If You Give a Gift, How to Avoid the Inappropriate Gift

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Common Sense Media is a wonderful resource for all sorts of information.  I encourage all Durham Academy and other parents to create an account at their site. If you are a Durham Academy parent,  connect with Durham Academy from under the Find My School Link. We are beginning to build reviews and suggestions with this profile. You can find other schools if you do not attend Durham Academy. This is a must connect website for all parents.

The link to Best Kid’s Gift or How to Avoid Giving an Inappropriate Gift is full of great tips.

Connected Learning – The Thrill of Discovery and Looping

Stephen Barringer sent me and other teachers the following link to a Google Presentation on the Future of Learning.

Hey Everyone,
I am sure you have probably already seen this presentation, but on the off chance you have not, this is incredibly thought provoking.  Especially, the short video clip that is embedded on slide 98, which deals with the way we teach math.  It is an exciting and also terrifying time to be in education when you contemplate the ways it will have to adapt to the incredibly wired children of the future. 
Here is the link…..  Happy Thanksgiving to all. 
https://docs.google.com/present/view?id=ah8n38hnwpnq_695dnwp3ccc

He is absolutely correct and I thought I would embed the video he mentioned as I agree. In fact, last year when TED x NYED was in the planning stages, I heard about it on the Ed Tech Talk podcast called 21st Century Learning hosted by Vinnie, Alex, and Arvind. Dan Meyer presented at the very conference. It is nice to see the ease at how resources can be shared with each other to connect our learning. I am also starting to see a loop where topics I learn about are coming back to me from people outside of my personal learning network. Does this happen for students?
How did you learn Math?

Shea Craig also shared a Google document on the cool things going on now on “The Creative Internet

Updated 11/30/2010 After I reflected on this post, I realized that school is all about looping in that each year students hear about information from the year before in many classes. I believe it was Sir Ken Robinson who said “Most great learning happens in groups” (at 10:48). I am glad to be part of such a large group of learners and reflective thinkers.

Teaching Beyond Borders

Ms. Joanne Shang taught her 7th grade Chinese course from Beijing using Skype for video, audio, and screen sharing. Our Moodle was used to connect her VoiceThread so students could respond to the prompts and she could then listen to their comments in Beijing. The screen sharing was useful as she shared an animation of writing characters and the students “air wrote” the characters. It was a very natural learning exchange and not that much different then a regular class except for the fact their teacher was in China and it was 2:00 AM there. Great work by the teacher and students. This was without a doubt the most amazing use of Web 2.0 tools as we combined all of our teaching and learning tools to make up for what started as the problem of not being able to find a substitute. There is no substitute for a dedicated teacher and tools that work.

There were of course issues with earlier sessions when Ms. Shang tried to teach her Upper School classes. The connection was not as strong due to over use by one of the hotel guests. Even though Ms. Shang had run tests the day before, there was no way to account for a person downloading massive files while she was teaching. I am glad our class was in the middle of the night and that the network folks at the hotel kicked off the bandwidth hog.

This is a short video that I took while the class was going on. I actually was in and out of the class as I was showing a different class how to use Google Apps for Education in the lab next door. I even called Dr. DuPont so he could see what we were doing. Of course the students in the lab next door also were looking in through the glass windows as their interest was indeed piqued.

Wisdom of Teachers and Students

A few years ago Julie Williams proposed teaching sixth graders to use Photoshop. The students all read the book Wisdom Tales from Around the World The idea was students would use Comic Life to create a comic to tell the story of one of the wisdom tales they read. Students needed to draw the comic panels for each scene and while we had Skitch, and even AppleWorks for drawing, Photoshop was clearly the best tool the project. I had my fears as to whether or not students could grasp and more importantly, could I teach this complicated piece of software. After three or more years of watching Julie and her students create master pieces, I am so happy that I overcame my fear/reluctance and helped to make it happen. Not all sixth grade teachers use Photoshop for the unit as Skitch works very well. For those students who learn Photoshop, their creative world opens up wider for them. I see them playing/educationally investigating Photoshop in the lab at break time.

Below are two examples of work being done by students. I was walking by and took them with my new iPod Touch. Both students gave me permission to use their images. Never underestimate what students can and SHOULD do.

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Twitter Hash Tags and Professional Learning Communities

While I was at NCAIS2010(hash tag #ncais2010) in Charlotte, NC., Melissa Tredenick was at Independent Schools Association of the Central States (hash tag #isacs10). The power of a hash tag allowed me to follow her posts as Pat Bassett gave his talk in Chicago. I loved her summary of what he had to say about Change. Melissa Tredenick Change I agree with Pat and will continue to move in that direction. Thanks Melissa and others in my PLN.

Something About Me

Students in my Foundations of Digital Learning Class created 30 +/- second videos about themselves. This is based on Tufts Universities http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/23/education/23tufts.html movies. Students used the Lumix cameras, Storyboards, iMovie, Garageband to create these movies. The project took about 4 days from start to finish. Enjoy as we learn something about them.