A Game and an Easy Click to Fight Hunger

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

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

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...

1. It had too much propriety Microsoft stuff in it.


2. It was too temperamental.


3. 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

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

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

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

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

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

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?

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

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?

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?!

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

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

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?

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

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

1. Thinking you already know everything
   
2. Being confused by the marketing hype
3. Not taking action
4. Giving up
5. Worrying about/listening to what others think
6. Dabbling with it
7. Having unreasonable expectations
8. Failing to/not wanting to (at least start to) understand yourself
9. 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

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

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?

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.

1. 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.
   
2. 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.
   
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. 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.
   
6. 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?

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

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

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

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

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!

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.

A Few Quick Thoughts about Tech Inservices

A frustration of my current job is that I haven't figured out the staff inservice piece. Back in KL, I was pleased with the after school drop in sessions Kent and I held for staff. I think they worked because...

• No advance registration was required. Teachers didn't feel they were committing to something.


• Weekly session were held. Teachers started holding non-critical questions for the drop in session. This meant I could safely run to the loo between classes without fearing being dragged into a classroom to provide support.


• Reminders were sent. I sent out a reminder email and posted signs in the canteen each week on the day of the session.


• Studio approach rather than set agenda was used. People came in to work on projects and we were there to support them.


• Teacher-student ratio was high enough. Often Kent, Suganthy and I were all there rushing about to provide just-in-time support.


• We were a trusted source. Suganthy, Kent and I had been there long enough that teachers felt safe dropping in for support.
  

I don't think the same approach would be successful at this school because their are more initiatives vying for people's time. I've tried offering after school sessions when needs arise, but teachers are so tired that it isn't a great time for them to learn something new.

I've tried sessions during their team planning time. I felt my inservice wasn't very good, but I can work on that. I plan to do more with this option next year.

I've tried giving brief teasers during staff meetings on new items that I think can be of real use to many people, such as a very easy way to resize photos to free up more space in their server quota. This has worked well and people ask for more info, but this venue only works for very specific types of information.

Therefore, I was delighted by an idea I heard tonight. The technology directors from various international schools in Singapore try to meet monthly to discuss instructional technology. Tonight, the director from the Australian school shared an idea that I think is brilliant. Next year he is going to offer full day professional development sessions for staff members. He will lead them in house. As he said, we often send people out for professional development. Why not keep them in?

There is much to love about this idea...

• Cost effective.
• Total control over content so able to tailor exactly to the users' needs.
• Teachers will be learning when they have more energy, not at the end of the day.
• Sufficient practice time can be provided in class.
• It builds support networks among the users; after the class they can ask their classmates for support.
• It is on our computers so everything will look the same when they return to use it on their classrooms.

I could go on and on, but you get the idea (and my level of enthusiasm). To make it even better, he proposes we all do this and open our sessions up to each other's schools. Only cost will be for subs. Of course, I'd need to find lab space and at the moment, that's an insurmountable barrier. Hopefully I'll soon be back in my own lab.

Are any of you using this model in your school/district? Is it working?

How do you support your music teachers?

This year, we've been forging new ground integrating technology into our elementary music curriculum. I'd love to take credit for it, but I can't; all the good ideas are coming from the music teachers themselves.

I'm new, but what they tell me is that one of the recommendations from the mid-term WASC visit (that's our accrediting agency) was to integrate technology into the music curriculum. They have taken that recommendation to heart.

One tool is Music Ace. I think I've mentioned it before. It is a music theory computer program for elementary-aged children. We've had a heap-load of trouble getting it running smoothly, but it is a sound addition to the curriculum. The students really enjoy it and the teachers are pleased with the learning they've seen so far. Now if we only had enough lab space for them to make a part of their music rotation for grades 1 - 5, we'd be set.

Another bit of integration has to do with the music on CD-ROM that comes with the music series. Each teacher has approximately 115 CDs. That's around 6 GB of music! Even using a multi-disk CD player, using the disks while teaching was tedious because they were constantly queuing up different disks.

One of the new teachers this year works part time and doesn't have her own classroom. She ends up teaching off a cart using whichever music room is available at that time. To preserve her sanity, she ripped all the CDs onto her computer and organizes the music into playlists to support that week's lesson or that class' upcoming concert.* She uploads those to her iPod. In class, she plugs the iPod into an iPod speaker system and she's ready to teach.

We have budgeted to purchase iPods for each of the music teachers for next year. However, we didn't purchase iPod speaker systems because each classroom already has a receiver that connects to surround sound speakers. We wanted to get the sound going through those. However, the teachers didn't want to be tethered to the corner of the room with the receiver.

We borrowed a number of FM transmitters. I have one that I use in my car and I really like it. However, when we were listening through those high quality speakers, we realized that while the sound quality is fine for listening to podcasts while driving, it is too full of hiss and crackle for use in the music room. We have read about Bluetooth devices for connecting iPods to stereos, but they are still in the development stage. We hope they will eventually be the perfect solution, but in the mean time, we needed something to fill the gap.

Each of our classrooms has a data projector. The computers can be connected to the stereo so we decided to not use iPods at all, just use the computer. We thought they could use Bluetooth mice to roam the room and using the image from the data projector, they could use their iTunes playlists. The teachers didn't love the thought of having the data projectors on all day with that light in their eyes, but it was worth a try.

Unfortunately, the network connections for the computers are in the opposite corner from the connections for the surround sound speakers. And we could use the wall speakers that every classroom has, but once again, the sound quality is too low for their needs.

And so for now, I have bought one teacher an iPod so she can pilot using it this spring. We've moved her iTunes library to a removable hard drive. Each day it backs up to the C: drive on her computer. Next year, all the teachers will have their iTunes libraries mapped to one network-able hard drive. (Can anyone recommend a good network-able hard drive? A 300 GB one will suffice.)

For now, the teacher will plug the iPod into the stereo and operate it from there. Hopefully by next school year, we will have all the kinks out so that we can bring the other teachers on board smoothly.

*(By the way, we did meet with a Singapore copyright specialist. Since each teacher has their own set of the 115 music series CDs, and since the company does not offer the music already on a hard drive, we are not defrauding anyone of profit, so this is acceptable fair educational use by a not-for-profit school.)

Skype in Your Letterhead?

This evening I received a quotation for purchasing an iPod for my music department. The vendor is a local Singaporean reseller. In the signature area, along with all the things I'm used to seeing, such as address, phone and FAX, this vendor also listed their Skype ID. I've never seen that before.

What does it say about their company? To me it suggests that they are small, and care about being accessible. I suspect they are forward thinking and open to new ideas.

Clarence was just writing about how the students in the International Teen Life project have moved beyond the formal communication channels set up by the teachers, such as video, email and Skype. They are now using IM, Email and wikis to chat, on their own time, with the other students in the project who are scattered across the globe.

If I were a classroom teacher, I might be thinking of putting my Skype ID on my syllabus next fall. I can see a few kids abusing it, but I can see more kids appreciating it.

It may work better for me as an international teacher. Before I went overseas, I didn't know many people who weren't living in my town, so I had no one to Skype with. Now that I'm overseas, I use it with family back home and with friends and colleagues all over. As a result, I usually have Skype open if my computer is on at home.

Would you consider giving your Skype ID to your students? Do you have one?

When is helping unhelpful?

I have great respect for the tech coordinators of the other divisions at work. The middle school tech coordinator seems especially well respected. He is hardworking and knowedgeable. He can see the big picture and has enough history in the job to quickly identify key issues when we are discussing options.

Being new, I have especially appreciated how patiently he answers questions. He is unfailingly supportive. Therefore, it has come as a surprise to me how often in our coordinator meetings, he will make suggestions that I view as harsh towards our users.

Since I respect him so much, this has given me something to think about. It is making me realize that often my view is too short. I may be doing too much hand-holding in my division. My actions may be inspired by kindness , but they don't help my users grow. They don't help me work myself out of a job, as Jeff Utecht would say.

I put this to the test yesterday afternoon. A third grade teacher came to me to discuss an upcoming project. She had seen a colleague's student brochure project and was impressed. She wanted to try something similar with her class. As we talked, she decided to use Microsoft Publisher. For this first project, we would give the students a template to follow. For the next project, we would let them create it from scratch.

This teacher is new to Publisher. She used it earlier this year to create a personal project, so she has some experience, but not much. My instinct said to sit with her, help her create the template for her students. Instead, I stepped back. I showed her how to access the pre-made brochure templates, and then told her to create what she wanted and I would use it with her students on Tuesday. She is a trooper and although she looked a bit surprised, she went off to give it a try. Hopefully she feels I am confident in her ability, and that feels like support instead of abandonment.

This is all making me realize I do a much better job of stretching the children I work with than the adults. I think of how often I ask children what they have tried, how they could figure it out. I do less of that with adults. Teachers are so busy that I tend to want to just fix the problem so they can get back to work. However, if they had been able to fix it themselves without contacting me, that would have been even quicker. I need to keep thinking about this. I need to think of this at a systems level. I don't know how to do that yet.

Zoho Wiki

I've mentioned Zoho before. It keeps rolling out wonderful web apps. The latest that I've noticed is it now has a wiki. I gave it a try over the weekend. I'm pleased to announce that like PB Wiki, it has a table feature that actually works. I like it much better than the PB Wiki one which looks fine when you save a page but is not correctly assembled as you work with it.

I made a wiki to keep track of all the handy info posted in our Want Ads mailing list at work. The list doesn't have an archive and so people are constantly asking questions that were asked before such as, "Anyone know a good electrician in Woodlands?" Now I have a handy place to put all the info from there that I want to save. I can access it from home and school.

Actually, I should qualify that last statement. I haven't used any Zoho products in a while and I am finding that at work the wiki pages are incredibly slow to load, and I don't have anything in the wiki besides text. No photos. No files. No sounds. Just text. Pages can take minutes to load. They are quicker to open when I click the edit button. I thought this was another proxy problem at work, but I'm finding it slow from home as well. Maybe Zoho is having technical difficulties. If it doesn't speed up, I'll transfer it the wiki to another platform. This wiki doesn't need tables so no need to suffer through slow pages. Anyone else having this slow Zoho experience?

[UPDATE: ZohoWiki was down for upgrading over the weekend. This week my pages are loading much faster.]