Category Archives: Thoughts

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The “I’m Done “Student Created Content in a Moodle Course

Ever had a student who said: “I am done” when you have others who have not started? We gave those students a challenge to make flashcards using Keynote and then record it using Garageband. Once it was done, they were to share it via a DAILE Moodle discussion form. Wow, did they make it better then we imagined. What started out as a simple concept became a text, audio and digital literacy tool that is iPod ready. Using the voice of Alexstudents were able to practice what the words sounded like since many had never heard them before. This helped, but of course learning is a continuum so not all students got each word correct the first time. I was impressed with the student who decided that images would add context to the vocabulary definition. Nice touch. Never underestimate what a student will do when they say; I’m done. We should all say: I’m done with being the only one creating the content for our learning. I am always impressed with how students help each other use the tools of their generation.

Next year after the teacher assembles the best vocabulary tutorials, she can podcast them so next year students can learn from this years students.
Vocabulary Week 4

week-4-vocabulary

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TechCrunch 50 and what it means for schools

I was listening to the TWiT #161 The TWiT Netcast Network with Leo Laporte: Hosts: Leo Laporte, Jason Calicanis, Andrew Horowitz, and Geoff Smith on my way to work this morning and was amazed by what I was hearing. Besides talking about many topics, they spent a fair amount of time discussing TechCrunch50 Conference which features some of the best new technology companies and their products. A few are amazing and many are ones I do not fully comprehend. As I listened to the podcast and then later saw what we were doing in the computer labs I wonder what would happen if schools started to have some of the technology integrated into our learning environment. Schools tend to be slower to embrace new technologies or methods and instead stick with what has worked in the past. While there is nothing wrong with this approach it is quite different then how businesses adopt technologies or how students now adopt the technology. I know that Durham Academy has looked at a laptop program and while I am on record in favor of implementing one, we are still in the stage of research.

What does this have to do with TechCrunch50? Lets look at one technology that will shake up schools if or when it comes on our technology. How will Swype make what I taught on Wednesday obsolete or at least very outdated. I was showing the 5th graders how to keyboard using Master Key and of course I do a whole story about the QWERTY keyboard layout and why the layout is the way it is. Kids love it and I really enjoying talking about the levers and the smashing of the keys through the ribbon into the paper. This year I asked the students why are the keys still in the QWERTY layout if we no longer need to worry about levers getting jammed. The most honest answer came from a new student in the back row, who said “old people would not know how to use it”. Is this true, absolutely!

Today students use Thumbboards on cell phones and even Predictive Text along with Virtual Keyboards on iPod Touches or iPhones.

So, someday we will be having Swype classes and instead of WPM (Words Per Minute) we will do SWPM (Swyped Words Per Minute). I have an application on my iPod Touch called Writing Pad that uses similar technology. We are closer then anyone thinks to this technology being in the backpacks or our students. When will we pull it out of the backpack and put it to work in our Moodle Courses? For more background on Swype check out http://www.crunchbase.com/company/swype:

Of course we also have MacSpeech Dictate which is a whole other story.

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New Year, New Tools, New Suprises!

This year is only 5 days old and already I am amazed if not a bit tired. I have been meeting with each of the grade levels for 2 classes in order to get the students organized and shown how to use some of the new tools. FirstClass is now available for all students grades 4 – 12. After many years of not providing students with email accounts, we have now included them into our FirstClass system. The system will allow for easier communication between students and teachers along with Instant Messaging, File Transfer, Web Publishing/Blogs and Workspaces which allow groups of students or faculty to create collaborative workspace to create documents, calendars and other resources.

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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Learning Through a Windshield & Rearview Mirror

As I see and feel the end of the year approaching I have been thinking of the work done by our students and teachers in the past academic year. I am also in the process of looking forward as I begin the process of ordering supplies for the 2008 – 2009 academic year. My own learning has grown this year as I learned more about working with middle school students and teachers, using DAILE Moodle to extend and support learning, iLife and iWork ’08 software to create well designed student projects, and how many of my colleagues support my desire to see our school adopt and expand the tools we use with our students by stepping up to the plate and modeling life long learning.

I have blogged about many of the projects that our students have done as I am proud to play a part in helping them learn forward with technology. For other community and class projects see: MS Digital Learning. I am the person who is the executive producer as I do the iWeb for this content. I hope to change that next year so students and teachers can produce the content directly with our new Leopard Podcast Producer. My hope is that we will make creating content and publishing content both easy but also as a natural process in the normal learning grid of a classroom. Students have always handed in homework on paper and now I hope to have students hand in their digital content so teachers can assess it and then publish it. We do some of this within the DAILE Moodle CMS but the audience is limited to just course members. We all want to publish to a larger audience and our students live in a world of instant publishing and content distribution.

I know how I have reacted to being published as yesterday I spoke with Peter Jauss from Parat Solutions about their iPod cases and synchronization tools for the new iPods for the Lower School. He said I was just reading about you in T.H.E. Journal and it triggered my memory that I had done an interview a few months back (Rearview Mirror) about our use of iPods and Raybook Math Facts. We live in an interconnected world where information flows with fewer boundaries then we adults know. How do schools reflect this flow of information? For too many students it is still one way I am afraid.

My windshield sees 8th grade students working on creating a Constitution project in history. They are making PowerPoints, Keynotes, iMovies and other content after being inspired by a project shown from last year. Allison K. did a remarkable movie that she brought in on a DVD which due to music used, I can not post on the web. However, she has inspired the students behind her to stretch themselves further. Mr. Dahlgren just poked his head in and confirmed this as he thought the partnerships and the work being done reflected ” the students running with this project”. He feels the students that have taken him up on reviewing their information (still the role of any teacher with research projects) have the the facts straight and could produce another round of inspirational and factual projects. Students using camcorders, headsets, learning how to compress files for transport to and from school, exporting files to different formats while developing a deeper understanding of the US Constitution is engaged and relevant learning.

Also in my windshield are 6th grade students creating their 4th booktalk of the year. Using Keynote, Mrs. Williamson is asking her students to stretch themselves by incorporating creativity, multiple programs into telling the story of the book they read. Keynote is the main tool with students using Alpha Channel, A to B animation, along with narrating their booktalk. Photoshop is a natural for some students when they need to have just the perfect image and a Google search does not turn up an image. (I think Photoshop is the better solution as creators have a future). Garageband is used to create a theme song for the book. Andrew H. used his home computer to create a theme song, shared it to iTunes and brought it in on a USB flash drive to use in his Keynote. He worked on his booktalk over the weekend! I know, what is the big deal, but he was working on his booktalk over the weekend and it was not writing a report, it was composing theme music for his booktalk. Did I mention the deal about how creative people will do well in the future. Daniel Pink’s book is a must read and is the foundation for a workshop here this summer and a book discussion group in August of Durham Academy teachers.

Next week I will work with 5th grade students who will podcast their research on 20th Century events. I was in the Library yesterday when word “leaked out” that phase 2 of the project would be recording podcasts. One student said that I would put them on iTunes, and I said, what do you mean? She said, “Our poetry is there already so why not our research projects”? This of course left me the opening of how I would be glad to publish their work as long as it is of publishable quality and that all resources are cited. Are students willing to meet these rigid standards? You bet they are and the more we can do to instill the need to publish quality, well-researched and properly cited work, the less time we will spend looking in our rearview mirror wondering what we just left behind us on the road of learning.

Now, how do we keep those bugs off of our Learning Windshield?

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Learning – Pink Style

I have been working on designing a workshop for teachers this summer that will be using the theme of Daniel Pink’s book:
A Whole New Mind as the the themes of Design, Story, Symphony, Empathy, Play, and Meaning. I think these are very important themes as we must prepare our students for their future and it is not the Information Age but the Creative or Conceptual Age as Daniel Pink discusses.

Working with Mrs. Birgel and her students to create movies illustrating the different Acts and Scenes has affirmed this to me in ways that I had not seen before. The premise of the project was that students drew acts and scenes out of a jar and then went about creating Keynote presentations which were exported to QuickTime movies that were then uploaded into her DAILE Moodle course. Since I am the digital learning coordinator, I got them started and helped along the way as students came up with creative ideas on how best to instruct their classmates. We did expect that there would be text, graphics, audio to illustrate and audio to narrate. All four classes are able to view and watch the movies within the DAILE Moodle course. Of course many students took it upon themselves to create projects that met the bare minimum while others decided writing a song, creating a Flash animation, shooting a video, or creating a theme song for their project. I loved watching the students collaborate and come up with creative solutions while at the same time, teaching their classmates about Romeo and Juliet.

Due to space concerns, I am uploading only Mariah’s song and a Facebook Movie as they are great examples of this “new mind”. Student’s response has been that they would like to record this song with her. Now that is learning in the 21st Century.

Mariah’s Song
Romeo and Juliet – The song

Carlton’s Facebook
Romeo and Juliet – Facebooked!

Two other students also did Facebook style presentations which is interesting since we “block” it at our school. Wonder what would happen if we had our students use it for their learning.

There are other great examples where students took leaps of learning and really created a solid body of work. Next year, Mrs. Birgel can use the best ones to help her students learn Romeo and Juliet. Nice when students help to make content for their classes. What will next years student create? Why resources for other units, of course.

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Extended Classroom with Moodle – What Are the Implications for Students?

I am in the process of grading the Computer Competency Exam that all 8th grade students have took the week of March 27, 28, and 29th. They had 3 days to take four sections which meant they needed to use study hall or free time to complete the exam. Over the course of the 3 days, 19 students were absent and 2 were absent the entire 3 days. Since we use Moodle for this and all of my teaching since I do not have a scheduled course with any grade in the Middle School, I am happy to report that once again, Moodle has provided the perfect tool to extend my classroom. The 2 students who were absent all 3 days, are done with all 4 parts without even talking with me. The directions and needed resources were all on Moodle so they simply did it from home. One student who missed over a week of school did it last night and scored a 96 average. She did say it took a long time and yes it did according to her log file. She completed it at 11:36 PM last night from her home computer. This confirms my belief that students need access to the various learning components that Moodle offers as life is messy and learning is not always done in the timeframe we set for it. Students today are connected and learning at different times of the day. As one person who I do not remember said in a podcast, students of today are the We generation.

Artifact of the process:
From 7:59 until 11:37

Moodlesm

The conversation we need to be having it how to make sure all courses have this level of access as a basic component of our learning environment. The parallel conversation then is how do we structure our learning time so students are able to manage their time so they do not need to complete work at 11:37 PM as I have a suspicion that students who do this are involved in many more activities then just school. How can Moodle help the student who is involved in sports, travel, health related issues, or other activities/events that demand time? Learning is not just done in a classroom in front of a teacher. Schools and teachers who understand this will employ the tools of Moodle so the information is available and the learning takes place under the banner of “We the learners…..”

Spring break beckons….

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Straddling Teaching with New Tools and Old Tools

I attended a conference yesterday where I presented along with colleagues on how our school is using Moodle and the impact it has had for changing the educational environment of our school. I started by showing a log of recent activity which is followed by my speech about “Walled Garden and Safe Digital Network” that Wesley and Miguel have made me aware of in past posts on their blogs.

I use this log as a teaching tool since it contains IP addresses and other important user data just like every other web site they visit. It helps get the awareness raised to the need to keep private information private and how web sites gathered all sorts of data from visitors. There have been stories on how some technology companies allow this data to be “screen scraped“. Awareness is the first point of the process of changing a behavior.

As we went through the presentation I could see the eyes of the attendees (along with their heads shaking) that they were seeing the power of it. Last Friday I taught the 5th graders about Cyber Security regarding passwords and user information and how there is a big difference between private and personal information. Private is meant to be kept off line while personal information like what cookies I like and how many dogs I have will give a viewer some information but will not let them triangulate where I live or will be at 3:30 today.

I constantly see the value of Moodle and do not know what I would do without it. In fact tomorrow all 8th grade students are taking a Computer Competency Exam through Moodle. While I will have them in the lab through their Science, Language Arts or History courses, they can do a review course now via Moodle. The exam covers Word, PowerPoint, Excel and Information and Digital Literacy. I wish I did not have to administer it as I think the skills that need evaluation are not measured by an exam. I do very little if any instruction on Word, PowerPoint or Excel but do a lot on using Discussion Forums, Journals, Podcasting, Images and other creation type tools. I know it is important to know how to use a word processor, presentation software, and even spreadsheets, but Microsoft is not the only game in town. I have students who use only Google docs as they do not own copies of Office. Until I figure out a better solution, I will evaluate students to make sure they at least know the skills tested. If a student does fail the exam, the only result is that they need to take a computer course in the Upper School before the end of their sophomore year. If they pass it, then they are exempt from taking any computer course in the Upper School. This actually is a bigger concern for me as in the age of information overload, knowing more is better then knowing being done. I think this is an example of a straddle effect.
Update 2/26/08: I had a meeting with the Middle School Technology Committee where we discussed items of interest and out of it came the need for instruction for students in how to send email, write email, and other uses of current technologies as feedback from professionals students contact is that they do not know how to write an email or letter. Maybe if we give students email accounts we could model and teach this curriculum. I remember learning how to write these documents in the dark ages of no computers.

New tools abound and one I am learning today so I can be in 2 places at once is called ScreenFlow. I am working at purchasing it since the demo mode is splashed all over the finished video unless I purchase it. This may seem easy enough, but the company is in England and they will not take American Express unless I use British Pounds instead of US Dollars for American Express due to the exchange rate. Get the idea! A global economy affects my learning and teaching here in Durham. Flat World indeed:)

Parents and students are great sources of links as well. Here are some I have been looking at lately:

http://www.2mminutes.com/ This is a movie about the life cycle of a learner in high school. There are about 2, 000, 000 minutes in a high school student’s career. How best to use it? This video will definitely provoke discussions and disagreement. I think like most things in the world, it all depends on the lens you view it with as to how you react. The video came about after Bob Compton visited India.

Futures Channel Jessica P. was finishing up her Independent Science project and wanted to embed the video on the Wind Farm. She had done her PowerPoint and has a link to the site, but wanted to see if she could just show the section of the film she wanted to show during her presentation. Since the video is a Shockwave file and because it appears that they hold all rights to the work, there was no way to do this mashing up or repurposing of the video. I was intrigued by the site and the tag line: “Connecting Learning to the Real World”. I think her use of it to support her presentation is great and I would have loved to of talked with her more about how she found it “I was looking around for resources”. This is where we need to be teaching and not how to insert a table into a Word document.

This post feels scattered and I guess it is as I have been teaching podcasting to 6th graders, helping a student get their Google Presentation Offline (No luck yet) and other duties that come up as I straddle each day with one foot in the future and one foot in today.

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Student Learning Networks and Global Change

Students today are wonderful teachers of teachers when given the opportunity to share what they have learned from their learning network. I was working with a sixth grade class on their podcasting project for History. We were learning how to research using web sites, citing of sources, creating a Keynote slide presentation to use as images for their enhanced podcast, script writing and just getting our assets in order before we actually begin recording. I believe this is how actual “news” organizations broadcast.

I am working with one group and a student named Chess wants to show me something that will help save electricity for all of the computers in the lab. I said, I would be interested in something like that for sure. Blackle is where he took me and told me how we could do little things that can make a big difference. Research I have done does refute some of the claims since CRT and LCD monitors have different energy use, but what I think is amazing is that here are a group of students talking about saving energy by using a different color.

I think this demonstrates the power of a personal learning network and also how students can shift change in their life due to their access to information. I have watched how students in the labs will do vocabulary in order to send grains of rice.

Student Engagement has lower barriers then when I was in school with the tools of today. Durham Academy is a member of iEARN as Tina Bessias travelled to Egypt for last years conference. TakingITGlobal is another student engagement site for global awareness.

The times have changed where student voices could not gather into a force to affect change. I think it is wonderful and look forward to being supported in my senior years by students who were empowered in their youth to affect change.

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Programming Classes in Schools

A colleague asked about Computer Programming Classes in Middle School. I found this compelling given a recent conversation I had regarding the lack of classes at our Middle School along with a need to adjust how we assess our students in the Upper School. The ideas here are generated from a listserv I belong to and while it is Creative Commons material, I have taken out the names of folks due to issues related to publishing of material that some folks think is private. The schools mentioned are all private schools.

I am using this more as a collector of information. I guess I could use my wiki as well.

School 1:
We do HTML and CSS in 7th grade (though as stated these are not programming languages), and an intro to Processing in 8th grade- this is
an MIT lab IDE. We continue with Processing in the US. For more information try: www.processing.org Also, my colleague Michael B. did a workshop at NEIT this year called Processing

School 2:
We offer a two week unit in Python programming to all of our 8th graders and another to all of our 9th graders. It’s not a course, by any stretch of the imagination, since by design we’ve left out most of the formal discussion in favor of examples and experiementation, but it could be extended into one without too much work. Our current state of play (due for revision, I might add).

School 3:
We teach Perl starting in the sixth grade. There is a very good book “Learning Perl” which has the classes set out for use. Perl has
several advantages. first unlike HTML Perl is a real programming language. HTML is a markup system. second Perl run on our three types
on computers (Windows, Mac, Linux) and the programs work the same on each kind. Third Perl is a widely used and useful language which the
students will not out grow. That is it is not a “teaching”language but rather one that has real practical value.

School 4:
Here at the L… Schools, we’re teaching programming using Logo(Microworlds) in the 5th grade, Scratch in the 6th, and Runtime Revolution
in the 8th. (Runtime Revolution is a successor to the old HyperCard — for those oldtimers like me — and is a terrific multi-media environment with a powerful yet easy-to-understand scripting language behind it. Infinitely better than HyperStudio.)

Other Suggestions

http://csunplugged.com/

http://www.greenfoot.org/index.html

I will continue to add to this post as the data comes in.

To be fair, I have installed Alice on the computers in the Middle School and hoped to do a club using students. One student is the son of a Computer Science teacher at Duke University who conducts Alice Training. I had to cancel it since there was demand on the computer labs to run a TV Commerical and Stock Market Club along with a Lego Mindstorms Club that I sponsor. In addition, I am offering camps on Scratch, Lego Mindstorms and Alice this summer.

I am amazed and jealous at times at what some schools are able to fit into the school day.

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A Vision of Durham Academy K-12 Students?

Michael Wesch from Kansas State has done a lot of videos related to technology and students. Most of them focus on higher education and are very well done. His site Digital Ethnography is full of content to help learn what is happening today. He recently gave a presentation on “The Crisis of Significance“.

He posed some simple questions to students:

Q: How many of you do not actually like school?

A: Over half raise their hands.

Q: How many of you do not like learning?

A: No hands.

I am not at all surprised by this reaction as I observe it each day. Granted, I am in technology and watch students use Microsoft Word to type reports for some teachers. Others students “get to use” Moodle to upload assignments, journal, post discussion items, and other interactive lessons. The last two days students have been using Photoshop to create Greek God and Goddess trading cards for one class while another class used Microsoft Word. The teachers decided what tool to use based on their comfort level. There is no wrong or right answer here as the key word is CREATE.

Technology use by teachers varies and is not determined by age, education, or discipline, but I think, by a willingness to vary instructional methods, allow for authentic learning by their students, and a desire to strive to learn new skills and methods of teaching. If teachers are willing to take on these characteristics, technology offers a lot of engaging power.

I spent the last year and half working on a Technology Task Force in order to recommend what Durham Academy should do to continue to be relevant and “significant” in a changing world. The presentations went well and most negative comments came out of a fear of how technology is either destroying students concentration or how it will change the culture of our school. I love a professional discussion on the merits of benefits technology can offer the learning environment so the day was a great opportunity for me to share my vision for Durham Academy. The voting process did not reveal a clear decision so more work will need to be done in April.

Students will work hours on an engaging project be it for school or for “fun”.

Here are some other questions to ask:

Q. Who did you learn from today?

Q. Who did you teach today?

Q. From how many people or countries did you learn from today?

Check out this video to see how we are connecting with our students.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_A-ZVCjfWf8

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