Not so Distant Future. . .the micro version

Mabry online Closing session

Wed, 27 Jun 2007 14:34:32 -0500

Well, we’ve made it to the closing keynote.

The conference is just getting going for me, and now it’s over ;)

But I’ve put faces with names, met some new people, learned a lot, been inspired(thanks Joyce!), and hopefully can face the long line at the airport with a lot to think about.

I won’t be able to stay for Tim Tyson’s whole session, since I have to address busses, trains, and planes, (no automobiles), but I wanted to catch a little of it.

Tyson started by nicely honoring his students.

School 1.0 versus School 2.0

Daniel Pink mentions the maniacal control in schools on rituals, rules and routines. As we’ve heard all week, also the web 2.0 emphasis on engaging students in engaging activities.

emphasizing that they wanted to make Mabry

meaningful, significant, connected, but he wants us to move beyond the discussion of connectedness, into how can we make a contribution.

Ask our kids, what do you have to say?

He’s received emails from all over—teachers from Australia came to visit their students, as did Russian students—that international voice is powerful.

I think his question about the contribution is important though. It is global—we all know how this has changed now, at least we in this audience do. But…how do we turn that into a positive contribution beyond our walls?

Tyson—the concept of childhood is basically new. In the past, the family relied on the contribution of the children. He wants to create a scenario in school where children can make a meaningful and significant contribution.

When does meaningfulness start? When they graduate from high school or college? When they begin a family? When do our lives assume a level of significance that really matters?

His answer is today.

Example—Film festival? students with a project on stem cell research—wanted to meet with a researcher, who presented to 12 year olds her presentation. She drilled down to make sure the kids understood the terms. Their resulting film won a film festival.

projects on human stem cell research, commercializing of pure drinking water, children’s slave labor on the ivory coast, the captivity of elephants. These are MIDDLE school research projects, by the way.

He’s showing a video that their students made about organ transplants.

They interviewed a researcher at Emory, met an organ donor recipient, researched organ donation—they wanted to encourage organ donation.

“making a movie, that’s like learning on steroids” one of the kids says.

This movie is available on iTunes. Their movie is unbelievably professional. Which life is worth more, they ask, as they show various people waiting for organ donations? while they have a countdown clock running.

Next movie Frankengenes—genetically modified food.

How much is a kid in Africa worth to us? asks another video about Chocolate and exploitation of children. Students describe at the beginning how they find the project purposeful and important. You can see they know they are making a difference.

human stem cell research—students split the screen—using the media to create a message just by the design of their film.

I’ve been thinking during the day about some of the sessions I’ve seen which were using wikis, which is fine, but then I wonder—shouldn’t we honor our audiences here with effective visual literacies as well? Wikis are hard to see on the screen—wikis are great tools for links, and embedding all parts of the presentation but how can we use them more effectively if we are using them to present sessions? Larger fonts, more images, colors?

Now he’s inviting his students, Tia, and Josh, on stage.

Josh is sharing how he met teachers from all over the world as a result of his video being online. He now has a couple of new “toys”—his parents bought him final cut pro so he could edit more films.

Tia—Malcolm Gladwell once said we learned by example. There is a real adequacy to verbal instruction. How many people get to talk to a transplant surgeon for a school movie, she asks? Why we should get this technology?

Making a movie —we learned so much more about the subjects we were studying. The movies are making a difference to those who see it.

I have to leave to catch my plane. Fascinating session.

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Women of the Web project

Wed, 27 Jun 2007 13:26:21 -0500

The four members of Women of the web met here for the first time four days ago—they started this last fall and do a weekly podcast.

womenofweb2.com

http://wow2necc2007.wikispaces.com/

Wanted to provide a voice for women online, the four of them met and formed a group in 24 hours. And had 200 members within a month.

Jennifer Wagner

Sharon Peters

Cheryl Oakes

Vicki Davis

Sharon is talking about why teachers should be using web 2.0 tools in the classroom. Students are familiar and fluent with the internet. And it’s up to us to make our educational system relevant to them.

Appropriate conduct—Students need to be learning appropriate conduct.

Global connections

Learning gains—In a survey educators were asked if their access to online social network impacted students’ learning gains, 79% said yes

Anchoring Filtering (George Siemens) and theory of Connectivism, Knowing Knowledge book free online; Educators need to address the skill of keeping focused and filtering out what is relevant, critical and appropriate.

Evaluation and Authentication—

Opportunities to Collaborate—allows educators to collaborate with top notch teachers from around the world with other REAL teachers

Transparency and Openness

She’s using a tool called Present embedded into the wiki—slideshow embedded into a wiki.

http://www.spresent.com

Online projects help build skill of negotiation

Why are projects easier now?

The web IS the new operating system

It’s about the content, not about the software

These kind of projects do meet the new ISTE standards.

Sheryl Oakes k-4 , now k-12

Advantage is that she knows what the k-4 students are using and now that she’s k-12 she can nudge the 5-12 teachers

Using Bubbleshare—

She took a sabbatical. She took a six week class with Webheads.

Find your purpose. Her purpose was to communicate with her students while she was gone. She used Bubbleshare to share photos. You can embed it, resize it, and can make comments on the slide shows.

For podcasting used to use Podomatic, Gcast,—she now uses Podcast People—you can register your students; a teacher at her school used Nanos to record podcasts.

Tinyurl.com as a tool to shorten long urls.

Skype.com—

Has a text chat, so even if you don’t have a mic, can use that. utechtips.com People were skyping sessions simultaneously, and saved the chat. Utechtips allows you to read along. and can make comments.

Skypecasts—semi-reliable—but can bring many people into a conversation

edtechtalk.com site for tips

jenw2404 skype

technospud at gmail.com

Walden Media—Charlotte’s Web Read-a-thon; part of guiness book of world records, had an excerpt from the book that was read around the world simultaneously

Salute to Seuss

Global Schoolhouse—to find a way to collaborate with other schools, can search for projects by time, day, project, etc.

epals—projects that you can join

Vicki Davis

Pillars of an effective web 2.0 classroom; in Terry Freidman’s book, Coming of Age 2 at Terry’s website, for free

safety/privacy, information literacy, web citizenship, web teamwork, intentional activities, accountability

Toondoo—can make cartoons

Meebo

Newsmap—from google news…can enlarge it—the bigger the headline is the more important the story is

Gliffy for drawing

Twitter—for microblogging. Twittervision—can see all over the world what people are saying or FLickrvision—moves around the world and focuses on pictures that are being posted. Twiku

www.lmeebo.com ” Meebo room” a chat with video

Stumble Upon for cool sites

THey have asked the audience to share:

Social bookmarking with diigo. —notes on your bookmarks and can use it to direct students with sticky notes

Zamzar converts any file to any other thing. now has windows 07.

Terry Friedman—url for book

David Warlick— vixy.net allows you to download videos off of Youtube easily; operates best at 4 a.m.

innertoob

Someone needs to be doing the research to show that we’re affecting positive change

picnik— image tool, clipart

Wow, lots to play with here. And I finally got to MEET the women of web 2.

One Laptop per Child project

Wed, 27 Jun 2007 10:29:13 -0500

Gregg DeKoenigsberg, Red Hat

They rely on the open source community and a partnership with them so that they can sell their product.

RedHat is the primary software developer for the laptop, the XO, which he is showing us now. It’s smaller than I would have picture, sort of like the size of those neo devices.

if you have linux and want to contribute to software

wiki.laptop.org/go/Sugar_with_sugar-jhbuild

Works well with fedora

The foundational belief in the XO project

We take more for granted than we can possibly understand. We make assumptions that may be wrong in the rest of the world.

Have you ever lived in a town without a library? without a telephone? without electricity?

We live in a world where we have so much info to absorb that we look for away to get away from it, to figure out what the best source is, or which tv channel to watch. Africans don’t enjoy that luxury—this is an unknown problem. Akst and Jensen—Carnegie Corp.

The Xo is partly supposed to be a textbook because of that. A way to view the world’s content—so designed to be an ebook reader.it swivels and turns into a little ebook reader. Cool. Can run in that mode on less than one watt of power.

It’s not only a textbook, but a library. Many places in the world can’t afford libraries. Much content of wikipedia, wikimedia, project gutenberg, MIT Open courseware, public library of science, entire internet, Google

Has speakers, camera, phone— the web cam cost 60 cents extra. Price will probably be about $150 now. The goal is connectedness.

We live in a world that has fundamentally more world connectedness than before, so the device intends to let people to connect to that.

Xo will be an orchestra. Tan Tan? the killer app he says for this project. Like garage band stripped down

The XO will be networked. Rabbit ear antennas allow it to connect with another XO nearby. The idea is to allow “mesh” networking—to let them connect these laptops to other ones. It won’t allow the internet, but all the kids in the village could connect to each other via these devices. This feature is a work in progress. But if one of them was connected to the internet, all of the others could.

It’s human powered. They ship with a yoyo that allows it to generate power—the goal is for every minute of using it, you get ten minutes of use. The idea was that the crank didn’t generate enough power, so the yo yo allows a lot of different ways to spin it and get power and it generates more.

The XO will be an opportunity. Negroponte says, “It’s an education project, not a laptop project.” They are trying to instill a sense of ownership with the students and the parents.

Objections to the project:

people don’t need laptops, they need food

This reminds me of Karl Fisch’s session—don’t limit us just because we are attempting something

Dr. Sen, Nobel Laureate in economics, “No substantial famine has ever occurred in a democratic and independent country, no matter how poor.” You need a tool to tackle the poverty, which must go beyond food.

another objection—computers don’t work in educatoin

but you learn computers by having long access to it over time, and have access to them

Fear—The XO will be used to exploit children.

The built in camera, when the kids take it home…how do you deal with that in the developed world? We try to get parents to understand how to use tools. So we probably need to do the same approach in the developing world.

Their problems they will have are ones we deal with too, and if they have parity with us, they’ll experience some of the problems we have.

OLPC can’t know all the answers right now. But the first goal is to make the question about how to use the laptop a real question. Then we can solve the problems.

(personally I applaud the OLPC for going forward—at least they are attempting to address it and maybe drive other vendors to start thinking about it and addressing it.)

www.olpcnews.com if you want to read some fearmongering and analysis who have big concerns about the project.

www.laptop.org which is the home of the project.

Colin Powell says that “perpetual optimism is a force multiplier.”

Great quote.

No moving parts, has a handle, membrane covered keyboard, trackpad, camera and mic built in.

Sugar is the interface which isn’t a standard desktop and probably what you have read about some of the controversy of this device.

Noun camp versus verb camp—everything in software

Files, folders (Noun people won)-

Sugar is based around verbs.

Current pilot is Thailand, Brazil, Uruguay, Nigeria, Libya

Uruguay deployment is going most effectively. The local people are running the pilot. Goal is to run pilots, study what’s making them successful and then applying those models elsewhere.

Intel is working on a similar one using their chip, because AMD powers this laptop.

Negroponte wanted to also make sure that the clever kids could “open the hood of the car” and use open source, so that’s partly why he went to redhat.

email gdk at redhat.com to get on mailing list if ou want to know when the U.S. will get these.

They’re now going to show us the actual Sugar interface.

Activity ring shows all the things that are running around a circle in the center, that depicts a stick figure person in the center. There is a neighborhood view that shows more stick figures and if you click on that kid, it shows what they are doing and it launches the application that they are using on your computer.

Showing us Tamtam, which allows you to create your own music. icons of instruments.

They are working on designing a server where the village could have one server. E grainery project does this…internet in a box for villages that don’t have connectivity.

Camera, Writing program, Etoys, music tool.

Because of the size of the hard drive, you’ll really only be able to have 50-100 activities on your hard drive. If you want to run an activity that is on another person’s laptop, it’ll load it up and just delete one you don’t use often.

Will it be a device that is used by a whole family? They don’t know yet.

Interesting seeing it in person. There are quirks in what they are showing us, but it is still in the design stages for this new version.

I wish there was money in this project to send a teacher from the States to these villages or Peace Corp volunteer or someone to work with the families and village to get the implementation off the ground.

Info fluency

Wed, 27 Jun 2007 08:33:07 -0500

Joyce Valenza and her colleague Ken Rodoff are going to share ideas for tools that you can immediately use in the classroom or library.

They are colleagues at Springfield Township High School, and she also runs Teacher Librarian Ning. This presentation was excellent and one of those that makes the whole conference worthwhile.

The slides and links for this presentation can be found at www.informationfluency.wikispaces.com

There’s a need to blend the ideas of information fluency and web 2.0 tools. Students need an understanding of the tools but also a new understanding in terms of fluency.

Joyce sees herself as in perpetual beta (she made a slide with a clever flickr badge showing her as a learner)—version 1.8.

Information fluency is an old thread that we need to weave in with these new tools, and we need to bring it into the classroom, and into the students’ lives.

Comparing web 2.0 tools to web 1.0, you can see that

Horizon Report from educause identifies “user-created content” and social networking.

Recommends the themes in these books:

Starfish and the Spider—leaderless organizations

Wikinomics—how mass collaboration changes everything

Whole New Mind—right brain thinkers

World is Flat

Starting with the story Stone Soup, which celebrates that creativity “rocks”, collaboration, etc. But she was troubled by the approach that the soldiers in the story took.

Changes—and Fluencies

1. Being able to access information appropriately (IMSA slide)

Is it really a good enough/why bother world? Ask students to have energy.

Her goal is to be a window on each of her students desktops to help them, and for them to be able to find all these different collections.

She owns the problem of students not using good information, and so do her teachers. Create pathfinders. But use a wiki so you can share the work and share the responsibility, and employ faculty and student leaders.

Librarians need to own these problems, use terms that users understand, and teach them how to use these tools better, like Google advanced search, and Google’s directory.

OEDB Online education database lists the 25 best search engines.

Put wikibooks on your pathfinders.

OER Commons is site universities are using to put up entire curriculums.

Blogs are resources for our students too, and we should direct students to them, and we shouldn’t be blocking them.

Asking students to do original research—zoho polls, surveymonkey, surveyscholar, zoomerang, responseomatic—are all sites they could use to do this. They guided students in creating the polls before putting them out in public, made sure they were well crafted, etc.

One student did their research paper on content in blogs.

The idea is that letting students see that others validate what they themselves have to say.

Also helping students use RSS feeds; next year global studies students will set up global feeds for the region they are studying. Speaking of that, news is not just local, and not just English.

Students pushed her to get JStor because it comes up on Google; but her students value them because teachers value them and know them.

2. Evaluate

She quotes Jimmy Wales—that telling kids not to use wikipedia is like telling them not to listen to rock ‘n roll—reminds me of the earlier presentation which said we can’t change a whole demographic group—we need to change our practices.

She creates tools on evaluating blogs, evaluating wikis, which is an excellent idea, making the evaluation tools specific, not just about the “internet.”

A surprising site that I hadn’t been familiar with—conservapedia…encyclopedia with a conservative viewpoint.

Ken—

Assignment with Hamlet

Students were assigned a character prior to even beginning Hamlet, and each group was a character and created a blog. As they read the play they tried to convey their character’s personality through the blog, and applied a deep level of analysis, which came back into the classroom discussions.

Kids posted comments in the voice of their characters on the other characters’ blogs in the same voice. Joyce suggested that you could imagine at the elementary level blogging Charlotte’s Web.

The teachers moved the literature circles onto blogs. They set up tags for the themes of the discussion so you could keep track of it thematically or by chapter.

Of course you spend time in class discussing ethical behavior. Ken points out that you talk to students about their belonging to a learning community and what that means. It’s really about effective classroom management.

Another wiki discussion format of Ayn Rand’s Anthem.

nightwiesel.blogspot.com two classes in different states discussing the book Night

Literacy—Using Information ethically

Avoid harming others

Documenting sources

Bibme—helps fill in the bibliography

Blogging etiquette

Guide students to use creative commons material and copyright free materials if they are planning to put it up on the web.

Guiding our teachers to Creative Commons—which reminds me that I should make a handout or do a workshop on this for our whole faculty.

She also has a link on her library page of copyright free materials.

Advice for social networking is important to give students as well.

Have all of their kids develop their own avatars so when they are communicating it’s easy to see who’s who. They have the kids do a pyschological character study. The wiki lists several sites that can be used.

Joyce Valenza is willing to partner with another school. That would be great.

Recommending ning—classroom 2.0 and library 2.0 as well.

Equity—

We have to fight for students to have access to these tools and have equity with other students elsewhere. So try to lead students to alternative free software so if they can’t afford or don’t have something, they have alternatives.

Synthesis—

Senior project—the kids are blogging a whole semester for their project. She’s created a template for the kids, showing them guiding questions. It creates transparency for their senior project—the teacher, mentor, or peers or librarian can see in their site and guide them. (see the wiki for an example)

Wikis and blogs cause students to reexamine their own beliefs in the context of listening to their peers.

Noodle tools has a new notecard feature.

Collaborate

Some new tools to check out—Celtx(scriptwriting site), jumpcut(video editing site), ajaxwrite13, thinkfree

Podcast project on the Crucible-the students wrote a script for a radio program; used the wiki as the playground for collaborating on the script. Used wikispaces, which also has a discussion area where they could debate the script.

It created a strong sense of ownership and motivation for students to get much more involved in the play.

Can use wikis for a team or club and let students add their own content, discuss ideas, etc. and it helps those sstudents who might be quieter.

Shares idea of using a scribe to create a blog or wiki for the class that changes each week.

Voicethread—telling a story around an image. You add voice to it.

voicethread.com

Joycle’s VOYA article—Open the Door and Let ‘Em In

Marco Torres video work from student film festival

Duck Diaries and Trout Blog—Elementary school blogs, Marin county day school

Primaryaccess.org—you can put audio and still images together

Rethinking ppt—They were trying to get students to rethink powerpoint in terms of story. There is a big difference between what we are asking students to communicate and how they are using powerpoint—so they tried to deconstruct this for students, rip down their old powerpoints and to rethink how they were communicating.

www.springfieldvideo.edublogs.org is Springfield’s Video Blog site of student produced video.

They made a site for the prerequisite reading list,that teachers are collaborating on. They’ve put video trailers up there, amazon links, descriptions and images of the books, so that students have a lot more information about the book ahead of time. Great idea.

Use of podcast for vocabulary study really motivated the students. They also had students put together videos on grammar “non negotiables” but the kids made videos on its versus its, personal pronouns, prepositions…. Did it for common grammar issues.

Flickr—Student art gallery—students can have peer review; visual exploration of words.

Back to Stone Soup story—The soldiers as catalysts, they lit the fire, maintained the faith, and changed the culture.

New RULES for 21st century practice

obstacles versus opportunities

do things and get blessings

let go of things that don’t matter

delegate all around

don’t wait for the workshop train yourself

you can’t punch this clock, you have to do some of this at home

it’s ok to be beta

stop watering the rocks, water the people who are flowers

teach outside the library

Get up, stand up and show them what an information professional looks like

lead from the center

What is the worst consequence of your best idea—Chris Lehmann

There is a lot to process here, great ideas, and great enthusiasm.

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Pulling the ideas together

Tue, 26 Jun 2007 22:34:45 -0500

My blog friend, Scott Schwister, who I have now met in person, once again inspires and informs my thinking.

While I have been using my blog as a way to collect notes from the sessions (since I have been basically going from session to session without much time to reflect or connect my ideas in between), he has highlighted some key questions or ideas from sessions he’s attended, that inspire me to try to pull some of my thoughts together.

Of course that reflection is what blogging or writing is really all about, as Karl Fisch’s workshop that I mentioned earlier, was all about.

I think for me this conference has been different because I went there with this mental idea of a lot of the writers that I read, who I knew I would meet here. So seeing what it was like in person, or trying to make those connections since I missed the edubloggercon, was a big part of this experience. I’m also not a “technologist” per se, though that has long been my interest. I straddle this strange sort of biosphere between libraries and technology sometimes.

Also it’s been a little stressful since my colleague Vicky and I have been having a lot of distracting travel experiences so it’s made it a little more difficult than usual to collect my thoughts.

I’ve concluded that meeting people via im versus blogging is somehow different. I met a lot of people via instant messaging in an earlier time of my life, and they were all very much what I expected.

As Vicky pointed out to me, blogging is written and it’s mostly professional, so there’s a different resonance to it than to instant messaging and most of my experiences there were for simple idle conversation, not professional. But because blogging is more composed, and because it’s professional, perhaps we reveal a different part of ourselves. Some writers are more transparent than others, I think.

Anyway, it’s been an interesting experience and something to ponder.

I’ve met some great people and had some good conversations. While talking today, I realized that I was most challenged and inspired by the keynote this morning.

I’ve realized I personally get a lot out of putting disparate ideas and people together, because maybe that’s a little of how I also think—I like pulling random, seemingly unrelated ideas together and trying to find something new in them.

But I also realize that my preconceived notions are limitations. Elizabeth Streb challenged us on that notion this morning—to leave our ideas behind when we are trying to answer a question. If we don’t create boundaries for ourselves, then what can we create and open ourselves up to?

Vicky and I were talking about the week tonight, and the theme she really heard was that the content should drive the technology use, not the other way around. I met Lucie from Vermont in the blogger cafe, and she said her director’s motto was “technology in the service of learning.” That was spot on.

I think also, at a conference like this—the question is how to gather all the information you can—but also make space for yourself to think. If you are wired and reporting and networking all the time, then how can you have the time you need to ponder things. I know most people may not have this problem, but I can get overly wound up in my thinking and learning and have to remember to keep things balanced.

I’m joking here, but maybe NECC should sponsor a session next year every day that is in the middle of the day that’s a nap or a mental yoga session ;) Of course, it being on the San Antonio Riverwalk next year will help since you can slip away, go outdoors, and wander a little.

Lastly, I want to thank Scott—because somehow his pulling of these threads out tonight was the trigger I needed to stop and try to pull a few of my own thoughts together. So thanks, Scott, and nice to meet you!

Technorati Tags: necc2007

Arapahoe HS/Constructivist use of laptops

Tue, 26 Jun 2007 15:04:13 -0500

I can already tell this presentation by teachers at Arapahoe High School will be wonderful. My real blog is STILL DOWN :( (futura.edublogs.org), so just email me if you want to comment or ask a question (whslibrarian@eanes.k12.tx.us).

I’m live blogging it here on my new friend, tumblr.com, and I have a plug to charge up my laptop too, so I’m happy, whoo hoo.

I also got to meet Karl Fisch, finally! The presentation began while we were waiting with a slide show with incredible quotes from students and teachers about how using technology and blogging affected their education—accompanied by some great music, like Changes, by David Bowie.

Brian Hatak, Science teacher, Brad Meyer, SS Teacher, Anne Smith, English, Barbara Stahlhut, Math All are part of the 21st century teaching team? at their school.

The idea of this session is a school partway through a work in progress.

Constructivism is a means of helping students to construct their own knowledge. The school started a grant, first year a cohort of teachers, second year another cohort of teachers—a total of 46. The teachers meet about once every three weeks, which the grant pays for, for about 3 hours. Spend time on educational theory, reading books or articles. What does the latest research tell us—argue, talk, etc. The time teachers never normally have to communicate is provided. Then time is spent talking about turning theory into pedagogy, and the conversation continues on blogs. The third part of the time a new technology tool is shared and they discuss how they might use it in the classroom.

For many of the teachers this is the first real successful staff development they’ve been involved in, some after 30 years of teaching. What they found was that teachers need time, but no one gives it to them. But they need time to collaborate, talk, someone with passion to drive that possibility through.

Anne Smith—

One of the things they realized and creating a professional learning environment was that furniture was needed—like chairs that could be moved, tables, inspirational posters—21st century connected types of posters; posted expectations that students created for the classroom.

That empowered the students to learn. So each time students were starting something like blogging or skype, the teacher would let the students create the rules and expectations.

Successes—

Brad Meyer—When they go to lunch the teachers now find themselves talking about ideas and how you teach, which he found to be a complete change from his first ten years of teaching. Students can be very passionate about their beliefs when asked to blog about it. This is a work in progress.

Anne has used the fischbowl, where students blog during an activity in class—live blogging during the actual class.

They found that Skype worked better than blogger for longer conversations where there were a lot of comments made by students.

Barbara—Collaboration with students

Flat Classroom “Thousand and One Flat tales project” on wikispaces, after reading Arabian nights. This project took place between a teacher at Arapahoe and one teacher in Seoul.

The school brought in a group of business people at the end of the year, and asked them what they would like the school to be teaching the students. Teamwork, when to be a leader and when to be a follower came up as an issue in those discussions.

Brad—

Being a reflective thinker is an important part of learning process, and in this project, they are asking students to be reflective thinkers, but the teachers are also modeling that through the workshops, blogging, etc. Students are taking on more the role of producers instead of just being consumers. Getting students to share their reflections is overwhelming in ways the group never expected.

Anne—

Podcasts. This I Believe Essays broadcast on NPR as an example. She had the students write their own essays, sent them to NPR, and then recorded them and posted on their blog, and has responses from New Zealand within a day which was very powerful for the kids. They’ve also used podcasting for vocabulary lessons that they create.

Brad—

Issues of outdated textbooks; so his astronomy class took it upon themselves to write four chapters of an astronomy textbook on a wiki. One student was the chief editor.

A very powerful way to use a wiki to bring updated content to the students and have them write as well. Another class did a Pay it Forward project on a wiki, which is on the website.

Anne—

Google Docs for collaborative editing is helpful—breaks down the walls of the classroom.

Another tip—the Reviewing toolbar, that lets people add comments.

Big questions—

What does it take to challenge the system? What matters? Essential questions. (Similar to what Chris Lehmann was writing about in Leading and Learning and that they are doing at Science Leadership Academy).

Mockumentaries—on the cold war, from Brad’s class, which are published on the blogs—link on the website.

They’ve put student work of all levels on the blog so students know their school is transparent.

They also use “scribe” posts—where a student is a scribe, and one of the students “scribe” post has been published in a book by Dean Kuropta (spelling?)

Developed a blog policy jointly with Google Docs.

They have some sort of alternating block schedule, so they help cover each other’s classes, and get substitutes, etc. It’s a trade off, but the time of day is rotated.

However, the ownership is on the kids, so even when the teacher isn’t there, the class goes on. Brad wasn’t there and the sub didn’t show up, the principal did an observation and there was no teacher—so he went to meet with the asst. principal—and the asst. principal said he learned more from the kids than he would have had the teacher been there. The students were using the web page to explain the lesson to each other.

How do they handle more traditionalist teachers? or the yeah, buts?

They started with a core that would buy in, and it has a ripple effect, because the other teachers can hear the conversations and the enthusiasm spreads. Students on their campus can select what teacher they want, like a college model, and there is pressure also because they want to be in the classes using the constructivist pedagogy.

Students in science go to different room for labs, so they’ve noticed students selecting depending on their learning style.

Sometimes you may just have to keep moving along—you gather those teachers around you who do agree, and who do believe that change is possible. Teachers are mentoring each other, informally and formally.

Karl Fisch came to the teachers the first day and said “change the world” with his presentation. But they did build this project with teachers as the leaders, and it wasn’t a top down decision or project mandated by a principal, and they felt that was an important part of the success.

I’m blogging this presentation and the content, but I also have been watching their projects unfold all year by reading the fischbowl blog that Karl Fisch runs. It’s been fascinating reading the cohort blogs where the teachers debate how these ideas and tools are affecting their classrooms, struggle with change, rethink how things work, as well as reading the student and classroom blogs and seeing the assignments unfold. It really gives you a sense of how this all comes together.

http://www.fischbowl.blogspot.com/

http://www.lps.k12.co.us/schools/arapahoe/21c/necc2007.html

learningandlaptops.blogspot.com

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An avatar opening the file cabinet where David Warlick’s...

Tue, 26 Jun 2007 13:32:45 -0500

An avatar opening the file cabinet where David Warlick’s handouts are stored online in Second Life

Contemporary Literacies with David Warlick

Tue, 26 Jun 2007 13:31:28 -0500

David started out today with a tour down memory lane and the first Radio Shack computers.

He contrasted that with today, and a visual “swarm” of recommended stories on Digg or Wikipedia having to block Congress from changing their own wikipedia sites.

He’s sharing a clever set of screen shots of Wikipedia’s different warnings about article content, and contrast that with a screen shot of books and newspapers. Do we want to use a set of resources that warn us they might have bias or mistakes or the old textbook that gives us no warning that it is out of date, or the newspaper that made a mistake?

Assignment—Part 1—go use wikipedia. Part 2—go prove it is true using other sources.

Literacy skills

—Teaching students to prove authority, not just assume it like we did.

—Reading—how to be able to find things, to decode them, evaluate the value of it, and to organize it into their own personal digital libraries

He’s explaining how to drag and drop an RSS link into the blog tool he’s using which is NewsFire. And as a new article is updated, it will be updated in his blog reader. Newsfire only operates for the Mac by the way. (I use bloglines as my RSS reader.)

It’s not just “reading” the information anymore. It’s about exposing the validity of it.

Going into Second Life to show a math use in Second Life. It’s using a site that generates weather information for flight, where you can enter numbers and move around a map of the weather.

Podcasting literacy—the audio editing screen of tools like Audacity uses math to change the audio quality.

Writing literacies—

So many choices that students have. The need to understand is important.

Writing literacies—Expressing ideas compellingly. Beacon School example—Students produced movie trailers for a movie version of Othello—he’s showing one which is pretty impressive. The teacher told her class that she had a problem she needed them to solve, which was motivating her students to read Othello.

Anatomy of the long tail. Study in 1998 which looked at differences between industrial age industries and modern businesses, and examined rhapsody, amazon.com, and netflix and sales.

Chris Anderson coined the phrase the long tail, to describe the long stretch of items that weren’t lucrative to sell. But in our economy, those items are still able to be available because we have online ways of marketing the content and making it available and allowing those authors to make a little money.

For example, David published his newest book on Lulu.com, two hours after he completed it. Saved book as pdf and uploaded it. lol..His first book helped put his daughter through college, so he’s encouraging us to buy his next book since his son just graduated from high school.

Other new literacies:

Spam—cost $50 billion in 2005—ethics is a literacy

Ethics—seek truth, minimize harm, be accountable

He has a student/teacher code of ethics that can be downloaded from his handout site, and it is permissable to alter it.

When we have students share their writing on sites like blogs, it helps make them more responsible and ethical because they understand the effects of tampering with technology.

“Stop integrating technology”—It’s about integrating Literacy. What are the basic information skills for today’s children? The technology are the tools of their time.

He did an amusing visual demonstration where he removed all the items from a photograph of the office of the future because we won’t need them.

We know we are preparing our children for a world we can’t even describe. Our parents didn’t know that.

Ways to prepare for unpredictability

-teach kids to teach themselves

-nature of information has changed

“learning literacies”

Kids take their connections with them—their “tentacles”.

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Finally, Staggeringly Good Things Mixing Google Earth/Media

Tue, 26 Jun 2007 10:29:45 -0500

Vicky, David and I are in Hall Davidson’s session on Google Earth, which of course is packed.

His powerpoint is online at discoveryeducatornetwork.com/ at blogs —DENmedia matters—june 20 entry DEN GOES TO NECC, and a word document with tips on using Google Pro.

Google Earth Pro—you can download the free trial by emailing GEEC@google.com, Debra Kettman.

He’s showing how in Google Earth Pro you can “add” music to a movie/zoom.

Google Earth basics-

Can add images on top of the earth

Image overlays and Flickr layer

How to add—Image overlay bar Click to add picture. Find the picture using a link or on your hard drive. Grab the photo, orient it, drag to shrink. Add description.

My places is where you store what you add.

He showed an example of adding a video overlay from archive.org, a movie archive site. You can download one from United Streaming so you aren’t running it off the web.

Google Earth preferences from menu at the top—controls speed, show baloons, 3-d view tab can be exaggerated, show web results to play in browser or choose to play in Google Earth screen.

Battery is low so check the handouts online!

Check out the Google Booth at 2 today—how they built Google Lit Trips.

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Tuesday Keynote NECC07

Tue, 26 Jun 2007 08:16:52 -0500

Tuesday Keynote NECC07

Keynote--Arts, Brain research & Creativity

Tue, 26 Jun 2007 07:39:54 -0500

The stage is set for creativity this morning at the opening session. As we walked in to the auditorium, a dramatic abstract video is playing on the screen, the room is darkened except for some blue lighting, and a dramatic cellist(Zoe Keeling?) is playing. It feels like something out of Cirque de Soleil.

I’ve live blogged this session, but it can’t really convey the energy and interesting mix of ideas creating by these five speakers.

Today’s opening session features a panel led by Andrew Zolli:

Elizabeth Streb

Michael McCauley

Mary Cullinane

Dr. Francesc Pedro

Michael McCauley—“Seek out your cathedrals.” Always seek a higher purpose because it elevates your thinking.

Mary Cullinane—School of the Future. Agree to not know; Create a school where failure is an option—where educators and students can fail. There is so much pressure on schools right now that this is difficult. We need some ad hoc gathering spaces—to allow kids to gather together. And it seems like most schools don’t want students to “gather.”

Elizabeth Streb—a teacher told her to pay attention to what you are interested in. She was interested in movement. She was interested in flight and how long could people fly?

She invented a place in New York City called Slam—and created a lot of spaces at Slam where you can experiment, move, fly and get your body in the air.

“We find our place in the jumping joyous jumble of life”

How do they create this? They try to break the rule. Ask questions. Set impossible goals.

She’s showing a video of her dancers choreographing a routine with giant cement blocks flying across the stage while the dancers leap between them.

She showed a video of Ricochet, where her dancers run up against a plexiglass wall and fall.

Notion of how we can “agree to not know” as Mary said—to go in ignoring what you know when you face a challenge or a question, in order to event something new.

The garage as a metaphor for the creative process.

www.strebusa.org

Michael—Creativity can be a dirty business. You have to break things and fall down. Mix things up, mix people together, bring people together—if the “flow” is going, it doesn’t matter who the people are, you just go with it.

Frances—Research on different sectors in terms of innovation. Theory of the Four pumps? (I’m not sure I understood this correctly) Four factors in education for innovation— 1. Ability to include dooers and users(learners). 2. Our ability to network. 3. Ability to to work as part of a system but act autonomously and scale things up when needed. 4. Technology. Teachers consider themselves as artisans, but what place do we assign research?

Zolli is asking about risk and empowerment and courage.

Mary is talking about the idea of risk in education. Can you imagine if innovation meant swimming downstream? In schools, innovative thinking is swimming upstream, and you get very very tired. So at School of Future, they’ve tried to eliminate some bureacratic requirements. Live within constraints but pushing the edge was their approach.

Michael—Big corporations are very thirsty for innovation. If schools would adopt that mindset, how different things would be.

He works in face to face marketing, trying to get companies closer to the consumer. Target asked his company to create a campaign for marathoners to use their pharmacy. Gave example creating a tunnel filled with motivating music for marathoners’ last stretch to help them get through that last bit of the run. It was a promotion but the agency wasn’t prepared for the paraplegics who went through the tunnel and how moving it was. He believes that he isn’t just doing a promotion—but something to create an indelible moment. His belief and enthusiasm is admirable—wouldn’t it be great to see educators espousing that they are creating indelible moments for students.

Frances—Foreign language education —research shows that it should start earlier, very early. Idea of gender based education—research doesn’t support it thus far.

Zolli was talking about a study about language and infants and the range of sounds they could hear, which supports the idea that early language acquisition is critical—because the younger you are, the more receptive you are to these “sound ” differences in language.

Mary— spent time at Microsoft. She came from education to Microsoft. The norm of the environment was constantly questioning “how can I get better?” At Microsoft, she had time to think. She wishes we had that kind of environment at schools. Employees were encouraged to think. They had gathering spaces to share. No need to justify what you were doing. Doing and thinking were the same thing. (LOL..but they weren’t open source offices—-tech joke). Everyone has their own office that look the same, no matter their level.

Books or things the speakers would recommend:

Michael—recommended Whole New Mind by Daniel Pink, and Dream Society

Frances recommended their website which will have new brain research posted next week

Elizabeth—www.strebusa.org and invites everyone to come to Slam in New York City—it’s always open. Teachers are on my shoulder this entire life that I am living. A teacher suggested to her to always go into a bookstore and read the name of every title in one section. Then pick one. Very stimulating idea.

Mary—Remember one word. Motive. Create an environment where you constantly ask—what motivates our kids? What are the obstacles? What do they value? What is their environment? We need to have that conversation.

Andrew Zolli—Ask a Ninja.com. Your students are watching this and it shows what can be done with a laptop and some video.

This session was an excellent example of how to bring innovation into a school by mixing and matching people from different walks of life, different fields and different interests as a way to generate conversations.

I think it might be interesting for the power lunches we are starting on my campus next year to do some that are a mix of two or three speakers. You have to pick the people that have that enthusiasm and inspiration, who really love what they do, whatever that is.

And Andrew Zolli’s moderation of the session helped set the tone as well of energy, creativity and humor.

I applaud NECC for setting the tone of the session right from the beginning, as well.

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Photo

Mon, 25 Jun 2007 22:47:52 -0500

Coherence

Mon, 25 Jun 2007 22:44:08 -0500

I really enjoyed Doug Johnson’s session today and it was unfortunate my battery died during it. He was engaging, funny, had great slides and very good insights. It was very fun meeting him after reading his blog, as well.

NECC recorded a podcast of his presentation, which I’d recommend once it’s up.

There’s so much to process here and so much going on and so many people. I feel like one of the fish at the aquarium last night—we were watching a huge tank of fish, and I wondered how it felt never to be alone—so many of the fish were in schools surrounded by other fish all the time.

Do we allow students any time during the day to process things? And should conferences plan a little “down” time where you can just sit and process ideas?

Although NECC has done a great job of creating all these different spaces—like the bloggers cafe, the global cafe—different areas in the building where you can sit with a few other people and chat or just work on your own.

And I know with this many sessions and this many people, that you feel somewhat driven to get as much out of it as you can. But it does make me ponder what the day is like for students sometimes, gathering up so many ideas in one day.

Had some interesting conversation at lunch with Chris Lehmann about coherence in schools and curriculum. The Science Leadership Academy uses essential questions to help tie the curriculum together and give it coherence, which I think is an excellent support to a coherent educational experience for students.

I’m feeling a lack of coherence myself, partly because my own sort of network is a little bit disrupted—I’m used to having my real blog, where I can have commenters, see who is visiting, and just where I’m used to writing. So it feels kind of disruptive to be writing somewhere else, and not able to interact very much with anyone. I’m missing the interaction part.

I’m starting to get very frustrated about edublogs not functioning properly.

Anyway, it gives me empathy for students when we disrupt their day with different schedules, changes in routines, etc. (Trying to look on the bright side!)

Time to get some sleep—Tomorrow is busy. I hope I can create some time somewhere tomorrow to sit on the bottom of the aquarium and lurk a little, so to speak—to watch the other fish, and get my bearings.

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Classrooms and Libraries with Doug Johnson

Mon, 25 Jun 2007 14:38:57 -0500

I’m so glad to be sitting in this session with Doug Johnson at this time of the afternoon, because he is making us laugh, and after lunch and a day full of workshops that is important.

He’s starting off by sharing with us some ways life is different for our students.

Beloit College

www.beloit.edu/~pubaff/mindset

List of how our students’ experience is different than ours.

2 big understandings—

—It will be easier to change the way we teach, rather than the way our students learn. We can’t change a whole demographic group.

-Today’s students like to learn. They just don’t like what we want to teach and how we teach it.

He is comparing his two children—one who loved every subject, and one who just didn’t like school, other than art, business ed, computers….

What do the studies show about the demographics of the students we are teaching? Some recommended reading:

—Educause—Educating the Net Generation (meta-analysis of all studies on this) free download

—Pew Internet and the American Life Project

battery is going…..more later.

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Preparing students for 21st century workforce

Mon, 25 Jun 2007 12:30:58 -0500

I’m sitting in on a panel on Preparing students for the workforce. Although I feel that schools need to do many things besides preparing students for the workplace, I am interested in hearing this panel’s views on what qualities they think are important and how that meshes with what our campus has been discussing regarding 21st century skills that our students need in the web 2.0 world.

I’m liveblogging this, so excuse the raw writing!

The panel includes corporate and education leaders:

Fari Ebrahimi from Verizon

Dr. Barbara Kurshan from Curriki

Dr. Steven Paine from West Virginia Dept. of Education and

Jim Rubillo from National Council of Teachers of Mathematics.

Fari is talking about as a parent, that he realized his child was using web 2.0 tools to communicate. And then he also realized at a block party in his neighborhood, none of the high school graduates were talking about majoring in technology. So he realized his role for sharing the technology’s benefits with his own child, and sharing information about technology literacy for his own child.

He’s also paying attention to the company’s student interns, because they are online collaborating and he realizes he can learn from them.

I admire his attitude about learning—that anyone can be his teacher.

He’s considering starting social networks within the Verizon environment to partner more and provide tools for their employees to network with one another. So he sees this as a group effort between parents, teachers, and the corporate world.

The first question is how is technology changing education?

Dr. Paine is sharing a story about his daughter who got home late and proceeded to get online. He thought she wasn’t doing her homework, but she showed him that she was using instant messaging to solve chemistry problems online.

He commented, “If we ever are going to compete for the interest of our kids….we must prepare our teachers to teach the way that our kids are living.”

“If we can secure all of the components of that technology world in a school setting…technology is that great equalizer…but more importantly, it is the great equalizer in helping students be globally competitive.”

Dr. Rubillo says there is a gap, because to “screen-agers’, i.e., teenagers, it is not technology because it’s natural to them, a natural part of their lives.

Dr. Kurshan says technology is a catlyst to change, and we need teachers to change education and they need the tools to do that. She’s differentiating between linear knowledge space that we grew up with— (you start on page 1 , end on page 60, you’re done). Our kids have grown up in a random knowledge space. So we have to teach in a random knowledge space and provide students the option to have choices in a random knowledge space.

That is a fascinating distinction, and I want to follow up on that later.

Ebrahimi points out that technology is not only changing education, it’s changing everything. He thinks the concept of speed has become very important. He gives an example of when he was talking with a student and offered to email him information. The student thought that was too slow, and why didn’t he just get on Facebook, and then share it with everybody.

To be competitive in the workforce, or just part of the broader social network, our students need to be able to learn to adapt to this speed. He asks, How do you continue to educate yourself? Technology is breaking down the time continuum.

What are we doing to change things so students will study engineering?

Dr. Rubillo—thinks it is what a society values. We are competing with many nations that value math and science. He’s not sure we value math and science in front of our students.

Dr. Kurshan thinks we need to look at how we teach science and math and make it more relevant—more application based—more random knowledge based. Students go back and learn it to get the answer when they are working on a practical problem.

Fari Ebrahimi says “We need rock stars.” People have to feel it’s cool to be an educator, we have to balance the pay scales so that educators can make a decent living. If a student could be famous within their own school because of their math/science skills then you have examples for the other students.

Three years ago, one of the students that received a Verizon scholarship told the committee that his brother was murdered in front of him. in east L.A. The student said that he wanted to become a doctor, because had he been a doctor he could have helped his brother.

Ebrahimi points out that when we talk about setting examples, we have to show kids one of their own who chose a different path, who is a rock star for the other kids.

Dr. Paine mentions a story about President Hu in China—who announced to his cabinet that he wanted China to be the world’s greatest most innovative economy by 2016, and we’re going to do that by investing in education first. He brings up the example of the Sputnik era and it’s impact on our education programs in schools.

He emphasized emphatically that more standardized tests are not the answer, that we need more performance based tests and other efforts.

Dr. Kurshan concurred. She was in India recently, and was listening to a study that is coming out of India, about the emphasis on testing there at elite schools—which discovered that students couldn’t problem solve effectively even if they were passing the standardized tests. She encourages investing in innovative solutions.

Dr. Paine points out that it’s not only about increasing rigor. It’s about teaching students to be problem solvers, creative thinkers, how to be responsible—those sorts of 21st century skills.

It’ll take me a bit to process the ideas here. More later….

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Collaborative global projects

Mon, 25 Jun 2007 10:52:28 -0500

I’m just joining Nigel Quirke-Bolt’s and Nigel Metcalfe’s session on collaborative projects and Nigel is starting out with a photo of Nigel’s Place pub. Always a good way to start a workshop ;)

They both work in the National University of Ireland in the department of education and their project is linked here http://dissolvingboundaries.org.

Dissolving Boundaries is part of an attempt to reduce conflicts between the two parts of Ireland. They also started a Local Traditions and Ceremonies project with Asia-Europe classroom participants with 11 different countries from Singapore to Denmark to Ireland and more.

The site is run on Moodle, at http://local-traditions.org with a private login for students, and the purpose was to allow students between 12-18 years of age to discover their own local traditions and ceremonies as well as those of others. Students could upload documents, interact, use forums or blogs—all via Moodle and in a protected environment.

Students needed little training on using the tools, though they had students that came from very rural environments in a couple of countries and hadn’t utilized the internet before.

Phase 1: Students got to know each other through forums to build relationships in the virtual environment.

Phase 2: Students getting to know each other’s ways. Students posted customs which generated a lot of questions from other partipants; some of the customs included mock crucifixions, flooding the villages, etc. So the Irish students were challenged to think of their own traditions that were of interest.

Phase 3: Sharing what has been learned. The information which all the students had learned was then moved from Moodle and portrayed in a more public way on a website.

Teachers that were interviewed about the project commented on the many skills like communication, research, understanding and empathy which were developed, which reminds me of the things Will Richardson said in the previous session about blogging.

Nigel pointed out it was a significant shift and giving up of control for the teaches involved, but the teachers found that the student motivation was very strong. Students were learning technology skills but using them for a purpose.

The second project was the Dissolving Boundaries project, which focuses on collaboration between students. This project had a real world importance, in trying to reduce conflict between the north and the south. One problem was that in the Republic of Ireland, IT isn’t required, but in Northern Ireland curriculum, it is. So it was a way to encourage teachers in the Republic of ireland to use IT in the classroom.

Nigel did an interesting demo of how even selecting the color for the website is fraught with difficulty because of politics. They had to spend time talking with students about things that they could say and couldn’t say as they crossed between these two conflicted countries. This project also used Moodle with a login for students. They found that using wikis was a good way for students to collaborate, and eliminated the problems with using something like Front Page or Powerpoint and emailing files.

They also found that in working with teachers across several schools, it eliminated the fear that students might trash another students’ work, because wikis allow you to back up to previous versions. The students color code their writing on the wiki so you can easily see which school has done which work.

They also used videoconferencing to connect the students. It was pretty incredible watching the students greeting their counterparts in the other Ireland and saying “see you next year” when you think about the conflicts these two countries have had for so long.

One thing students ended up doing was writing stories, and they printed the stories from students in both countries and gave them to the participants as a bound booklet/book.

There are issues with videoconferencing and bandwidth, etc., between different countries, even two countries so close to one another.

It was helpful just to consider some of the obstacles that you would need to address in working across countries on a project of this sort, because there are quite a few that wouldn’t have been obvious.

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Will Richardson on Blogging at NECC

Mon, 25 Jun 2007 08:28:22 -0500

I’m here in Will Richardson’s workshop “Learning With Blogs” and the room is overflowing. It’s good to hear him again, since aside from being an interesting writer and blogger, he’s also an excellent teacher.

He’s referencing a post he made on his blog about Andrew Keen’s book Cult of the Amateur, which resulted in 41 comments, a great illustration of the power of blogs to start a conversation among professionals.He points out that his blog has become his “adult curriculum” as a self-learner, and the importance of a tool like blogging in helping students to continue to learn.

He emphasizes the power of blogs in the classroom is that students have a real audience. The more students write on their blogs, their fluency, writing, and reading skills improve. He made the astute point that reading is actually what generates most of the ideas that bloggers write about. I’ve found that true in my own blogging, and that I read in a more substantive way since I’m looking for connections to write about.

He mentions the importance of network building as a skill that blogging supports, which reminds me of Andrew Zolli’s comments in the opening session last night about how networking is a skill that our students are going to need help with. I want to think more about what these kinds of skills entail. I want to think more about what these kinds of skills entail—what are the networking skills that students need? Connecting? Collaborating? Delegating? Supporting? Searching? It’s easy to see how blogging would help students develop those kinds of skills, and as educators, blogging helps us model and develop those skills for ourselves as well.

As beginning bloggers, most people aren’t very networked. That develops from commenting on other writer’s blogs, linking to ones that interest you, and inviting others to read your site. But learning how to build your own network as an educator outside your campus, is a way to internalize those skills.

A speaker in the audience coincidentally just was talking about this issue—what if you create a blog and no one enters the conversation? Will pointed out that you use a blog to somehow improve what you are doing in your curriculum, not to just have a blog. He recommended writing on your blog about something you read on another site, which brings in readers from that site, as one way to bring in some outside contacts.

He had an excellent recommendation if your district is reluctant to allow blogging—to sit down with an administrator or technology person, outline your goals for using a blog with your class or on your campus, show them examples from some of the sites listed below, and discuss your educational goals with them.

I know in our district that opening up that conversation last summer really was helpful in getting blogs and other web 2.0 tools to be made available to all of our teachers. We ended up starting out with one site, edublogs, open for staff and students, and then progressed pretty quickly to having most blog sites opened up to staff, and I think a lot of it had to do with us having those discussions in the district.

He also recommended having a policy—here are our goals, potential problems, our solutions, etc. that could be shared with parents if you have concerns. His wiki site below has links to some sample policies, and I know he has one in his book, Blogs, Wikis, and Podcasts, as well. We also discussed having students help develop the policy (Bud Hunt does this), and use a wiki to have them develop it.

Other questions—how to assess. One option is to have students make a certain number of posts per week. Students can turn in one “official” post per week for assessment. Students can be graded on making commentsRSS feeds are important to making blogs easy to grade. Sites like Pageflakes allow you to view all their blogs visually.

He is sharing Kim Moritz’s story about her blog, and how her district has finally allowed her to take the “disclaimer” off of her blog masthead, which said these aren’t the district’s views, and recommended her site, as well as Clarence Fisher’s blog, Remote Access.

He’s also sharing how 6 million people have viewed the Did You Know Video which started out as a production Karl Fisch did for his campus oat Arapahoe High School and then posted on his blog, and it started circulating around the world.

Karl is speaking later on at NECC, by the way, and I can’t wait to get to meet him.All of these connections, as Will Richardson says, are very powerful for you as a professional and for students. Several of our staff from our district are in this session—I can’t wait to see how it impacts their practice as well.

(You can follow his workshop links from his wikispaces site.) Also see a list of educational bloggers on www.supportblogging.com/links+to+school+bloggers, broken down by teacher, classroom, principals blogs, administrative blogs, librarian blogs, etc.

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Coca Cola Museum after dark near the Aquarium More photos on my...

Sun, 24 Jun 2007 21:27:44 -0500

Coca Cola Museum after dark near the Aquarium

More photos on my flickr stream:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/99107397@N00/

NECC -- Opening Session

Sun, 24 Jun 2007 21:24:50 -0500

A few thoughts from my day and the opening session—

First off, after not connecting with folks I wanted to meet today, I ended up touring the Coca Cola museum. But I actually ended up getting great ideas for the classroom there.

I thought about how this museum takes one subject (Coca-Cola) and then explores it through advertising, art(Andy Warhol exhibit in the museum), video, history(displays on Coke in world war II), and food, and how we could do that easily in the curriculum with any possible subject. Anyway, it got my wheels turning. We miss so many opportunities to make all these connections between subjects, and this was a great example of how you can extend something in so many directions.

Then, it was to the opening session with Andrew Zolli. One thing that interested me was when he talked about the concept of choice—how we are overwhelmed with choices. I thought about how little we really are helping students with this issue of making choices. I was thinking that in terms of searching particularly, and how we can help them with being selective.

The most interesting takeaway from me from that session was the last five minutes. He was talking about what “trumps” what in terms of importance.

The four items he listed: The personal trumps the impersonal; tangible trumps intangible, present trumps past/future, and desire trumps responsibility. Anyway, it made me think about when we are doing workshops, introducing software or books to students or teachers—what we should focus on is how it affects them personally in the present in a tangible way. I also think this is a good approach to addressing change.

So I’ll be mulling those thoughts over for awhile.

Last stop was the Georgia Aquarium, unbelievably crowded, but we sat for a long time watching a huge aquarium. I considered how the schools of fish are like all of us, milling about, some lurkers, some swimmers, some on the surface, some deep swimmers.

Sidenote: To my dismay, Edublogs is still nonfunctional, so I’ll continue with my blogging from here. Tumblr is actually a very handy little website!

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Sun, 24 Jun 2007 20:55:14 -0500