Very cool. I am including a screen grab of the Twitter direct messages that Melissa has sent me as she listened and approved the many comments.

Nice when a plan comes together.

Oh, yes there is a reporter from the Herald-Sun coming last period today.

Check out the Voicethread as well.

http://voicethread.com/share/591694/

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What has me excited for this year?

iPod Touch Cart
I am getting ready to deploy a cart of iPod Touches for use in classrooms. I have been working on setting them up so they connect to our wireless, have the apps on them I want our students to interact with and figuring out how to be legal with the purchasing of multiple copies of apps. Apple does not make it simple to do this purchasing.

Voicethread
Voicethread has gotten much of my time as we have it now for our students. I am getting ready to roll it out with students next week. I am very excited to deploy this learning tool as I see a lot of potential in all curriculum areas. The fact it can be embedded into our Moodle courses make it a natural extension.

Here is one done by students at 5th grade students at The Linsly School done with Melissa Tredenick who I know from our time together in North Carolina. Our students read the same book so I am hoping to share between our students.

Direct Link
http://voicethread.ning.com/video/5th-grade-summer-reading

Yabla
Working with a few Foreign Language teachers to integrate this resource into their Moodle courses.
http://www.yabla.com/
Moodle
The cart or container for all things we do here at school. WDIDBM (What did I do before Moodle?) – Less
I am happy to see this report on Blended Learning Environments
http://www.guide2digitallearning.com/professional_development/meta_research_k_12_online_learning_turns_little_research

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Here is what I have heard back today in an email to me and his department marked Urgent, you must read:

Hi Trish and Barb,

I have been talking to Karl for a while now about the iphone and itouch. Do these devices have a place in our science curriculum and teaching? At first we chatted about simple tools like the iLevel. Handy in physics whenever you want to know if something is plum, level, or is a whole surface horizontal (i.e. a lab table). A digital, handy level is nice. We have one very expensive digital level in the lab, but the ilevel app is free! And it works!

Much more interesting, for physics at least, are the astronomy apps. Two itouch astronomy apps, for ex., are Starmap and GoSkyWatch Planetarium. Karl has been incredibly helpful and cooperative in working we me on this. Yesterday, he loaned me one of Computer Science’s itouches after having downloaded GoSkyWatch Planetarium and Starmap for me so I could take it home and experiment with it.

Even after one night of use, I am speechless. GoSkyWatch Planetarium, especially, is incredible. It not only is a portable planetarium, making it a huge resource for any astronomy activities a class or student may do, but it also is a celestial object identifier!!!!. Yes, that’s true. You point the back of the itouch toward the object of interest, the itouch screen changes as you move the itouch showing the section of the sky the back of the touch is facing. Wait until the object of interest is in the crosshairs and the program TELLS YOU WHAT THE OBJECT, CONSTELLATION, etc. you are looking at!!! I have not had enough time to experiment with the program totally, but this demands our attention as a science tool…at least for those of us who use astronomy in our curriculums.

Which brings me to my 2nd point. We should think about getting into the itouch, iphone apps development business. SERIOUSLY! We are teachers and scientists. There is nobody better positioned to think about educational applications for the iphone and itouch than us. This is a gold mine waiting to be harvested (mixed metaphore?). We would need to learn the language used by the iphone, and that is no small task for those who have not programed before, but…

For now, I would like to purchase an itouch for physics so I can continue investigating this tool and hopefully integrate it into all my physics classes. (Karl has offered to loan my his for a while, but I can already tell that this would be well worth the couple hundred dollar investment in our budget. I am taking a survey today just to see how many of my students have, or have easy access to, iphones or itouches. It’s looking right now like it’s about 50%, but it’s too early to know for sure. The younger kids seem to be more on to this than my seniors. Probably, b/c the older kids already had an ipod and are reluctant to get an itouch.

I am copying Karl on this, b/c I want him to know about my progress in such a short time and about my growing excitement about the use of this technology in teaching. As you know, I am a cautious adopter of technology in teaching. I like gadgets, but the iphone and itouch are NOT gadgets or play toys. These are serious computational devices and again, demand our attention.

My opinion of course.

I have attached the link to the site which describes GOSkyWatch Planetarium. The more you read, I think the more amazed you’ll be. GoSkyWatch cost $10. The other astro. app, I believe, is free [Karl's note: $11.99]. iLevel, I believe, is also free. So the cost of these things is going to mainly be the cost of the itouch. I don’t know what is the cheapest way to buy these is, Karl would. GoSkyWatch is very memory intensive so if the itouch comes in different memory capacities the largest capacity would be warranted for that app. (This info. I gleened from reading some of the literature on line about the software.)

OK, that’s it for now. I have already typed for longer than permitted and you have had to read more than you probably wanted. Lou

I replied to him with the lyrics from Billy Joel’s We Didn’t Light the Fire

“We didn’t start the fire
It was always burning
Since the world’s been turning
We didn’t start the fire
No we didn’t light it
But we tried to fight it”

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In this recently publish article in National Middle School Associations Middle Ground magazine he outlines again what I see happening in classes here at Durham Academy. My goal is to see it happen in all classrooms where appropriate and useful.

We have come full circle as globalization quickly becomes the norm, and it may now be essential for our students to compete with peers from around the world. Today, we can restore the dignity and integrity of the child as a contributor. Across the country, pioneering teachers are providing students with new roles that have students making contributions to their learning communities. We have powerful, easy-to-use tools such as screencasting and podcasting that give students opportunities to contribute content to the class. At the same time we can also provide them with rigorous and more motivating assignments and better prepare them to become more productive in our new global economy. It’s an exciting time.

The jobs as Alan states them to be and what I see in our school include:

Tutorial Designers – Students in Mrs. Williams sixth grade Language Arts class are creating Vocabulary Podcasts complete with pronunciation, spelling, parts of speech and even images. See I’m done!

Official Scribes – Many students with a learning difference get notes from a scribe as an accommodation. Why not make it a part of the collaborative learning. With FirstClass Workspaces some students are starting to create these shared resources. See When Students Take Charge. Moodle discussion forums also allow for this sharing of the notes. Teachers do resist this step due to the belief that students must write the note in order to benefit and simply getting the notes delivered to them will decrease the understanding. I can understand this thinking but also believe that contributing to a collaborative process will engage more students. If some students are not still note takers, perhaps they need to be Fact Checkers or Researcher which is the next job.

Researchers – How open are we to letting students get and share information they find on the topics we cover in class? Every so often a student suggests a web site or other resource that could be useful to the learning of the group. We recently did 1920 Radio Podcasts and a student found a 1920 slang web site which really helped the students to speak in language of the era. We shared the resource in the Moodle course for all students. However, we could make assembling the resources part of the project itself.

Collaboration Collaborators – This is an job that has not taken off like I would hope. We have brought in guest via Moodle courses where discussion forums proved helpful. Mostly though we do not reach out to bring experts in or connect with the world in our classrooms. We have the technology available but do not make use of it like we could. Mrs. Ward did use Wimba to connect with students while she was part of PolarTrec.

Contributing to Society - We have built schools in Uganda, paid tuition for students to attend school in Kenya and even now we are having a Mseki Primary School Book Drive where students are reaching out globally to help. We also do much work locally with food drives and community service projects.

Curriculum Reviewers – This is beginning to be seen more as teachers have students create content or share content with classmates. I would love to see this expanded and hope that we will begin to see more classrooms construct the digital materials for students to download or access as part of their Moodle courses.

I agree with you Alan and look forward to building out our DA Learning Farm. The tools are at hand and only the change in perspective stops the cultivation process. Of course we always fall back on “if I only had the time”… Let’s work smarter and more efficient by managing our digital farming to include all participants.

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Enhanced Sync Support for Mobile Devices: In FirstClass 10 we will greatly enhance our “Sync” support with the following new features:

* The FirstClass 10 version of FCSS will support Microsoft’s ActiveSync protocol for the bi-directional syncing of contact, calendar event, and task data. This will provide a simpler, more cost-effective and more robust solution since ActiveSync is now natively supported by Windows Mobile, Palm/Treo, and the iPhone. There will no longer be a need to purchase and install a 3rd party sync translator on platforms that natively support ActiveSync. In addition, our ActiveSync implementation will include support for Directory Searching. This will enable devices that support Directory Searching to search the FirstClass directory directly from the handheld. Only directory entries that have valid résumé data will show up in the search, and the résumé data will be provided to the handheld as the user data (sometimes referred to as a virtual contact).
* Our recommended syncing solution for Blackberry continues to be the Nexthaus SyncML agent through SyncML via FCSS. We will continue to work with Nexthaus and enhance our offering as they provide new enhancements in their offering. In addition we will be testing out Blackberry ActiveSync solutions that are starting to appear from 3rd party vendors. We will keep our user community advised regarding our findings. Also, RIM has announced on October 21st, 2008 that they will be exposing their APIs for their push technology to their 3rd party developer community. We are now investigating the feasibility of building a direct push solution from FCSS to Blackberry devices without the need for any intermediary software. We expect that such an approach will provide the fastest and most reliable solution over the long run.
* FirstClass 10 will include the new FirstClass iSync Connector. This software runs on Apple Mac personal computers and enables FirstClass users to quickly and easily configure it so that FirstClass contacts, calendar events, tasks, and bookmarks are synchronized via the iSync engine with other applications such as Address Book, iCal, and MobileMe and devices such as iPhones, iPods, and 3rd party devices that support iSync.

FirstClass Native Mobile Clients: The power of the latest generation of mobile devices and mobile development environments is at last sufficient to enable the delivery of a compelling mobile experience for FirstClass communications and collaboration features through native mobile applications. By building on top of the latest device-specific development frameworks we can provide a user experience that matches other device-specific applications. As well, we can exploit device-specific features by integrating them into FirstClass. For example, if the device has a camera, it would be useful to enable a direct upload of a photo of a person on the device into a FirstClass contact. We are now working on FirstClass Mobile Clients to deliver this. The first one of these to ship (as part of FirstClass 10) will be the FirstClass Mobile Client for iPhone, providing real-time push delivery of mail, in additional to full access to social networking and other applications in the FirstClass suite, including FirstClass Forms, Workflow and Application Services. We expect that the iPhone version will be followed by a FirstClass Mobile Client for Blackberry.

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Over the weekend some discussions were seemingly lost inside of a Workspace that a student had created for 7th grade History class. Because I was asked to assist, I logged in as Dana and helped her to undelete the discussion posts. These are the quoted messages between myself and her teacher.

This is not Dana, but Mr. Schaefer logged in as Dana so I could fix the discussions. I got them back or as many as I could. I went to View and said Show Deleted Items. Once the posts showed up (they had a trash can next to them) I selected all and then went to File – Undelete which removes the trash can and the fact that all of them were deleted. How did they get deleted, I do not know although anyone in the workspace you made could delete them either on purpose or by accident I assume. This is a case where a discussion forum in Moodle would work a bit better since the discussions would be available to all students and there is no way to delete them as a student. I do love how you have used more of the features in FirstClass and think it was OK to try this out. There is a balance between FirstClass and Moodle here that we are all learning. Obviously FirstClass allows students to manage their learning more then Moodle which is a good thing:)

Are these all of the discussions? Mr. Schaefer

This is the response from her teacher:

Thanks a lot. For extra credit, Dana, put ALL of my students into the discssion in First Class, so ALL of my students should have access to it – not just a few selected people. For the next unit test, I will work on setting up something in Moodle.

Thanks again for retrieving the lost items!

Betsy

I wrote back:

I noticed that after I wrote that she had indeed put all students in the workspace. I had assumed that she had only a few subscribers. Awesome work on her part and something she took away from Science.

This is the response from her teacher:

Yep. Dana mentioned the science thing and asked if they could do a similar thing with history. I assumed (perhaps incorrectly) that the science stuff was for lab groups. So, I told Dana that I would only want her to do it if ALL of the students could participate. (I thought about Moodle at that moment, but since it was a student’s idea, I went with that…) I thought it was cool that she was learning something in science and applying it to history. So, I threw in some extra credit if she was willing to spearhead the movement and enter all of the students. I have NO IDEA how she did it! The really cool thing is that the students are taking ownership of their learning! Dana is also spearheading the collaboration on quizlet – she is one cool kid!

To which I responded:

I agree totally and can see exactly how it happened as Dana is an awesome student. I would have done just what you did as that is why we have FirstClass for kids. I am very happy and proud of your group and you for letting it flow.

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Configured correctly, Parental Controls are remarkably effective. But you may want to do more. Your next steps depend on how strict you want to be and how much you trust your children. Beyond talking to them, there are several ways to allow them access to the online world while retaining some control.

Read the entire article at http://www.macworld.com/article/136339/2008/10/parentalcontrols2.html

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Mrs. Murray also shared a story from the Financial Times about the project: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/64923fa8-9665-11dd-9dce-000077b07658.html

I think this has some great potential.

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While all of this is great (and expensive compared to the many free Web 2.0 solutions), it became apparent quickly how much it has changed the community. A family is in Italy for a semester and the twins are blogging for their classmates in order to stay connected. We met before they left to get started and then worked together within FirstClass to make it work separated by 6 hours.

In addition, we have a student studying in China for a year. She wanted to be able to take Latin in 8th grade so she is auditing the Latin 7 Moodle course of Janet Long in hopes of being ready for Latin 8. We have communicated via email and she is now in the course.

I like having the tools and ability to connect our students with their friends around the world. I look forward to a broader connection and more surprises.

To read more from Jamie and Ben visit: http://www2.da.org/~13salzmanj/

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