Learning, Teaching & Technology

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 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.

The majority of this session is a set of resources in a wiki that includes a nicely scaled set of activities geared toward initial users or experienced users of classroom blogs. There are well-designed webquests that I could have teachers do in a self-paced session on there own or as part of a course I teach. In going to the SlideShare link I was able to follow along with the presentation. Now that slideshare.net allows us to add a voiceover podcast I hope to post more of my teacher materials on this site as I think the audio is a very helpful addition.

I had a few classblogmeister pioneers last year and the most use was by a 2nd grade teacher and a 3rd grade teacher. We sat down together in the lab one day with David Warlick’s book “Classroom Blogging” and followed the directions. We each went home and “played” a bit more and very quickly they had created classroom blogs with access for each student. We were a bit nervous about young students having the patience to fill in text boxes, type in scrambled spambot text and manage it all; we shouldn’t have feared any of it as they were undaunting in their efforts to publish and share their work. One blog from last year can be viewed at: http://classblogmeister.com/blog.php?blogger_id=137726.

As Anne mentions, David Warlick manages the hosting and the software development of this tool on his own and he also encourages teachers to join a classroomblogmeister yahoo group that is a wonderful place to connect with other teachers, ask for help and participate in the community of learners who are attempting to incorporate blogs into instruction.

Thanks to the pioneers in my school this year I have more interest in classroom blogging. Many were hesitant to put in the work if it was just a technology thing, but in a course on Writing taught in the district last year a teacher shared her blog, the student’s excitement and that for her it was the best way she had ever found for sharing student work with parents. She found is was saving her time as the parents weren’t asking so many questions in emails and extra conferences; not to mention it was the first time parents were interacting with their child’s writing!

I began to use Google tools over a year ago and yet here I am finding ones that I haven’t accessed to-date. Sharon’s session gives me the option of using her wiki, her embedded videos or the downloaded video clips. She is a master at teaching teachers and the careful design of her session didn’t surprise me. The multiple resources will be helpful during faculty meetings and small “help” sessions with teachers. The google tools have evolved and will continue to do so for fortunately I have become more comfortable with screencasting lately and should be able to do my own sessions that teachers can revisit.

While I was setting up some of the investigation tools that Sharon recommends I couldn’t help but go off on tangents to Talk (is it better than Skype?), check my Reader, check to see if I have the latest Picasa plugins for my browser and iPhoto (I didn’t), and thus I found that I could have spent my whole day on the google tools page. I didn’t know about google Web History; that will save me tons of time!!

The continually expanding opportunities of google tools are bringing more and more communication and collaboration options to our classrooms. Sharon and others have described a way to use a teacher gmail account to have students have logins that are a derivative of the teacher account and they go to that account, not a separate student account, may be a way to have our younger students use these web 2.0 tools with their own login, but with guidance and supervision from the teacher.

Once again by viewing the session materials I have more on my “back to school” To Do list than ever, but I am enriched by so many more resources that I have been helped to apply and understand. Thanks Sharon!

The first time I viewed this session was shortly after it was posted in October of 2007 as I wanted to know what the authors thought the “Cool Tools” were at the time. I tried to skim the session and didn’t view it very carefully (or successfully).

This time through I learned a lot from Alan, Brian and D’Arcy; I will be referring back to it and using these notes to help me remember what is here. The first thing that struck me was that they were writing about RSS in 2003 and I really didn’t grasp the value or start using RSS until 2007. I could feel badly about that time lag, but as I work with educators in Southern Maine most are still unaware of the uses for RSS, or classroom blogs, wikis, personalized web pages, del.icio.us accounts, etc. The goal I have for this 08-09 school year is that each teacher will have and use all five of those tools for themselves and their students.

Starting off with a tutorial on embed code is for me an example of a quick “how to” for people like me who have avoided learning to write in html code, but I can just copy & paste to use online content in a blog or wiki.

I didn’t know what “API” stood for (later described as: Application Programming Interfaces), but digital storytelling has been an interest for many teachers I work with, first with iMovie and now web 2.0 tools. I have used Alan Levine’s http://cogdogroo.wikispaces.com/StoryTools with teachers and in courses as a great compilation of sites that can be used to build a better way to present a story. One note is that some teachers were frustrated that a site may have a cost that isn’t clear until teachers have uploaded images and done considerable work. This may have happened since they were posted.

The descriptions of tagging using flickr, del.icio.us & slideshare as examples would be very useful to show teachers in a instructional setting (they always like listening to outside speakers, not just me).

I enjoyed Brian’s bit on the earliest days of Google docs and the debate about moving from Word. It will be interesting to see if Google docs and the various Google for Education resources remain free to all users. Certainly the iPhone and handheld tools are allowing us to access online content just about anywhere, freeing us from paper and even our own laptops.