a free account at PrometheanPlanet to follow these links.

Activstudio Benefits was created to show off the uses of an IWB. Original target was school boards and other funding sources, but it would also be a great tool to use with teachers to give them idea of how to use their IWB.
Creating in Activstudio shows different techniques to designing flipcharts.
Layers and Groups Resource Pack includes 15 activities with detailed notes on how to use them and to adapt them to your own uses.
Reviewing Activstudio would be great to use after you have given your teachers some training. It uses the format of the game show Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader to review concepts such as layering and the use of various tools.

So now I'd appreciate your help. I'd love to hear your ideas of what I can include in the student flipchart and the parent flipchart. I'd love to see any reasources that you have created which meet these needs.

Embed Live Spreadsheet into a Web Page

2008-07-25T08:32:00.011+08:00

I just had a Geek Moment...

As my family plans our trip to New Zealand, the need arose to have a place on the wiki to record expenses as they are accrued. For example, much to her surprise, my sister just discovered that the hotel rooms she booked for us on Stewart Island have already appeared on her Visa bill.

My first thought was to create a table on the wiki. It wouldn't have formulas, but we can all handle the math. However, as much as I love Wetpaint as a wiki platform, their tables aren't full featured. I can't figure out how to add a new row to a table that has already been created. Tabbing doesn't work. I can't find a hot place or menu that allows me to expand the table. If you know of one, please tell me.

Since that didn't seem to be a good option, I started thinking of ways to embed a spreadsheet into the wiki. I know you can embed a Google Form into a wiki and even show a live chart as people add data, but I didn't find a way to do that with Google Sheets.

Fortunately a web search pulled up an article on the Zoho blog that lead me to this post on the Digital Inspiration blog. It shows step-by-step directions for embedding a live spreadsheet onto a webpage using Zoho Sheet, a free, online spreadsheet. It even provides a link which allows viewers to download a copy of the spreadsheet to their computer.

I already have a Zoho account. I think their suite of online applications is far superior to Google's. So I...

Logged in to ZohoSheet.
Created a spreadsheet. (Or I could have uploaded one from my computer.)
Clicked on the menu item to created code to embed the spreadsheet.
Copied the code to my clipboard.
Using the toolbar on my wikipage, I clicked the tool to allow me to embed a widget.
I pasted the code in the box that appeared, chose whether I wanted to change the size or justification of the spreadsheet on the page, and clicked "OK."

When I saved the wiki page, the live spreadsheet appeared on the page. It is like magic! I can scroll around, add data, click on the tabs. My lovely colors, bolds, filled formulas, etc. are all there because the spreadsheet is embedded using an I-frame - something you web design gurus will understand.

As I experimented, I learned the follow things.

If I change the spreadsheet in Zoho Sheet, and save my changes, those changes appear on the wiki when I refresh the wiki page.
If I make changes to the spreadsheet on the wiki, those changes are not reflected in Zoho Sheet.

I can forsee a few potential problems embedding spreadsheets this way. First, to embed a spreadsheet you must make it public. That means that even though my wiki is private, it is humanly possible that someone could find the public spreadsheet and mess with our data. However, they would need to know the unpublished URL to get to it. This doesn't seem likely.

Another problem is that Zoho's servers can be a bit slow. That was a big problem in the past, but now I'm finding them to work just fine. I suspect they upgraded to eliminate that problem.

A final problem is that not all blogs or wikis allow you to embed i-frames. I was able to do so in Wetpaint via the "insert widget" button and here in Blogger by clicking the "Edit Html" tab and then pasting the code where I wanted the spreadsheet to appear. Check your platform's editing toolbar to see if you have that option.

So, give it a try. Add some data to my spreadsheet. And let me know if you have found other or better ways to embed a live spreadsheet into a web page.

[UPDATE: Bad news. My sister tried using it on our wiki, and as old math man says here in the comments, the spreadsheet works great until you navigate away from the page. At that point, all your data is lost. So, this is an elegant solution for data that you don't want to keep. For example, making a web site on the solar system and allowing visitors to enter their own weight in pounds or kg to find out how much they would weigh on different planets.

Can you think of any other times you wouldn't want to retain the data after the visitor leaves your site?]

FlickrCC - Another Flickr Creative Commons Search Tool

2008-07-23T09:10:00.003+08:00

A few weeks ago I wrote about Compfight, a helpful search engine for finding images in the Creative Commons section of Flickr. Today, on one of my groups in Diigo, I learned about FlickrCC. (Sorry, I deleted the original message so I can't say which group or who posted it.)

I really like the speed and layout of FlickrCC. Simple search field with tick boxes to indicate if you want photos you can edit and/or use commercially. Your search results appear on the left half of the window. Click on a thumbnail and the image appears on the right side of the screen. Attribribution and URL appear with it, along with links to allow you to edit the image in Picnik or on your computer. Along the bottom are links to the other sizes of the image.

Uploaded with plasq's Skitch!

I plan use this for myself. However, since it does not have a safe search feature, I plan to use Compfight with students. Do you have a favorite way to locate images in the Creative Commons domain?

A Ning for Promethean Users

2008-07-19T00:24:00.002+08:00

One of my challenges for the coming school year is to help my teachers and myself use our Promethean boards in powerful ways. Since we already have wireless mice and keyboards and data projectors, we can already perform low-level interactive white board tasks without IWBs. However, we'll have more than 20 boards in our division next year so it is time for the pilot to gain momentum, for us to use the boards for higher order thinking and deep learning.

I had hoped to garnish great ideas at NECC, but I was unable to get into most of the IWB sessions I had planned on attending. Fortunately, I stumbled across two resources via Diigo. The first is Ms. Jruczak's Instructional Technology blog. Although the blog does not yet have many entries, each one is a gem full of useful information. It is not focused specifically on IWB uses, but it worth a look.

The second resource is only hours old but I'm hoping it will grow into a rich source of support. Kim Jurczak has started a Ning for Promethean IWB users. Her vision is for this Ning to be a place where users of the Promethean IWB Activclassroom tools can collaborate and share ideas for classroom use.

Since I am needing just such a community, I joined as soon as I found it, making me member #2. Despite my poor track record with other Nings, will make an effort to be an active member. How about you? Will you be member #3?

Another Spiffy Wetpaint Feature

2008-07-14T21:31:00.003+08:00

I've long been a fan of the Wetpaint wiki platform. I was originally drawn to it because it is one of the only wikis that creates visually appealing websites. Often, when I have a need for a wiki, I turn to them because their feature set is good and the wiki is so easy to use.

My family is planning a trip to New Zealand. Unfortunately, most of the planning will be done with me in Singapore and the rest of them in the USA. Right from the start, I thought this was a great use for a wiki, but other family members thought Google Docs would be easier. A few weeks ago I started a number of documents and shared them, but we've had lots of trouble with permissions and people needing to sign up for Google. (That seems to be a change. Last fall I was able to invite people who didn't have Gmail accounts to edit Google documents and they were successful. Now it wants my family members to create Google accounts to view or edit the documents.)

Last night, tired of the hassles, I set up a private Wetpaint wiki. Since it is private, my family members will need to sign up with Wetpaint, but that is quick and easy and ends right there.

As I copied the pages over, I was amazed to discover...

Graphics in my Google docs copied right into the wiki. No need to upload and insert them.
When websurfing, I could highlight diagrams from the internet and copy them directly onto the wiki. They came in as images so formatting was preserved.

In both cases, a message appeared briefly on the screen informing me that the item was being reformatted and then Voilá! It was there looking great.

I only encountered two problems. The first was when copying Google Docs tables. They did copy legibly, but not attractively. The second was with tables in Wetpaint. Unlike other wikis, I wasn't able to add a new row by tabbing. As a result, I decided to make lists for our to-dos instead of handy tables.

My mom and I worked a bit later than everyone else and already the wiki was proving useful as we captured airfare searches, flight time tables and other useful bits of info. The pages are quickly turning into a mishmash of data. They aren't pretty with all the fonts and colors from different web sites, but they are a goldmine of useful info.

What wiki platform are you using? Is it meeting your needs? What features doesn't it have that you'd like to see?

Help End the Julie Amero Debacle

2008-07-14T21:22:00.002+08:00

Who hasn't heard of the terrible story of substitute teacher Julie Amero? If you have felt as helpless as I have to take action to help her, click on the link below to sign a petition. The link was posted to the EdTech listserv by Nancy Willard. She encourages us to sign the petition to let the prosecutors in Connecticut know that the rest of the world has not lost interest in this case.

http://www.thepetitionsite.com/57/Justice-for-Julie-Amero

For more information on the case...
The case against Julie Amero needs to be deleted

Let's end teacher's long nightmare

Engagingly H.O.T. Comics

2008-06-30T21:34:00.003+08:00

Notes from the NECC session by Bernajean Porter on using graphic novels in the classroom.

Oh I wish I had more notes! This was a great session. Bernajean really focuses on raising the bar (or making it H.O.T.ter, as she calls it. However, I was filming the session using my new Flip Mino which filled half way through the Comic Life tutorial. )

Graphic Novels cover a wide range of content areas - much wider than I realized.

Comics are an American invention, something we gave to the world. In 1954 US Senate investigates relationship between comic books and juvenile delinquency. Art Speigelman won Pultizer Prize for Maus I, an examination of the Holocaust. He uses a metaphor of mice and cats.

Her website: http://www.digitales.us
complete with rubrics and other useful tools.

Don't let your students remain information consumers; move them into producing.
Start with the content up front, before touching the comic software. After the storyline/content, have them decide on the emotion for each frame. Only then are they ready to gather info
ign off the content at the storyboard level to ensure the rigor.

Craftmanship

Pre-Production Phase

Writing a narrative script
Planning the project
Organizing project folders

Production Phase

Making the voiceover
Gathering and preparing media resources

Post Production Phase

Putting it ALL together

Distribution Phase
Applause! Applause!

Comic Life
www.plasq.com

A Quicker, Safer Way to Access Flickr CC Photos

2008-06-30T11:53:00.004+08:00

This past semester, most of the classes I work with used the Creative Commons section of Flickr to find photos for their Voicethreads, wikis, websites and other projects.

For the most part, I was pleased. Students found great insect photos to illustrate their insect life cycle diagrams. Other students found powerful photos to put on their Read to Feed brochure that they were creating to solicit sponsors. Still others created movies about problems affecting the oceans using still photos from Flickr CC. The list goes on and on.

However, all was not as good as it could be...

Flickr pages can be really, really slow to load
Some kids would forget and use the search field at the top of each Flickr page instead of returning to the Flickr Creative Commons search page. Then they would find photos with all right reserved. Sometimes they could save these photos, but they woudn't insert into projects. It took me quite a while to figure out what was going on.
Our process of searching, then saving the photo and copying the source information to give proper credit to the photographer was complex. Some third graders never mastered it.
We started to find inappropriate images. I had prepared the children for that possibility. We had reviewed what they should always do if they come across inappropriate content. The children did a good job of using those few opportunities to practice safe internet use, but I don't like taking elementary children to a site that I know has inappropriate material.

Given these limitations, you can imagine my delight to read about Compfight. It is a very simple, very fast way to search Flickr.

Uploaded with plasq's Skitch!

See the little search field at the top? That's what you see when you go to the site.
Click on the...

Tags button to toggle between searching tags only or all text
Creative Commons link to toggle between all, off, or commercial searches
Seek Original link to choose whether or not you are only looking for original images
Safe Search link to make searching safer for young users

As you can imagine, that last item has me thrilled. I plunked in some of the innocuous search terms (such as books) that brought up inappropriate images but all the hits were appropriate for my students.

I hope the searches are as quick at school as they are from my NECC hotel room. Photos start appearing withing a second of me hitting enter. The search results are posted many to a page instead of the ten that are on a typical Flickr search results page.

I think this tool is going to solve many problems for us. Give it a try and let me know what you think. Any idea what the name Compfight has to do with searching Flickr? That one has me stumped.

A big thanks to Sue Waters for her post at The Edublogger that introduced me to Compfight.

Cybersafety Workshop

2008-06-29T22:55:00.004+08:00

Great workshop with Davina Pruit-Mentle and Nancy Willard
These are very incomplete notes. Please check out their website for great information. Even better, go hear them speak.

Tactics that don't work to keep kids safe...
Fear-based Tactics

stranger danger warnings
kids view adults as not knowing what is really going on with teh internet

Misleading Use of Data

1 in 7 youth have been sexually solicieted online - not true
generally received by teenagers from other teens

Reliance on Filtering

won't block porn traps
won't protect against online communication
won't deter determined teens because they know how to bypass the filter
frequently blocks appropriate sites
over reliance on this has created false security and doesn't teach kids safety skills, responsible choices

Simplistic Rules

"Don't post personal information online."
"Just say no" didn't work with drugs
Simple rules are appropriate for children but not tweens and teens

Sole Reliance on Adults

Tell an adult if you feel uncomfortable - assumes adults know what to do
Teens won't tell adults if they think the adults will blame them, restrict their online access, or make the problem workse
Most at-risk kids don't have great relationships with adults so they don't have someone they can go to for help. We need to educate those savvy teens on how to protect themselves and their less able friends

Avoiding Uncomfortable Information

Some programs don't discuss the intentions of predators, behaviors of the teen that might attract predators...

Successful Tactics
Children should not be out surfing the internet. Period. They don't have the cognitive capacity to independently make good choices online.

For middle school students, teach them practical problem solving. Teach them the values and standards they should uses in their ethical decision making. (Nancy has a great list of ethical decision-making questions.)

Risk Prevention Approach- we are pretty good at addressing the needs of the naive kids. We are failing at addressing the needs of the at-risk kids. Needs to happen at school, district, state and national level. People who understand technology often don't understand what they need to know about youth risk, and vice versa.

Finally Diving into Diigo

2008-06-29T04:27:00.004+08:00

More notes. This time an informal Edubloggercon session to get us started with Diigo. Alice Mercer along with Margaret Tsai who is one of the developers of Diigo and Jen Dorman who has been using it with her students.

(I know. I'm probably the last person to look at Diigo. What can I say? I was busy and Del.icio.us was mostly meeting my needs. And I admit I quelled a bit at the thought of yet another social network.)

Plays Well With Others
Lots of options for sharing your Diigo info, including auto post to blog or Twitter and share with your Del.icio.us account. Can also import your Delicious accounts.

Groups
Can be public, private, moderated. Can share tags. Can create student accounts using linked Gmail addresses.

Lists
We are familiar with tagging, but sometimes you want to present specific lists of URLs. We can create lists and then "add to list" is one of the Diigo options.

So, my take? I don't need it for use with students. If I were a classroom teacher then yes. But as a specialist in a school that has not embraced Diigo, then no. I also don't need another social network. I'm not doing that well keeping up with the ones I'm already in. I think its strength is in searching things people have already bookmarked, which is the same as with Delicious. Other strenght is huge-- ability to mark up the page and share the annotations. I can see that being really powerful for personal and class use.

Web 2.0 Smackdown!

2008-06-29T03:18:00.003+08:00

Sitting here at the NECC 2008 Edubloggercon. This post is just notes I'm taking for myself.

Pollseverywhere.com allows participants to text in multiple choice answers to a poll.
Animoto - free teacher accounts allow us to download 1 minute videos free.
Piclens.com allows you to take a set of photos or videos and create a photowall that lets you scroll around. Need a really good internet connection to make it work well. Looks like that thing from the TED talks.
Free Mosquito Ring Tones.com: adults can't hear it so kids use it as a ring tone to receive calls in class unnoticed.
CoverItLive allows live blogging as part of a conference.
Qik.com used to only be available for Nokia phones but now also works with some Windows Mobile devices. Allows you to create live streams. (Thanks Steve Dembo)
Handipoints.com allows you to create kid's chore lists or other criteria and share it with teachers, grandparents, etc. Can be a nice conversation piece. (Thanks Lucy Gray)
Diigo is a blogger's friend. The education group in Diigo is growing quickly. They have a set of common tags.
Peggy's new island... Peggy Shehe (sp?) has 3 islands in the teen grid of Second Life, a multimedia island, a language island, and a ~.
Webcast Academy a place to learn to create your own webcasts.
Make Beliefs Comics is a simple cartooning site. No ads. Limited feature set prevents kids from getting lost in the details.
Ajaxim allows you to create a free, IM network. Teach basic IM etiquette to kids in a safe environment.
Doodle quickly poll a group to schedule a meeting. No sign in required. You can send them the link or a discrete URL.
TimeBridge also allows you to schedule meetings and it talks to Google Calendar and Outlook.
TagGalaxy mines flicker tags
Webkinz can be used by a class to help kids learn about digital citizenship.
exolead
Plurk is a twitter-like social networking app. It has a timeline. You can have real conversations.

Dippity, Second Life, Diigo,

Anyone for a Little NECCing?

2008-06-18T08:28:00.003+08:00

This is my big year; I'm attending NECC for the first time. I think I'm more excited about meeting people face to face than I am about the sessions, workshops, vendors, etc. There are many bloggers I am eager to meet. Others I know from Twitter. Of course, given the thousands of people that attend, I wonder how many people I'll actually run into.

I do have some other goals related to NECC...

Look for professional development models that are working.
Look for tech integration models that are working, exploring both the process and the hardware requirements.
Look for ways to help my staff find powerful uses for their IWBs.
Visit Second Life. (Anyone want to bring me in and show me around?)

Are you going to NECC? Have you joined the NECC Ning? What are your goals and expectations for NECC 2008?

Media-Rich Interactive Quizes

2008-06-01T20:48:00.002+08:00

MyStudiyo is a website that lets you create interactive quizes to add to your website or blog. You are able to upload a logo to brand it. Quiz questions can contain graphics, audio or video clips. Quizes can be embedded or take at the MyStudio.com website. You can also send out a URL via their invitation feature. You can take the quick quiz I created to learn more about the service.

&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;a href="http://www.mystudiyo.com/act66602/mini/go/is_it_a_survey_or_a_quiz?"&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;Is it a Survey or a Quiz?&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/a&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;

One feature I find interesting, is that you have two choices of ending. One is to show the participants score. The other is to allow the participant to add a question. I think the latter could be powerful (or dangerous) if used with students.

Participants do not need to login. However if they do have an account and login, the results of registered participants appears filtered out from the anonymous participants. As per usual, registering requires an email address. However, registration is instant, no need to confirm registering by clicking a link sent via email. I didn't try registering with a linked Gmail account. If that works, it could be used with elementary students.

Uploaded with plasq's Skitch!

The service is free while the site is in beta. At some point it will no longer be free but the quizzes created during the beta period will still be free to take.

An Alternative to the Flip Video

2008-06-01T11:16:00.006+08:00

Video is the bane of my existence. I inherited all sorts of baggage with it, from cameras that can't connect to our computers, to lack of software to work with the video on the cameras, to poorly written programs like Pinnacle. Few problems in our Windows XP environment have made me long for a Mac lab as much as this one has.

Most of the video my teachers take is informal. Most commonly they record student presentations such a book reports and social studies presentations. A few capture students at work. These video clips are just a few seconds in length, shot close to the subject in decent lighting. We should be able to just use our point and shoot cameras since they all have a movie mode. Digital camera video clips aren't stellar quality, but the convenience of being able to use the classroom camera outweighs the decline in video quality. And truth be told, most of the time YouTube quality is more than adequate for these uses.

However, we have found that anything over 3 minutes tends to corrupt. I first thought it was just the battery running out since shooting video really chews through the batteries. However, shorter clips on the same card shot after the corrupted long clips, are just fine. Interestingly enough, we were able to use the corrupted file on a Mac. The Windows machines couldn't even download it, but iPhoto sucked it right in and played it, so if you run into that problem try a Mac. Unfortunately, we don't have Macs in my division.

So, video from point and shoot cameras wasn't the answer, but it seemed like it should be. Enter the Flip Video camera produced by Pure Digital. I think they are brilliant. Even the most technophobic people I've handed it to have gone from, "Don't give me this... I don't know how to... Oh!" in a matter of seconds and then they are recording (and looking delighted.) I handed it to students and within seconds they were recording their podcasts. After I showed them once how to locate the camera on the computer when it was plugged in, they were able to do it on their own.

As with the digital cameras, the quality isn't stellar-- this is 640 x 480 video we are talking about, after all. The audio won't win any awards, but it was much clearer than I expected. The children were truly delighted. It had the most trouble with moving targets, such as a person walking across the room.

The only problem is the cost. In the US, they are around $140 from Amazon.com. That's less than a point and shoot digital camera. Unfortunately, our local vendors are unable to get them and Amazon won't ship them here. Only Soninc.com was willing to do it at a much steeper price plus shipping.

Therefore, it is with MUCH excitement that I read about the new Creative Vado.

The Vado is similar in size, shape and quality to the Flip, but it has a 2 GB hard drive and a flexible, integrated USB connector as opposed to the Flip's rigid one. It has a lithium ion rechargeable battery instead of the convenient AA batteries, but the battery is removable so you could buy a second battery.

I searched at Causeway Point and down on Orchard Road but no one seems to have heard of them, much less have them in stock. Maybe by next school year they will be available. I'd love to hear from anyone who has used one. Are they rugged enough to be used with students? How good is the video and audio quality? Would you buy it for yourself?

In the Soggy Quiet Places

2008-05-27T18:43:00.003+08:00

As I try to bring blogging back into my life, I realize that one reason I've been writing is less is because I've been thinking less, or rather, deep thinking less.

My frantic schedule at work doesn't allow many bathroom breaks, much less thought breaks as I dash from teaching to tech support to meeting. It's all good, but none of it is meditative.

Being a specialist who only sees the students once per week for 40 minutes, I don't have the luxury of routines that provide breathing space such as I had when I was a classroom teacher. I've even worked to move much of the keyboarding from school-based programs such as Type to Learn and Mavis Beacon to Custom Typing which is an online subscription. I didn't move them to eliminate my breathing space, but that has been one of the results. Keyboarding time was really the only activity that approximated down time when teaching, since there are just so many times you can adjust a child's posture without driving them crazy.

On top of being busy at work, my ipod, which has taken the drudgery out of washing the dishes and cleaning the litter box, also helps to keep me from slowing down my thoughts. Likewise, I no longer live alone, so there is that (wonderful) distraction. I can tell that even when I sleep lately my thoughts are still too active.

Therefore, I've started swimming in silence. In the past I avoided doing that. I'd get too bored and then I would quit swimming so I used to wear my ipod in its waterproof case. Now, I'm finding that my brain is so full that the 40 minutes of silence fly by. I'm not even having deep thoughts then; by the end of the swim I'm just slowing down, not yet to the point of sustain concentration.

In the past, I've meditated, journaled, done yoga. I've gotten away from those things. Maybe it is time to bring some of them back into my life to raise the quality of it.

So how do you make space for deeper thinking? Are you able to pondering deeper thoughts in the midst of business or do you need a clear mental space for it? What strategies have been working for you? Frenetic minds want to know!

We Go Both Ways...

2008-05-25T21:34:00.002+08:00

Our school began its IWB adventure with Smartboards. However, despite good local service, when problems were escalated to the US support team, we wouldn't hear from them for weeks while the boards sat unusable. Therefore, after our first year of the pilot, we began switching to Promethean boards.

Our local vendor allowed us to swap x number of Smartboards for every y number Activboards that we purchased. By next year, we'll only have one Smarboard left. I left it because the new teacher in that room won't be using it. That will allow me to swap it out the next year for free if all goes as planned.

However, that's meant that this year I was trying to support teachers using two different platforms. Earlier this year I'd heard that you could open Smart notebooks on an Activboard. By the time we got around to following up, the place I'd originally read it had pulled the info, but one of my teachers gave it a try and voilá! It worked. We were using Smart Notebook 9, not the new 10, but this now gives us even more options for ready made flipcharts.

Has anyone else had success using the notebooks/ flipcharts cross platform?

All We Wanted Were Book Club Forums

2008-05-23T21:31:00.004+08:00

Last night was one of THOSE nights, the type where you start on what you think is a simple task and many hours later, you are still trying to accomplish it.

All we wanted was an online venue where the elementary summer school students could have ongoing, asynchronous book discussions. Our school has a Blackboard CMS so it should have been no problem. However, this summer our Blackboard will undergo major changes which will take it off line during part of the summer school session.

I wasn't heartbroken to realize that. Neither this teacher nor most of the students are experienced Blackboard users, and I find elementary children often have trouble navigating Blackboard. The forums are especially confusing since when you try to read a post, the header fills the entire screen, so children can't see the body of the post unless they scroll down, and children always think they should save rather than submit the post. As a result, it never shows up in the forum.

My next thought was to create a private Ning. I knew of other elementary teachers who had created the student accounts using linked Gmail accounts. Unfortunately, despite numerous attempts throughout the day and evening, these were failing. I could send the invitation, but when I clicked on the confirmation link in the Gmail message, it would say I was ineligible no matter what the birth date was. I know plenty of other teachers who have used linked Gmail accounts to create Ning accounts, so hopefully it was just a technical problem.

(And yes, I did say "birth date". Ning was out of compliance with COPPA since some elementary children were participating in networks. Now Ning is needing to gather birth date data so they can not allow users under the age of 13 to participate in Nings. (Steve Hardagon has some updated information and possible work arounds on his blog. However, using a Ning was becoming impractical.)

Next I tried Wetpaint, since they have great forums, but I couldn't make the wiki private, and linked Gmail accounts didn't work.

So I asked my PLN what to try and one tweet suggested Imbee. I hadn't checked out that site before. It is a social networking site for children. It is an interesting site and has safe guards in place to make it a healthy environment in which kids can learn to be responsible social networkers. The site has teacher materials and encourages classroom use, but I didn't see any way to make a private network within it, and the teacher doesn't want everyone in there to be able to be part of the book discussions.

Finally I decided to try pbwiki. I think that was the very first wiki platform I ever used. I knew we couldn't use actual wiki pages for the forums because only one person could edit a page at a time. However, I was pleased to see that each page now has a comments tab. I played around in there and it looks like it will work for book discussions.

I was disappointed to see that having the invite key is no longer the only thing you need to access a private pbwiki. I tried using a different browser and going directly to the wiki. A login screen appeared, but in addition to entering the invite key, I had to enter my name (so people can track my revisions) and an email address. It no longer lets you skip adding the email address.

Next, I sent an invitation using a linked Gmail account. That worked just fine as long as I entered the wiki via the link in the email. Otherwise, I need to enter an email address, name and invite key to enter. We can have children do that using the linked Gmail address, but it is a bit more putzy.

I'll show the entire system to the teacher next week to see if it meets his needs. If it doesn't, what suggestions do you have for a free, private venue for online book discussions, that works with linked Gmail accounts for the email addresses?

"Oil Can"

2008-05-23T18:12:00.004+08:00

Anyone recognize that quote? I'm pretty sure it's what the Tin Man said to Dorothy when she first meets him in the Wizard of Oz movie.

I'm feeling like I should be uttering those words to readers of this blog. For a variety of reasons and excuses, I've done very little posting for a long while. I'm hoping that is about to change. My head is full of topics and I'm eager to get back to it. To begin with, I'm not even going to worry if they are worthy-- I'm just diving in.

Thank you to those of you who kept dropping by during the drought. I hope the upcoming monsoon makes it worth your while.

Photo credits: Oil Cans by Peter Shiffman used under Creative Commons "By" license

Lessons Learned As the Student Podcasts Arrive

2008-04-07T20:19:00.004+08:00

A creative, tech-savvy music teacher at my school gave her students the assignment to create a podcast about gamelan music, since that is what they have been studying. She sent a letter home to the families explaining the project and the due date.

To her delight, a few days later, the first podcast came in and it was far better than she had expected. We figured out how to easily attach it to her web site and waited for the rest to arrive.

Now that they are pouring in, we are needing to overcome some technical difficulties. Here are a few things we discovered.

iTunes, or at least our flavor of it, wasn't liking the disks that came in in audio CD format. I assume they had been burned on a program such as Nero. Fortunately, we discovered that Real Player not only plays them, but by tweaking a preference, it will save them as mp3 files. This nicely compressed format was easy to upload to the website.

Audacity is a great tool for podcasting, but its files aren't portable. Saving Audacity projects generates both a .aup file and a separate data file. We have a student who keeps bringing in the .aup file. Since he doesn't have the LAME encoder plugin for Audacity at home, we are trying to get him to use Audacity's export command to turn it into a .WAV file. From what we read online, that should make the file portable.

Internet Explorer 7 doesn't have a very good upload engine; files move better with Firefox.

mp4 files play with in Real Player. For some reason, the podcast that arrived in this format plays fine on the teacher's computer, but when we attach it to the web page, the link isn't playable in the browser and when you try to right-click it to download it, you get a page not found error. We are trying to use www.zamzar.com to convert it to mp3.

No word yet from the teacher as to whether or not Zamzar did the trick. It is a handy website that lets you upload a media file or enter a URL (think YouTube video), select a format you want, and then enter your email address. The site converts the file to the selected format and then sends you a download link.

This is one of many ways you can download YouTube videos. I haven't tried it in it's latest version. Our system engineers tell me it works well, but slowly. It took 3 hours to capture a 4o MB YouTube video, but it worked.

Anyone else assigning podcasts as homework for elementary students? How did it go? How did most students record them? What format were they saved in?

I'll post the URL when the teacher is ready for visitors.

Student-Created Avatars

2008-04-02T21:22:00.003+08:00

As my colleague and I met a few months ago to plan out how to bring more multimedia and online goodness into our curriculum, the topic of avatars came up. They can be a fun part of developing an online identity, but we have so little time with our classes, were they worth the time?

That lead me to think about Moodle. A few years ago, I set up a Moodle for my fifth grade classes. We frequently used it to host our asynchronous discussions. From the start, some kids loved it. Quite a few others approached it with suspicion because it looked too much like work. They weren't connecting with it.

Then I got the idea of avatars. Moodle allows each user to upload an avatar which appears beside their screen name when they post into Moodle. Since our Moodle was private, I figured educational use of graphics allowed us to choose avatars from one of the many online sites offering them. To my surprise, it worked. Being able to personalize Moodle, even in only that small way, helped many of them connect and they began taking part much more.

Based on that experience, we decided that if time permitted, we would devote a short amount of one class period to creating avatars. If time didn't permit, they would go without.

Our first thought was to use Kerpoof since they have a kid-friendly avatar creator. Unfortunately, you have to create an account to make an avatar.

Our next idea was to create them in Kidpix. This had a few advantages. First, we have it and the kids know how to use it. Second, our students adore using it, but we haven't had much call to use it this year. Third, self-created images are free of royalty complications. Finally, it is difficult to create photo-realistic type of drawings in Kidpix so there is no danger of making the avatar too realistic if the child decided to do a self-portrait.

Here's how we did it. First we modeled using the rectangle tool to create a square, since so many programs crop avatars to a square shape. Then me modeled making our drawing be large, fill the square. I showed them an avatar still in Kidpix, then how it looked after it was in Voicethread so they could see how much the image would shrink. Finally, I showed them how to export their avatar as a JPEG file to their My Documents folder rather than to the network location that the network version of KidPix uses by default. Then they went to work.

I was impressed by the creativity the students showed. I had expected that they would make representational art, and some did, everything from sporting equipment to animals to cartoon-like portraits. However, Kidpix has so many tools that many kids created abstract images and were pleased with their final product.

I have a number of classes working on Voicethread projects but most aren't to the point of adding their avatars yet. However, my colleague is ahead of me on it and already he is seeing that the avatars are once again proving powerful, helping the students feel connected to the activity. They also make viewing the Voicethread feel more personal for the viewer.

Do your elementary-aged students have avatars for their online school identity? Did they make them themselves or use ready made avatars? Do you think the avatars are worth the effort?

For an insightful article regarding bloggers and the reasons for having an avatar, check out Sue Waters' recent blog post, Is Your Photo Avatar Making You Look OLD?.

Wikispaces Finally Has Text Formatting Toolbar

2008-04-01T20:00:00.003+08:00

I've used Wikispaces for years. I've appreciated their teacher-friendly willingness to set up accounts for students who don't have email addresses (or who are under age 13 so are prevented by COPA from creating their own accounts.) I've loved their program to give away ad-free wikis to teachers. I've steered numerous teachers to consider Wikispaces.

However, many times, teachers would check it out and then disregard it because there were no text formatting options. What's a class poetry wiki without the ability to center text? What fun are color poems when you can't change text color?

Fortunately, those are now problems of the past because Wikispaces has added a text formatting toolbar that allows you to to easily change the color, style, size, alignment, and background color of your text.

I know my students will greatly appreciate these new formatting options. I see them as a blessing and a curse. They will allow us to make the pages more user-friendly, but they also allow the children yet another tool in which they can focus on style over substances. For some classes, the lack of options helped kids keep on task.

What do you think? Does the new text formatting toolbar affect your likelihood of using Wikispaces? Does it make you more or less likely to use it?

Do You Drupal?

2008-04-01T19:48:00.003+08:00

Our school is very close to making the plunge and moving to Sharepoint. We need it to provide off site access to files, both individual and shared. We will most likely also use it for some of our web page needs for groups and departments.

Before we make the plunge, I'd like to hear more from people who are using Drupal for file storage. Is it working well? Have the roles and permissions available out of the box been enough for you? Or have you had to code your own changes? Does the search feature meet your needs? Any modules you'd strongly recommend or strongly NOT recommend?

One of our engineers has installed a demo version of Drupal and we hope to play with it this week, but as I've done my research, Drupal seems to be more of a toolbox than a product. It looks like you'd need lots of time on the forums to find the best modules for your needs. Is this indeed the case?

Thank you for any light you can shed.
(I have been reading forums, EdTech listserv, etc. I'm hoping that I can gather other information via this blog post.)

Google Does it Again

2008-04-01T19:44:00.002+08:00

I don't know how long the link will be active because they don't usually leave them up very long, but Google has once again made a very enjoyable announcement on April 1. I hope you get to see it. After all, it's not every day that Google messes with the time-space continuum-- or is it?

Voicethreads, Flash, and the Problem with GPOs

2008-02-24T18:50:00.003+08:00

The best laid plans...
After a few brave colleagues were kind enough to help us troubleshoot Voicethread.com last fall, we finally have everything working from within school. It involved a change in the proxy server settings, and the installation of Firefox, since there are know issues with Internet Explorer not playing well with Voicethread.

Two weeks ago I met with each grade level team to show them there wheres and whys of us spending much of this second semester using digital media applications with their students. It was fun to meet with the teams, celebrate that our students are doing so well on our current outcomes that we are able to add these highly engaging digital media applications to our curriculum. After giving them an overview of Windows Movie Maker, Voicethread and podcasting, I asked them to schedule a meeting with their tech integration teacher before the end of the month so we can work with them to integrate these technologies into their classroom curriculum in appropriate ways. Then I said I'd send them the links to the Voicethreads along with a calendar to help us plan.

Well, going on a week later, they still don't have those links. The first teacher I met with asked me to drop by that afternoon to show his class Voicethreads. When I did so I found that yes, the staff machines do now have Firefox, but because it was installed after the main build, the Adobe Flash plugin wasn't installed. On my machine, because I am local administrator on my machine, when the Voicethread site directed me to the Adobe Flash plugin download page, I followed it and was easily able to install the flash plugin and get down to business. This is not the case on my staff and students machines.

Being a Very Large Organization, my school uses GPOs to control groups of users on our Windows XP system. Currently, these GPOs do not allow .exe files to be saved to the My Docs or servers. They do allow saving to the C drive, but to do that with the Flash plugin requires skills that a number of my teachers don't have. And I don't want to teach my students to install on these computers.

As a result, I had to ask the IT Department to create a packet of Firefox with the Flash plugin installed, and then use SMS to push it through the system to each computer. Our IT Department is top notch and despite having a million other things to do, they did this for me.

I scheduled to occur during the school day because my busy teachers have a terrible time remembering to leave their computers on at night. The first day we ran the update, it didn't finish and it encountered many failures. I asked them to run it much earlier the next day. My assistant and I walked to ever computer to make sure it was turned on. We had a much higher success rate, but we still have around 20 computers that failed for some reason.

Walking through the building turning on every machine isn't a great use of our time. (Yes, the engineers should be able to turn the machines on remotely, but one brand of computers we have won't wake remotely.) Spending more than a day pushing updates through and tracking failures isn't a good use of our engineers time. And having staff without the skill to easily download a plugin to the local drive and install it is also a problem. If they can't do that here, they probably can't do it on their home machines either.

Those are just a few of the many reasons we are looking at making teachers local administrators of their work computers. IT Departments are always walking the narrow line between keeping the network stable enough that people are willing and able to use the technology, but open enough that it isn't a hindrance to getting their work done. It is time, in our organization to open things up a bit more.

Our current GPOs have done a great job of protecting our system. I think it has been remarkably reliable. However, it is now causing too many conflicts with software and with web sites. So much educational software is poorly written from a programmer's point of view. It breaks the rules of good coding, saves files in inappropriate places, and does a bunch of other things that make it not function with our GPOs. The software is worthwhile, just not well written. We experience this the most in our primary school which uses many educational games, and in our high school which uses many department specific types of software, such as foreign language software, science probes, CAD programs and smartphone software.

We've done some trials and loosening the GPOs is solving those problems. Since we are not making students local administrators, we will still have issues with some software titles. Hopefully, these changes will not greatly compromise the integrity of our network.

If this change is to be truly successful, it will take good teacher education. Some staff already have the skills needed to back up their own documents, run the anti-virus software each week, and make responsible decisions regarding what they install. For many staff members, frustrated that they can't update their iTunes software and constantly running out of space as they try new technologies, the change will be welcome.

For others, it will be a bunch of responsibility that they don't want for no tangible benefits. I see benefits, such as them learning how to do these things here so that they can also do them successfully at home. Part of being a professional educator is keeping their skills up to date. In this day and age, some of those skills involve technology. If they can't back up their files or run the anti-virus, is it likely that they are able to integrate technology in meaningful, rigorous ways? Possibly, but I think not likely.

Where is your school network on this continuum of safe but locked down, or open but more vulnerable? If yours is open, do staff back up their own personal files? Has it made your system less reliable? I'd love to hear from you.

It's No Longer My Blog (And That's a Good Thing!)

2008-02-20T20:37:00.003+08:00

I've been writing lately about our first elementary blogging project at my school. Because this was our first attempt, I've been very hands-on. I have been teaching the lessons while the teacher assists both in class and by tracking down permission forms. We scheduled one extra lap visit per week so I could teach the introductory lessons, help edit blog posts, assist with publishing the first posts, approve the posts and moderate the comments.

I'm happy to say that the classroom teacher is gradually taking over. First, she figured out a rotation schedule for their silent reading time. Each day, x number of kids rotate through using the four classroom computers to write posts, reply to comments, and leave comment on our blog pals' blogs. No longer do they need to spend lab time blogging.

Today I took the next step and changed the blog email address from mine to hers. Now all comments will come to her to be approved. I'll also show her one more time how to approve blog posts, and then the system will be hers to run.

Thus far, she seems pleased with her students' excitement and their eagerness to read and write blog posts. This project is now supporting her classroom curriculum. I hope all my other integration projects go so well this term.

If you are a tech integrationalist, are you being successful at gradually releasing control of projects? Do you have any tips to share to help the rest of us do this well?

If you are a classroom teacher, what steps can tech integrationists take to help you feel more comfortable assuming control and responsibility of integration projects?

Kids, Comments, ClustrMaps and Clocks

2008-02-20T18:48:00.003+08:00

On Monday the third graders were exuberant in their delight at finding comments on their blogs. At the start of class I reviewed how to find their post using the category list, and then how to open their comments.

I warned them that the teachers who visited their blogs over the weekend might never visit again, so any replies we left for them might never reach their intended audience. To my surprise, that did not daunt the children. They still wanted to reply before working on their new posts. As is typical with this great group of kids, most put quite a bit of thought into their replies. They have the makings of fine bloggers.

Unfortunately, I am not doing as well. I did finally get the Clustr map working on our site -- I'd love it if a few people would now visit the blog so it would start registering visitors. However, now I can't even get the Widgetbox widgets to work on the site.

I had a clock working before, but took it out because it was so ugly. However, since my attempts to make other widgets work failed, I wanted to put the ugly clock back on so our blog pals could compare their time with our time. No such luck.

I have watched the videos in Learnerblogs that shows how to insert widgets. The problem is caused by many widgets using javascript, which isn't allowed in Learnerblogs; it will break them. So, the video shows you how to paste the code from the Widgetbox widget into a text editor and extract the panel ID. That is what I did last week that worked so well. Now, the widget code doesn't have a panel ID when I paste it. It has a different ID and that one isn't working when pasted into the widgetbox widget holder on the blog. I am NOT amused.

Non-Widgetbox widgets need to be inserted in text widgets in Learnerblogs. However, if they contain javascript, Learnerblogs automatically strips it out. Google Gadgets all seem to use javascript. Does anyone know where I can find a well behaved javascript-free clock?

The Kindness of Twitter Friends - or- My PLN Saves the Day Again

2008-02-17T17:21:00.003+08:00

All but four of the third graders have published their first blog post. They are eagerly awaiting comments. Unfortunately, I know that the person coordinating the project in Bangkok has been out of town, and our Pennsylvania group hadn't started blogging, so our blog pals would not be visiting our site for a while yet.

Knowing how disappointed the children would be to come to class on Monday and still have no comments, I sent out a quick tweet on Twitter asking for people to comment on the blog posts. Then I went to bed.

When I checked Twitter the next day. I had a message from one kind teacher who had already left some comments. However, I had message from a number of other helpful teachers saying they had tried to leave comments, but were told they had to log in first.

Then I remembered that we had ticked the Learnerblog setting that required people to login to Learnerblogs before they could comment. We had done that to prevent spam, but it was now preventing legitimate comments, so we decided to change that setting.

After a long search, I finally located that setting again, and then I sent out another Tweet. In short order, numerous teachers had left comments for EACH student. Some of the teachers had lived in Singapore or visited Singapore so they were able to personalize their comments to address experiences the children are likely to have had. One of the commenters had attended our school as child, and later had taught at it. All in all, their comments were the thoughtful, well-written type that will serve as powerful models for our students as they comment on other blogs.

Even more importantly, when they visit my lab tomorrow, every single one of those bloggers will feel the thrill and validation that comes from having connected, at least briefly, with another person via their writing. THANK YOU to each of you who made it happen. Know that you have made a difference.

Overcoming Commenting Problems with Learnerblogs

2008-02-17T16:58:00.003+08:00

Last week our third graders published their first blog posts. Then they visited our blog pals site and started leaving comments. After I modeled how to leave a comment, they were very eager to begin, (and very intrigued with the need to type the code they saw in the comment box to prove that they are a human and not a spambot.)

Other years, with other classes on other blogging platforms, I had run into the issue of some blog sites not allowing very many consecutive posts from the same person within a short period of time. I assume that system is in place to prevent spambot attacks.

I had hoped to get around it by having my students used linked Gmail accounts as the address they used when posting comments. (If you aren't familiar with linked Gmail accounts, read Kim Cofinio's great post about them here.) However, after about 10 minutes, the students started receiving screens telling them to slow down on their commenting. The linked Gmail addresses weren't solving the problem.

Next, the teacher and I ran around entering first our school email addresses and then my personal address, but that didn't solve the problem. Evidentally, the system was tracking our domain or IP addresses, not the email address.

I don't know how to get around that, except to only have a few students comment per session. That makes it seem like commenting could best be done by a few children at a time in the classroom rather than the entire class in the computer lab.

Another solution is to have more than one class blog to visit. Fortunately, we are in position to use the latter solution. Since this blogpal project has begun, we have added classes in Pennsylvania, Florida and Wisconsin to our blog roll.

Another minor problem we encountered involved comment moderation. We have not paired up the students in this project. They don't have one blog pal; they are free to comment on posts by anyone in the other class. This avoids the problem of students not getting on well with their partner, or of prolific writers being paired with less enthusiastic writers. However, it leaves open the possibility of some children not receiving many responses. Our class decided that we would try, at least this first time, to make certain that every one of our blog pals received at least one comment.

It was a noble goal, but since both class blogs have enabled comment moderation, we couldn't tell which blogs had already been commented on by our class, so we quickly abandoned that strategy. Fortunately, before we had begun commenting, I pointed how how to navigate their blog using the category links and the calendar, so hopefully students whose post was no longer visible on the front page also received comments.

Now we just need to wait for their teacher to approve the comments, and for them to visit our blog.

What I've Learned So Far Using Learnerblogs.org

2008-02-17T16:00:00.003+08:00

About a month ago, Kim Cofino blogged that she was looking for a simple, writing based, collaborative project for her third graders. I was just thinking about the online pen pal project I'd done with a third grade class last year, so I Skyped her. In about 20 minutes, we hashed out the preliminary details for a blog pals project.

We both wanted a project that would encourage reading and writing, and we didn't want the technology to get in the way. We decided to use a free, multi-user Wordpress blog from Learnerblogs.org. This allowed each class to have one student login, and one place for the other class to visit, making it easy for the students to find their way around. Making a category for each child allows visitors to quickly view all of that child's posts, making it look like each child has their own blog.

Kim developed an excellent set of preliminary lessons that we used with both classes. This time spent up front was well spent. By the time students finally got down to writing, they were very eager to begin and well-informed. I wouldn't change a thing except to possibly add one more day where they can read blogs. We read blogs the day we researched common blog features, but they really wanted to read the posts, not skim the pages looking for commonalities.

Last week the children wrote their first posts in Microsoft Word and then pasted them into the blog. I didn't like how small the font was on the blog so I did a bit of research. First I tried other themes, but each had its own problems, so we returned to our original theme.

Next I looked for plug-ins. I didn't find very many for this multi-user platform. However, one I did find was a more full-featured text editor. It included a button that makes it easy to paste text copied from Microsoft Word. I've only had the chance to use it with a few students, but their posts came in at a more reasonable font size.

I also wanted to customize the header to a Singapore-related image. In the Creative Commons section of Flickr I found a number of panoramic Singapore skyline photos that included the durian-shaped Esplanade building, our most-distinctive building.

With those two changes in place, I only have two more wishes. I want to add clocks that show the local time of each of our blog pals (we now have blogpals in Pennsylvania and Florida in addition to our original Bangkok blogpals.) I can successfully add Widgetbox brand widgets, but none of these have the look I want. When I try to add any other widgets, I am unsuccessful. I also want to add a Clustr map. I subscribed so we have a map that we can use, but I'm not having any luck getting it onto our Learnerblog. I can get them to work on Edublogs, but not Learnerblogs. If you have added non-Widgetbox widgets to a Learnerblogs.org blog, I'd really appreciate hearing from you.

If you would like to make a group of third graders really happy, drop by and leave them a comment. And be sure to mention where you are writing from, since the Clustr map isn't working yet.

Need Suggestions on Best Way to Let Homebound Participate

2008-01-27T16:44:00.001+08:00

We have an amazing student who is finally home after months in the hospital. On Friday, her class visited her. She has a long ways to go before she can return to school. In the meantime, we'd like to have her take part in one class per day. I'd appreciate suggestions on how best to do this.

On her end, she has a computer with a web cam and a tech savvy father. On our end, we will get whatever we need to make this work.

Some factors to consider:

We want the student to have as rich an experience as possible.
She will be able to see and hear and speak, but she is not able to type or use the mouse on her own.
She is an elementary students and her class is a mostly self-contained so we only need to set up one classroom with AV equipment.
The classroom has a data projector and the teacher's computer has a Bluetooth mouse and keyboard. The computer's sound can be broadcast through wall speakers. The classroom also has a PA system with an amplifier and a wireless mic.
We are installing Skype, and hopefully I will soon have a Yugma account. We have web cams and video cameras.
There is an aide in the classroom who can run the camera. She can switch the focus from the teacher to the whiteboard to the students as needed.

Concerns I have:

I don't know if our web cam (or any web cam) has enough focal depth to be able to see the whiteboard or to refocus on people at different distances.
A video camera would probably be a better choice in terms of focal length and picking up voices across the room. However, I don't know if our computers or their computers could handle the data stream.
The teacher would like her to be able to read the whiteboard at times when it is crucial to the lesson.
This needs to be stable. If it is bogging down or crashing, it will get in the way of instruction.

Our first thought is Skype. We are going to play with it with a web cam. Maybe it won't be too limiting. Another thought is Elluminate's vRoom. It allows for 3 participants, so the student, the teacher's computer and another student in the class could all be on. The teacher could use the whiteboard feature. She has a data projector and a wireless mouse and keyboard so she could use those from the front of the room. It will also handle the video. The teacher can make herself and the student both have the microphone so she can talk with the teacher and the class. The teacher could use this option for tutoring after school as well.

Will either of these work? Do you have a better solution to suggest? Any ideas on how to tweak either of these options for optimal performance? Please let me know. I dearly want to make this work and make it work soon.

A Trip to the Virtual Staffroom

2008-01-27T16:28:00.001+08:00

Last Sunday I had the honor of chatting with Chris Betcher and Kim Cofino on Skype. Chris polished the discussion and posted it as a podcast on his Virtual Staffroom blog. Our topic of discussions was, appropriately enough, teaching tech.

This was my first time being part of any podcast and I want to thank Chris for making it all so easy. He is a talented interviewer and a gracious host so a good time was had by all.

If you have any interest in it, go check out the podcast. Or better yet, use iTunes to subscribe so you don't miss a single episode of his entertaining and informative podcast.

(And three cheers for my old iBook G4 which delights in bonking during Skye calls but was kind enough to work without flaw for the entire session. Maybe it knows how much I'd like a Macbook Air...)

Solve the Tech Teacher Substitute Dilemma?

2008-01-26T20:56:00.000+08:00

I think that most classroom teachers would agree that preparing a for a substitute teacher is often more work than it is worth. As a technology integrationalist for part of the day, my sub plans can either be incredibly easy (e.g. keyboarding for first 20 minutes, TimezAttach or Freerice.com for rest of class) or incredibly challenging, especially if I don't know who my substitute will be, or if I know the person is not comfortable with technology, doesn't know their way around our computers.

Since we have returned to work this January, I have missed all or a portion of 7 days for training. It has been great to be a student, but more challenging that usual to prepare for the substitute.

With some units, I teach the skills and then the classroom teacher finishes up on their own time. For example, last week a teacher asked me to show the students how to create a timeline in Excel. They had never used the program before and so I got them started. She had prepped them before hand by having them decide which of their own life milestones were going to be on the timeline, so I spent ten minutes teaching them the tech side and then they were ready to roll. She scheduled lab time during the week to finish the project. Easy.

Unfortunately, I only see my students once per week for 45 minutes and I'm trying to finish my web design unit. If I were using Contribute with my students, then I could reasonably ask my teachers to finish up the pages with their classes since they use that to maintain their class pages. However, I've been teaching the students to actually write the HTML tags, writing their pages by hand. I cannot ask a teacher to do that.

I was gone three days of the first week back to work after the Christmas holiday. That meant the kids had forgotten a lot. Not wanting to have so much time lost, I tried to leave a lesson plan that let the students keep working. It sounds like it met with limited success. My students remembered too little and she couldn't support. It was a setup for all of them and I realized that I should have left a one off lesson instead.

Then today I read Sylvia Martinez's post entitled Students as Substitutes. That wouldn't be a good choice for unplanned absences, but for a time like this, where I knew weeks in advance that I was going to be absent, this could have been a great solution. I especially like this idea for my fourth and fifth grade classes; my lessons for third graders are usually easy enough for any sub to teach, especially since my assistant (who is NOT a teaching assistant) is very willing to drop by before school to help the substitute get up to speed.

Part of my recent spate of training was 3 days spent with the amazing Jenny Black at Tanglin Trust School to work on my Promethean ActivStudio Curriculum Developer certification. I am now more eager than ever to get my students creating flipcharts instead of just using them. I would so love to see the end of Powerpoint instruction and see its use diminish, since it is such a challenge to helps students create truly engaging presentations with it.

Picture instead that with a substitute on hand, they were taking turns using their self-prepared flipcharts to teach their classmates a new skill. Even if they run into troubles with the IWB, since all of the students would have been creating flipcharts, then they should all be able to help; the software is not rock science. However, unlike Powerpoint, I think the Activstudio software could encourage students to develop more interactive features in their presentations. Just as they love the animations and sounds in Powerpoint, I think they would love the actions, sounds, containers and ability to embed things in flip charts. I rarely see a good Powerpoint inspire other students to do better work, but just like good student-made web pages challenge many other students to improve their own pages, I think a clever student-made flipchart would spur on other students to meet the challenge.

Next steps for me include getting more copies of the ActivStudio software. 6 copies come with each board. Right now I have 8 boards and 8 copies of the software installed, plus one lab installed. I either need to move those lab installs to my lab, or get more copies. Also need to re-explore the student use of the Activstudio software. Last fall Kent had discovered that at the Promethean Planet website there was a page where students could download the software. I can't remember if it was the full version, but it was not just a player; students could use it to create flipcharts at home!!

So, what about you? Have you ever had students teach when you were absent? If not, could you? Would you? Why or why not?

Learning from My Online Project Mistakes

2008-01-03T00:00:00.000+08:00

As usual, Graham Wegner is making me think. He posted a great parable about online collaborative projects and it's forcing me to rethink an experience I had last year that I never paused to reflect upon because it felt like a failure.

Graham's parable shows some of the challenges of coordinating an online collaborative project. I've been on both sides of this parable. Mostly I'm on the tech coach side, but after my experience last year of taking part and then disappearing from a good online collaboration, I've learned that even with all my tech experience, I can make a mess of it.

Differing schedules, teacher's declining, no class of my own all contributed to my failure. I had joined the project was to force myself to do more with wikis, more with Flickr, but the project itself kept getting more complex, having more requirements and steps to follow until, for me, it collapsed under its own weight.

Now that Graham has brought this experience back into my focus, I'm realizing I can take quite a bit of learning away from the experience...

Start really simple. If the students can't do most of it themselves, then chances are, I'll learn far more than they do. Nothing wrong with me learning a lot, but teaching time is too short for me to do things that don't greatly benefit the students.
Similarly, start small. Online projects often require a huge amount of communication and ongoing planning by the teachers. The more teachers, the more people who must be consulted at each step. The more people involved, the more formal a process may be needed to manage it all. Sometimes, just having two teachers, two classes will be the most effective, despite all that could be gained from having more kids in more places involved. Likewise, start with a shorter termed project. If it rocks your socks you can extend it.
Be very clear what you want the students to get out of it. Use backward design to fit the project to the learning and not the other way around, as is so tempting with new tech tools.
Check, check and recheck access before committing. My account at work has more privileges than student and teacher accounts. Didn't think to check access when logged in as one of them, until we were into the project. They couldn't add comments to the wiki. They couldn't upload to it either. And the wiki only allowed so many comments per hour from the same person, so I couldn't log them all in as me.
Upfront, try to make a realistic prediction of the time commitment and the the skills needed. Make those estimates based on the time it will take a new user, not you who have been experimenting with the tools for months. Based on the little I have done with online projects, I'd say double the time you think it will take, both in class and outside of class.
Consider all the schools' vacation schedules when creating the project calendar. Also note end of term, standardized exams, etc.
Keep communicating even when the ship is going down. I expressed my frustrations minimally and then bailed. I wish I'd had the guts to stay in longer or at least take my leave more gracefully. I really enjoyed the people in it, but after three months, it felt like it was pulling me under. I was so much happier when that weight was gone. I don't think relief is what we should feel at the end of collaborations.

Next time I feel tempted to dive into a project, I'll reread Kim Cofino's wise words about planning and implementing social networking projects. She has been involved in many successful projects. Her post comes from a place of wisdom and experience.

In the mean time, what tips can you add to my list? What else should we keep in mind as we embark on collaborative projects?

-

St. Paul Paper has article on XO

2007-12-29T01:20:00.000+08:00

Nice Associated Press article in the St. Paul Pioneer Press newspaper about the XO's reception in Peru. Good to see more coverage.

XO Pros and Cons

2007-12-28T12:35:00.000+08:00

Okay, I'm back home on a regular keyboard so I can reflect a bit on my XO experience so far.

I've just begun to explore the One Laptop Per Child XO computer. I purchased it as part of OLPC's Give-One-Get-One program. Here are some initial thoughts...

Pros

Great software set for kids. It comes with a great collection of constructive software that encourages kids to explore, create, experiment. I think many of my students would come with such a strong schema of "computer" that they would have trouble diving in and figuring things out. I hope kids in developing nations find that easier.
Wide variety of applications. The XO ships with a great variety of apps already installed, from photo, video and recording, music creation, measurement, writing, drawing, painting, web browsing, chatting, programming, memory games. There are more available online and still more in development, including Scratch. Can't wait for that!
Amazingly strong wi-fi receiver. My old ibook has a good antenna in it, often finding 5 or 6 more networks than Kent's Powerbook can detect. The XO has a much farther range than my ibook, and it is just a click to access unsecured networks, such as coffee shop wi-fi.
I don't have access to a second XO or I'd be testing out the mesh networks. Get two XOs in range of each other and they automatically form a mesh network. That in itself is interesting. When you realize that MANY of the applications on the XO are collaborative, then the idea of mesh network becomes amazing. I can invite you to collaborate with me on my picture, my story, my music. I can even invite you to browse the web with me.
Visually appealing. I was sitting in a coffee shop today near a window and people on the other side of the window kept stopping to look at it. I would have been interested to see children's reactions to it, but none came by.
Expandable. I just bought a 4 GB SDHC card. There is a slot under the monitor. It slides right in. You can't run apps off of it, but you can store files there. Has 3 USB ports so I can plug in mouse, keyboard, thumb drive or other peripheral goodness.
Sturdy. Light, rugged, easy to carry (built-in handle), sealed keyboard.
Great community. There are already good resources online. Here are a few I've used the most:

Cons

Tiny keyboard. That's GREAT for its intended users, but is making me crazy. I've ordered a folding keyboard to use with it.
Slow typing. I can type much faster than the letters can appear on the screen. Not sure why that is. It doesn't seem to matter if I get way ahead of the display. The letters get there eventually. However, I can't check for typos as I type.
Lots of lag time. Slow to start. Web pages were slow to load. Slow to switch between home and a running app.
Track pad is a bit dodgy. I've grown too used to my mouse with the scroll wheel and the the ability to scroll from my ibook's trackpad. The XO's trackpad doesn't scroll the window. Mine isn't very well callibrated. I've recallibrated it and that helped, but it is still tricky to click exactly where I want to type. It is also slow. I haven't found a place to speed it up.
Bookmarks are temporary. They persist until I close the browser, then they are gone. I hope this is a bug that will be fixed.
No tabbed browsing. Didn't realize how dependent I was on browser tabs until they were gone. I can open more than one copy of the browser, and move between them via the home screen.
News Reader isn't working. Not with the subscriptions already in it. Not with ones I tried to add.

Of course, the biggest Pro is that if you buy one, a child in a developing nation receives one as well. Pros don't get much bigger than that.

I'd love to hear from you if you have one. How is it working for you? Any killer apps you've found? What do you love/hate about it?

Photo by Manu Contreras

Written on my XO

2007-12-28T03:50:00.000+08:00

This is my first entry from my XO laptop. (It will be short because the keyboard is too small for me to touch type on it and the spacebar requires a heavy hand.)

I am just starting to use it. I am impressed that I can access Blogger Dashboard with the Browse program.

More later when I am on a full-sized keyboard.

For Your Listening Pleasure...

2007-12-07T17:28:00.000+08:00

The last few weeks have been amazing at my school. The Learning 2.0 Conference started it last September. Then the Laptop/Wi-fi pilot in the high school helped key people start seeing the shift that needs to happen. Vision planning and strategic planning are making evident the need for 21st Century teaching and learning skills. All of it deserves to be blogged.

However, it is Friday night. I've been worked on budget stuff until the wee hours. It seems a better use of my time to introduce you to this amazing kid. Enjoy!

(Thanks to Chris Sloan for posting it.)

Creating Comics Online

2007-11-28T22:12:00.001+08:00

A teacher asked me to recommend a comic strip program that will allow the students to add a few sentences of text and have a number of panes. I hadn't looked at comic strip programs since last year, so I decided to see what I could find. Here is a summary of my research.

[NOTE: After experimenting with different ways to show the strips in this post, I decided to put them in my Flickr account and then upload them here full size even though the strip gets truncated. Any other way shrunk the strip so much you couldn't see enough of the detail to get a feel for the program. Clicking on any of the comic strips in this post will take you to the full strip in Flickr.]

MakeBeliefsComix.com

I had a brief chance to use MakeBeliefsComix.com last year with students.

Pros

No registration required.
Strips can be 1-4 panes long.
15 characters to choose from, each of which can be flipped to face the other way. Each has 4 expressions.
There are writing prompts that drop down from each pane to help the cartoonist flesh out their strip.
Very easy to flip, scale, move or delete objects.
Lack of background choices, props, and limited number of characters means students will get down to work more quickly.
Invitations to view the strips can be emailed to people.
No comments from viewers allowed, so no need to monitor them.
No gallery of comics that were created by other people, so no need to worry about objectionable content.
Many teacher resources on the site.

Cons

Talk balloons can only contain 7 lines of text.
Lack of background scenes and props may limit the types of cartoons created.
When I emailed myself the link, the linked cartoon had a rendering error. One of the characters appeared in a frame twice. The strip did not look like that when I sent the link.
Site URL is tricky because of the "s" after beliefs and the "x" in Comix. Students found it difficult to type correctly.

StripCreator

I found StripCreator via a Google search tonight.

Pros

Has different character sets and each character in a set has 2 positions.
Has different background sets such as urban, rural, fantasy.
Can handle large talk balloons.
Choice of 1-3 panes.
Good privacy controls. You decide if your email is visible. You decide if your comic strips are public or private. You decide whether or not to allow visitors to leave comments.

Cons

A bit tedious when setting up the same scene for each pane; no way to set it once and have it persist for all the panes.
No way to email your comics or embed them into blogs or wikis. Could not right-click-save the strip; I only got that element that I was clicking on.
There may be objectionable cartoons on the site. There is a gallery of strips created by other users.
Down at the very bottom of the home page is a link to the creator's Brad Sucks site which is where you buy creator's music CD. It is all innocuous, but having the word "sucks" on the page may make it objectionable to some teachers.
Had a rendering error that I couldn't fix- the broken park bench in the first frame.
Requires email address to register. It sends you the password which is not easy to remember. Fortunately, you can change your password after you log in.

ToonDoo

I had heard of ToonDoo and was surprised to find I already have an account there. However, the feeble efforts in there tell me I didn't play with it for long. This is the most complex of the web apps I surveyed tonight. I was getting tired by this time, so the strip I created is a bit discombobulated.

Pros

This is the most full-featured of the programs I tried. It has many pallettes of characters, backgrounds, props, and talk bubbles.
Much flexibility, provides lots of options so can be used to create a wide-range of strips.
Looks professional; I think students would be pleased with how good their comic strip looked.
Can handle lots of text. You can click a button and the talk balloon to make it fit better.
Create strips from 1-3 panels.
Can create online comic books! You could tell entire stories! Check out this Learn A New Word ToonBook.
You can upload photos to integrate them into the comic strip.
You can alter the facial characteristics of the ready-made characters. I didn't try out this feature so I can't comment on how well it works.
Has buttons to allow you to embed, email, and tag comics you view or make.

Cons

The many palettes were slow to load. May have been my connection since my Starhub often slows to a crawl at night, but other pages are loading fine.
The large array of options may prove insurmountable; some children would spend all their time searching through the palettes and never finish their strip.
Text doesn't wrap; you need to hit returns to keep the text within the pane as you type.
There may be objectionable cartoons on the site. There is a gallery of strips created by other users.
Site requires an email address to register.

Now it's your turn. What online comic creation apps have I missed? Do you have experience using any of these programs with students? Any words of wisdom to share?

Need Your Suggestions for Photo Sharing Sites

2007-11-27T20:41:00.000+08:00

One of my colleagues sent me the following request ...

Would you be willing to throw out a request for input from your Twitter/blog/facebook/whatever community and ask them if they could recommend the best photo sharing service out there? I’m looking for something to suggest to groups of people who have large amounts of photos or other files that they wish to share – cross platform etc. For example, for my house building trip, people want to pool their photos and have access to the originals. But this is also a huge need for Interim trips, and other school groups. I would even be willing to pay for a corporate account to something. Any feedback from your web mavens and gurus would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

Any suggestions for him? I'd love to show him the power of personal learning networks by presenting him with a bunch of helpful suggestions from all of you. Thank you in advance for any advice you can give him.

What Was the Gateway Drug to your PLN?

2007-11-18T09:56:00.000+08:00

I was sitting in on Kim Cofino's amazing session at the Teach IT 2007 conference here in Singapore. Her topic was Developing the Global Student: Practical Ways to Infuse 21st Century Literacy Skills in Your Classroom. I could blog for a month on all the compelling ideas she presented, but for now I'll just tease apart one idea that she sent skittering across my brain.

Part of her presentation had her showing teachers how to choose the best Web 2.0 tool for the job. As she discussed social networking, she dropped a comment about her personal learning network (PLN) only being 1.5 years old. My jaw dropped as I realized she was right. How could something that had only been part of my life for less than two years feel like such an essential part of me?

That brought to mind Alan Levine's post titled Twitter The Gateway Drug. I laughed out loud when I read the title, and I DO think time away from Twitter brings on drug-like withdrawals. Just this week I felt myself twitching a bit as conference prep kept me away.

Thinking about what Kim and Alan were saying I realized a few things. First, my personal learning network has been around much longer than Twitter or Ning. I think it actually started in the mid- 1990's when I scored my first Internet account as part of a grant that had me teaching science and math teachers about radical new tools like email and Mozilla and Netscape. It was around that time I joined the TAWL listserv for teachers applying whole language. I gained valuable knowledge and a sense of community from belonging to that group. Within a few years of that, I joined the EdTech listserv and I still make use of that group today when wresting with tech problems or questions.

That was probably the extent of my online learning network until fall 2003 0r 2004 when Kent installed NetNewsWire Lite on my computer. It had a directory of blogs and although I didn't know what a blog was, I started poking around in the education and technology sections and found one by a passionate writer who was blogging about educational blogging. I'd never heard of him before but his passion for the topic, for the educational potential of blogs hooked me. Soon I was reading Will Richardson's Weblogg-ed blog a few times a week and started to expand my blog roll, started to comment on other people's posts. By spring of 2005 Will's blog had convinced me I needed to be doing this with students, and this blog was born.

Much to my amazement Will himself promoted my blog and soon other educational bloggers like Bud Hunt and Clarence Fisher started leaving comments on my blog. You should have seen the happy dance I did in my living room in KL when I was listening to one of Bud Hunt's podcasts that spring and he mentioned my blog online. I admit it-- I reversed the podcast and listened to it again (and again), amazed that someone in Colorado was reading and podcasting about what I had to say.

For the next few years, blogs were really the center of my PLN. They still are the biggest chunk of it, the part that most informs my practice. Podcasts are also a huge part of my PLN. As my job has left me less leisure time, podcasts entertain and inform me as I wash dishes, work out, and ride the train.

Chat and VOIP are peripheral parts of my PLN. I am not exaggerating when I say that I had Skype on my computer years before I had anyone to Skype with -- the down side of being an early adopter, or just a geek with few social skills? Now, I find that I mostly use Skype in my PLN when we are in Twitter or even Gchat and we start having a real discussion and need a smoother tool in which to have it. I also use Skype a lot when testing out other web apps with friends. We chat in Skype while trying to get the tool working.

In the past year, my PLN has expanded to include Ning and Twitter. Ning is still only peripheral. I think it has tremendous potential but at first it was too slow to access here in Singapore. Even now that it has RSS and is faster to use, I still have to make myself go there and check my networks, interact with them. Something about it isn't a good fit with my own learning process or flow. I also find its navigation cumbersome but I keep going back because I know at some point it is going to click for me.

Twitter eluded me for a long time. I think it was some time last year that I joined, or maybe I just looked at it and didn't join until this year. The reason I question if it is a gateway drug, is that Twitter seems to work best when you already have a PLN. You add those people to your Twitterverse, and then see who they follow to expand your own list.

When I first started using Twitter, I had very few people on my follow list, and most of them were in North America so they were Twittering when I was asleep. Now I have Twitterific so my tweets appear every few minutes on my desktop without me needing to refresh a web page, and I follow more people who are in Asia, Australia and New Zealand, so I am able to be part of real-time twittering rather than reading old tweets after the fact. I also follow more North Americans who seem to never sleep because they are twittering when I am online (I'm talking about you Jennifer Wagner, Chris Craft, John Pederson, Dean Shareski, and D'Arcy Norman!) That has brought Twitter to life and let me leverage its potential.

Now I am constantly amazed at how much I learn from Twitter. From the Alan Duke webcast to a ridiculous amount of just-in-time learning, it channels me to resources that inform my practice. Faster than any other tool in my PLN, it helps me know the people in my PLN on a different level, somehow a more superficial and more personal level as their tech journeys are interspersed with tweets about a daughter's engagement or a relative's illness.

I enjoy Twitter so much that I was confused to find something about it niggled me. I couldn't quite figure out what that was until I read Kathy Sierra's post Is Twitter TOO Good?...

Twitter scares me. For all its popularity, I see at least three issues: 1) it's a near-perfect example of the psychological principle of intermittent variable reward, the key addictive element of slot machines. 2) The strong "feeling of connectedness" Twitterers get can trick the brain into thinking its having a meaningful social interaction, while another (ancient) part of the brain "knows" something crucial to human survival is missing. 3) Twitter is yet another--potentially more dramatic--contribution to the problems of always-on multi-tasking... you can't be Twittering (or emailing or chatting, of course) and simultaneously be in deep thought and/or a flow state.

I'm trying to sort out if this niggle is a legacy brain sort of thing or from some other cause. I'll leave you to chew on that.

So now it is your turn...
What was the gateway drug to your PLN?

Excellent Webcast on New Literacies by Allan Luke

2007-11-18T09:44:00.000+08:00

This morning, I was fortunate enough to be online when Jo McLeay Twittered about finding a webcast by Allan Luke focusing on New Literacies. I had never heard of Allan Luke before, but now I'll be seeking out more information. The web cast really made me think-- and that is not an easy thing to do on Sunday mornings. Not ready to write about it, need to keep chewing on it in my head.

Every Wonder How Google Works?

2007-11-18T09:15:00.000+08:00

Here is a quick visual explanation of what happens when you start a query using Google. It won't tell you the secrets behinds its search algorithm, but I found the process interesting and this site makes it visually appealing.

A Game and an Easy Click to Fight Hunger

2007-11-11T11:10:00.000+08:00

In case you haven't heard, there is a new, free, fun online game that just might increase your students' (or your) vocabulary and fight world hunger at the same time.

Free Rice provides 10 grains of rice for each word you correctly define. The grains appear in the rice bowl on the screen. The rice is paid for by the advertisers at the bottom of the screen.

As I write this, my partner Kent has probably fed an entire village one meal because he has a huge vocabulary and likes to play computer games. Of course, because he is so good at it, the words are getting more difficult to define. The game has artificial intelligence to adjust the difficulty level. Get three right at one level and it goes up to the next level. Get some wrong and it drops back down.

This is the kind of game to leave open on a computer in your classroom. See how full the bowl can be by the end of each day. No need to belabor the point that your students are also helping themselves while they help others.

Another easy way to fight hunger is to visit TheHungerSite.com. Click the button on the page and the advertisers pay for one+ cups of food for people in places struck by famine. No registration, no spam, just click each day and make a difference.

And while you are there, why not click the tabs across the page to visit the other click sites. One fights breast cancer by providing mammograms to women who can't afford them. Another provides basic health care for needy children. One supports literacy by providing books to children. One purchases rainforest land to preserve the rainforests of the world. The final one allows you to provide a bowl of food for an animal at a shelter.

These are all easy steps that any child or adult can take to make a difference. You could easily add them to your class website during specific units. For example, my fourth grade classes are studying rainforest and we need to be careful to not overwhelm the students will all the bad news about deforestation, extinction of species. Having them click each day on the rainforest site can give them an immediate way to feel like they are part of the solution.

My third grade classes study basic human needs and usually gather funds for the Heifer Project. This year, I'll suggest that they add clicking on TheHungerSite as part of their efforts.

Note: I think the site tracks IP address, so having your entire class take turns clicking from your computer may only count as one click. Might be better to do this in the lab or as homework-- and you can also click once a day from your classroom computer.

HTML + IWB = True Love

2007-11-08T20:05:00.000+08:00

Last year, I was pleased with the success of the web design unit I did with my fourth and fifth graders, but I wanted to find a way to bridge the gap between me teaching them a tag, and them successfully using it, especially early on in the unit before they "got" it.

One thing I tried was to insist that they split their screen. On one half was their Notepad document where they were coding their page, and on the other side was WebMonkey so they could be looking at the lesson, referring to the codes. For some there came an "Aha!" moment and then they took off, looking at codes, trying them out, tweaking them. They had learned to learn and I was thrilled to have launched them down that road.

For others, I felt like I was just outside of the Zone of Proximal Development. There would be momentary glimmers, but not enough spark for it to catch. The HTML was too abstract for them.

This year, I have a Promethean interactive whiteboard in my lab. I felt I was under-utilizing it until this unit began. Now it has become essential. Right from the first day, I used it to help the kids start being aware of file extensions, since this is the first time some of them had to type them in.

I created a simple matching exercise with the extensions on one side, and the file type on the other. When they paired the file type with its extension, the white hidden text appeared "magically" in the black box where the extensions were. The kids named this "the X-ray thing!" and keep asking for more such activities.

As important as their enthusiasm for this type of activity is its effectiveness. I taught the same concept last year, but it didn't stick. This year, after that one brief activity, when I say. "File extension, remember, the file's last name?" I get instant nods and looks of recognition, and if someone is adding a photo to their web page and it isn't working, I can say, "Did you remember to add the extension to the file name?" and instead of a blank stare, they'll glance at the screen and say, "Oh! That's the problem."

Next, I introduced the concept of tags and taught them the four key tags that must be on every web page. Then they practiced putting these tags in place by dragging them around on the IWB. I don't know if it is the large muscle movement helping to make the abstract concept more concrete, or the fact that since so many kids want a turn at the board, that we spend more time in guided practice before they try it on their own. Whatever the reason, it is working. When the kids leave the group area and head to their computers, I'd say 2/3 of them now seem to know what to do, compared with 1/3 after the first lesson last year.

I am only referring to fourth graders who haven't done any coding; my returning fifth graders have amazed me with what they retained. I do think many of them didn't get it last year, but as so often happens between fourth and fifth grade, things that seemed beyond them as fourth graders, be it editing their work, reflecting on their learning, or writing HTML code, they suddenly seem to understand it when they return as fifth graders. That was one of the many reasons I love teaching a combined fourth/fifth grade classroom for so many years back in the US. If I'd only taught fourth, I have never know that the lessons did finally take root, they just had a long gestation period.

As we move into more complex tags, the IWB has continued to be a powerful tool. As I mentioned in the previous post, the tag we use to insert graphics into web pages, is long and confusing. Kids often leave off a bit of it or put the bits in the wrong order. As I pondered how to make them more successful, I created a number of flip chart pages around this tag. The first page introduced the tag. Then in a large font size, it showed the tag as it would need to be typed. I colored coded it so I could point out what they were likely to forget, which parts were easy to accidentally flip, etc.

The next page was a matching activity so they could match the parts of the code with each part's purpose. To keep everyone engaged, I had the student who were sitting in the audience be ready to give each try a thumbs up or thumbs down to indicate whether or not they agreed.

The final page had all the tags we had already learned in their proper places, and then all the pieces of the image source tag waiting to be inserted. That was a real challenge; sometimes it took the entire class working together to correctly assemble that line of code, but every class eventually succeeded. And in the work time after that, students had good success, and were very willing to help each other until everyone had an image on their web page.

Adding the IWB to this unit has been a positive experience all the way around. The students seem to be learning the content more easily and are clearly engaged. I'm learning to use the IWB. Life is Good.

The Return of the WebMonkey

2007-11-06T20:01:00.000+08:00

Last year, my web design unit with my fourth and fifth graders went on forever. I started it in Front Page, which is how it had been done for a few years at my school. I was new to Front Page. After working with it with my students for a few weeks I decided that...

It had too much propriety Microsoft stuff in it.

It was too temperamental.

The kids weren't learning much of value.

For me, #3 was the kicker. I felt they weren't learning much because they were already comfortable users of Microsoft Word, and much of Front Page feels very Word-ish. And the parts that don't feel Word-ish are their own strange Front Page thing that won't help the kids anywhere else in life.

And so, I decided to teach them to code. Never mind that I was far from adept at coding, I just dove in.

Fortunately, I used a site called Web Monkey as my starting place with the children. It steps through the basics of web design with irreverence and a blue monkey with a hammer-- Who could ask for more?

We are using that site again this year, but more as a reference than a read and follow it step-by-step type of thing. Older or more experienced students could do that, but most of my 9-11-year-olds find that too daunting at first.

Thus far, this has been our sequence...

Lesson 1: Intro to HTML
We start with quick look at the idea of HTML, including the concept of tags. They then open Notepad and add the html and body opening and closing tags, add a few words to the body, and then learn where and how to save it. At this point, a miracle happens (at least in their minds.) Their simple text document now has an Internet Explorer icon and when they double-click it, they can see their web page. Life is Good.

Lesson 2: Body Tags
The next week, after learning how to right-click, and the "Open with Notepad" their index.html file, they learn how to expand the body tag so that they can change their pages background color and text color. When I show them the handy chart of the 216 web-safe colors with their hexadecimal codes, you'd have thought I was showing them photos of Eden given the reverent "Oohs!" that are heard around the room, soon followed by genuine happy dances of joy as their pages change color.

In addition to the bgcolor and text tags, I teach them the font color tag. They oblige by joyfully creating truly garish text color combinations on their pages-- we'll deal with tasteful design after this pure joy has worn off.

Next I challenge them to figure out how to change the font tag to change the size of certain words. They leave feeling very clever and talk web design all the way back to their homeroom.

Lesson 3: Adding Images
The img src tag is a real challenge for lots of reasons, including...

it's length
the tricky words (is it img src or img scr? Most kids choose the latter for some reason.)
the need for quotation marks (which are easily forgotten)
the need for us to use ../ because we are on a network
the need to put the images inside their web folder
the need to know the file extension on the image.

A typical image tag ends up looking like this:

img src="../susans/images/cardinal.gif"

They thought back ground tags were bad, so this is a bit daunting. However, I have carefully prepared a folder of animated GIF images for them to copy and use. The anticipation of having a flapping butterfly, a barking dog or a flaming, flying dragon on their web page pushes even the most reluctant to persevere.

I use my "first dones" as experts and soon everyone has an image on their page. As they leave class, I usually hear a few scheming to go online and find images of something they are passionate about, such as Runescape characters.-- Means I need to have the "Can't use copyrighted images on something we are posting online" talk soon, but not today.

For a few classes who were ready for it, I gave them the optional homework of going to Flaming Text to create a banner for their page. They need to put the image into their Digital Dropbox in Blackboard to get it to school, thus reinforcing a skill I've been helping them learn.

Lesson 4: Messing With Text
In which we emphasis text using b and i or em tags. Then we learn to move text and other elements around the page using the p and p align tags. Finally we explore headlines and agree that it is vexing that with the font size tag, larger numbers create bigger text, but with the headline tags, H1 makes a larger headline than H6.

We'll go on from there, but I'll stop writing this for now. It is such a delight to teach my students something that they find so meaningful and engaging. The rest of us may argue that "real" webmasters don't code by hand. However, my students see this as an important way to spend their time. A number of them have gone home and on their own created a simple page. I wasn't offering extra credit; they did this for their own delight. If only everything was this fun to learn...

A Vision of Students Today

2007-10-14T09:46:00.000+08:00

Michael Wesch has done it again, and done it well.

He's a cultural anthropologist at Kansas State University and he created this video with his students. Or maybe I should say that his students created it with him, since it came out of a Google Doc worked on by all 200 of them. Like his previous video, The Machine is Us/ing Us, he shows some of the implications of Web 2.0.

At the Learning 2.0 conference in Shanghai, Will Richardson encouraged us to look at conversations outside of education to inform our practice and help us envision the needed changes. He made me realize how much of what I read has been written by classroom teachers, which is good, but limiting.

Being a cultural anthropologist, Michael Wesch brings a different perspective to the issue of 21st Century Literacy. For example, in "The Machine is US/ing Us", he starts out showing how digital text is different than printed text and then goes on to show the implications of that, how it has changed and is changing the world. By the end, he is pushing us to reconsider key definitions of copyright, and even family.

This new video is yet another push that I need to start making changes. I do all this reading and thinking, but not much acting. I was much more constructive and progressive as a classroom teacher than I am as a technology coordinator. Part of that is due to the tremendous learning curve I went through last year working in a new school in a new country on a platform new to me. Part of it is working in such a large school. As a classroom teacher, I could still close my door and move ahead on my own, if need be. Now I am a coordinator trying to move 50+ teachers and more than 800 students forward.

Those are all valid excuses, but they are still excuses. As I get a better handle on this job, one of my obstacles now is empathizing too much with the classroom teachers. They are so stressed, always working so hard, that I am loathe to add more to their load. I too clearly remember the heavy feeling of not being able to add one more thing to my schedule without imploding.

When I was a classroom teacher, I turned to tech in part because it made my job easier, and also because I was finding it the most effective way to make the curriculum more engaging and meaningful. When I was a technology integration specialist in Malaysia, with some teachers I was able to share this vision, help them move along. I think most would did so would admit that it didn't exactly make their job easier, but it was such a powerful learning tool that it was worth the effort. [I find it interesting that the projects I created with them were much richer, more worthwhile than the projects I did as prep activities. All I can say is that I was new to the job and kept teaching the outcomes, even though the outcomes were too skills based.]

So, it looks like my challenge this year, is to keep pondering the messages of Michael Wesch, Karl Fisch's "Did You Know?", and Kim Cofino's definition of 21st Literacy Century, to make me passionate enough about all of this that I DO feel justified in adding on to the teacher's burdens. Hopefully I'll find a way to keep it from being a burden to them. Either way, that's my job. I'd better get to it!

Thanks to Bud Hunt for Tweeting about it. (How exactly, should we credit Tweet sources? It there an APA citation format for Twitter yet?)

The K12 Online Meme - Three Things I Hope to Get Out of the Conference

2007-10-12T11:27:00.000+08:00

The K12 Online Conference has begun! They started a meme to help publicize the event. Here's my response.

1. Watching the dialogue develop- Many of the bloggers I follow are presenting at this conference. I'm interesting in hearing what's new in their thinking, what new steps their thoughts have taken.

2. Professional Development with/for Learning 2.0 - I know how tremendously web 2.0 technologies have impacted my own professional development. As a tech coordinator, I am struggling to provide PD for my staff that helps them move ahead, and embrace these technologies, both because they make the curriculum more engaging, and because at the moment, our students are getting left behind.

3. Practical Knowledge and New Frontiers - After attending the Learning 2.0 conference in Shanghai, my staff is starting to bring these disruptive technologies into their curriculum. I want to be well informed to help them do this. I also want to have my own thinking pushed.

Krabi

2007-10-12T11:15:00.000+08:00

Oh Dear,

I am on holiday in Krabi, Thailand, enjoying the sun, sand and surf. I had looked forward to finally doing some substantial blogging while here since I'd have time to really reflect and write. Instead, I've been watching the tide roll in and out. I've never really done that before. It might sound a bit like watching paint dry, but it holds my attention.

Also spent low tide climbing around on rocks, exploring mud flats and tide pools-- who'd have thought so much could be living in the water in crevices in boulders?

After that, someone had to check out and follow the animal tracks in the sand. Do rats live on beaches? If not, what four-footed critters with feet the size of rats live on beaches in Thailand?

I couldn't come this far and not swim in the blue-green water and comb the beach, and eat dinner near the shore watching amazing sunsets while local guys play a mean game of soccer on the beach.

In the evening we had a massage and ate ice cream and watched "Return of the King" for at least the sixth time (and it was still good.)

Tomorrow we head back to Singapore, where I'll get to publish this post and maybe even add a photo or two. No words of wisdom besides these... Go spend some time by the sea.

Custom Typing

2007-10-03T21:07:00.000+08:00

Last year I realized that our keyboarding program was not meeting our needs. The problem wasn't the software or instruction, it was the lack of access to the computers. Typing is better learned in shorter sessions many times per week than one long session of equivalent length. (There is research to support that statement, but it is back in Minnesota in my Hamline materials, instead of here where I need it. Just call it packing mistake #236.) Unfortunately, our lab spaces are maxed out as it is, no chance to get the classes in more often. And since we are stuck in the tech integration-as-prep-time mode, I can't front end load extra typing sessions early in the year. Therefore, a home option seems best.

This week, I'm introducing my fourth and fifth grade classes to Custom Typing. It is an online subscription typing program. We piloted it last year and were pleased with the students' progress. I was also pleased by the great customer service we received. We usually received a useful response within 24 hours. This fall, I was able to upload the accounts via a database file. It was a life saver as I created more than 700 accounts.

This year I made it available to any fourth or fifth grade class as long as the teacher agreed to...

assign it as homework for at least 3 nights per week
monitor student progress on a regular basis
become familiar enough with the program that they can provide student support for basic problems.

This introductory lesson that I taught this week has the kids logging in, choosing an animated coach, choosing a background, and going through the introduction. They loved choosing the coach and the backgrounds. They found the intro deadly dull. They found the initial exercises long, but most were able to complete their first quiz. They needed a score of 61, but most has a score over 100. That was just the hook they needed.

Of course, it is not free of problems. One problem is that the workstations at their homes were probably set up for adults, not children. Fortunately, the site has a good ergonomics section built in. It has helpful photos to supplement the kid-friendly text. Some teachers are making it an assignment to view that section and report back on how their home workstation measures up.

Another problem is that children are unlikely to voluntarily cover the keyboard to prevent peeking. However, this program works well enough that the students in the pilot last year did get past the peeking stage. Each exercise is long enough that they stop looking since they "know" the keys.

I asked the teacher to attend this first session so I could get them up to speed with the program. Initially I had not set up student accounts for the teachers themselves, but a number of them asked for them, so I made them for everyone. Teachers us a different login to get to the student accounts and records. I didn't get much feedback from them. I'm sure they wished they could be having their prep time instead, but they are great sports and attended anyhow.

Next I need to create the support materials for teachers to send home, and to help teachers generate student reports. At least the children have all been able to log in and seem to be enjoying it.

Blogger Play

2007-09-30T22:04:00.000+08:00

Think of the times you've been home sick. Too sick to do any school work or even read, but you've slept for 14 hours and need to be awake for a while. You turn to TV and are amazed to find that despite have 70 channels, there's nothing to watch.

Your salvation has arrived from an unlikely source... Blogger. They have released a feature they've had in-house for years. Go to

http://play.blogger.com/

and you can watch the photos being uploaded to Blogger blogs.

Now, you may be thinking this sounds like torture, a play on the old, "Come over and watch our travel slideshow." However, you'd be wrong. What you see is an amazingly diverse stream of photos. In a few minutes of watching I saw teens mugging for the camera, the Sydney opera house, a wedding photo, a grinning dog lounging in a backyard, kids on a soccer field, scrapbooking papers, food, and of course, a few ads.

In our media-rich lives, it is almost refreshing that there is no sound track. Of course, I have iTunes streaming Radio Margaritaville through our AirTunes.

I wonder if you uploaded a photo to your Blog and had this sit in a different tag, if you'd see your own photo go by, or if it is just grabbing one as the previous one finishes showing. If you figure that out, let me know.

So, the next time you are home sick, or needing a break, a visual meditation, give it a try.

Flock 9 is full of Web 2.0 Goodness

2007-09-30T20:14:00.001+08:00

I need to work on our WASC report tonight and finish lesson planning, so no real time to blog. However, I did download the newest version of the Flock web browser and I am impressed.

From the start, Flock has tried to be a Web 2.0 web browser. This version takes a big leap in that direction. It has a My World tab that gives me one click access to my Flickr, YouTube, Blogger, Wordpress and other online homes. It posts to my blogs. It uploads my photos to Flickr.

It has a decent RSS reader. I like that I can easily toggle between full posts and teasers. It also has a similar feature for different types of media. As always, it is blazing fast at loading pages-- much faster than Firefox on my Mac or IE on my HP.

It has a blog post editor which has tabs to access the source code and a preview. No image upload in it that I can see, but otherwise it looks good. Strange that it won't talk to my Flickr, but I suppose that is too controlled by the blogging platform of my host.

And unlike it's early, early versions, it's been stable all afternoon since I installed it. Hopefully that will continue.

Go ahead. Give it a look and let me know what you think.

Blogged with Flock

Free Conferencing/Training Platform?

2007-09-18T21:46:00.000+08:00

Tomorrow I'll be meeting with our part time math coach. She is ending her first session on campus as she helps us implement our Everyday Math program adoption.

On her agenda for our meeting is our school's Web-Ex set up. That part of the meeting should be short, since we don't HAVE a Web-Ex set up.

Okay, maybe that answer won't quite fly. I need one that will. We don't have big online conferencing/training needs, don't offer any courses online. Most of the time when a vendor wants to conference with us, they have Elluminate or some similar tool. Therefore, I'm not looking for something that requires a subscription.

For the past hour I've been poking around. Since I haven't met with her yet, my best understanding is that the math coach want's to run little training sessions online. At minimum, I'm expecting she wants participants to be able to see a Powerpoint-style presentation while being able to hear her. More likely, she wants them to be able to converse.

Zoho may partially meet our need. Part of their suite is Zoho Show, an online presentation tool. Within it you can imbed meeting slides that allow the participants to actually see the presenter's desktop. I'm trying to test it right now and it isn't loading, but that is likely due to half of Singapore being online right now.

Zoho may work for the visuals, but we'd need something like Skype going for the audio. It would work best in our IT conference room where we have a conferencing phone system. However, some of the telephones at work have a speaker feature as well.

Another option for the visuals may be Google Presentations. They were announced on Google's blog yesterday. You can use it to co-create a presentation. She can also share it online. Like Zoho's tool, you invite participants to come view it. It has a chat client in the sidebar, which might work better than audio Skype for the participants. Easier for everyone to follow the discussion and there would be a transcript to refer back to afterwards.

Unfortunately, I couldn't test that one either. It crashed my computer at work a few hours ago. However, that may have been the result of huge numbers of people testing it, since it was just announced yesterday.

So, what other free options are out there? If you've used one I'd like to hear about it. I'd like recommendations of what to use, and what to avoid.

(BTW, a big THANKS to D'Arcy Norman and Chris Craft for Twittering about Google Presentations. That's how I heard about it just as I was starting my online search for such a tool. How perfect is that?)

The Learning 2.0 Conference Has Begun

2007-09-14T18:43:00.000+08:00

Okay, I admit it. I feel like a groupie. There on the stage, not more than 50 feet away, are Jamie McKenzie, Alan November, Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach, Wes Fryer, Will Richardson and Jeff Utect. Amazing. I get to spend this weekend learning from these educators. Doesn't quite seem real to look up from my Thai green curry at dinner and see Will walk by. We are sitting next to the Brainpop rep.

I have such high hopes for this weekend. I am hoping it helps us all see the shift that Will is discussing tomorrow. (Yeah, I'm a lazy tech coordinator who is hoping this weekend can jump start the fire among my great staff. Rather than waiting for me to start it.)

And so it begins...

Need Email Addresses for your Students?

2007-09-14T08:12:00.000+08:00

Just read in the T.H.E. SmartClassroom Newsletter...

ePals Delivers Free E-Mail, Blogging for Schools

Education technology provider ePals is making its formerly subscription-based services available to schools free of charge. These services, available to all schools around the world, include SchoolMail, SchoolBlog, and In2Books.

Read More:
http://www.1105newsletters.com/ppezoon_rlswaslr.html

Blogging from Shanghai?!

2007-09-13T20:04:00.000+08:00

I am surprised to be writing this. Last night when I tried to access Blogger, I received a "Page Not Found" error. I assumed it was because I am here in Shanghai and that Blogger is still a blocked site here. However, tonight I find I can get in.

Yesterday, the other technology coordinators, the director of technolgy, and I flew to Shanghai. Since each of the tech coordinators works in a different division, we rarely see each other outside of our weekly meeting. Having this time together, even the informal times over meals, is a real boon in terms of team building and new ideas. Spending time with all of them is a treat.

Spent a great day today seeing the sites. We bought knock-off goods in the morning, drank good Paulaner beer for lunch, and went up in the Orient Pearl Tower this evening. Now we are contemplating massages. Life is Good.

Eagerly anticipating the start of the conference tomorrow night. As a tech person, I'm used to attending the big EARCOS conference and trying to find a few worthwhile tech sessions. Being here at Learning 2.0 where the entire thing is tech feels to good to be true.

I feel especially fortunate that 10 teachers from my division are attending the conference. I hope it gets them excited and gives them ideas for how to bring Learning 2.0 to their classrooms.

It all starts tomorrow evening...

Really Getting Started with IWBs

2007-09-09T12:46:00.000+08:00

Last year my division purchased six SmartBoards as a pilot project. We had months of hardware compatibility issues. By the time they were resolved, the Director of Technology had decided that due to technical support issues here, we would switch to Promethean instead. We were able to swap out 1 Smartboard for every x number of Prometheans purchased. As a result, I know have 8 teachers with Promethean boards and four with Smartboards.

I've been trying to get my brain around how to support these teachers. They are such skilled teachers and have had basic instruction in using the boards, so I didn't want to waste their time on mundane things they could figure out themselves. However, even more so than most groups, this group has a wide skill range. One is a tech integration specialist. Two others have served as technology coordinators in other schools. They are more skilled with the boards than I am at the moment.

At the other end of the spectrum are users who just received their boards this week, have had little time to experiment, and some are not naturally geeks, they don't do this for fun. How was I to plan an inservice that met their needs?

And how should we organize? I have teachers from each grade level, plus a tech specialist and an enrichment teacher. Two of the grade levels have both types of boards in the team. The boards each have their own software, and projects made in one cannot be used on the other. It was not obvious to me how to group them to best effect.

It is difficult to get time during the school day, but I received permission to pull them all from their classrooms for all of Friday afternoon. Since we may not get many other large chunks of time, I was really struggling on how best to use the time. Last year I attended a workshop and built into the workshop was time to look at the resources that were presented. That sounds obvious, but usually I walk home from workshops with a pile of resources I don't have time to look at. I wanted to build some of that time into this work time.

I decided to use a portion of the afternoon to give them a chance to assess what they still needed to learn and to explore their options. I used Wikispaces to create an IWB wiki. It contains links to training resources, lesson resources and good interactive web sites. It also has a page devoted to Del.icio.us. I had the Delicious toolbar buttons put in this year's build. This is the first group I've taught to use it. Some people really took to it. It was my hope that they could use it to find what other people have tagged with IWB or smartboard or promethean. We found some good resources that way and soon my teachers were tagging away. I also hoped we could use our own sasiwb tag to share resources with each other. Not sure that will work, but it was worth a try.

Next they explored the training options. Some were delighted to just start at the beginning and work their way back through tutorials. They were pleased to discover how much they already knew. One signed on for the free Promethean course taught via Moodle. He was zipping through the lessons. Others felt they didn't need that and spent more time in Del.icio.us or explored the lesson resources in the wiki.

After that, we went around and each person shared their experiences thus far this year using the board. That was a good use of our time. You could feel the energy in the room build as people gained new ideas from colleagues. The third grade teachers commented that since the primary computer teachers had the boards last year, their students have come up knowing how to use the boards and were proving to be great support as these teachers found their way.

From there, I asked them to figure out how they wanted to organize into ongoing working groups. In the end, all three grade levels decided to work with their grade-level colleagues, but all the teachers were adamant that they wanted to continue to meet all together for work sessions because they gained so much from the other groups.

One grade decided to continue working on tutorials and to start looking for flipchart resources for upcoming social studies lessons. Another group was finding that their most powerful lessons with the board so far had involved interactive websites, or tools from the gallery such as compass and protractors. They wanted to spend time locating interactive sites that they could use with their current units. Since all our teachers have data projectors, they envisioned being able to share those resources with colleagues who do not have an IWB. This year we gave all classrooms a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse set, so they can be up by their screens rather than back by their computers when they use the data projectors. That makes using interactive sites much more effective.

Another grade had four people, two on each platform. They decided to still meet all together because they were getting such good ideas from each other. One teacher has really been using his board well in the week he's had it. Between interactive web sites that supported his current math unit, and just bringing the kids to the board to write their thinking on a math problem, he already has a bank of useful lessons saved. He is finding that having students come to the board to show their thinking, and then saving that page as a PDF allows him to save it and share it with all colleagues. It is no longer editable, but it is a great record of what they did. He can put it in Blackboard for the students to refer to. It makes me think a bit of Mr. Kuropatwa's class scribes.

These teachers were very focused on how to support their colleagues who receive boards next year. When I commented that we didn't know that we would expand this project to include other teachers because we hadn't yet seen that it was a success, they acted like I was crazy. To them it is obvious that all the teachers need these boards.

I am not yet convinced. My board was installed last week and so I used it in minimal ways with the kids for the lessons that were already planned. The kids are mesmerized, eager to use it. That in itself is worth something. I am wondering if for most of my teachers, taking hours to construct a flipchart that is only used for ten minutes is not the way to go. Interactive web sites, and just using the gallery tools as needed in lessons may be a better use of there time.

We are also fortunate that with our new Everyday Math adoption, two of the three grade levels purchased the interactive lessons CD-ROMs for all the teachers. This has the full TE and all the student journals, homework pages and other materials. Teachers are able to pull up a student work page and display it on the IWB and work on it for the class to see.

Yes, if you made a transparency of every page, and didn't lose them, you could accomplish the same thing with an overhead projector, but not quite. These seems a powerful tool.

I wonder if the actual board software might not be more powerful in the hands of the students. Rather than having them create yet another Powerpoint, they could create much more powerful demonstrations of their learning with the layering options the board presents. And they could make their presentations more interactive, and therefore more engaging.

I am also wondering if for our primary students, could the board be an effective way to help children move from concrete to symbolic stage with a concept, since it is a very movable symbolic representation?

All in all, I still feel that I'm not giving them enough direction. They are such skilled teachers that they will do good things with it despite my lack of leadership. I'm hoping that in Shanghai I'll glean words of wisdom from teachers who've been using the board for years. One session is devoted to sharing just that sort of wisdom. Whatever happens, I feel good to finally have this project launched.

I'd love to hear from other people with great resources or IWB training tips to share.

The Return of the Geek Girl

2007-09-08T19:17:00.000+08:00

First six weeks back at work have been a blur. Not quite in the clear yet, but truly needed some down time, so I spent today on the sofa with the cats. They napped while I started to reconnect with my online life.

First, I peaked at a few of the 1608 unread posts in my blog roll. I know I'll realistically never get time to read all of those, but here a a quick few that have me thinking.

Doug Johnson over at Blue Skunk blog has an intriguing post about what his next card catalog needs. It is full of web 2.0 goodness and I think many of the items on his list are needed in more places than just the library card catalog.
Cool Cat teacher Vicki Davis has a post about a new online contest in which students create You Tube videos about preventing the spread of flu (as in infectious disease, not magical powder that lets wizards transport from place to place). My school now has a You Tube channel but it is languishing away unused. Now I'm itching to start using it in this type of way.
The upcoming Learning 2.0 conference in Shanghai has a blog. I hadn't checked it in a while. It was a treat to read through it and see the huge number of presentations that I want to attend. I need to clone myself to do justice to the 45 pages of presentations listed in the program.

And speaking of the Learning 2.0 conference, I spent a bit of time joining the conference Ning, inviting conference attendees to join my network, and creating a blog in my profile. Ning still seems a bit slow, but I'm more comfortable with it now than I was last spring when I first joined the Classroom 2.0 Ning network. Back then it was so slow (at least when used from Singapore) that I gave up on it.

Another social networking tool that the conference is employing is Twitter. Interestingly enough, I first heard about the conference via a tweet by Jeff Utecht. I had played around with Twitter last spring, but I can't access it at work, and most the people I follow in it are in in North American, so not many tweets come through when I am online. However, I just downloaded the new Twitterific. I'd tried out a previous version last spring, but it was buggy. this new version seems much more stable.

Finally, I spent some time in Facebook. I joined last summer to see what all the fuss was about. At that time, not many people I knew were using it actively, and I didn't have time or interest to use it for finding new ones.

Now a few more friends are in there, and through them I'm discovering fun apps to add in, and groups to join. The latter are interesting. I suspect for teens the groups work. For ed tech adults most of the groups that interested me had hundreds of users and no action. I wonder if it is because people join and then never check back or if some key catalyst is missing to make the reaction take off.

So now it is 7:45 pm. I'm stiff from sitting on the couch all day, but I feel grounded in a way that has been missing for months. This Geek Girl is happy again.

Which Star Wars Character Are You?

2007-07-09T10:39:00.000+08:00

My results:

You are Luke Skywalker
You value your friends and loved ones,
but can sometimes act recklessly
because of your emotions.
Occasionally you resort to whining.
You look ahead to great things for yourself.

Which Star Wars character are you?

Click here to take the Star Wars Personality Test

9 Mistakes That Can Kill Your Positive Growth

2007-07-09T09:54:00.001+08:00

One problem I've been having is that my my RSS feeds are just too good. I just read the past 36 posts that Doug Johnson made to his Blue Skunk Blog and as usual, I find myself tagging half of them in Del.icio.us. He's just so good at clearly identifying problems and then providing wise solutions.

One of his posts was a recap of a number of items posted on Abram Stephen's Lighthouse blog. It was a look at Henrik Edberg's discussion of 9 Mistakes That Can Kill Your Personal Growth on the Positivity Blog:

9 Mistakes That Can Kill Your Personal Growth

Thinking you already know everything
Being confused by the marketing hype
Not taking action
Giving up
Worrying about/listening to what others think
Dabbling with it
Having unreasonable expectations
Failing to/not wanting to (at least start to) understand yourself
Not taking responsibility for yourself

I want to really look at these, but not at this moment. I hope you find them useful without my chewing on them publicly.

In Which We Begin Posting Lots of Half-Baked Ideas and Things I Want to Keep to Chew on Later

2007-07-09T09:44:00.000+08:00

Nope. I'm not dead. Just doing my best imitation of a hamster on a wheel as this amazingly short summer slips by.

It's been a mixed summer...

Good times with family and friends, but too little time to spend with each person. I think everyone feels I've neglected them.
Up too late most nights spending time with family, and then up too early due to loud birds, house noises, and the need to workout before it's too warm.
In fabulously better shape than when summer started, but thanks to not sleeping, and not being patient, I keep pushing the workouts too hard, not listening to my body (or my heart monitor) which leaves me too tired.
Almost no napping! That's bad. I really need to return to work rested. I'm not there yet.
Just starting my professional reading and work now. Reading about combining UbD with Differentiation, Jamie McKenzie's ideas on tech, questioning, and other pertinent topics, catching up on my backlog of ISTE journals, and finally dipping back into my RSS feeds after being away from my own computer. It's all energizing, but I head back to Singapore in less than a week, will be traveling for a week with friends, and then work starts again on July 30. No time left to digest, to ponder, to reflect. Auuugggghhh!!!!

And so, for the next week, I'll be dumping lots of half-baked thoughts here to clear out my head, keep the ideas for future reflection, etc. May make for uninspiring reading; you've been warned...

Time to Review UbD

2007-06-03T21:21:00.000+08:00

One of the many tasks on my summer list is to revisit the tech integration process for the classrooms. Currently, a person from each grade level team develops the plan for the team and submits it to the tech integration specialists for comment. Teachers who didn't want to use the team's plan were free to create their own plan with the tech specialists. In theory, that document becomes my lesson plans for the semester.

This system isn't working very well. One reason is that our students have outgrown our current tech outcomes so the tech plans aren't stretching them. Another reason is that we aren't really following the plans. Teachers tended to run into me in the halls and say, "Oh! This week could we..." Or else they feel guilty that they aren't giving me better information. Surprisingly good integration was occurring, but it was despite the integration plans, not because of them. And so, I knew I needed to spend time this summer on how to improve the system.

I'd like to come at it from the other direction. It doesn't make much sense to me that teachers are creating the tech plans and then submitting them to use for comments. After all, I am the tech specialist. I should be helping them come up with the integration. However, I was struggling for a framework to use.

Fortunately, tonight I started to tackle the backlog in my feed reader. I started with Kim Cofino's Always Learning blog. One post that especially intrigued me discussed how she has switched to using Understanding by Design principles to plan technology integration units with her teachers. In the post she outlines the process she went through to help a self-professed technology dinosaur become a tech immigrant.

Her process is more in-depth than I'll be able to do with my teachers. They are too swamped to sit and plan the entire year's tech integration to that depth. However, I think there are ways to draw in UbD. Good thing I have this summer to mull it over.

However, now I need to pack up for my holiday back in Minnesota. Too much to do here to follow those thoughts now.

Good luck to all you who are finishing up the year. I hope it goes smoothly.

Why Moodle Instead of Blackboard?

2007-05-13T17:46:00.000+08:00

Jethro over at Mr. Jones' Education Blog asked why I thought Moodle was better than Blackboard. I'm glad to answer but first must say that my Moodle is just MY Moodle. I've never run one for an entire school or entire district. I've never tried to make it talk to the Active Directory. I'm speaking only from a classroom teacher's point of view.

Last year found me back in the classroom after four years as a tech specialist in Malaysia. Being back in the Minnesota public schools was a rough transition. I was in a new school and all the curriculum I was teaching was new to me. I had also switched from teaching wealthy children to teaching children with a much lower socio-economic status. The challenges that poverty brings often left them with little attention for classroom learning. But that's another story.

I set up my Moodle to try to make some of my tasks easier to accomplish. I first bought web space from Go Daddy but didn't have time to learn how to work with the back end SQL (or was it Php?) databases for the Moodle, so I jumped ship and signed up with BlueHost instead. They've been awesome, but originally I chose them based on one good review and because they have Fantastico. That is a helper application on the Bluehost servers that let me install Moodle in just a few clicks. I know it would be FAR wiser to master enough of those databases to be able to install it myself, but being in a new job, time was my least available resource (along with sleep) so I went with easy and it worked. Later in the year I was even able to use Fantastico to install the upgrade and it did so flawlessly. I was probably just lucky, but it worked. And they now have 24/7 live customer support so even if I had trouble here in Singapore I could get support.

My Moodle worked well last year and I didn't really think much about Blackboard until January or so of 2007 as I finally had enough mental space here in Singapore to dig in. I've used Blackboard before when teaching university classes. I've also taken class there with it. In both of those situations, I was using it in a prescribed way so I didn't think much about what else it could or couldn't do. If you want to know how I used my Moodle, just go back and skim my blog starting in January 2006.

Now as I look at it, I'm most disgruntled about the following things. Possibly you can purchase add-0ns or configure the Blackboard in different ways that overcome these problems. These are just the problems as I see them.

No built in options for blogs, wikis, journals, etc. How can something that costs so much not offer those basic tools? And yes, you can purchase add-ons from third-party vendors, but they are expensive and are rudimentary at best, lacking the granular control that a teacher should be able to expect to have by now. For example, there is no draft area for the blogs where only the teacher or a group of reviewers can conference with the blogger before the post goes live. That's a pretty basic requirement and the vendor didn't even see why we'd need that when we spoke with him. There are all sorts of other things I expect from a student blogging platform, but I won't go into them all here. I haven't checked out Moodle's blogs, but I did use its wiki and journal and they worked well for us.
No place for feedback on assignments. With Moodle, I'd have students draft their writing in a word processor and then paste it in to the Assignment module. I could then score it and give feedback. Finding time for meaningful writing conferences with upper elementary students is different. Their writing is getting longer, and more complex. And my group last year was rarely just working quietly while I conferenced with one student. And even if they had worked quietly, it would take days to conference on just one assignment. Writing comments in the evenings in Moodle and then spending class time in the lab really worked. Students would have my comments in the top half of their screens and the piece in the lower half and for many of them, that really worked. It was much more effective than face-to-face conferences, or notes written on their paper. And it persisted. Both the student and I could go back, read my earlier comments. I really miss this feature now that I'm back in Blackboard. Yes, third party add-ons can give Blackboard this ability. But for what Blackboard costs, I think this obvious feature should be native since it is a learning environment. and you could use email, but my students don't have it and the comments wouldn't be right with the assignment.
Journals. Yes, I mentioned this above, but I should clarify. One way I build rapport and encourage students to write is to journal with them. They write to me and I write back. In the past this meant 25 notebooks and lots of me flipping through the books and writing by hand. I HATE writing by hand. It is slow. I make spelling mistakes. I struggle to write neatly. In Moodle I set up each student as their own group. Then we had a private space for journaling. No more me lugging notebooks around or staying late to write in them. Students could (and did) write from home. I could sit with my feet up and the cats curled up nearby and write with 24 on the television. Much better than my classroom where the heat went off at 4 pm. Admittedly, there may be a way with groups to make this happen. Maybe you can set up groups and then journal in the same way. Since I'm not a classroom teacher this year, I didn't check that out.
Easier to navigate. It sure seems to take a lot of clicks to get to where I want to be in Blackboard. My Moodle was more flexible and quicker.
Avitars. Yep. They are a bother, but kids really loved being able to have some way to express their individuality. Moodle lets you have a tiny avatar alongside your posts.
RSS- Why doesn't Blackboard let me set up RSS for the different modules? If it can't do that, why doesn't it at least email me? It has my email address.

If I were still using my Moodle daily, I'm sure I could be much more persuasive. And I'm not using the newest version of Moodle which probably has even more Web2.0 goodness embedded in it.

Movies or Essays?

2007-05-12T12:24:00.000+08:00

Still making movies with kids. Still loving it.

Still slightly amazed at how quickly most kids have taken to it. Makes me think back to last year when my students were writing their DARE essays. Essays are clearly not something my students spent time reading, which made writing them very difficult. In constrast, my students have been exposed to a great deal of video. I suspect that is why they found this so easy.

And it was the kiddos who had struggled most this year, the ones who still haven't grasped that ALL their documents are stored in their My Documents folder, that made the biggest gains. So many of those kids are the ones who actually got hold a digital camera and used Legos or Bionicles, candy bars or army guys or rubber ducks as their subjects. They took photo after photo of these subjects in different positions. They found a way (CD-ROM, thumb drive, Blackboard, bringing in the camera) to get the photos to school. They narrated the entire video, usually with different voices for different characters. They searched through our collection of royalty-free music to find just the right sound tracks.

All the children seem to enjoy this unit, but these kids are especially delighted and amazed by what they have created. They sit and watch the video again and again. They keep going in and making small tweaks to make the video just right. They are focused and animated in a way I haven't seen all year, although I glimpsed it during our web page unit.

My next step is to put the videos in a location where the classroom teachers can reach them, and offer the viewing of the videos as an activity for those last few days of school. I hope the teachers are as delighted and amazed as the children and I have been. I hope it sends the teachers off on the summer vacation thinking, "I wonder how I can use student-made videos in my curriculum next year?" I'll be asking myself the same question.

BlackBoard Uses in Upper Elementary

2007-04-20T20:58:00.000+08:00

I've used Blackboard on and off over the years. I've taken classes that used it, and I've taught courses that used it at the graduate level. At my current school, all classes in the middle and high school divisions must have a Blackboard component to them. If we had to close the school for some reason such as bird flu or haze, those courses would continue in Blackboard with the students checking in from wherever they were in the world.

Our primary school doesn't use Blackboard at all. My intermediate division has made spotty use of it, mostly with grade 5 classes.

This year, with my frantic start in new country, new school, new job; I was happy to just let it sit. My amazing assistant had created and populated a course for each grade 4 and 5 homeroom, but I wasn't pushing the use of it. Fortunately, even without my involvement, its use has began to grow.

First, two fifth grade teachers decided to team, with one teaching all the science and social studies, and the other teaching all the math. They asked if we could somehow change their homeroom courses to also include all the students from the other class. That was done and soon they were making good use of Blackboard. They post due dates, assignments, resources, etc. Students are able to post assignments digitally. It was making their lives easier.

A few months ago, one of the grade four teachers who hadn't used it, decided to create a forum and post a question related to their current read aloud book. Students responded as homework. It was yet another way to approach literacy and the kids liked it. The teacher found he was gaining useful information so he shared it with his colleagues. Soon I was leading an inservice to teach 6 other teachers how to use it and many of them started posting weekly questions.

In one room, this has really taken off. As a lead in to their study of Antarctica, she asked them to post 6 things they new about the area and 6 things they wanted to learn. Within a week, the children had written more than 300 posts in this discussion. As she read through them, she was delighted to find that the 300 posts were high quality, with the children truly having a rich, respectful discussion online.

She was so delighted that she started looking for other ways that Blackboard could enrich her classroom or make her job easier. She started wondering if it could help her schedule her upcoming student-led conferences. She conferred with another teacher and soon she had set up a conference sign-up discussion board. I checked with her today and many of her families have successfully signed up in the past two days. She is delighted. Next she is planning on using our podcast plug-in in Blackboard to create our divisions' first podcasts. I'll keep you posted on how that progresses. She and I will learn much as the project progresses.

I started using Blackboard myself this spring when I realized it could be that missing home-school link that I've been searching for all year. With the homeroom teachers' permission, I made myself an instructor. I am using it in a big way to provide structure and resources in my movie making unit.

I am pleased with how it is working out. Far more students are completing their homework than during our web page design unit. More importantly, they are learning how to use Blackboard which should make moving on to middle school a bit less stressful.

Next year, I plan to introduce Blackboard early on in the year so that we can all reap its benefits earlier. In my heart of hearts, I still wish it were Moodle instead of Blackboard, but that's a battle I'm not going to win here, so I'll content myself with enjoying our small successes with Blackboard.

Dabbling with Movie Maker

2007-04-19T20:43:00.000+08:00

Our students are coming up from the primary division so well prepared that we are able to add on to our tech curriculum. We decided add movie making.

I know that teaching children how to make web sites makes it easier to help them view other web sites more critically. My hope is that we will eventually craft this unit so that it helps students learn to express themselves in this media and also become more critical of it.

Our eventual plan is to use...

Photostory with third graders using still photos,
Windows Movie Maker with fourth grade using still photos
Windows Movie Maker with fifth grade using video-- probably the video from digital cameras, not video cameras due to server space limitations

For this year, we are using still photos with all the students as we find our way in this unit, figuring out what does and doesn't work.

Our first idea was to have them use our online photo gallery to gather images to create their own video yearbook. Unfortunately, a bit of experimentation showed us that our online photos are too compressed. The resulting movie becomes too pixelated.

Our Plan B is to let the students chose their topics and use either their own photos, their own drawings, or images from the Creative Commons section of Flickr. In my most advanced classes, I'll also let them bring in video from digital cameras if they have a way to do so.

I wasn't sure how best to help students plan their videos, but a few years ago at a different school I had learned that students need to make a movie before they can successfully plan one. To that end, my fourth and fifth grade classes raided our school's online photo gallery and make very short movies. For most classes, this took two class sessions. The first session had them gathering the digital photos, importing them into Movie Maker, and then adding them to the timeline. The second session was the bells and whistles, such as transitions, video effects, titles and audio.

Throughout the first two sessions I kept stressing that this was a practice movie for them to learn what the program can do. I encouraged them to experiment, not worrying about ruining anything. When they asked me for help, I kept my hands away from the mouse, always asking, "What have you tried?"

Those strategies paid off and the students are quickly achieving more interesting effects than I've managed in my attempts. As with our web page unit, the students are enchanted with what they are able to do and I have to all but haul them out of their chairs at the end of class because they don't want to leave.

Windows Movie Maker is not as stable as I would like; a few students each hour have it crash on them. However, I like that when you are making a project, all your media is inserted as shortcuts. The actual photos and sound aren't pulled in until the project is rendered. This makes it much less processor intensive, much more responsive while we work on the movies.

For our beginning movie makers, this program is a very easy place to start. Since the program is free, many of the children are realizing that they have it at home and are starting to dabble there as well. I think we've got a winner here!

Outlook Meeting Scheduler as Field Trip Notification System

2007-04-07T17:48:00.000+08:00

Last fall I wrote about how we were using the meeting scheduling feature in our Outlook Enterprise mail system to check in with staff during emergencies that arise during vacations. We are now putting the same system to use in solving a different problem- field trip notifications.

If you've never seen it deployed, within Microsoft Outlook mail client is also a calendar. Like any computer calendar, you can keep track of your appointments, meetings and other events on it. Unlike most computer calendars, if your mail server is set up for it, you can also use it to schedule meetings.

Scheduling a meeting is a bit like writing an email. You decide everyone you want to send it to, fill in the date, subject and location fields. Then you set the start and stop time, type a message in the body of the invitation, and send it.

The people receiving it have buttons at the top of the invitation allowing them to accept or decline the invitation. If they accept it, the event is automatically entered into their own calendar. It's pretty spiffy. I think Lotus Notes also has a similar feature.

And as further icing on the cake, the person who sent the invite can go to their calendar, click on the event, and click on a tracking tab that lets them see who has accepted, declined, or not responded at all.

My division doesn't make much use of this feature, but we've been struggling to find a good way to notify all the specialists when a class is going on a field trip. Being such a large school, a grade level's field trip is often spread out over 3-5 different days, since few venues want 250 kids descending upon them at once.

In the past the office had tried sending out regular email notification, but that only met with limited success. Now they photocopy all the field trip requests and put a bundle of copies in each specialists' mailbox. We are hoping that sending out the notice as a meeting invitation will have more success.

Specialists can decline announcements that don't impact them. When planning their lessons, they can open their calendar and see in a glance all the trips that do affect them. The office staff no longer need to spend time copying all the trip requests and putting them in boxes. Specialists are no longer wading through big bundles of trip requests. And no trees are being turned to paper in this step of the process.

It will of course, have problems, but here's hoping this is a better solution than the one we have been using. Have you found a good way to keep specialists in the know about classroom trips?

Gmail Paper

2007-04-01T22:32:00.000+08:00

I appreciate the way Google decorates its logo for holidays. For today's holiday, they have rolled out a new product instead. If you are able to reach this start page, be sure you follow the link for more information-- the quotes are great!

Spring Break!

2007-03-23T17:16:00.000+08:00

At long last, spring break has arrived. At 11pm tonight we board a plane bound for Istanbul. We will be there a week. I can hardly wait!

I don't expect to be blogging again until I get back. If you are fortunate enough to have a spring break, I hope you enjoy it.