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.
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.
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?
Via: Online PhD Programs
In any case, I’m going to go use an anti-bacterial wipe on my phone!
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!”
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
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.
This term I was planning on teaching three optional staff tech integration workshops around the theme of tech tool for writing. I posted a survey on my blog requesting suggestions and I received really useful responses.
Here is a HUGE thank you to all who responded. Not only did I use many of the suggestions in my workshops, but I have now used a number of them with students. I am pleased to be able to share them with others now.
I was going to summarize the responses, but I found them more powerful in the writers’ own words. I have reformatted their responses, added links, and made minor revisions to the responses to improve readability.
Maggie Hos-McGrane
I am teaching in Switzerland at the International School of Zug and Luzern. My blog is: http://transformingtechnology.blogspot.com/
- All our Grade 5 students blog.
- One class uses Wikispaces to host a book club where students comment on what they are reading in their Literature Circles.
- All Grade 5s used Bitstrips for their peace and conflict unit.
- All Grade 4s have used VoiceThread to comment on belief systems.
- One class of Grade 5 used VoiceThread to comment on their peace pictures.
- All Grade 5s used either OurStory or Xtimeline to write about tech advances over time. They are just about to start using XtraNormal (though we are having problems and might change to GoAnimate) to write about life changes/ life phases.
- One Grade 4 class used Google Earth to write about how the landscape affects people.
- Grade 2s used ZimmerTwins to write about healthy lifestyles.
Mister Norris
ISSH, Tokyo
Here are a few tools that I would use if I was teaching writing in my class:
- Mind Node – Free mind mapping software for Macs. Great to plan writing sessions before they start.
- Etherpad.com – Online, real time colaberative wordprocessor. Children could write parts of a story together, write notes together at the same time, edit work, etc. The possibilities are endless! I love this website! [Editor Note: Etherpad has since been acquired by Google. The creators of Etherpad have a new site: www.teachwith.me with very similar features.]
- Audacity – Free recording software. The children could make voice notes and come back to these when they start the writing process.
These are just a few off the top of my head, I look forward to see what everyone else contributes.
Dorothy
Auckland, New Zealand
These were done with primary school kids:
- Blogging – we have our projects researched and the results from the least 2 years i.e. the impact on student achievement outcomes for writing, are huge
- Podcasting – writing the scripts, digital storytelling through animation – again writing the scripts.
Pam Darling
Shawnee Mission School District Shawnee Mission, KS (Kansas City area) I am a technology application trainer for all staff.
- Inspiration and/or Kidspiration to show the process of writing
sangambayard-c-m.com
I am a full day Kindergarten teacher with 20 students, with a very wide range of abilities. So far, I have used the interactive Whiteboard in my classroom as a resource to increase letter/sound recognition as a prelude to beginning writing. I have also just begun to have my student’s use the laptop as a step toward writing by recognizing beginning sounds in Kidpix. We are just moving to the point of sounding out entire words to help with our sentence writing in journals. I would like to be able to have them create journal entries on the laptops, complete with illustrations, which we could then print and post in our classroom.
I welcome ongoing suggestions on this topic. I greatly appreciate learning from the visitors to my blog.
Photo Credits
60/365 – Finishing homework by Jez Page
In a recent post I asked for help in planning a three-part workshop for my staff on ways to use technology to support writing development. Soon I will write a post to share all of the great responses I received. In the meantime, let me share one of them, ZimmerTwins.com.
I first learned of it from Maggie Hos-McGrane who was using it with some of her students as a way to share their learning at the end of a unit. I played around with it and wasn’t sure how that would work since the characters and settings are so limited. It is very easy to make a movie, but I thought it would be very challenging to create an educational cartoon. However, I also knew that having only 3 characters and a limited number of settings to work with could also help keep the children focused. I decided to jump in and try it with students.
My assistant set up the free accounts for us. It is a tedious business to create a class set. First you complete an online for for each student. Then you go to your email and open each student’s message that contains their password. Since this was a password that the children wouldn’t remember, she next logged in as each child and changed the password to something that will be easier for them to remember. If I were a homeroom teacher, I probably would have given each child their temporary password and then as a class gone in and had everyone change the password to match their Windows login. As a specialist who only sees these children once per week for 40 minutes, my time is too limited to take the time to have the children do that. I now have one class set of accounts that I use with all of my students.
Next I introduced ZimmerTwins.com to the students. There is a short tutorial cartoon on the site that takes you through the process of creating an animation. It is well done and the site is easy to use so students tended to have few or no questions after viewing the cartoon.
As was appropriate with a new tool, most children needed to play around with it, try some silly things before they could get down to creating their cartoon. However, by the end of the first session many children had found their direction and their movies were beginning to take shape. You can view a draft of a cartoon by clicking on the picture below.
Joe's movie in progress
The children found the activity engrossing. The room was almost silent as they worked. As they left at the end of class they eagerly asked if they could keep working on their cartoons at home.
In this pilot, I have so far used it for one class period with a third grade class, a fourth grade class and two fifth grade classes. It was a real stretch for the third graders to tell a story that made sense and had a beginning, middle and an end. Only the strongest writers were being very successful but all of them were enjoying the activity. I think they could be much more successful using this site to share something they have learned.
Fourth graders were more successful. They were working on creating educational science or social studies cartoons. As is appropriate, their cartoons are more basic so far than the ones created by fifth graders.
I have used it with two fifth grade classes. They are the most successful so far but at this point, many are lacking in educational content. I am not worried. I think by the end of the next class period most will be dramatically better.
Even though at this point most of their cartoons contain too many gratuitous actions, such as fainting or teleporting, many students are starting to see the power of those same tools. For example, a few students used teleporting to go back in time to teach a history lesson.
I told the children the cartoons could be funny as long as they taught us accurate information. When I see how eagerly children watch each other’s cartoons-in-progress, I think that these little cartoons may indeed get used by next year’s teachers as one of the many tools they use to teach their content.
Equally importantly, I’d say this activity is at the top of Bloom’s Digital Taxonomy and fits neatly into our tech framework which is based on ISTE’s current NETS-S. It is a higher order thinking task to use the limited characters, props and settings to teach real content. The children are really working hard — and loving doing it.
A few details about the site.
- It is moderated. When students save a movie, it does not appear online until it has been viewed and approved. One of my students logged in from home and posted something inappropriate. I was notified via email and also warned that the account would be closed if that behavior persisted. The site clearly posts what is not allowed, such as swearing and violence.
- Members are able to rate the cartoons and leave comments. I hadn’t even thought about that aspect of the site until my students started receiving comments. They haven’t seen them yet (except for one of my students who wrote her own comment, something along the lines of “Great movie! One of my favorites!”). Next class period I will talk with them about that feature and we will arrive at guidelines for leaving comments.
- There is a Zimmer Twins TV show on qubo. That is the origin of these characters. I’ve only found qubo mentioned in a few places on the site and it is mentioned once in the tutorial cartoon. Other than that, there is no advertising.
- If you are in the US, there is a chance that your cartoon could be shown on the TV show.
- Beneath each cartoon is a collabowrite button that allows any member of the site to copy and edit someone else’s cartoon. The original is left untouched.
- If students forget to login, they cannot save their cartoon. Saved cartoons can be further edited by their creator at any time.
- The cartoons have a fairly short time limit which my students have gotten around by creating a part 2, part 3, etc.
So what do you think of this site. Do you see a place in your curriculum for using the ZimmerTwins movie creator? Please share your ideas.
[UPDATE on 6 April 2010 : ZimmerTwins just changed their model. Now we are unable to continue editing after we save unless we become a paid subscriber. Understandable, but very disappointing since this was such a motivating and engaging tool.]
Back in 2005 I began playing around with wikis, trying to discover which one best suited my needs. Over the intervening years I’ve enjoyed watching the different platforms mature. Now that I am a technology coordinator, my criteria have changed because I need an enterprise-level wiki solution.
Before I started this job, I don’t think I even knew what enterprise-level wiki solution meant so let me explain. If I only need a wiki for myself or a small group of people, my needs are tremendously different than if I need to be able to create tens, even hundreds of wikis that will be edited by thousands of people. All of a sudden the ease with which you can create and manage accounts and wikis becomes important.
Other considerations had to do with advertisements, privacy settings, and whether or not students needed an email address to have an account. Drill down control is also important. It would be nice to be able to set permissions at the page level rather than at just the wiki level. That way, different groups could have full rights to edit some pages and few or no rights to edit other pages.
I’ve been using WetPaint, Wikispaces and PB Works for years. I’ve used all three with students and with staff. Wetpaint is still my favorite in terms of how it looks, the templates it has, and how well the tables work. Until this term, we have been using it for our parent conference sign ups and it has worked exceptionally well.
Unfortunately, they don’t offer corporate plans. If we want ad-free wikis we’d need to pay for each one separately, and there is no way to administer them centrally. Wetpaint used to offer free ad-free wikis for K-12 use but they quit doing that. We have no way to create accounts for children.They also were mis-applying the COPPA rules and shut down one of my teachers’ wikis even though the parents created the accounts, not the children.
We did not want to host the wiki ourselves so that left only Wikispaces and PB Works as options. Each has some nifty features that the other lacks. Neither is as pretty as Wetpaint and the tables aren’t quite as nice, but they can meet our needs. In the end, it felt like a roll of the dice but we went with Wikispaces since they were going to give us more a bit more for our money. Since then PB Works has introduced a new rate for schools so each are equally viable. You can view the Wikispaces plans here and the PB Works ones here.
We are due to start parent conference sign up next week, so we had to quickly shift the conference wiki from Wetpaint to our new Wikispaces.net account. Unlike Edublogs, Wikispaces doesn’t send you a nifty manual to get you started after they take your payment. We had to stumble our way through setting it up. In my next blog a future post I’ll share with you what we have learned so far.
Photo Credits: Untitled by Goose frabaaa
I have some friends and family going through rough times right now, but watching this UN Flickr set of photos from post-earthquake Haiti makes everything else look easy. As I watched, I kept thinking, “Where do you even start?”
http://www.flickr.com/photos/un_photo/sets/72157623084697787/show/
Thank you to Wes Fryer for tweeting the link: “This Flickr set from the UN of the Jan2010 Haiti earthquake is sobering and compelling http://ow.ly/14uZ4″
