Category Archives: Thoughts

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Musings of a Master Teacher Academy Member


Photo credit: click from morguefile.com
I was accepted to be one of a few Master Teacher as part of NCAIS Virtual that was looking for “Change Agents”. I debated taking on this role/task as I had been working on streamlining my life. The more I considered it though, the more I wanted to be a part of something big like this as I see it as a great opportunity to learn new strategies and connect with teachers and trainers outside of Durham Academy. I consider myself to be pretty versed in many of the tools but am always looking to learn and challenge myself more. I think all educators need to continue to push past the comfort zone of ” What I did last year”.

The training starts in January and is even at the Hill Center.

What will I learn? How will I grow as a teacher? What impact will be felt at Durham Academy? How big will the audience be for our collaborative work? How will my teaching change?

The information below is from NCAIS Virtual http://www.ncaisvirtual.org/index.asp

21st Century Teaching Academy

Mission Statement

Present day education requires a more complex and demanding educational landscape.  The 21st Century Teaching Academy embraces a constructivist conception of school transformation and acknowledges the importance of changing minds, not just practices.  The Academy affirms the value of educational leaders to stimulate the reflections needed to unsettle the status quo and mobilize change.

Opening the door for 21st century teaching and learning involves a commitment to professional development training.  The 21st Century Teaching Academy is the essential component and change agent committed to making this professional development happen

 

 

Master Teacher Academy

The NCAIS Master Teacher Academy represents Phase I of our 21st Century Training model.  10-12 teacher from NCAIS Virtual member schools will be chosen from a pool of applicants to receive elite training (at no cost to schools other than release time to attend the training) to become part of a unique 21st century collaborative that is attracting nationwide attention.  The 4 day 3 night training will take place in the winter of 2011.

Our training team includes:

Amanda Antico-Majkowski, Educational Consultant and Chang Agent

Faculty from the Online Learning Task Force at St. Alban’s School, Washington, DC

Christopher Gergen, Founder of Bull City Forward, Durham, NC

Bruce Friend, NCAIS Virtual Education Consultant

Select NCAIS Innovators

Encourage the “Difference Makers” at your school to apply for this selective NCAIS program and let us take them to a Whole New Level!

 

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Foundations of Technology 5 Student Portfolios

With my  new Foundations of Technology course for 5th grade students, I wanted to students to develop an online portfolio that could live outside of both the classroom and our school. My goal is to give the students an opportunity to share their work and reflect on what it means to them. The idea of parents or other students also sharing their comments is a secondary goal. A third goal will not be obvious since the actual portfolio is the showcase for finished projects, and that is creativity, design and even fundamental technology skills centered around formats, copyright, privacy, communication, and others that are embedded into the projects we create. I used the term scaffolding with the class today as I wanted them to begin to connect the things we do in class instead of thinking, we start new each time. I was prompted to talk about this due to the age old question of “can I, can ya, or  can you”. I have a standard answer in that I ask them the question of “Where is Kenya?”. Often they understand this play on words although I feel like I am undoing some long learned rule of learning. I told the students today that if I taught you how to use it last week, it is OK to use it this week as that is the scaffolding part of this class.

So, I share now the portfolios of my students as we work on creating a digital portfolio using VoiceThread. For the price of a site license, this is incredible software for our students to begin telling the story of their learning. Remember that learning is often messy. That term is from a web site that I have read for years. http://learningismessy.com/blog/

PpFeKD

Naomi J. http://damiddle.ed.voicethread.com/share/1318864/

Haley P. http://damiddle.ed.voicethread.com/share/1315501/

Mosehe I. http://damiddle.ed.voicethread.com/share/1315500/

Jonathan W. http://damiddle.ed.voicethread.com/share/1315499/

Izzy S. http://damiddle.ed.voicethread.com/share/1315498/

Tate F. http://damiddle.ed.voicethread.com/share/1315497/

Hannah J. http://damiddle.ed.voicethread.com/share/1315495/

Nicole R. http://damiddle.ed.voicethread.com/share/1315494/

Finn M. http://damiddle.ed.voicethread.com/share/1315493/

Catherine M. http://damiddle.ed.voicethread.com/share/1315492/

Dylan P. http://damiddle.ed.voicethread.com/share/1315491/

Ethan G. http://damiddle.ed.voicethread.com/share/1315490/

Jack M. http://damiddle.ed.voicethread.com/share/1315488/

Tyler S. http://damiddle.ed.voicethread.com/share/1315486/

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Ready set, reload my files, good to go …

qzP1Ah

I have written about Ryan S. in the past as he is a student who does amazing things with technology and in how he thinks/problem solves. He impressed me yesterday again during Open House. He came into the computer lab, logged in, plugged in his USB flash drive and proceeded to drag over all of his files from last year, and the year before. As Ryan finished copying the files, he said ” Now I am ready”.

He is onto the fact that each year all of his files are deleted by our Network Department. While we have had some light discussion on how we could change the practice, nothing ever came of it. In many ways, starting over is a good thing as some students keep a Home Directory much like they do their bedroom closet.  How would I feel if each year I had to start over? Not happy given the fact I have 2 terabytes of storage on my desk for backup plus the server backup. I do not like loosing anything.

I think most of our students live their digital lives without limits to the amount of storage. YouTube and Google do not wipe out everything after 9 months. What are the implications for education with this group of students who are creating their digital dossier? I think we need to allot more space for students to build their learning space so they can retrieve the history of their learning much like we can all look up our web history.

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New Year, New Course, New Moodle

After a summer of healing my broken arm and enjoying my grandchildren, I am ready for the newness that awaits. I have again become digitalkarl after spending most of the summer in analogkarl mode. Except for two weeks when I did summer camps on Lego Mindstorms and Scratch, I was not on a computer. I did listen to my iPod often on walks and did “read” Omnivores Dilemma by Michael Pollan. A great book and one my daughter will be teaching to her 8th grade students using the Young Readers edition. I would think it would be perfect for our 8th grade students as well.

Onto the title:

New school year is full of promise and changes as new technologies are introduced as well as new teachers, students to our middle school. I am now leading an early bird workshop with 5 teachers who are learning about our new technology skills matrix based on ISTE’s NETS skills. I am thrilled with how the workshop is going so far as teachers are receptive, engaged and providing great feedback in the VoiceThreads and Moodle Discussion Forums. This is great because all MS Faculty will be using this course next week during the kickoff to getting ready for school. It is my first attempt to have a true online workshop in Moodle that can be self-directed if so desired. My hope is this will free teachers to learn on their own or to complete it when they have time and use the time dedicated in the start up week to the most pressing issue which may or may not be attending a workshop with me.

New Course: Foundations of Technology for 5th and 6th graders. I will be teaching a trimester course  where we will address these ISTE technology skills. I am excited to finally have this course in the schedule as it has taken 4 years. The course is now part of the Fine Arts rotation which means the final spoke on the 6th wheel will not be the ability to take one of the Fine Arts from the existing rotation. In most of life, we live in a zero sum world, and in order to fit in this technology course, we dropped this choice. The rotation also means that a student could have been here for almost 2 years before they take a technology course. Still, it is better to have one then not as has been the case. Integration into core classes has been pretty successful, but this course will allow me to focus directly on what I think students should be learning and not embedding it into other projects. My course will be totally project based with students assembling a digital portfolio in their own VoiceThread.

New Moodle: The Middle School now has our own Moodle server as we have installed a separate Internet connection on our campus. The new address is http://msmoodle.da.org/moodle/ This new 20 mbps connection should really help with load time and computer use. Please adjust your bookmarks to reflect this new address.

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Summer Camps and the Programming is Fun! but not that Easy:(

For the past 3 summers I have run Lego Mindstorm NXT camps and Scratch camps for children aged 8 – 13. I employ 3 or 4 helpers who in fact are much more then that as they rush about showing campers how to use the software and hardware. I could never do it without them.

Checkout the camp wiki. http://dalegoscratchcamps.wikispaces.com/

This summer has presented me with a challenge I never have faced, a broken radius bone in my left wrist. I fell unloading hay on May 16, 2010 and suffered a compound fracture that required surgery and an external fixation device. I am healing, but slowly and have had to learn how to not do most of what I am used to doing in the summer. I have learned how to sit still and how to ask for help. I also had the rest of our hay delivered:) I will be ready for the training I will offer teachers in a few weeks as well as teaching my new Foundations of Technology Course.

Here is what I called “Rodney” as he is gone but will be sent to Nicaragua someday to be reused.

brokenarm.jpg

To learn more about the EFD http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/External_fixation

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LotW for May 3 2010 – The FaceBook Edition

The FaceBook Edition

Full Disclosure – I do not use Facebook. I did set up an account once and all of the people I no longer wanted to be friends with were back. Call me antisocial but hey, there is a reason I do not want you to auto connect to me simply because I added a profile of where I went to Elementary School. I am not concerned that there is no longer much privacy as much as I am concerned about who controls my privacy. I teach and live in public ways that I choose and not a vendor. Therefore, I set my privacy controls depending on who I want to see my “stuff”. I prefer and Opt in versus Opt out policy.

This leads me to the Facebook edition where I am putting together a few links that address some rather important issues for those of you with Facebook accounts. This is not a judgement on whether you should or should not share your life on Facebook. Obviously, I choose to not share my life. I still have an analog life and a digital life.

What drove me to this post was listening to some very, very, very, smart people who write programs, run Internet companies describe how hard it is for them to manage their privacy settings in Facebook. It made me realize that some of you who use Facebook, but perhaps do not realize the depth of information you are revealing. In fact, two of them were deactivating their Facebook account until they could figure out how to manage the privacy.

The issue has not to do so much with what your Facebook Friends and you do, but what happens when a FoF interacts with your Friend. It seems as if the privacy setting you set for your Friends does not stop your Friend from passing on your information to one of their Friends who you are not a Friend of.

Again, I do not have first hand experience as I deleted my Facebook account shortly after opening one to communicate with a friend in Uganda.

Facebook Eroding Privacy Policy Timeline from Electronic Frontier Foundation
http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/04/facebook-timeline/

See What Facebook Publicly Publishes About You – Lifehacker
http://lifehacker.com/5526429/see-what-facebook-publicly-publishes-about-you

Use this link to enter in your Facebook ID or alias
http://zesty.ca/facebook/

Time to Audit Your Facebook Privacy Settings – Here is How by Gina Tripani
http://www.fastcompany.com/1624745/time-to-audit-your-facebook-privacy-settings

Facebook’s New Social Plugins – Now 50,000 plus in one week – an article from Mashable
http://mashable.com/2010/04/28/facebook-social-plugins/
Facebook for Parents from CommonSenseMedia
http://www.commonsensemedia.org/facebook-parents

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Google Docs and Office2 HD on iPad – Not a Good Relationship

I have been testing the use of many applications in order to get a solution to editing Google Documents on the iPad. I thought I was there with Office2 HD but a funny thing happened on the way to productivity.

This is a screenshot taken of a simple Google Document with a table and some formatting.

Googledocsondesktop It looks pretty good but the image below is what it looks like after I edited it on an iPad using Office2 HD.
Googledocafteroffice2Hdonipad It looks pretty bad unless of course you like the squished table look. In order to display it correctly, I have to go back in an edit the table to be the correct size. Sure it is not that big of a deal, but still, I can not have this happen for students who may have the same experience.

Keep trying folks as it is only a few weeks old.

This is a review video done that shows the power of Office HD which is strong just an issue with going between the two devices mentioned above.

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iPad – The Good, The Bad, The Ugly, The Unknown – with apologies to Sergio Leone and cast

I have had my iPad for two weeks now so I think I can write a review that reflects where I see this device in an educational setting. In a nutshell – close but not there yet. Do not get me wrong, you can not pry it out of my hands, but there are some limitations that must be overcome.

The Good
Design, Touch, and Feel – This is a wonderful device for the eye, fingertip, and hand as it is easy to carry and use. Using the touch interface on this device is a little bit like magic. Check out LukeW’s wonderful resource for how to use the Touch UI. http://www.lukew.com/ff/entry.asp?1071

There are many apps that are outstanding examples of how this device is a different approach to a computer. This is not an exhaustive list, but one that represents my early use and the fact that my account is empty:)

  • The Elements which can be purchased as a book, or you can even use the web site http://periodictable.com/ On the iPad, there is the ability to rotate and look closely at examples of the element in nature or products.
  • The Weather Channel Max – Another well done app that takes full advantage of the screen and interface
  • NPR – Access to all stories and all stations with a few touches
  • Magic Piano – play differently and with others
  • Evernote – If you do not use this app, you are missing elegance and simplicity and is the only way I have found to get documents out of this device as easily as I should be able to get documents out of this device.

The Bad

  • Smudges on the screen make it look bad really fast. You do not want to eat while using this device
  • While the case is nice, the texture feels weird to me. I suppose it is less likely to slip, but I am not a big fan of it.
  • Not that many apps that I own have been updated to the iPad version or in a couple cases involved repurchasing them
  • The constant envy and gasps from people who see it and want to touch it

The Ugly

  • Document management is lousy and frankly a HUGE mess. Until this is solved, this device will not work in a school or at least in any way where a school deploys them for multiple students to use.
  • Google Documents do not work in the mobile Safari. Many companies are attempting to solve it, but there should be no reason to use an intermediary service.
  • The inability to use the Dock with the Case on the iPad – Really no one thought you might want to dock the iPad with a case that you sell on it. Can you say “Incredibly stupid design and I want a refund”
  • iPhone apps look pretty bad but are useable even when upscaled.

The Unknown

  • Textbook publisher have not provided samples of what they will be like so unless we can remove the 30+ pounds of books from the backpacks of students with a highly interactive, annotation capabilities, and a strong pricing structure we just do not know
  • Management tools for school wide deployment and configuration. iPhone Configuration Utility works – barely

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LotW for 4_22_10

Well, doing a weekly list of links is hard given the flood of activity going on in the labs. Maybe I should have called them LotWhen I Get Around to it?

Here are some good ones that came into this week.

2010 Horizon Report for K-12
This report lists trends and emerging technologies in K-12 education. A good read for where we are and where schools should be headed.

http://www.nmc.org/publications/2010-horizon-k12-report

From Virginia Hall
Does Font Choice Make a Difference in cost of printing? You bet it does! In fact, think before you print can also help save money.

http://blog.printer.com/2009/04/printing-costs-does-font-choice-make-a-difference/

Teaching About the Web includes Troublesome Parts
A great article about how we must use the very parts of the web that can cause some concern. I plan to use the CommonSenseMedia curriculum next year.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/09/education/09cyberkids.html

The CRUDS
Never heard of them, well a picture is worth a thousand words. Look carefully.

http://www.golfdigest.com/golf-courses/golf-travel/buddies/2010-05/myrtle-beach-cruds

Individual Knowledge in the Internet Age by Larry Sanger – one of the founders of Wikipedia.
http://www.educause.edu/EDUCAUSE+Review/EDUCAUSEReviewMagazineVolume45/IndividualKnowledgeintheIntern/202336

From the article “analyze three common strands of current thought about education and the Internet. First is the idea that the instant availability of information online makes the memorization of facts unnecessary or less necessary. Second is the celebration of the virtues of collaborative learning as superior to outmoded individual learning. And third is the insistence that lengthy, complex books, which constitute a single, static, one-way conversation with an individual, are inferior to knowledge co-constructed by members of a group”.

From Loften D. – Never underestimate a sixth grader I say. He was showing me how he can now bring any of his or anyone’s Quizlets to his iPod Touch for offline review and studying. Very cool. This is a link to the Quizlet blog where they talk more about it.
http://quizlet.com/blog/archives/944

He likes the App Touchcards2 which is $1.99 in the App Store
http://slidetorock.com/apps/Touchcards-flashcard-learning-system.html

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My Morning at Culbreth Middle School

Today I went back to where I began my teaching career to see how they have developed a strong technology program using iPod touches.

The notes below were typed using Evernote on my iPad. It worked beautifully and I even got to ask an Apple Engineer about how to get Google Docs to work. She assured me she would look into it and let me know. I told her that the lack of Google Docs is my only concern about suggesting this 1.5 pound device become standard for our students.I also met Tony Perez from Atlanta Girls’ School. They will become a 2 to 1 school next year as students will have a MacBook and an iPad.

My rough notes:

Teacher’s got them first – not too much planning or rules as that can stop innovation.
Chorus Class:

Musictheory.net was used to go over the notes study. Had booked marked. Used site as textbook for lesson.

Science class:
Headphones in baggies, 4 iMacs,1ipod cart, overhead, LCD projector with speakers, and 2 teacher MacBooks. One student did not have iPod so had to share headphones. iMacs looked like they were not running OS X but were being used for the Citrix setup. May have been same computers I helped set up. They still use FirstClass. iPods used video on race – gave out directions teachersdomain. Had teacher account.

History class:
mrstaberswiki.pbworks.com students watched video and took notes from teacher handout in notebook.

Math class:
Coin flip for probability app iHandy coin flip game. Chccs.k12.us/culbreth Robert bales

Science class:
Different teacher but used same lesson as other Science Teacher. Watched movie acceleration activities used same http://www.teachersdomain.org/asset/phy03_vid_velocity/

Each teacher had a small sheet of paper with questions and directions. At one point another student noticed a student using his iPod for something other then what he was supposed to be using and said “Vincent is using his iPod with unapproved app”. Public shaming is alive and well.

A Burmese student was using dictionary to translate notes.

Next steps:
Culbrethpodcasting.chccs.k12.us will be used for announcements and other information done by students on iPodsl .All will be done with podcast producer with wikis and blogs.
Classroom20.com is where you can find information on the program.

Other notes:
Started with a beta team and had them work with their students to learn how to use them the best. PD was how to use the device.Val now have 28 wifi stations. 16 carts with 622 iPods. ITunes account for each team. Val gets list of apps from teachers to get. They are added to laptop in the cart. Mobicip is the filter they use. http://www.mobicip.com/ they use premium account.

Conversations happen if issues come up with the report.al has a portable Bretford case for 20 iPods.iPads are coming for use in a sandbox lab. They will have students begin to write apps or other uses. Stuck in the shallow end ….. Book The hope is to get these into the homes of their students.

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