PLN Goodness: Tech Integration Inspiration, iTunes U and FOSS

I was a long-time subscriber to Edutopia but the magazine arrived back in Minnesota and I was living in S.E. Asia.  Summer was too short to read all the periodicals waiting for me when I arrived home, so I didn’t really understand what an amazing resource Edutopia is.

This past month, following links posted by my PLN on Twitter, I discovered their Schools that Work section of their website, as you can see in my previous post.  Today I followed a tweet from Kim Cofino.

Kim Cofino on Twitter

That article and the accompany video were useful, showing me how one elementary school has built in different sorts of collaborative planning meetings.

Having now found two different sets of using tech integration articles on the Edutopia site, I wished I had some way to keep on top of their tech integration videos.  While reading the comments to that post, I found out that there is.  Enter iTunes U!

I suspect that readers of this blog are familiar with Apple’s iTunes software.  However, they may not have taken the time to explore the iTunes U section.  Or, like me, they may have explored it in the past and not found much for elementary teachers and their students.

Fortunately for me, I’ve found two great resources on their in the past month.  The first is an Edutopia tech integration subscription. It is free and can show up in your iTunes just like other podcasts.   These are video podcasts that you can watch on  your computer or on your pod if it is the type that plays video.

The other great resource is a real find if you use the California Edition of the elementary FOSS science kits.  At this time, the kits still have their teacher preparation videos which help teachers prepare to teach the modules. They are especially helpful when you are trying to set up an experiment for the first time.  Unfortunately, these videos are in VHS format and FOSS does not yet provide them in DVD format. Starting next year, we will no longer have VHS tape players in our school since they are now extremely difficult to buy and maintain here in Singapore.   The videos are viewable on the FOSS website as Flash videos. However, teachers wanted to be able to download the videos. The website is not designed to allow you to easily do this, and most teachers don’t know how to capture a flash video.  The good news is that FOSS is adding these videos to iTunes U.  We could not find them by searching the iTunes store, but there is a link on each video page on the FOSS website that brings you to that same video in iTunes U.  FOSS does not yet have all of the videos online, but you can see which ones are by visiting this page in iTunes U.

What iTunes U finds are you using?  Please leave me a comment and tell me about them.

Differentiating Instruction

One of the many great practices I observed at the American School of Bombay during ASB Unplugged 2010, was differentiation in action.  One method of differentiating was allowing students to choose how they shared their learning.  Sometimes they had to choose from a number of different tools (e.g. a presentation, a poster or a written report.) Other times they could choose any tool they wanted.  In one class different students choose a skit, a flash animation, and a clay model to explain what they knew about cell structures.

I’ve been thinking about how to help my staff do more of that. At this time, based on how our curriculum was previously developed, units tend  to have a single type of product to show learning, such as a rainforest Powerpoint or a biography research paper.

Opening up the end product has a number of challenges. Some products take longer than others, so it may be even more difficult to have students finish within the same amount of time.  It is challenging to create a rubric that allows for many different types of end products so it could lead to lower quality products. There are management issues when some students require technology to work on the project and others need paint and others are needing places to move around for a skit. There is also the teacher’s comfort level with having children doing different products.

This video on the Edutopia website doesn’t address all of those issues, but it does show powerful differentiation in practice.

Resistance is Futile or The Power of Info Graphics

Yep. This graphic comes from a site that advertises online PD programs, but the facts on it jibe with what I’ve heard on Scientific American Frontiers and other podcasts and the sources are listed at the end.

While I find the information on it unsettling, I am saving it to add to my arsenal of graphics. I know the power of graphics like this over written text. I know I want to help my students create this type of thing so that they can be effective communicators.  I think they would find this an interesting vehicle to share their learning, and it could easily be embedded in a blog or wiki.  I haven’t figured out more than that.

Are you creating this type of graphic with your students? What are you using to create it?  I hate using Photoshop with children.  It needs so much configuring to play nicely.  I haven’t played with Glogster, could it do it? We could actually do it in Word if we had a source for whatever graphics we need.  Right now some of my students are making digital scrapbook pages using photos from their class photo gallery.  Some of the pages are attractive keepsakes – and the rest are good lessons in layering, color choice, and other graphic design basics.

I need to think more about this. How would you make this type of graphic with 8-11-year olds?

What You Need to Know about Bacteria
Via: Online PhD Programs

In any case, I’m going to go use an anti-bacterial wipe on my phone!

Our Final Student Username Solution, For Now..

I greatly appreciate all the comments on my earlier post and on Twitter regarding protocols for student usernames. I brought your collective wisdom to a meeting of the other tech coordinators and our director of IT.  We had another good conversation as we tried to find a way get graduation year into the username, since that would allow us to manage student accounts as groups in platforms such as Edublogs which does not have any tools for grouping users.

We knew we needed to get the graduation year on the front of the username, since that would allow us to sort users or search by that.  We realized that using just the last two digits would suffice.  Unfortunately, with a school as large as ours, gradyearlastname was not going to be a unique identifier, there would be duplicates.

Middle and high school teachers have been HUGE fans of our current lastnameID# protocol since it made it easier for them to identify students from username in Blackboard, Sharepoint, Google Docs, etc.  However, gradyearlastnameID# was getting ridiculously long and more challenging to implement.  We even looked at changing the admission’s office procedure so that ID number rather than being consecutive would have the graduation year built into it.  After much discussion we decided that ID number was the one thing that has never changed over the years, and for now, we didn’t have a compelling enough reason to mess with it, given all the problems we could foresee if it were mucked up.

In the end, our decision came down to this…

  • The Tech Advisory Council was comfortable with letting students retain their blogs, Google Docs for Education, and other accounts after graduation.  The blogs, wikis and other parts of their web presence will still be bound by our acceptable use policy, so we can delete the accounts and their products if they violate that policy. Otherwise, since our Google Docs and Edublogs accounts allow us unlimited users, we will let them persist, which means we don’t need a way to weed out accounts when students leave or graduate.
  • Using student last names for middle and high school students seemed to make sense, although we could make a case for keeping middle school students using first names, we decided that since they receive their own Edublog, Google Docs and Powerschool accounts in sixth grade, it would be most useful for the students if those same accounts followed them through high school.
  • Since we are not deleting online accounts, it is less of a problem for students to blog in elementary school and then switch to a new blog in grade 6. They can link to the old blog.

Based on all of that, we are sticking with our original plan for next year, which is middle and high school students using lastnamestudentID# and intermediate students using firstnamestudentID#.  I’d like to say that we were completely comfortable with this decision, but we were not.  Niggling in the back of our brains was the feeling that in the future, we were going to regret not finding a way to work in graduation year.  For now, the reasons to do so just weren’t compelling enough to overcome the problems it created.  In a few years, you can all say, “We told you so!”

Fabulous Pictures of the Icelandic Volcanic Eruptions

In case you haven’t stumbled across these already, share this photo set with your students as you discuss the volcanic eruption, how a volcano in northern Europe can ground planes around the world, weather patterns, etc.

http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2010/04/icelands_disruptive_volcano.html

and more pictures: http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2010/04/more_from_eyjafjallajokull.html

And here’s a cool Flickr image of the same volcano…

Volcano Audience in Iceland by Sverrir Thor

Username Dilemmas with Web 2.0 Apps

Our three-year edtech strategic plan was ratified by the board earlier this year.  Now that it is in place, we are moving ahead to make anytime, anywhere learning more feasible.  Part of our strategy to accomplish this is to move more of what we do into the cloud.

When I arrived four years ago, we already had Blackboard and made Outlook Web Access available to staff.  Two years ago we added Sharepoint.  This year we began using our own Google Docs for Education account with some students and staff.

In the past few months we have purchased corporate Wikispaces.net and a campus subscription to Edublogs.  I am trying to write up the SOP (Standard Operating Procedures) for both.  I keep getting stuck at the same point with both, so I hope you can help me think it through.

While I’ve been at my school, student usernames have evolved over time. When I first arrived, we used the child’s first initial followed by their last name.  This sounds good, but in an Asian school with many duplicate names, this did not work well.

Next we switched to using ID number as username.  This was somewhat successful. It is a challenge for younger students to remember the number, but it was workable. However, as we started to use Google Docs and other online tools we realized that it was inconvenient to not be able to tell who a student was from their username.  Seeing that you received an email or were asked to share a document with 936618 isn’t very useful. Their active directory account could have a different username than these other accounts, but it would be best if students have one username for all school accounts.

The next year we switched to using last name followed by student ID.  This seemed like the perfect solution, especially for middle and high school where teachers have 150-200 students.  Those teachers were delighted.

It was more challenging in the elementary school.  A surprising number of third graders cannot spell their last name.  Those with long names often made mistakes.  Memorizing their ID number was a challenge for many.  However, we soldiered on and it was working until we started using more Web 2.0 applications.

The problem with web 2.0 apps was that we often ended up having both the child’s first and last name appear together online.  In the elementary school, our policy is that students’ work and photos may appear online with their first names as part of school projects.  With the student username containing their last name, and children often forgetting and using first names in their posts and comments, we were violating our own policy and Best Practice as stated on many Internet safety sites.

We talked around and around on the idea of changing usernames to first name followed by student I.D. We love the idea for elementary students.  Students know how to spell their first names, and for a classroom teacher, even if they have a few students with the same first name, it would be easy to remember their ID numbers to tell them apart online.

Middle and High school teachers were strongly opposed to the idea.  Given the large number of students they work with, they find it much more convenient to use last names for student identification.  Other problems arose around nickname versus official first name.  Many of our students, especially Korean students, use a nickname at school.  For example, in their passport a child’s first name may be Su Fang but at school she may have always gone by Clara. This leads to confusion and discomfort.

We cannot use nickname instead of first name because many of our systems talk with each other by means of scripts. For example, Blackbaud and Powerschool exchange information and using nickname leads to duplicate accounts and other problems.

To get around these problems, we came up with the idea of using first name followed by student I.D. in the elementary school, and then switching to last name student ID in middle and high school.  This could work.  Since some of our high school students already have a Google Docs for Education account, they won’t need to change over to a new account.  However, it means that any accounts children have in elementary school go away as they enter middle school. In Edublogs, deleting a child’s account deletes their blog as well.  Likewise, they’d lose their Wikispaces and other accounts.

This also doesn’t help us with account deletion.  Ideally, when a student graduates, we want an easy way to find their account and delete it.  To do that, we would need to have their graduation year as part of their account.  For platforms such as Google Docs, that means it would need to be part of their username.  However, if we combine graduation year with student first or last name, we will end up with more than one child having the same username. If we try something such as graduation year followed by first or last name followed by ID number, it will be so long students won’t be able to type it correctly.

It seems we will need to make compromises, but we aren’t sure which will be the most workable.  How does your school deal with this dilemma?

Photo by Scott McLeod used under a Creative Commons licensed.