Blog 4 SBTS Class

Podcast #1

I found the Al November’s podcast inspiring and depressing at the same time. It was inspiring because it made me feel like I work in a position that could make a difference. It was depressing because I feel like we have a huge hill to climb. I often feel many students and teachers seem to feel entitled in many ways.  Teachers often come across as if they don’t have the time to learn new technology, take the initiative to understand how it would benefit their students. Keeping in a frame of mind that is stuck in the last century will only harm our students. I also see a lack of motivation in many students – they feel it is ok to turn in late homework or have their families do it for them, they don’t take learning seriously  Hopefully our educations can help this generation understand if they don’t take initiative, they will be the ones working for people on the other side of the world and not the leaders coming up with new inventions, new efficiencies and new life improvements. I would be more worried about this if I had not also worked in a different school in FCPS where the socio-economic background was the opposite of my current school. There the many of the students were inspired to learn because they and their families made such sacrifices to get them to a school. It will be hardworking students like them around the world with so much to gain who will make a difference and be the leaders in the world.

Podcast #2

Larry Lessig’ perspective on how creativity gets strangled by the law was interesting. He took us back in time to other turning points in history where new inventions pushed the limits of existing law. He relates social networking and media remixing flourishing to the days before radio and tv when people would socialize by singing on porch steps. Rather than the passive interaction of radio and tv, people’s creativity is coming out with the ability to remix and rewrite – coming full circle. 

His slideshow was interesting and made me kind of lose focus on what he was saying actually. I found myself trying to read into what his images meant  – I guess I am not as good at multitasking as I thought I was.

Now that I am deep into this course, I understand these t-shirts, so I guess I am a geek. Are you?

http://www.switched.com/2007/10/24/top-11-geek-t-shirts-1/

Can I use this music in my Photostory? or Can I add this music to my slideshow?

According to the Technology and Learning Copyright and Fair Use Guidelines, up to 10% of a copyright musical composition may be reproduced, performed and displayed as part of a multipmedia program produced by an educator or students. A maximum of 30 seconds per musical composition may be used and the multimedia program must have an educational purpose. So, the answer is as long as the music clip is no more than 30 seconds and 10% of the song, and the Photostory and slideshow have educational purposes the music can be used.

Step by Step – Building your Web 2.0 classroom
http://k12onlineconference.org/?p=169

This presentation was given by a technology teacher who has been teaching technology for over 10 years. His presentation was well planned and kept my attention. I was upset to find out that the audio and video cut out in the middle of his presentation. Technology, you can’t live with it and you can’t live without it.

He categorized basic Web 2.0 skills educators need to learn into 3 groups:

• Explore and Participate – tabbing vs, windowing, bookmarking, signing up and logging in to web sites, how to comment and review
• Deconstruct and Reconstruct – cut and paste effectively
• Emphasis and Alignment – basic information design, using images, uploading properly, connecting and creating

Other key points

• Web is hugely abstract and science fiction for many educators. Our job is to make it concrete and take small steps
• Skill sets are hugely diverse – more pronounced in staff than students
• His definition of Web 2.0 is many things – self publishing systems to make and publishing your own content, social networking sites and supporting activities, widgets, bookmarking, rss

Why is Web 2.0 for teachers?

• Time is the teacher’s most scarce resource, and even though it takes time to learn how to use web 2.0, it great amounts of time down the road – (He did not elaborate on this and I wish he would have.)
• Demonstrate effectively relevant lesson options – do things online that are best done online
• Enhances class interactions – get discussions online better than in the classroom
• Improves student behavior – they love being online (Not sure I agree here because students can easily get sidetracked online.)
• Makes teaching more rewarding (Also not sure if this is true for all educators. It may be rewarding to be able to reach students in new ways or reach those students you couldn’t reach before, but it is a long road to haul for many teachers to integrate any technology, let alone Web 2.0 ideas.)

I have to say I was a bit apprehensive about what I could get out of an online conference when I first started this assignment, but as you will see from my blog posting I feel I learned a lot.

From a technology standpoint viewing an online conference was a little clunky, but it was a fun way to learn. Downloading the mp3 of the presentations didn’t take much time, but the audio was not complete on one of the presentations I chose. Listening to audio only presentations was not as easy to follow as with a slideshow or video. When trying to view the original video streaming through Google the video would skip and stall, even with high bandwidth. Downloading the complete movie file (if it was available) was the best way to experience the presentations, but the download time was very long.  Being able to see the slides, rewind and pause was a great feature that allowed me to listen and follow at my own pace and repeat items I needed to review. I found myself wanting a ‘repeat last 8 seconds’ button like on Tivo because sometimes I could not understand a bit of what the speaker said. It was hard to rewind back just far enough without going too far back.

My Conference Agenda
“More Than Cool Tools – Keynote”
New Tools Strand
http://k12onlineconference.org/?p=149

“Step by Step – Building your Web 2.0 classroom”
Classroom 2.0 Strand
http://k12onlineconference.org/?p=169

“Challenging Assumptions About Technology Professional Development”
Obstacles to Opportunities Strand
http://k12onlineconference.org/?p=183

 “The Technology Specialist as Teacher Leader: Strategies to Ensure Successful Technology Integration and Student Learning in Schools”
Obstacles to Opportunities Strand
http://k12onlineconference.org/?p=186

Professional Learning Networks
“Expanding Horizons – Engaging the Adult Members of your Community (Teachers, Administrators, and Parents) through the Use of Personal/Professional Learning Networks”
http://k12onlineconference.org/?p=199
More Than Cool Tools
I listened to the audio podcast of this conference and within the first 5 minutes I was a little lost. I am embarrassed to say, since I am a technology specialist, that I had never heard of the phrase Web 2.0 until this course. This presentation was a collaboration of many speakers and it was very hard to follow with audio only. I found myself writing a lot of notes, which is what I do when I can’t absorb what is being said as it is being said.

I kept listening to this talk hoping to hear what ‘cool tools’ we could use in the classroom, but it wasn’t until the last speaker that I heard anyone talk about education. I honestly came away from this presentation dreading listening to/watching the others because this was so poorly put together.

What I took away from this presentation:

• Web 2.0 is the phrase for the web based applications that have evolved to help people and web sites connect online
• The Embed Tag, which has been around for a while, help make a lot of this connecting happen
• Sites used to want you to go to their web sites, now you can grab parts of web sites to feature on your own
• Slideshare  is the You Tube for PPT that converts powerpoints to flash
• API – tools that open communication channels between web sites, like coordinated Flickr and Picnic accounts
• Mixercast sounds like an interesting site that allows you to grab images and videos, put them on a timeline then produce a slideshow video
• Web 2.0 tools work well when you give a user something that helps them personally get organized to capture their attention then add tools and extend their social relationship with the web site.
• Good examples of this are Flicker and Delicious. Great tools to organize photos, tag them with keywords and geotag them to location, then there is a  cascading effect that builds a community and helps you find others with similar tastes/interest
• Google documents is new  and works well with multiple author editing and eliminates need for synchronizing which is final word processing and spreadsheet documents. Similar buttons and commands to word but file is saved online, which could be beyond comfort zone for some. Files can be saved as Word files. Zoho is a similar site.

What all this means for educators:

• When you create a relationship in one of these social networking web sites, you can then customize your web searches within those sites. This limits searches to those sites you trust.
• Creative Commons makes it easy to license and set criteria for use, like an online badge of approval
• You can use Google’s advanced search to filter by license
• It is easier to publish online now than it ever has been. You can control the flow of content through a community – edublog, bluehost

For my lesson rubric I focused on a lesson I am thinking about doing with a 3rd grade GT teacher.

Lesson Question: What are the similarities and differences between the geography of Virginia and China?
Unit: Ancient China, Grade 3
Task: Students are to work individually to review materials from prior lessons about the geography of Virginia and China and research additional information either in the library or online. They are then to create a project demonstrating their knowledge of the geographies of Virginia and China and present it using technology.

Following is the lesson rubric:
Virginia and China Comparison Rubric

In Stephanie Harvey and Anne Goudvis’ Strategies That Work: Teaching Comprehension to Enhance Learning the authors explain their reading strategies to build bridges from what students know to new knowledge. As I read through Chapter 6 on Making Connections I thought of many ways we could use technology to build those bridges.

The first kind of connection the authors wrote of making note of items in text that reminded students of something they already knew. This first building block in the bridge discusses using stories close to the students’ lives and experiences to make text-to-self connections. I believe this connection making is akin to Bloom’s Taxonomy Analysis level in which students compare and contrast what they know.

In a lesson using text-to-self connections, students are to mark a “R” in their text near items that remind them of something from their lives or experiences. Using technology to mark those reminders, this could be done in a group with the SMART board where the passage is projected and the students write “R” on the board near reminder items. Then in a chart on another SMART Notebook page the students could chart and share what those text-to-self connections. Individually, students could use the Insert Comment tool in Microsoft Word to note those reminders. Another group or individual lesson could be to develop an Inspiration or Kidspiration web of connections. These methods could be used with e-Books or other online passages. Once students are comfortable with this strategy, it could be extended by asking students to share their connections online through a group blog or message board.

The next step in making connections is making text-to-text connections where students are to mark what reminds them of other text they have read. From there they make text-to-world connections. Teachers can help students make text-to-world connections through online database searches, such as biographies and timelines. With each of these types of connections we could use color coded highlighting in Microsoft Word or with the SMART board to indicate what types of connections students are making. As the school year progresses and the students have read more and more items either as a class or individually, students could keep a database of these connections. This could be created by the teacher or ITRT and could be a simple form that has student type in the book name and author, choose what type of connection it is from a drop down, then a description of the connections. Over time this database could help students report on and organize their learning progress. As students master the strategies they could report on their comprehension by creating a collection of connections. Taking it a step further they could evaluate each other’s reports and defend why they made the connections they did. This database could be expanded as they learn to understand and identify literary elements. A database is a great sorting and classifying tool that helps synthesize all aspects of these learning strategies.

As the author points out, one does have to be aware of pitfalls when making connections. Often when students are engaged in a technology lesson they just want to raise their hand to talk about the computers they have at home or what tool they have seen their family member use – it’s a connection but not exactly on track of the lesson. Teachers should steer the students towards meaningful connections to the lesson at hand by asking how and why questions. For example they may ask about how they have seen family members use technology tools or what they their parents might use different software for.

Through this reading I felt the goal is to make critical thinkers out of our student. It is not so important to be able to mark up reading but to make a connection. Using technology to keep students engaged and find ways to see those connections, as well as peer and teacher modeling, helps to refine these strategies. The more we know the more we wonder.

To me, Instructional Technology, at its core, means being able to take an old lesson and teach it in a new way. That new way has to be engaging and interactive, allowing the students to take part in the learning. It means integrating technology into unexpected lessons – not just writing and editing or internet research – but allowing special needs or ESOL students to record themselves and listen to what they said through a computer microphone and speaker, or taking a counting change math or historical map lesson to the SMARTboard.

A core challenge of Instructional Technology is to get over teachers’ technology inhibitions and fears of change. This hurdle is usually higher for those teachers approaching retirement (not to stereotype but this seems to hold true) because old lessons have worked well for them in the past. However, with testing requirements and parental pressure that excuse will not work for teachers much longer. Instructional Technology is modeling lessons using technology to help apprehensive teachers understand how to ease technology into their lessons.

When thinking about Instructional Technology I also take into account the need to be more efficient in this day and age of teaching. Technology can help the classroom teachers can help with time management by helping teachers get and stay organized through planning and calendaring tools. Time management allows the teachers be more proactive than reactive, and thus be better teachers. Nowadays, parents expect timely and responsive technology use, and Instructional Technology can help teach a teacher how to plan, grade, organize and communicate efficiently.

Meeting the students at a technology level with technology that engages them is so important when planning lessons. Many students are easily bored in lessons using technology if it goes too slowly or uses tools and techniques they have mastered. Those teaching with Instructional Technology always have to be stretching and challenging the students’ technology skills – another of my core beliefs of Instructional Technology. Otherwise, the new way of teaching a lesson this year using technology can quickly become an old lesson. Therefore Instructional Technology means we need to be always rethinking what we are doing during lessons in order to capture all students.