Although this is the first term that’s I’ve met with each teacher to collaborate on a tech class semester plan, I’m increasingly enchanted with the results. Here are just a few of the projects that are in the works.
Need a Good Book? Jeff Scott, a fourth grade teacher, worked with me to create a voice discussion board full of book reviews. His students wrote a synopsis of the book they were reading and then selected a “golden passage”, a passage that they felt gave a good taste of the book. They rehearsed reading the passages, focusing on the reading skills he’d been focusing on in class. Then they were ready for me.
The first week I introduced students to Blackboard, our CMS. They learned to find their way around and to use the Wimba Voiceboard module that we have installed.
The next week, they went into the book review voiceboard. They created their own post. They put the book’s title in the subject line. In the body of the message, they typed their synopsis. Then they used the voiceboard’s recording tools to make an audio recording of themselves reading the gold passage.
Now the students are enthusiastically using the voiceboard to find good books. They keep a log of books they want to read and they are eagerly using the voiceboard to find good books to add to their list. The project is now independent. The students will be able to come in any time and add another post. Jeff is not sure how often he will require them to post.
Book Trailers Jemma Hooykaas has her fifth graders immersed in higher order thinking to create movie trailer style book teasers. She worked closely with me to design the assignment and create the rubric. She worked with the students to select their books. I created a movie resources form to help them gather their photos and record the photo information for their movie credits.
Jemma started students using a storyboard form she created. Students were challenged to identify the tone and important elements of the book they read, and then to find images to set the tone and represent those elements
I taught students about Flickr and Creative Commons. I introduced the FlickrCC image search engine. I modeled how to use that website and the form I gave them to gather their photos and record important information about the photos to include in their credits.
This past week, students were to bring in their photos so we could use Windows Movie Maker to create the movies. As we expected, not all students had all their photos, but this gave us time for individualized instruction as needed.
One exciting discovery was to see how much some of the students remembered about Movie Maker from last year. All of those students worked on a powerful Poetry Cafe project last year with their homeroom teacher and they are now our movie making experts.
This coming week, I’ll show students how to access our school library of royalty-free music to set the tone of their movies.
The final products will either be posted in our school web photo gallery or on our school’s YouTube channel.
There are other great projects in the works. I’ll try to write about them soon.
Doug Johnson over at the Blue Skunk Blog honored me with a blog award. Now I have the good fortune to be able to award it to seven other bloggers.
I suspect Clarence Fisher has already received this, but I don’t remember seeing it on his blog, so here goes. Remote Access is one of those blogs that I find myself reflecting on days, even months after I read the posts. They often come up in conversations with others. I appreciate that be blogs so regularly, giving us an ongoing view into his classroom. We see his projects and his ideas evolve over time. He reads widely and thinks deeply. Enjoy!
Technology in the Middle is Patrick Woesnner’s blog. It covers a good range of topics, from helpful utilities and websites, to notes from classes, to curricular projects.
Betchablog is a place where Chris Betcher connects Best Practices to every day use. He’s a skilled podcaster, and he also makes video tutorials, so don’t miss those parts of his blog.
Kathy Sierra’s Creating Passionate Users is no longer being written, but it is still online and worth reading. She is a computer programmer, author, horse trainer, and artist. Her ideas for creating passionate users apply not just to software, but to education and life, and her graphics are powerful and fun.
Dr. Scott McLeod’s Dangerously Irreleveant blog is anything but irrelevant, He is a university-level lecturer and researcher who is now working to get education students and administrators up to speed.
Dan Meyer’s dy/dan blog’s tagline is “Working hard to make it look easy.” He fascinates me with the way he draws on technology to bring the world to his math class.
Stephanie Pearl-McPhee’s Yarn Harlot blog has next to nothing to do with education and a whole lot to do with knitting and book tours and good humor. Check out her recent post on an unfortunate (but hilarious) coffee episode at an airport during her recent book tour.
You will notice that two of those blogs aren’t education blogs. I think it is important that we read outside out fields, both for our jobs and for ourselves.
The K-12 Online Conference invites participation from educators around the world interested in innovative ways Web 2.0 tools and technologies can be used to improve learning. This FREE conference is run by volunteers and open to everyone. The 2008 conference theme is “Amplifying Possibilities”. This year’s conference begins with a pre-conference keynote the week of October 13, 2008. The following two weeks, October 20-24 and October 27-31, forty presentations will be posted online to the conference blog (this website) for participants to download and view. Live Events in the form of three “Fireside Chats” and a culminating “When Night Falls” event will be announced. Everyone is encouraged to participate in both live events during the conference as well as asynchronous conversations. More information about podcast channels and conference web feeds is available!
Just as I’m thinking about the hows and whys of connecting elementary children to the larger community, I read injenuity’s blog post about Michael Wesch’s presentation to the Library of Congress regarding an An anthropological introduction to YouTube.
Wesch’s videos are always thought provoking and this one will give you and interesting view of the impact YouTube is having on our cultures and ourselves.
We are making progress. In the past, my colleague and I wrote a semester tech plan and brought it to the staff. Most teachers approved it as written. A few would ask us to work on other projects with them.
This term, I am meeting with each of my teachers to create a semester plan. In most cases, this isn’t the deep, rich collaboration I envision since my class provides them with prep time, but it is a good start given time constraints. It means I no longer have every class in a grade level on approximately the same lesson. I’m looking at 15 potentially unrelated preps a week, but since I was a classroom teacher for 11 years, I’m used to far more preps a week than that.
None of this would be possible without the teachers being willing to work with me. They each either gave up a prep time or met with me after school. This may not sound like much, but our school is a fast-paced place and they are all involved in many projects, meetings and conferences beyond their regular planning for lessons and assessing their students. With so many tasks competing for their time, I am appreciative of their generosity.
I’m happy that what I’m doing with the students is more closely integrated with the classroom curriculum, and that this process allows me to help the teachers see ways to teach with technology. In some of our plans, they will book time beyond my class to work on the projects. Other teachers will team teach with me some of the time. For other classes, the entire plan is contained in my weekly class.
Ideally, I want to move towards the type of integration and collaboration that Kim Cofino blogged about here>and here. That change requires a different staffing model. My principal has made a staffing request for next year, but their are many competing requests so we will have to wait and see if it is funded for next year.
As happy as I am with the progress made, I keep mulling over the words of one of my teachers. As we finished the semester plan, she lamented that it wasn’t very Web 2.0. She attended the Learning 2.0 conference in Shanghai last year and embraced the need for teaching 21st century skills instead of the old consumer model of information.
She’s right. While many of the semester plans do allow students to create content, show their learning in new ways that involve higher-order thinking, there is not much connection with the rest of the world. Except for a few YouTube videos and VoiceThreads, there isn’t much in these plans that connect our students with the world outside of our school. Does there need to be in an international school where the children are sitting in class each day with other international children? Does there need to be at the elementary level where so much of what we do with technology is still new to them?
My first response is, “Of course!” However, I need to think more about the whys and hows. If you are using Web 2.0 tools to connect your elementary students with the larger community, what drives you? Why do you personally think it is import? I’d love to hear what you have to say.
Glenn over at History Tech blog has been using Compfight to find CC images in Flickr. Like me, he discovered that the safe search isn’t really safe enough for student use, so he contacted them. The good folks at Compfight are considering creating a truly school-friendly Flickr CC search tool and are asking for input.
For the elementary students I work with the ultimate Flickr search engines would have the following attributes.
Light, not resource intensive because schools often have old computers and slow networks.
Basic interface, Compfight is brilliant because it is such a clean interface, nowhere for the children to get lost or distracted. Kids are instantly successful.
Large thumbnails. 8 and 9 year olds tend to like words and pictures on their screen to be big. They make their fonts size 18 and put extra space between words to make them easier to see, not just to fill the page. Compfights are a good size. FlickrCC is a bit small. I’d include fewer images to make the thumbnails a bit bigger.
Split screen like FlickrCC. On one side we see thumbnails of the hits. On the other side, we see an individual image, its URL, photographer’s name, and links to the other sizes of the image. I like FlickrCC but it is missing a key feature, the name of the photographer. According to Flickr, to use the CC images, you need to credit the source by listing the name of the photographer and provide a link back to the image. FlickrCC lacks that and as a result, my wee ones are having to navigate through multiple pages. That is really tough for some of them. Being able to grab URL and photographer’s name off one clear page before they go to get a larger or small size of the image would be much easier for them.
Open links in a new tab. If a child needs a larger size of the image and follows that link, it should open in a new tab so that after they download the image, they can close the tab and they are right back at the search engine.
Safe Search. No filter is perfect. Some photographers are wily in how they tag their photos. However, one that blocks 95% of nudity, sex, and violence would be great. A second grade girl who types in kitties doesn’t want a screen full of sex kittens. Naked toddlers, victims of floods standing amidst the ruins of their home with only rags on their body aren’t the problem. It is the art photos of nudity and the pornographic ones that are making our searches problematic. We haven’t had a problem of accidentally pulling up pictures of violence in Flickr, but we don’t want to start having one either.
Free. I am currently working overseas at a private school. I have a budget and could pay for this feature. However, most of my career has been in the public schools in the US and then it was only me on a teacher’s salary paying for things we needed. I could do it because I don’t have children of my own, but many teachers couldn’t pay anything.
What would you like to see in a school-friendly search tool for the Creative Commons section of Flickr? Give Compfight your feedback by posting on Glenn’s blog or by contacting them directly via the link under the About button at the bottom of their site. And drop by Glenn’s blog for a good read and to thank him for taking the initiative to start this discussion with the Compfight folks.
