Category Archives: Thoughts

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Giving Students a Voice on the World Stage

I sent this message to the faculty today as I wanted them to read the ISTE articles. I can not attach them here as you must be a member, although the link below will take you to the articles that are visible. I reccommend that you become a member if you are not one now.

The evidence I see happens each day in the computer labs, in the classrooms with laptops, and sometimes even at lunch break when students do things like play online video games or collaboratively write a story in a Google Doc for “fun”. I also am slowing seeing students making better decisions with how they add to their digital dossier. Slowly….

Dear Faculty,

Durham Academy is a member of ISTE (International Society for Technology in Education) through a membership paid for by the technology department. Each month ISTE publishes a magazine called Learning and Leading with Technology. I read it cover to cover and then pass it on to the other members in the department. You can read some selections here: http://www.iste.org/learn/publications/learning-and-leading.aspx

I am attaching 2 articles to this message (see above) as I think they are thought provoking and show what is possible when students use their voice with the tools we have available to all of us on campus.

Dreaming Up Ideas discusses Social Media in schools and how it can help students and teachers develop a PLN (Personal Learning Network) This is not without controversy for sure since most schools take great pains to “protect” students from some of these tools. Many are available to our students and are a part of their life outside of school and for some in school when it comes to Google Docs, Blogs (The Cav), VoiceThread, and Skype. I think there is value in protecting but also in teaching students how to use these tools for learning as in the absence of this guidance, they can and often do make errors in judgement.

Lessons from New Zealand discusses how students were encouraged to develop and use their voice in the classroom, community, and across the world. Again, we have the tools are our fingertips and some students are already exploring them. I heard a member of The Cav say the other day that we have a reader from Pakistan and wondered why and if they were a terrorist? I assured them that not all people in Pakistan are a terrorist:(.

I do believe that giving student work “legs” as Matt Scully from Providence Day School called it in one of his NCAIS workshops is powerful in two ways. We all work harder to write it right when we know more people will read it. The use of the tools also helps students develop the digital and critical thinking skills necessary to more successfully manage their digital dossier. One big hurdle is that sometimes our work has mistakes or the learning is messy, but in the end we help the students to learn how to grow and use their voice and that is a good thing, as Martha Stewart would say.

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Donnelly Think Board Using Google Doc

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Students never stop amazing me with how quickly they adopt and put into practice new tools. We have been using Google Apps for Education since late October and each day I see students being successful with this new tool for OLD uses but also now using them for NEW uses. Patti Donnelly’s English class is using a Google Doc as a Thinking Board to discuss how they could collaborate throughout the school using technology. I will share with you some of the writing, understanding this is a LIVE  private document that as I write this post, students are adding their ideas and thoughts. I asked permission to share some of their content and was granted it. The image above was created by the students in the Google Doc.

Student additions:

Student Cyrus: I’m in green (they chose colors to easily identify editors)

Like Mrs. Donnelly was saying during LA, what if we could collaborate throughout the school technologically? We start small, then inspire the city, which leads to the country, then the continent, then the world. DA has almost all the tools necessary, iTouchs, laptops, and now with access to Google Docs, we could easily be socially involved with the upper and lower schools. The problem is will we. Mrs. Donnelly, I think you’re right; if we have the tools, why not try it-the worst that could happen is that it doesn’t work, but who cares, at least we tried. If we start, it can and probably will cause a chain reaction, which means the world will be able to connect wherever and whenever via Internet or maybe a worldwide software. This global change may not happen in our lifetime, but if it works, it could cause a whole planet to connect and communicate with technology. Also, the global connection could be used for not just business or school, but also helping end world hunger, or pollution, or stopping war. Imagine how much better this world would be without that stuff. But you can’t know what’s happening in the world if you can’t communicate. Families could have more time together, because they wouldn’t have to hunt down information about the world. Learning would be upgraded and fun, and the world would be happy. If we want a change in the world, we should start now, and I think it could start at DA.

Student Collin: Guys, what Cyrus says make a lot of sense. This would be the ideal situation but, this may not happen because it is too big. We should try and express our opions here because if we do then people who look at this will look deeper and catch on.

Teacher Donnelly: Cyrus, this is so powerful!  What do others think?  Just brainstorm ideas….what comes to mind?

Student Hunter: Black/Yellow

I agree with Cyrus, It makes a lot of sense but this might be hard to get out to everyone.

Student Cyrus:

I think we should add some stuff about how people learn. I believe there should be 3 separate parts of a school-

1. the section for visual learners

2. the section for audible learners

3. the section for learners who need to move to learn

We can have technology in every room, which means there would be quicker access to information. Kids also get more excited with technology in the room, which means they will be more excited about learning, and like the video said, school is kinda boring right now, which is why more and more people are dropping out. You’d think advancement in technology would be good for schools, but hardly any schools have used it to an immense advantage. Technology also gets students more involved because they’re not jut listening to a teacher talk. Mrs. Donnelly is introducing iTouchs and laptops to us, except we use them for school, not surfing the web. DA can definitely take a huge step towards the world of technology if we try.

Student Collin: This makes sense but we need to really stretch this out. If we want to pull this outside of our classroom we need to build it into a large essay type thing. Then we can pull it outside and place it inside the real world for everyone to see and then press it into this.

Student Cyrus: I think we could make something like the video or maybe an essay and post it on youtube. Mr. Schaefer’s blog is going to help with the publicity, too.

Student John H.: is purpleish-

Think, is it the way you learn or is it or the things you use to learn. The answer is not that technology is the answer, it is how we use it. We have the tools we have all we need, we just need to use it to our liking. We have the goods we just need to use them. If you do not enjoy using the technology you can go to another side of campus. Or if you enjoy working with sound you can go to certain classes or go to a different moodle course or something along those lines.

Student Collin: Guys, What if we build advanced moodle course that recognizes advanced students and give them challenges that the teachers will allow them to do in class. For example. The 6th grade course would have different sections that are password protected so that the teachers could give the password to the best of students. Then when there is review or something that is stupidly simple for that student so they do added work for tons of extra credit and other incentives.

Student Cyrus: People should take a test to see which part of the school they belong in. The moving learners can be interactive and play games or something that helps them learn well. The visual learners can look at diagrams or charts to help them learn, and the auditory learners can listen to the teacher explain about the material.

If this doesn’t work, we could just have different types of schools. I still think technology should be used more in schools, though.

With this sort of discussion taking place in a 6th grade class, I wonder what could happen by 8th or 9th, … In fact check out this link that came across my Twitter feed today where what the students above are discussing is taking place. http://www.prototypedesigncamp.com/

What a great time to be a teacher with the tools we have today.

 

 

 

 

 

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

lilymice.jpg

grace.jpg

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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.

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Durham Academy’s Online Newspaper “The Cav”

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The Cav has been done using a FirstClass Conference in the past with some success. This year Mrs. Williams, Mrs. Donnelly, and I wanted to offer an opportunity for our reporters to write for an authentic audience so we switched to an Edublog account. For about $40.00 we have a highly managed and secure system that uses advanced editing tools. Students are excited and writing away. Teachers are the ones who serve as publishers making sure before it goes live, it meets the editorial standards of our newspaper.

 

Check it out at http://thecav.edublogs.org/

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Google Apps for Education K-12 is Now Available to Middle School Students

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I am  pleased to announce the new Google Apps for Education at DA Middle School. I have begun to show students and teachers how to use these powerful tools. Students in 5th and 6th grade are already writing collaborative documents or sharing their private writing with their teacher. Efficient and eliminates all the issues of not having the proper software or the wrong version of the paper.

Basic Rules:

Use of the tools will be for school related projects. The use of Google Apps for Education K-12 is governed by Durham Academy’s Middle School Handbook and Durham Academy’s Acceptable Technology Use policies. The account will be managed and administered by Durham Academy.

Google Collaborative Apps @ Durham Academy will provide access to digital storage, Google Docs (Word Processing, Spreadsheets, and Presentations) and Sites. Other collaborative web-based tools may be introduced in the future.

Google Apps at DA Middle School will not include Gmail, Calendar, or Google Talk. FirstClass will remain the only application for this type of communication.

Students will be able to use Google Docs to:

* Work on documents from any computer with an Internet connection

* Collaborate and share their work with other students and teachers

* Get instant feedback on their work from multiple collaborators and teachers

There is no ability to share documents outside of the students.da.org Google Apps Domain.

I have shared this story with classes after it happened to me. I was working on my nice 27 inch iMac in my office when we had a power surge on campus. Last week I had to switch my power supply from the UPS backup slot to the surge protection slot due to a chirping battery that needed to be replaced. Since I was no longer plugged into the backup slots, the chirpying was not an issue, but I also had no reserve power for when we lost power. The minute the power surge hit, my iMac shutdown. I lost some things I had open but had not saved prior to the power surge. I did not loose the Google Doc I was typing on because it saves every few seconds or when changes happen. This reminded me of the first question posed to me in my interview in 1999. “When should a student know how to save”? My answer was when they needed to save. How far we have come in 11 years. I am not sure the question was only on when but more then likely it was about name of file, where to save, and how often, most of which are still skills our students need to know. Saving anything as untitled is not a solution even if the software saves automatically in the background like Google Docs does. More software is beginning to save automatically to save us from ourselves.

Issues I have had to solve relate to involve redirect messages because of students  using our new Google Apps domain, (http://docs.students.da.org) AND also use a different Google account on the same computer/browser.

Sometimes users get an error message in Safari or other browsers like this:

“The page isn’t redirecting properly. This problem can sometimes be caused by disabling or refusing to accept cookies.” I then tried again and got this message from Safari”: Safari can’t open the page.

Too many redirects occurred trying to open ìhttps://www.google.com/a/students.da.org/ServiceLogin?service=wise&passive=1209600&continue=https://docs.google.com/a/students.da.org/document/d/1H7gPzpj_gKWaOaNnzZs-Lnc0_sj1UYpsu6z_yvjYCQw/edit?hl%3Den&followup=https://docs.google.com/a/students.da.org/document/d/1H7gPzpj_gKWaOaNnzZs-Lnc0_sj1UYpsu6z_yvjYCQw/edit?hl%3Den&hl=enî. This might occur if you open a page that is redirected to open another page which then is redirected to open the original page.”

It seems that using the same browser to log in to multiple Google accounts causes the issue. The solution for now is to adjust your browser’s Cookies and Cache.

Basically, you need to Remove Existing Cookies, Accept Cookies from all sites, and Clear the Browser’s cache file. The cache file stores information from previous visits which is what causes the problem when you have more then one Google Account.

The best strategy for using one computer with more then one Google Account is to use one browser for one account and a different browser for another account. This prevents the cookies and cache issues.

In the near future, I am looking forward to  Google Apps being fully supported in Safari mobile on the iPad as that and Moodle 2.0 will be an awesome combination for learning and collaborating for our students. Until that comes, Office2 HD works beautifully.