Learning, Teaching & Technology

The focus of this session is introducing possible participants to the purpose and possibilities of their Women of the Web 2.0 (WOW2.0) webcast on edtechtalk.com. Through Cheryl Oakes I had the opportunity to met Jen Wagner, Vicki Davis and Sharon Peters at NECC07. It was interesting to hear from the hosts how it all started and to view the making of a show at NECC07. They and their successors on the show have since become well known as innovators who host noted guests and topics of interest.

This session gave me a lot of information about how the hosts came up with the idea of webcasting and what they actually do during the production of the show. Although I have listened to the show some Tuesday nights I learned more from the presentation about the archives and delicious links available online.

I know that when Cheryl Oakes first participated in the Webcast Academy she found the access to international educators and the broadened conversations revolutionized her professional practices. Since then she has assisted many others who have been interns in the academy as well as supporting the development of new shows and encouraging listeners to shows. One of my goals is to find the time to enroll in a Webcast Academy which is usually offered in the summer and the winter of each year. I would like to become comfortable with webcasting so that I could assist students and teachers who want to collaborate with others across geographic distances in this format.

As I consider learning to webcast I am fortunate to have local access to my colleagues Alice Barr, Cheryl Oakes and Bob Sprankle who have just begun sharing their “Seedlings Podcast at Bit by Bit” on EdTechtalk on a regular schedule. This has evolved from a regular podcast they have done for over a year. As the presenters say in their title, it’s about “expanding the conversation.”

This presentation offers a set of essential skills needed to build an online experience in teaching and a view into what will be in the future. Drew reports that he is getting positive feedback and finding it more enriching than other teaching experiences now that he is using interactive materials online in his classes. As we in Yarmouth try to move from static web pages of information about courses I am intrigued by the much richer site that Drew is able to develop and the interactions with students that are integral to the site. He views his course page as a community that invites opinions and debates, with an assumption that he will give feedback and students will give feedback to each other. Students learn to use the development tools and they contribute video tutorials, etc. As I have found at our high school, Drew mentions that there are big gaps between what some students know and can do and others.

The critical elements of web 2.0 that Drew thinks are reasons teachers should use web 2.0 include saving teachers time and the capacity to create relevant, effective lessons. Getting a critical mass of teachers to see these two in reality would help move more teachers toward using web 2.0.

Some of the 10 skills Drew suggests we need are organized around exploring & participating, deconstructing & reconstructing, and connecting and creating. Within these three overall areas he creates a progression that could be used to work with teachers and students. Using this progression would help those who have gaps or feel they are novices at the use of web 2.0.

I chose this session as I thought Liz might offer some resources to add to the discussion at our high school about whether cell phones can ever be useful in the classroom as opposed to a distraction that should be banned. First of all I commend Liz for a well-developed presentation (maybe too much text on some of the slides…) that has elements that I could use during a team discussion about this topic.

As part of my overall interest in having students see that the technology tools they use everyday (e.g. cell phones) can be learning tools I share Liz’s belief that we can offer that bridge to our students. What if we thought about cell phones as portable microphones attached to recording features that can access web2.0 sites? Even voicethread is now setup to take phone calls for audio content. I learned about evoca, and gabcast in addition to gcast (which I already use) as podcasting options using cell phones. I hadn’t thought about these sites saving directly to a blog, but I learned about many tools that can make the steps of podcasting to a blog much easier for students and teachers.

I wasn’t aware of the conference services like freeconferencepro and talkshoe. These conference calls are not unique to cell phones and they can be saved as mp3 files. I’ll have to explore what the differences are between using these sites and Skype. Teaching students to use jott or similar tools could help students with organization and planning.

One thing that I had heard about that I intend to try is to set my cell phone camera up to go directly to my flickr account. I have used resources like bubbleshare to create slideshows for our school web page and now I think I know how to send the pictures from my cell phone if I add email service to my cell phone account.

This is a very thorough presentation with many “how to” sections if I need help remembering the steps for accessing the resources.

I chose this session because I wanted to review current copyright and fair use guidelines and learn more about Common Commons so that I can offer that information to teachers and students. I had heard about Creative Commons and had seen the licensing they offer used by others, but the materials provided in Karen’s wiki filled in some gaps in my knowledge and added to the set of sites that I can use that encourage collaborative use of original materials that are in the public domain or available under various licensing structures.

As more of my elementary students want to add audio effects and photos to their research reports I will need to develop a web page for our student resources links that compiles these sites for them. When our younger students copy or insert a photograph from the Internet it seems that they are within the current Fair Use guideline: “Images may be downloaded for student projects and teacher lessons.”

By 4th grade I ask students to place the Internet address of the photo or sound clip they are using with the picture or in a Credits page at the end of a project. We talk about copyright and I think they would enjoy adding their original work to Creative Commons as Karen mentions. Some classes have setup flickr accounts and I have worked with some teachers to show them how to access the millions of photos that are shared under Creative Commons licensing on flickr.

This session is a great resource for questions about current copyright issues and site for open access or clearly licensed posted materials online.

This session is just what I needed as I take on the adventure of working two days a week as an Instructional Technology Integrator at our high school for the first time. Our 7-12 students all have 1-1 laptops and there is a need and interest in more support for learning with technology at grades 9-12. I am concerned about one of the initial points that Sylvia makes that students want the “socially connected experiences” that they engage in outside of school; teachers need to learn how to incorporate that into classroom learning. Alice Barr and I will be working together on ways to have students as our “allies” as we help teachers to face the obstacles and opportunities of adding web 2.0 tools.

Working at the elementary school level I have asked students to take responsibility for oversight of laptop carts (somehow classes never put them away the right way or make sure they are charging) in classroom wings and more and more I ask them to share learning and teach each other at the projector during classes in the lab. Some of the students who were innovators when I had them in 3rd or 4th grades are now the high school students who help us teach courses to faculty (imagine our surprise when students did all the reading assigned to the teachers!) and who are in the process of forming a student tech team. They are asking the right questions about what student tech team should have as it’s mission. Lately they have wondered if they should be offering a web 2.0 class for their peers as they find that many students don’t seem to be exploring the way they are. These seem to be along the lines of what Sylvia talks about as authentic learning and real life problems.

I started this session last October when it was first posted. Working daily with Alice and having access to Cheryl and Bob as southern Maine colleagues and participants in my personal learning network I was excited to see what they had prepared for us. At the time it was my introduction to podcasting and an early use of voicethread, gizmo project (now http://gizmo5.com/pc/) and a group ning. One thing that was striking about this session is that there were several tasks to be completed with great instructional resources on how to setup and use each tool. This presentation is full of examples I can share with teachers of expanding the conversations about learning using recording tools that are clearly presented in their tutorials.

As I listened this time to the podcast they created for this session it was interesting to reflect on the conversation that is now almost a year old. Bob talks some about our roles of supporting teachers and how the beginning of the year it seems to be all about supporting equipment and not even the tools the equipment can provide. Jeff Utecht references this flurry at the beginning of the year recently on his blog, “As we continue to support teachers using technology tools in their classrooms we need to realize that teachers’ use of technology is not the same as supporting teachers teaching with technology…Although it’s important to support teachers in the use of technology it’s much different then supporting teachers teaching with technology.” Our role as technology support educators is meant to be based on curricular knowledge and staff development skills to increase the learning of our students. The great thing is that we are not alone in this discussion about keeping the learning at the forefront of our work as we can create podcast shows, blogs and ways to keep each other fueled in our professional goals.