Technology to Empower Student Learning

Building Knowledge and Learning

2009-10-31T11:40:00.002-04:00

I'm sitting here early on a Saturday morning taking a look at what's going on in the world through the eyes of those I follow on Twitter.

I've had more questions and more conversations about Twitter recently and I'm asked about how it works and why I use it. Here's why... This morning, I'm came across a tweet from Wes Fryer (@wfryer) about a presentation he's sitting attending in China. (at about 7:45 am my time, Twitter shows that it was posted about 3 hours ago). I now have his notes from the presentation and links to several videos on Edutopia that I hadn't know about 15 min. ago. What's even more important to me is that I can now connect the teachers I support in my school district with this resource. I have some knowledge that connects with my personal learning but can also be distributed so others can gain new knowledge or build new connections in their own learning. I don't know about you, but I think that's pretty cool!

So, here's what occurs to me...if I didn't have a Twitter account and didn't follow the people that I do, how would I have known about this? Why do I use Twitter? Because it helps me to build my knowledge and learning from the experiences of others. As a teacher and as a learner I can't think of any reason more important than that.

Image by mndoci on Flickr

Creating Conversations

2009-10-27T19:59:00.006-04:00

As the school year has gotten under way here, many new opportunities for working in collaboration with teachers have come up. It’s been an exciting start to the school year!

Today I spent some time in another classroom helping kids (and teachers) to understand more about blogs. Last year, some of these teachers had begun blogs but they had had a difficult time sustaining their use throughout the school year. This year, as we talked about starting the blogs up again, I suggested that we work together to present a lesson (or lessons) to the class that would help students understand what a blog is. We talked about some guidelines for safety on a blog and we talked about their “digital footprint”, although we discussed that in terms of “character” or how you portray yourself to others on the Internet.

For the most part, the lessons have been structured in much the same way for both 4^th and 5^th grade classes. We get them thinking and making connections to their prior knowledge by talking about ways that we communicate on the Internet. When we did this with our first class of 5^th graders, we thought that if they could list at least 5 then we would be doing well. Of course, I’m sure you know what happened… We listed probably 12-15 ways of communicating – everything from email to playing online games. They definitely understand the concept of being able to communicate with people in the outside world!

The next part of the lesson is devoted to giving them new information – in this case, the blog which many of them have never used before. Now that we’ve sparked their thinking about communication, we begin to talk about an author’s purpose for writing. They’re well versed in that – inform, persuade, and entertain. Their teachers talk about author’s purpose throughout the reading and writing program. But, we add just one more to the list because it seems appropriate to blogging…”thinking out loud” or reflecting.

We have some blog postings from students who worked with Anne Davis a few years ago and we’re using those as sort of mentor texts for right now (and continuing to look for others). We use these examples and talk about author’s purpose. Students have also pointed out things like mistakes in spelling and punctuation and even one where the student used his full name (we have our students created pseudonyms for their blogs).

We’ve continued on with some guidelines for blogging. While it’s more meaningful for students to create their own guidelines, we’ve found it helpful to use some that were developed by 4^th graders in Thailand. (thanks to Kim Cofino for sharing her practices) Since most of our students have had some Internet safety lessons with our librarians, many of the guidelines are already familiar to them in that regard so then we can concentrate on the “digital footprint” aspect a little more closely.

In some classes, we wrap up this portion of our conversation by asking students to write down one question that they still have about blogging. This gives us a little feedback about the lesson and lets them consider what they’ve just learned and tell us what they still need to know more about.

As we continue on, we’re moving into talking about commenting. Keeping the focus on communication and conversation, we’ve pointed out to our students that one practice that can encourage conversation is to ask your audience a question in your blog article. Then we ask students what naturally happens when someone asks you a question? The answer, in terms of a blog, is called a comment. We talk about commenting first in terms of how you would answer a question in a face to face conversation. We’ve given them four reasons to comment:

“ I agree with you…”
“I (respectfully) disagree…”
“ I have some more information I can add to this…”
“I have a question to ask…”

Using the blog articles from the previous lesson, we go back to take a look at the comments these articles received. We have one article where the student’s Mom replied to him so now we can talk about how anyone can comment on a blog! We’re comparing the comments to our four reasons and finding that many of them conform to these with some variations.

Today, in a 4^th grade, we tried something different because of the time available for the two lessons. Yesterday, after we wrapped up our discussion about communicating and author’s purpose for writing, we had the students start a list of at least 2 topics that they could write about on their blog and note what their purpose would be for writing. Later in the day, the teacher had them choose one idea to write about.

This morning, after our discussions about commenting, we paired up the students, had them exchange their writing and asked them to write a comment. As we walked around to watch their progress we noticed that the students were quite thoughtful in creating their comments. Their comments were positive, they asked questions back to the author and some students had the time to write additional comments.

As we wrapped up today, students were asked to write down two things they learned about creating comments. Each of them were able to quickly write these down.

So…where do we go from here? I’m trying to comment on student blogs as often as I can. A mother of one of the students I’ve worked with has told me already that her daughter was impressed that “that lady” wrote to her. The mom said how personal that was to her daughter. Will I continue to comment? You betcha! How could I not with that kind of feedback. Let the conversations continue!

Image by Markus Koljonen

Brainstorming about eCommunication

2009-08-07T16:41:00.004-04:00

Just saw a tweet about this article from eSchools News "Ten Tips for Building eCommunication." (Thanks @kylepace!) I'm thinking about their list and how it could be applied to a school district as well as an individual teacher's website but also about how these tips are really about creating "community." So I'm going to take a stab at brainstorming a few ideas for each of these and perhaps you might add more of your own in the comments.

1. Start Tweeting: We're seeing that school districts are jumping on the Twitter technology and using it as a way of communicating with parents. Wouldn't it be great if the district tweeted to:

welcome new teachers to the district
keep parents up to date with school curriculum nights
reminders about vacation dates, half days, testing dates, etc.
congratulate teachers or students on their accomplishments
communicate regularly with staff
point out outstanding classroom projects

2. Tell stories: We have a staff newsletter that comes out at certain times during the year. Instead of a printed newsletter giving us bullet points about new teachers, why not ask them to write a short story about themselves? Instead of bullet points about teachers retiring, why not have them write about their experiences as teachers and their plans for the future? How about featuring students telling stories about things they're learning in their classrooms?

3. Add more people: eSchool News refers to this as bringing a human dimension to communications. How about creating and sharing a VoiceThread about things going on in the district? It would probably take as much time for someone to record a message as it would to write, revise, print and distribute.

4. Keep it fresh: I think my school district's website does a good job with that but individual teachers don't always. People who are considering moving into the district almost always begin with the district website and then move on to look at what teachers are doing. Simple tools can help to make the updates easy to do and keep the pages fresh. How about enlisting older students (in an elementary building) to buddy up with students who are younger and help them choose pictures or class work that they'd like to display on the teacher's web page?

5. Survey your audiences: While eSchool News points out the use of online tools such as SurveyMonkey or Zoomerang "for less than $50 per year", Google forms provide a free way of surveying people quickly and gathering the results together in a spreadsheet for further analysis.

6. Use new tools in new ways: The article talks about building in feedback loops.

Seems like Google forms would be easy to use. It could be embedded in a teacher's webpage for parents to visit with ease. A survey form could be used for gathering names of parents to help with field trips or special events or for students to gather data to be used in Science, Math, Social Studies, etc.
How about presenting a math problem to be solved, then have a chat room such as Today's Meet set up for other classes to contribute their ideas and/or chat about the possibile solutions?

7. Start blogging, podcasting and video streaming

What if student's doing a Reader's Theatre were streamed live to other classrooms?
Blogs are easy to set up. Classblogmeister and Edublogs are pretty standard for classrooms and they're free.
Video streaming in-school events, evening concerts and other events would be a great way to bring the school and community together
Put a virtual bookshelf, such as GoodReads, Library Thing and others on your blog or website and invite others to talk about the stories you're reading with your students - your memories, what connections those stories have to your childhood, etc.

8. Free control of web sites from IT.

Does your network administrator or IT team know what's going on in your classrooms? Now is a good time to help them see what they're supporting. Send them regular emails, tweets or whatever linking them to class projects, blogs and other instructional work where the technology is key.

9. Improve site navigation: I like the site search engine idea...I don't think we have one. That would be a great addition to every school website.

10. Learn from the kids: Many of the teachers I work with have said that they feel like the kids know more than they do. So what? We can take advantage of that. We can create expert groups among our students to buddy up with younger kids or with other teachers for assistance. That would be a great way to promote community in the school.

Well...that's what I've come up with. Anything you'd like to add?

The Art of Possibility

2009-08-04T16:18:00.003-04:00

Since attending the Building Learning Communities conference put on by November Learning in Boston last week, I've been working to make some final edits to a wiki I'm working on to support a workshop on Digital Tools and searching for just the right way to present the information. Ben Zander, conductor of the Boston Philharmonic orchestra was the first keynote speaker. His point of view and philosophy about life and work and everything else was refreshing to me and I immediately found the inspiration I was looking for to move on with my workshop planning.

On Wednesday evening of the conference, we were able to see him demonstrate how his philosophy becomes performance when he conducted the Youth Orchestra of the Americas. I've been to a number of musical performances in my life but this one...this one was...absolutely wonderful!

I picked up a copy of the book he wrote with his wife Roz and just finished putting it on my "currently reading" shelf at GoodReads. If you haven't seen GoodReads yet, I'd recommend it highly.

The Art of Possibility: Transforming Professional and Personal Life by Rosamund Stone Zander

I need to give an "A" to more people in my life. Read the chapter 3 to learn more.

View all my reviews >>

The Power of Words

2009-07-15T13:13:00.000-04:00

Wordle is such a great tool. It really gives us the power to see the intent of a document. Here, at the Connected Classroom, is a Wordle created from the NETS-A document just released by ISTE. With that in mind, I thought I'd see what Wordle would do with the NETS -S. I removed the words "student", "use", "using" and "technology" thinking that it's a fairly obvious assumption that those words would occur frequently in the document. Here's what Wordle came up with.

I kind of like this: digital, information, and learning - all of those words are important as we help our students use the digital learning tools that are available and that help them locate, organize and use information.

Now, let's see what the NETS-T looks like. Once again, I removed "teachers", "use" and "using" as well as "technology" - again, feeling that those words should be pretty obvious. Here's the result:

Learning comes out on top - of course, that's really what I would have expected to see. But, I'm also noticing that model, tools, and digital are fairly large words here. That is what I hope we can continue to think about in our work in my district next year. Teachers learning to use the digital tools and modeling their use for our students in order for them to begin to use those tools for their learning.

Embracing Imperfect

2009-07-15T10:12:00.000-04:00

I'm reading an article today on AssortedStuff titled "Imperfect is What You Want." This is making me reflect back on the work we've done in our school district this year in creating digital stories, having students blog and working with wikis.

It's always been the case that we want our students to achieve some level of perfection before they publish their work. But, publishing to the walls of the hallway is different than publishing to the world. It's when we start putting our work and our voice on the web that we begin to be even more afraid of the imperfect.

But, imperfect is the beginning of growth isn't it? It gives us a chance to go back and look at our work and reflect on what we can improve on or take stock of how far we've come. The web then is the perfect place for us to begin that journey since it provides a way of archiving the work that we do.

As I think back on the work done last year in my district, I keep thinking about the fact that we've tended to use our technology tools too much for just the end product - the "Project." I worked through this thinking a little bit in a previous post when I was reflecting about how the use of the technology became problematic in some of the "projects" when the inevitable glitches or lack of knowledge on the teachers' part prevented them from moving forward. We waited until the end product needed to be created before we taught students how to use the tools. I think this makes our work more difficult when we're at a point where we need to come to a finish on something, especially those projects that brings us right up to the end of the school year.

So, next year we should begin to embrace imperfection early on and learn together as we go. Imperfect is a part of life and a part of working with technology and imperfect means that we're growing.

The Technology is Getting in Our Way

2009-06-13T20:26:00.005-04:00

Over and over again in the past few weeks, this idea that the technology can get in our way keeps coming up. Let me explain a little further...

This has actually been a really exciting and productive school year. We've had several projects going on incorporating the use of new technologies or software that have been introduced including PhotoStory, VoiceThread, and Diigo to name a few.

But, here's what I'm struggling with right now... It seems that these tools have been incorporated into projects at the point where the students need to be using them to support their learning or for creating the end product. In other words, we're not teaching the tool and refining the skills as we go along with smaller, manageable activities. We're teaching the tool as the learning needs to be occurring or as the project needs to be completed. And, because of this, I'm wondering if, when we wait until that point, the technology is getting in the way.

The tool is never the point, of course, but, the processes and skills needed to use the tool effectively have to be taught. How can we scaffold the teaching of those skills in such a way that, when it's time for that "big" project, our students already have an automaticity with the skills to the point where the technology isn't "in the way?"

Kim Cofino already recognizes this need when she writes:

One of my first tips for any teacher wishing to authentically embed technology into their classroom experience is always to start small. It’s easier to build on a simple, achievable idea, than it is to trim down an all-consuming tech monstrosity.

The automaticity with any tool is what helps us to use that tool to support our learning and to create. This is where procedural knowledge comes in. When what we need to learn involves following a specific set of steps in a process, we need to practice these steps to a level of automaticity then begin to apply the use of those skills to new situations. If we begin with "simple, achievable ideas" first, we can provide the scaffolding of procedural knowledge that will help our students become better users of technology in support of 21st century learning.

Flickr photo by Chrysaora

No News Makes a Difference

2009-05-23T22:13:00.005-04:00

On the way into Panera for breakfast this morning, my husband commented that he'd been listening to something on the radio where they were talking about whether or not we would soon see the end of newspapers all together. Since he's retired, his morning routine begins with coffee and breakfast at Panera along with the morning newspaper. He jokingly said, "What am I going to do when I come for breakfast if there's no newspaper?"

In the last few months, that newspaper that we enjoy together over a leisurely breakfast on the weekends has changed. The number of pages is fewer, the focus of what's printed has changed and frankly, what we pay for it isn't worth the read anymore.

So, in response to my husband's question, I said that maybe places like Panera will have to build devices into some of their tables so that we can get whatever news we want digitally. I can just imagine not having to drag my laptop there but rather being able to just pop up some sort of screen that automatically connects me to the web so I can access the news in any way I'd like. What do you think? Is someone out there already thinking about this?

Create a New Story

2009-02-25T21:14:00.001-05:00

This video on Teachertube is a really cute way of conveying a message using the format of a familiar story by Laura Numeroff, "If You Give a Mouse a Cookie." Enjoy!

A technology specialist took this one step further and made it a project done with first graders narrating. Nicely done!

In the Trenches...

2008-05-18T16:21:00.005-04:00

Holy cow! It's been about a month since I've been here to update my blog. I never have set goals for keeping up the writing and sometimes the thoughts don't come when so many and varied things are going on. So...let's see if I can catch up a bit here with the events of life in the fast lane in just the last month!

Technology Site Visit
Each year, the National School Boards Association sponsor site visits to school district to "showcase innovative technology implementation." We attended a visit in Batavia that was really interesting. We saw the use of interactive whiteboards, document cameras, tablet PC's and we got to hear from district staff about how they've funded, planned for and implemented the use of technology in their classrooms. These were two well spent days. The NSBA did a fine job of organizing the visit and the staff in Batavia were very welcoming to those visiting from New York state, Arizona, Louisiana and elsewhere. Oh yeah...and their music groups entertained us all along the way. Batavia can be very proud of their music programs as well.

Curriculum
Five years ago we began a curriculum process in which we created documents that would guide the teaching, assessment and learning in our classrooms. We've begun to take a look back at Social Studies to review the alignment between the documents and our state curriculum. We've found that we're doing well in that area but we need to provide some additional resources for some of the topics. I've had an active role in this process and it gives me a chance to get a better idea of exactly how Social Studies is being addressed by our teachers and to make some recommendations for technology resources.

Collaborative Projects
For the past three years, we've been involved with the PALS project through our regional school library system. PALS is all about the librarian and the collaborative relationships that can exist with the classroom teacher when we all have access to the data that informs instruction and learning. As an instructional technology specialist, it's a lot of fun to help plan this work with our great library media specialists and classroom teachers. But the best part is the problem solving we're doing together as we work through the collaborative process and the implementation of the technology tools that support all of the projects that are being designed. Our work with collaborative projects continues to grow and expand each year.

Literacy
This year, each grade level has had the opportunity to meet together twice to discuss small group instruction and the use of literacy work stations. As the basis for this, they've talked about the Daily Five (the excellent work of Gail Boushey and Joan Moser) as well as the work of Debbie Diller.

We have an excellent group of teachers who are known as ELA team leaders. They have been charged with helping to facilitate these groups and have done a really spectacular job with it. We have a Blackboard site for Curriculum and Instruction which we're using to support English Language Arts through the sharing of lesson activities and resources. Since I help to maintain that site, I stay involved in this initiative. Again, a great way to stay in touch with teacher needs and a great way to bring the use of technology into the discussions.

Teacher Training
This year, the decision was made to switch our elementary computers from Mac to PC. It's difficult to see this happen for a number of reasons, not the least of which is the fact that we've supported the use of Macs in the district for more than 20 years. Nevertheless, some of our teachers need to learn how to use Word and understand the navigation of a networked PC. In addition, we have computer lab assistants who are learning to use new software tools such as Scholastic Keys. We'll also be working with Google Picasa and PhotoStory 3. These are the kinds of issues occupying a lot of my time not to mention planning for the removal, discard or reallocation of all those computers as we make this switch in stages.

Smartboards
For the past three years, we've slowly been installing Smartboards in our secondary buildings - grades 6-12. This year, for the first time, we're beginning to install them in our elementary buildings as well. Unfortunately, they've just come in - too late in the school year to make arrangements for full training on the use of the boards and the software. So, late this summer, we'll be preparing these teachers to make use of the Smartboard in their instruction to begin the next school year.

Data Analysis
OK...I'm a data geek. We have some cool resources for data in my district and I've been taking all the facts and figures and putting them together for building administrators. I really do like that part of my job but it's really labor and time intensive. And...wouldn't you know it? The data isn't usually available until right about now. First of all, it doesn't come in a timely fashion that allows us to use the data to have an impact on this year's learning. The best we can do is to look at the results, let the next year's teachers for those students see how they did and try to find some patterns in performance that help us to know what kinds of skills in general are in need of remediation.

So, I think that's about it. How about you? Is the end of your school year as busy as the rest of the year or does everything seem to happen at the end? Cheers!

Ahh....Springtime!

2008-04-17T10:52:00.003-04:00

Spring break...we look forward to it every year as a time to open the windows and let nature remove the stale winter air from the house replacing it with the fresh, clean air of springtime. While many of my colleagues take this time to travel to southern climates (which are not always all that warm at this time of year), we usually prefer to spend this time at home doing the things that we can't always get to when we're working.

Here are some reasons that I'm really enjoying this particular Spring Break.

1. A change from the work routine.
The work routine and time schedule is well established in our household. With the kids gone, we're thoroughly entrenched in our morning routine - out the door before 7:00 am; me to travel for 25 minutes and my husband to enjoy his coffee, doughnuts, morning paper and chats with friends before going to his school. We're into our work for the entire day then back home again - me to go exercise at a local establishment, my husband to work a little extra beyond the usual day and then we're both home to enjoy dinner and relax for the evening.

But this vacation, my routine has been to start the day with exercise then come home and do a little work at the computer - reading blogs, thinking about the tasks to be accomplished before the end of the school year and doing some writing. I could easily adopt this routine forever!

2. Time to read and actually process the information I'm getting.
I do a lot of reading both in and out of my job. The reading outside my job is mostly related to reading blogs, checking in on what those folks are connecting their readers to and sometimes, tackling a pile of books that I seem to find interesting enough to purchase but hard to read on a continuous basis. It's been very rare lately that I start a book and then read it all the way to the end. I guess I find that I read about half of a book and get the gist of what the author's thesis is then move on to something else. After all, it's going to be sitting on the shelf waiting for me if I ever have the need to go back to it.

But, what happens, no matter what I'm reading during the school year, is that I feel this rush to move on to something else. I log in to my Bloglines account, click on the latest updates, save some for "future" review, sometimes make a comment but, mostly I just skim through for new information that applies to my own work. Under those conditions, there's not really a lot of time to process what I'm reading - to think about it more deeply, respond more clearly, make clear connections to my previous learning.

So, on this vacation, when I come home from the exercise, I get my breakfast ready, fix a nice cup of tea and go to my computer for my reading and thinking time. I can spend all morning here if I want or I can spend a little time now and a little time later. I'm already feeling lots of cobwebs being swept from my brain as I replace them with the freshness of new ideas.

3. Make new connections for creativity and innovation.
I'm reading a book right now that I've vowed to read from cover to cover. It's called Group Genius: The Creative Power of Collaboration by Keith Sawyer. I've kept a notebook at my side while reading this book.

A couple of quotes I've written down from this reading:
"The engine that drives collaboration is conversation." When make connection between this and my own learning, I think about the blog reading that I do on a daily basis. Whether we all know it or not, we're engaged in collaboration all the time with the end goal being to improve our schools and our students' learning. Blogs provide the conversation [no matter how many comments you're getting]. It's a conversation unlike the face to face discussions that we engage in with our work colleagues. This conversation is free for you to engage in or not - but the engagement in the conversation is where the learning really occurs. Comment on a blog, read what other people's reaction are. Frequently, I've written a comment on a blog then wished I'd stated my position a little more clearly or I've read someone else's point of view and a different side of the issue becomes more apparent than before. All of these interactions, whether we know it or not, contribute to our thinking in some way that may not become apparent for a while and, even when they do resurface, we may have no idea where the connection came from originally.

"Today's pervasive and high-bandwidth communication and social networks give us the potential to be far more creative than human beings have been at any time in history." Both the synchronous and asynchronous contributions that we all make to the "conversation" have an impact on someone else, somewhere whether we know it or not. The tools we have on this day in 2008 are the most powerful we've ever had for communicating with other. It's that ability to communicate our ideas to a wider audience that inspires creative thoughts and new ideas.

The book begins with an explanation about the inner workings of improvisation and groups that perform improvisationally. We've been to see some performances ourselves and are constantly amazed at how these people manage to create something from a single word, song title, or small suggestion. One of the things that Keith Sawyer points out is that these performers frequently use "yes, and..." as they work through the improvisation. "Yes, and..." keeps the performance following and keep conversations evolving. Makes me think about those meetings where someone inevitably begins a sentence with "yes, but..." - stops the conversation from evolving and the creativity from flowing every time doesn't it?

4. Read books that have been stacked up and waiting for a very long time.
My book buying decisions are usually made in at least two ways - by wandering around certain sections of my favorite bookstore or on the recommendations of others. I came across Group Genius via the wandering method. Using this method, I also located The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, From Edison to Google by Nicholas Carr as well as Five Minds for the Future by Howard Gardner. Both of these books are loudly calling out to me, just the titles alone made me buy them and make me want to delve into them - but that would mean I'd have to break my "read it cover to cover" vow. For now, they'll have to wait though because I have to find out how Group Genius ends first.

Image: The Purple Invasion of Spring http://www.flickr.com/photos/bogenfreund/428005735/

Reading Books Online

2008-04-14T09:57:00.002-04:00

A while ago I posted about a site online where you could read children's book before you buy them. Thanks to an anonymous comment to that posting, I've been exploring another site that allows you to read books online - both fiction and non-fiction. As I peruse the site this morning, I notice that there are some great non-fiction books that would support topics that teachers are addressing in content areas so I'll be recommending this to them.

Best Children's Picture Books Online - BigUniverse.com

Excellent resource for fiction and non-fiction books that can be read online. Users may also create their own books or purchase using this site.
tags: literacy

In addition to reading books, you can also easily create your own books. Read the Terms of Use carefully if you sign up for an account and intend to create a book.

Who Made You Think Today?

2008-03-31T19:40:00.001-04:00

It's become my nightly ritual to open my laptop, log in to my Bloglines account and read through the new postings for the day. Sometimes, I even sneak a look during a few minutes break at work. And, I believe I'm addicted because it sure is hard not to see what's going on every day.

It's not just that I want to see if anything at all new is posted. It's that I'm looking for new thinking all the time, new ways of looking at the issues that I deal with, new ways of approaching common themes that come up about technology and instruction. Sometimes, I store what I find in my brain's memory, sometimes I use my Diigo account to bookmark what I've found with a note to help me remember my thinking later. Other times, I comment on a blog or I send a link to that blog posting on to someone else who I know will enjoy the reading.

So...who made me think today? Well, it started with Miguel Guhlin who wrote in reaction to Ryan Bretag's article on the Techlearning blog. Here's what I'm thinking...

Yes! I can raise my hand. I spend time every day trying to enhance my professional practice, trying to learn something new. Does this take place in "a collaborative context with other professionals?" If you count reading the blog, commenting, or posting my own reaction on my blog then...yes! I can raise my other hand. But, I wish I were raising that other hand because those "other professionals" were the colleagues with whom I work each day. This is not always the case and it's where I struggle each day on the job.

Maybe instead of holding on to what I've learned or passing on those links to only a few people, I should instead borrow a little wisdom from Ryan's action items. So, here's what that might look like:

1. Dedicate a portion of each day to send out messages to teachers about what's going on in the web 2.0 world. Providing little tidbits of what's out there and what I've learned from my own involvement in my personal learning network might inspire more of my colleagues to ask questions and begin to raise their awareness of the possibilities that exist.

2. Encourage others to establish a professional learning network. By following step #1, this is possible. By helping teachers to connect to the best resources this is possible.

3. Establish and maintain a virtual professional learning space that fosters shared knowledge and resources. Just creating another blog space to feature what others are writing about or to point to good examples of what teachers are doing with web 2.0 tools could help to establish that space in the professional learning practices of others. Last week, I spent some time with a small group of teachers who learned a little bit about Diigo, Google Docs, and wikis. That was just a quick introduction. The professional learning space can be the follow up to that conversation and many others.

4. Make professional reflection and scholarly work a priority and make it public. We already have some instances of teachers using wikis (mostly in collaboration with their library media specialists) and we have some teachers who have started blogs with their students. Through our professional learning space teachers could engage in conversations about the use of these tools for instruction.

5. Model professional learning for colleagues. There are about 125 teachers with whom I can share what I've been exploring and learning about. Time to get busy and open the doors to a learning network!

Thanks to Miguel for pointing to Ryan's article and thanks to Ryan for making some very bold statements that we should all take to heart.

The more it's used, the more it grows

2008-03-31T13:37:00.001-04:00

"More than any other commodity, information is everywhere. Not only can almost anyone access almost anything at almost no cost, but, unlike corn and wheat, information doesn’t have to be consumed to be used. Quite the opposite: The more it’s used, the more it grows."

Think Better by Tim Hurson ©2008

Using Technology in Teaching is an Act of Declarative Knowledge

2008-03-29T19:21:00.001-04:00

Over the past few years, we've been learning a lot in my district about procedural and declarative knowledge. Do a Google search for these terms and you'll find more information about them. Basically, procedural knowledge is a set of steps in a process. We learn the steps, we practice the steps, we apply them in new situations. In terms of technology training, my main role in my district, I've recognized for a long time that this is how we learn to use computers. We learn where to click and when to make certain things happen. And, once we know the steps about where to click to make certain things happen, we can apply that to other technology tools. But, I've also recognized that, to follow steps and to act as if the procedural knowledge is all we need, pretty much defeats the purpose of using technology as a learning tool.

Declarative knowledge, on the other hand, is facts, generalizations and principles. We need to process declarative knowledge. That's what I'm doing right now. I've been reading through several blog posts this afternoon and now, by writing this post, I'm processing the information that I've read. So, as we process declarative knowledge, we can do that in a number of ways. As mentioned, we can write about it. Blogs and other online tools that allow others to create conversations around what we're thinking about our learning are important in declarative knowledge. So, we gather the information, we process the information in a variety of ways and then we construct a new idea - think Bloom's taxonomy.

This is, I think, where professional development for technology needs to reside. We've spent lots of time and effort in teaching the steps. Now, we need to teach the concept of technology in the teaching and learning process. If educators have the declarative knowledge, the means to process that knowledge and apply a thinking skill so that they can begin to construct new ideas about the use of technology, then I think we will have moved forward in a positive direction.

This blog posting was influenced by several things that I've read this afternoon, some of which are linked below. While you, the reader, may not see all the connections that I've found that's all right. The connections come not only from the reading, but from the background knowledge that I already have in regards to this concept. This is declarative knowledge in action.

Developmentally appropriate technology integration PD - Wes Fryer
Internalization vs. Utilization - Scott Weidig
"If the news is important, it will find me." - Mathew Ingram

It's Because I Read...

2008-03-26T19:41:00.001-04:00

This morning before I went to work I logged into my Bloglines account for a quick check. The first blog posting I read was from Brian Crosby. Today, he was writing about a project that he'll be doing with his 5th graders in collaboration with Lisa Parisi. As I read through the post, I was struck by the number of technology tools that will be employed in the course of this project and how well they fit together to support the intended learning. The project will allow students to collaborate to write original stories based on the illustrations in the book The Mysteries of Harris Burdick by Chris Van Allsburg. Not being familiar with the book, I went right to one of my super-duper librarians this morning to borrow it.

As soon as I read that post, the contents of a workshop that I'll do tomorrow suddenly crystallized. This workshop will be with a group of teachers that I've been working all year. They wanted to take another look at some of the web based tools that I've been talking about all this year. But I've been struggling with how to present these in some sort of meaningful context. That is, until I read Brian's blog this morning. And, it's because I read that this kind of thing often happens to me.

Tomorrow, we'll start by going to Diigo where I've already set up an account and bookmarked Brian's post. This will get us quickly to that post which I'll have the teachers read. [We'll talk about connections that this project might have to our own curriculum. I'd like them to also take a look at the NETS for students - this will expose them to a document that many of them might not have known about otherwise.] Now that we've gotten to the blog, we can learn how to annotate it using the Diigo toolbar.

Next up is Google docs. Brian and Lisa are going to use this tool as a way for their students to write collaboratively. We'll use it to respond to some questions that I've set up that are related to each of the tools we'll work with.

Then it's on to the concept of the wiki. By way of introducing this concept, I have Wikis in Plain English ready to show. Then we can go to Lisa's wiki page which will serve as one example. There are other samples that I've been collecting as well for us to explore. This will give us some food for thought about how wikis can be used effectively in instruction. We'll return to Google docs to record our impressions.

By exploring these tools within the context of this project, I hope that the teachers will be able to see the connections among these tools, and the value they add to learning. I also hope this will provoke some additional conversations about exploring the use of these tools further.

It's because I read that I learn from others and that I'm inspired by others. I can't imagine how I could do my job without access to the ideas and experiences of talented educators around the world. Thanks to all of you!

Collaborate or Perish

2008-03-24T16:25:00.001-04:00

After having read Miguel Guhlin's account of the student who is being charged with academic misconduct, then another article online, as well as a lengthy IM conversation with my daughter this assignment occurs to me:

Students: here is [the assignment] for your homework and it's due by Friday. Here are the expectations...
1. You must arrive at a well thought out conclusion - all answers, if well documented, will be accepted.
2. You must work in collaboration with at least 5 other members of the class. Two of those must be someone you don't regularly work with. Real learning is a social process. So...get out there and learn from and with each other.
3. Record your reflections on the collaboration and the tools you used as well as how you arrive at your conclusion.
4. All of these are required in order for the assignment to be accepted. Good luck!

Winter Fun

2008-02-11T15:07:00.000-05:00

The snow has been falling since before we got up this morning at about 6:00am. My husband's school is closed, but mine, only 20 miles away is open. Not a flake in the air, I've heard, and the sun is shining but it's cold and windy. I chose to play it safe and glad I did. At noon today, the local weather report was that we had gotten 38" of snow. It's now about 3 hours later and I'll bet there's at least 6 more inches on the ground.

I've been working steadily since I got up this morning catching up on my own personal professional development in lots of ways: I've checked Twitter a couple of times, read through the feeds in my Bloglines account, checked the Google news, local news and weather reports and answered any email in my school account.

My newest learning for today is using Picasa for Windows. I've had it downloaded for a while but haven't had a chance to really use it. So, I've been taking pictures of the snow events outside our windows and using those to go through the features of the software. One really nice thing is that Picasa has a button labeled "Blog This!" I selected the picture you see above (not a great one, taken from our living room window), clicked on Blog This and it prompted me to sign in to my Blogger account then upload my photo then begin this post. There are also some other nice features - I can email a selected picture, print in a number of formats, create a collage or run a slideshow from a folder of pictures. Many of these features are also found in iPhoto but I'm trying to learn Picasa since my district is switching from Macs to PCs next year (long story) so I'll need to help teachers learn how to use Picasa instead.

What new learning did you experience today?

Defining 5 W's for Technology Learning

2008-02-11T10:33:00.001-05:00

Jeff Utecht, in his blog post today talks about "Just in Time Learning." Realizing that there are only so many hours in a day, you just can't know all the tools, even if your role is to provide leadership to teachers in the use of technology. We frequently resort to learning something only as the need arises.

But Jeff brings up a good point: not only do we need to know how to use the tools but we need to know why as well - that's the most important point when it comes to working with teachers and supporting student learning. This point is also made in an article from the Techlearning blog by Ryan Bretag.

As I thought about Jeff's point and read through the article on the Techlearning blog, it just felt to me like there needed to be a little more clear definition put on those "W's", especially when working with teachers who are unaware of the many tools available. It also occurred to me that this might be a great topic for some upcoming professional development opportunities in my district.

So...if we go with the old standard 5 W's (+1) and relate them to using technology to empower learning, here are the questions that I've been brainstorming this morning. By no means perfect, but a start at least - they really all go hand in hand.

Who? Who should know about and use this tool? Who will benefit the most from the use of this tool? Students, other students, teachers, other teachers, the global audience?

What? What is the functionality of this tool? What thinking/process skills does it support?
(communication, collaboration, creativity, research/information fluency, critical thinking)

Where? Where in the curriculum does the use of this tool make the most sense and provide the most support for learning? (state, district, ISTE, AASL, etc.)

When? When would I choose to use this tool instead of something else (including paper and pencil)?

Why? Why should teachers be using this tool in our instruction? Why should students use this tools for their learning?

How? How will my pedagogy support the effective use of this tool? How will my pedagogy need to change in order to use this tool effectively?

Those are my thoughts...how about you?

Focusing on Connections

2008-01-13T10:33:00.000-05:00

This morning, after enjoying a few moments with the Sunday paper, I started doing a little cleaning out of my home office space and came upon a piece of paper from probably last year some time. I had drawn a web called Social Software and as I looked it over, trying to recall my thinking at the time, it occurred to me that this might be useful for some work I'm doing right now so I recreated it in Inspiration. After that, I set it aside on my desk, opened up my computer and signed in to Twitter, my email, iChat and Skype. As I read through Twitter I noticed that David Warlick had posted a new article to his blog - "Is Pedagogy Getting in the Way of Learning?". Catchy title...not sure what my focus is for today...love to see what others are thinking early in the morning...why not?...let's go see what's up with David this morning.

As I read through this blog article and the comments, a few things started brewing. First of all, those involved in these "social technologies" such as Twitter, Skype, UStream and whatever else, are strong advocates for their use. After all, they connect us with others, they help us make connections between our knowledge and the knowledge of others, they connect us in ways that are new and exciting and weren't in existence when most of us were in school. These technologies really reflect a lot of what you might read about in books by Eric Jensen about the brain and learning. So, therein, lies my connection between David's post and the piece of paper I found while cleaning. This web that I drew was my attempt to begin understanding how the social technologies intersect with what we know about the learning process. As advocates of social technologies, how many are considering the way that learning takes place and how many are considering that kids, even though they take to these tools easily, really deeply understand the learning aspect of the tools? Are we as educators, being explicit enough about the learning when we advocate for or use these tools with students?

I'm finding, even at the elementary level, that these technologies [and the learning skills they support] need to be taught and the best ways to teach them will only come as a result of good pedagogical practices of teachers. I'm not so sure that technology is the platform as David suggests. We may be thinking about technology in a very limited scope here. When you mention technology to any teacher, I'm sure that the picture in their brains is a computer but computers are not the only technology we possess for helping our students to learn.

The definition that I'm working with right now is this: technology is an innovation that brings about a desired change. [Of course, as educators, that desired change is an improvement in student learning.] With that definition in mind then, pedagogical practices are a technology as are certain instructional strategies, cooperative learning structures, Bloom's taxonomy, habits of mind and many others. As a teacher whose title is "instructional technology specialist", this definition suits me right now. It allows me to approach my role in a different way. Instead of being the one who can figure how ways to use a computer in a lesson, it puts me in a position of being able to work with ALL of the technologies of instruction, seeking to find connections between and among them and helping teachers to understand where the use of a certain computer technology intersects with a particular pedagogical technology to improve student learning.

And...by the way, here's the web that I found and recreated in Inspiration. Now that these connections born from Twitter and the blogosphere have me a little better focused for the morning, I guess I'd better get to work!

Read It Before You Buy It

2007-12-31T16:55:00.000-05:00

Here's something new that came to me today. A website that features picture books that you can read online. This site, LookyBook, is trying to give books a chance to be read that might not otherwise come to consumer's attention - there are also some books here that have been in publication for a long time such as "Corduroy." It's a great concept. With a free account, you can read books, create your own "bookshelf", and comment on the books you've enjoyed. And, if you'd like to promote or share a particular book, you can grab an embed code to feature it on your website or blog as I've done below. If you're an author who would like to have your work placed on this site, you can do that as well.

Right now, children under 13 cannot register at this site but they're releasing a LookyKids version sometime in the future.

This is well worth taking a look at!

No Such Thing as a Technology Activity

2007-12-04T16:37:00.000-05:00

Using Statcounter to track visits to this blog is interesting. I can see where people are from and, if they're doing a search using particular keywords I can see that, too. I've written previously about that feature.

Today, in looking at my Statcounter account, I notice a search for "easy technology activities students can do." My blog is #5 on the list of search results. However, Google isn't taking this searcher directly to the link related to "activities." Instead, it points to my main blog page.

Here's the previous blog post that I wrote about the use of activities versus learning experiences. "Activities" per se don't do a couple of things:
1. They don't accomplish specific learning goals. Any "learning" not connected to a specific goal means that our students don't have much to connect to and to return to in the future.
2. They don't promote thinking. Thinking = Learning When our students have to apply particular thinking skills to content, there is more of a chance that they will retain that information for future use.

"Easy" only gives the teacher the opportunity to say that his/her students are using computers and releases that teacher from connecting the use of technology to thinking and therefore, learning. "Easy" only keeps a student "busy" in front of a machine as a management tool. If we really want to tap in to the power of technology for learning, we need to give our students learning experiences which require them to actually think their way through the information using whatever tool is most appropriate for the task.

Seizing New Opportunities

2007-11-30T20:33:00.000-05:00

The Literacy Workshop began this morning as all the other meetings had. An explanation about the intent, an invitation to share and discuss. They began by talking about struggles with literacy instruction – a time to vent, a time to express frustrations and, everyone who needed to say something had their chance. Then came the prompt to think about what successes were being experienced in instruction – now we’re getting somewhere. First, one idea is shared which inspires a connection or comment from someone else, then a new idea is brought up and more connections and comments are there as well. And so on, and so on. Good, inspiring, thoughtful conversations.

The wrap-up: comments all around about the morning’s collaboration, thoughts about the need to get together as a group more often to continue the conversation, someone jokes about having a “group hug.”

Sounds like all the elements of a learning network doesn’t it? Those of us who engage in blogging, sharing Google docs, creating groups in Google, Yahoo or Ning or gathering instant input from Twitter, experience this type of camaraderie, this conversation and professional development on a daily basis. This face to face encounter among these teachers is only the beginning of what it could be. They want more meetings like this but what they haven’t yet realized is that, they need only 5-10 minutes a day using the right technology tools to help them continue these important conversations, to develop their notions of best practices in literacy instruction, share their ideas, gather input from others who are dealing with the same challenges.

They’ve made some positive steps forward today. So, on Monday…comes a new chance, a new opportunity to help them understand new ways of continuing the conversation.

Personal Learning Networks as Systems

2007-11-15T20:24:00.001-05:00

There certainly are a wide array of tools out there that help us to communicate and collaborate with others. And there are certainly lots of educators out there looking to communicate and collaborate with each other via those tools. How many new tools have you discovered over the last year, month, week? How many of those tools have you integrated into your personal practice? How many blogs do you read? How many of the ideas from those blogs have you integrated into your own thinking?

The tools and the people that we connect with because of those tools become a part of our personal learning network. They all interact together in some way - and I suppose that makes them a system. So, to continue this line of thinking tonight, I'm referencing back to Classroom Instruction That Works. I'm looking at the thinking skills in Chapter 9 about generating and testing hypotheses - specifically the section about systems analysis. So, in doing a systems analysis, we need to understand the purpose of the system, the parts of the system and the function of each part. We also need to figure out how each part affects others.

Starting with this then: the purpose of the personal learning network (our system) is to support our own personal professional development and our continued learning. The system consists of a number of parts: people first of all and the thought and ideas that they generate as a result of all of their experiences, tools such as blogs, wikis, podcasts, multimedia, and communication tools. How does each part affect the others? As we share our thoughts and ideas via the tools, we continually examine points of view and either reject them or integrate them into our continued thinking or personal and professional practice. As we work with new tools we also either reject them or integrate them into our practices. For example, some of us look at Twitter and immediately integrate it while others reject it as not being of value to their own learning network.

Now, we take a part of that system and think (hypothesize) about how a change to that part might affect the rest of the system. Right now, this system consists of some trusted "authorities" that have been evaluated based on my personal learning needs. If any of my trusted sources are missing, I might hypothesize that the depth of my learning could be greatly affected both negatively and positively I suppose - I would either miss that point of view or be ready to move on to new ideas. This system also consists of tools. Many edubloggers have already been analyzing the changes to their learning networks with the addition of Twitter while others have been examining the affects of using other tools such as UStream.tv. So we hypothesize how each tool that we encounter might affect the rest of our already existing system.

Considering a personal learning network as a system puts a different light on it for me. But it also makes me consider how this concept is presented to others who don't yet have this "system" in their own professional practice. We can present our audiences with lots of information about how great it is to have a learning network and how powerful the tools are that help us to develop and maintain that network. However, our biggest challenge is to provide professional development opportunities that immerse our audiences in the information that they need then help them to think their way out - make comparisons among the many different types of tools, construct arguments about the value of one tool over another tool. Without the thinking, it's just information. Period. With the use of thinking skills, we can avoid the effects of "drive by training" and have a more positive affect on the learning of our educator audiences.

A Little Fun with Dylan

2007-11-09T13:28:00.001-05:00

Just having a little fun trying to figure out if I can really synthesize some information into only a few words or a few characters. I wonder what kind of challenge this might create for students?

Activities, Activities....too many Activities

2007-11-05T19:36:00.001-05:00

Many of us went through our training as teachers in a time before there were standards, in a time when curriculum documents sat on shelves in our classrooms if they were there and available at all. It was during that time that we learned to create well designed activities. You know what I mean...that "fun" apple unit that you did in the Fall where you pulled together all sorts of activities - the apple poems, the apple songs, the apple art projects. All of that kept our students very busy doing lots of "stuff" but, what about the learning?

Sitting in a meeting this afternoon I was reminded that we haven't quite broken out of this model even while lots of other things have been changing around us - the development of curriculum documents, training teachers to construct well designed lessons, the plans that brought technology into our classrooms to name a few. There were stories being shared today of students using computers to access a website provided by our reading series that contains a set of...you guessed it...activities. There were recountings of literature circle activities that culminated in....you guessed it...another activity. And I began to wonder, with all that we know about the brain and learning, why we can't break out of that mindset.

It's hard work to teach students to think. You have to lay lots of groundwork before students can independently use thinking skills. It takes modeling, practice and time. Unfortunately, this is what we so often overlook or skim over thinking that all we have to do it "show" our students what to do or give them some sort of activity to do and they'll automatically be able to do it.

To use technology to support learning takes lots of modeling, practice and time but instead we're letting ourselves rely on activities provided by websites that involve no real learning whatsoever. Several teachers have been talking about how they set up stations during their literacy time and they tell me about the great activities that our reading series provides for students online. Finally, while other discussions went forward, I logged onto a computer and got into the website to really take a close look at what's going on there. Having heard the claim that "our students need to practice these skills to get better" from so many teachers I was hoping that what I would see would prove to be worthwhile. But no...just a lot of activities. It goes something like this...Read/listen to the directions, go to the first example, choose the answer and move on to the next example and - oh, yeah - no feedback about wrong answers and you get to see how many points you earned at the end. If you're not truly invested in actually reading the material and thinking about the choices all you have to do is click on each possible answer until you got moved on to the next example. I'd wager that the brightest students invest a little time in looking for the right answer the first time - but then again, the brightest students probably don't need this type of rote activity. And, as for those who struggle with reading - is this kind of thing really going to help them be better readers?

A few weeks back, Jeff Utecht wrote about whether or not we really need standards for technology. I've thought about that quite a bit lately and my answer unequivocally is YES! We most certainly do need standards. If for nothing else than to keep these types of "activities" off the list of things our students can do during the instructional day. But even more than just having a list of standards, we need to have an understanding of how standards work and how they break down into specific benchmarks so that we can move into the realm of using technology less for activities and more for true learning experiences. Wikis, podcasts, blogs, VoiceThreads, SlideShares and the like are really cool - but, if it's not about the learning, if it's just an activity we teach our kids how to do, then it's just a waste of time.

New Tools and the Use of Thinking Skills

2007-10-27T17:07:00.000-04:00

Today,Wes Fryer shares his experiences in writing his doctoral thesis using web tools. So, with a little time on my hands I've given Jump Knowledge a try. Here's a sample: (scroll down a bit if you check this out)

Click here to view an annotation of Weblogg-ed

There are other tools that function similarly to Jump Knowledge. One of them is Diigo. I've been using Diigo for a while. I like that I can highlight whole chunks of text then annotate them. I also like that I can go back to my Diigo account to see the chunks with the annotations associated with them. You can then extract the highlights so that you print a page containing your highlighted chunks of text along with the annotations you made. I think this is perfect for student research and for bloggers as well as for creating conversations among groups that you create in Diigo.

Jump Knowledge, on the other hand, seems to only let you print the annotations alone. Without the text that the annotation refers to, I'm not sure how much I might use this tool. If I'm doing research I find it more beneficial to have the original text together with the annotations - for me, this helps to preserve the text and experience based connections that I found while reading.

As I think about writing this blog post, I think about how we use the power of technology for learning. The use of technology is most powerful when we can use the tools to gather and organize the information we need in order to apply thinking skills. While writing this posting, I've used my blog, my email, Jump Knowledge and Diigo but, in order to really improve my learning about these types of tools, I've also used (in this case a very limited) comparison, which is one of the most effective instructional strategies we can use with students and a skill that helps us to process information in order to retain that knowledge for long periods of time. So, it's not just about the tools - it's about the learning that the tools support and the instructional practices we use.

Reading to Learn

2007-10-14T11:33:00.001-04:00

"I want my students to use the computers in a way that helps them learn," my teacher friend said to me this summer. "Great!" I said. "What do students need to learn in your classroom?"

So began a conversation about technology use in the classroom. This one, like many, led to exploring option together and working on what we thought might be a viable solution.

The solution: teach 3rd graders to use Word to help them with main idea. Here's how it would go...
Find some short articles from Time for Kids at the 2nd to 3rd grade reading level. Copy the article and paste it into Word, develop a question that would lead students to find information from the article that addressed the main idea, teach students to delete any text that did not address the question - in the end leaving them with the question and a list of items from the article that answered the question. This seemed to us to be a great way to get kids to use technology to help them sift through information to remove unneeded pieces of information and keep the necessary information.

But wait! It didn't work! How could such a simple strategy, such an easy way of using technology not work? Well...the technology couldn't possibly make a difference when the real problem was that students just didn't really understand what main idea meant in the first place. Interesting...because for the last two years, when we done the data analysis on our state assessments we've found that main idea and summarizing were areas of weakness from 3rd grade to 5th grade. So, if the kids don't really get it in the first place the technology doesn't matter.

We've been talking about using technology for years with our teachers. Is it possible that our teachers don't really get the concept in the first place? Do they need that concept first before the technology makes a difference? How do we best approach teaching that concept then?

What are we searching for?

2007-10-14T11:13:00.001-04:00

This morning I'm taking a few minutes to go back through my Statcounter account. It's interesting to take a look at the visitor activity but most especially to look at the search terms that people are using. Overwhelmingly, I'm noticing that people are looking for information about how technology affects student learning. And I'm wondering - what blogs are addressing this question well enough to satisfy those who are looking for that information? I'm pretty sure mine isn't - mostly because I'm not a classroom teacher - I'm a technology specialist so I'm reflecting on the issues that are directly affecting me - issues that I'm trying to work through by writing about them.

In the first session I attended at the NECC conference this past summer, the presenter's main purpose was to talk about things we can do with technology that would affect student learning - but not just the technology. She was also talking about the instruction that supports the use of the technology. I'll admit, the presenter was a little difficult to warm up to, but several people got up and walked out. I considered it myself but stayed anyway and was pleasantly surprised at how the session unfolded. I walked away from that session thinking how smart the presenter was in the approach she took to the presentation. But then, I wondered, why didn't other people stay? What were they looking for that they didn't find in this session?

This question of what our teachers and other staff are looking for where technology is concerned has been bothering me a lot lately. I keep thinking they're looking for the "magic bullet" - that one little thing that they can easily implement that will make a difference in student learning. But, there isn't any such thing really -just as there is no "magic bullet" that will help every student to learn to read and read well. We need to try different strategies and different tools until we find what fits our students needs, interests and learning styles. No amount of talking about all the really cool tools out there will help until we as teachers dig in, do our own investigating and try something new supported by well established instructional strategies.

The Unexpected

2007-10-12T19:22:00.001-04:00

The other day I wrote about a workshop I had done and my thoughts about the two kinds of learners that made themselves apparent via the structure of the session. Another thought occurred today and that was that the structure created "the unexpected" for many teachers.

My usual strategy when introducing new tools or teaching teachers how to use tools has been to provide them with materials, complete with screenshots and step-by-step directions, that they'll take with them to use later on. I'd been doing that for many years because teachers had told me they liked having them to go back to. But, in doing so, I may have been creating too much of a crutch for them to lean on. The other problem, if that's what I should call it, is that it really didn't do too much to change teaching practices. Teachers came, they listened, they asked for a repeat of the directions, they practiced a bit and they took the materials with them. But, in the end, many didn't use what they had learned and they haven't internalized some strategies and skills that they can apply with the use of almost any piece of software or technology they encounter.

It reminds me of the kinds of classroom that many have written about - you know...the kind where the teacher teaches, frantically trying to pour all the learning into their student's brains so they can regurgitate it later and never use it again. :) But, it's the unexpected that wakes the brain up, that intrudes on the ho-hum-ness of the same old thing day after day, that gets those neurons firing away in the brain. That's the kind of professional development experiences that I'd like to provide to teachers. They already know a thing or two about the technology - they just need to push beyond that basic level of knowledge (think Bloom's) and get into applying what they know to new things.

Struggling...

2007-10-09T18:27:00.001-04:00

So...you think you've got some cool tools to show to teachers. Tools that will amaze them, excite them, get them thinking. So you show them off, you set up accounts, you give them time to explore, you encourage them to interact with each other to figure out all that each tool has to offer. For some teachers, this is their learning style - just point the way and they'll find the right path. For others this creates panic - "You're not going to show us how to use this?" "We don't even get a tutorial first?"

This was my experience today. It was really great! And...it was really a struggle. I set up four tools: Pageflakes, Writeboard, Google (docs, calendar, iGoogle and maps) and Trailfire. Put together a quick intro using Voice Thread, placed that in a wiki that I had set up as a preview to the session (which no one went to as a preview even though it was in the session description). My VoiceThread intro was all about how the web has changed and it talked about each of the tools one by one giving a little background about how the tool could be used- probably could have done at little more with that whole part of the presentation.

Where did I go wrong? Well, I didn't...not really.... It's just that there were basically two different kinds of teachers in the room and I didn't meet the needs of all of them. So, some walked away muttering about the great tools they saw with one teacher who emailed me later in the afternoon with what he had already created and some walked away talking about needing a lot more support for their learning. Hmmm...I guess lots of kids do that too huh?

The next time...
If I ever get a change to do this again, and I hope I will, I would set up the lab with tools to explore but use the wireless laptops in the library (since it's right next door) to provide a tutorial for those who need it. We have to be able to address those learning styles for teachers just as we do for our students. Today's session was only an hour and a half - which was actually cut short because of the length of the keynote speaker's presentation. Instead of the single session - I'd consider doing a double session instead - spend the first session taking more time to talk about the instructional use of the tools and doing that quick little walk through, then the second session could be devoted to setting up the tools for instruction and for sharing what was accomplished as well as providing that extra support that some teacher learners need.

Fighting Another Curriculum or Maybe Not

2007-09-25T20:16:00.001-04:00

My school district has been working on creating curriculum documents, using them and making revisions for the last four years. We've made some great progress and some good (though sometimes overwhelming) changes have happened. Conversations about technology in the classroom focus on learning goals rather than cool tools.

Because we've spent so much time on the academic curriculum and because so many changes have happened based on this effort, I've not been an advocate of even creating a technology curriculum. Until tonight...

While relaxing and enjoying a little downtime tonight, I came across something on Doug Johnsons' blog that was actually written in January, 2006. He refers to adopting a philosophy of "AND not OR." My focus has been on technology curriculum or no technology curriculum. I've advocated for NO technology curriculum because of all the other things that are currently pressuring our classroom teachers and because my fear was that a technology curriculum would cause us to just simply teach technology for technology's sake and not for the sake of learning. But Doug has reminded me that this doesn't really need to be an "or" situation at all.

Here's what I'm thinking: let's create a technology curriculum but let's write it as something more than just a laundry list of skills that should be accomplished by the end of some particular grade level - the revised NETS comes to mind as a start. Then let's take that curriculum and view our academic curricula through that lens. Perhaps with the addition of a technology curriculum we could really begin to make some headway with technology for learning supported by some more frequent training opportunities for teachers. Many of our teachers are doing good things with technology in our classrooms, some are still dabbling, while others are begging for the opportunity to have the time and the training that would help them move forward. The time is right to think about technology AND!

Routines and Procedures

2007-09-07T20:20:00.001-04:00

Elementary teachers are amazing! Our school year here began this Wednesday and I marvel how, after only three short (and very hot) days the students have already been trained in some regular routines. It almost seems like they never left the building and we're back to business as usual.

As I think about those routines, I think about some parallels between them and the ways we learn to use technology. Here's what typically happens with these simple classroom routines:

Teacher explains what the expectations for performance are (no talking in the hall, walking in a straight line, hanging backpacks up on the appropriate hooks, sharpening pencils before the day begins and whatever else)
Teacher guides students through the appropriate performance step by step
Teacher helps students practice and supports the learning of those individuals having difficulties with the performance
Students are expected to perform independently
Teacher shapes further performances as needed

I think about how that applies to the learning of skills that we teach in technology. We follow the same sort of process whether we're teaching reading strategies or teaching technology skills. If we could take students through the procedural knowledge they need for performing with technology tools with the same intent as we teach them the steps in using a particular reading strategy or walking from the classroom to the cafeteria we could save ourselves so much more time in the long run.

One of the primary teachers I work with recently moved from 1st grade to 2nd grade. She spent a lot of time exploring technology tools with her students and carefully helping them to build some basic skills while in 1st grade. Since she has most of her former 1st graders in her new 2nd grade class she can really see how the development of that procedural knowledge is helping her to move into the use of some more advanced tools with ease.

If we could only take a little extra time at the beginning of the school year to establish technology routines, the payoff throughout the school year would be tremendous. Not only would that benefit the individual teacher but it would set the stage for the next grade level and beyond.

It's the little things...

2007-09-05T20:26:00.001-04:00

I've spent many hours over the past few days doing what we do every year at this time - checking out the little things that may have been missed during summer cleaning/reconnecting/imaging or helping teachers with little things like making sure their projectors are connected properly to computers and in working order. We also strive to get those last minute things out to teachers as quickly as possible, in particular the passwords that will be used by students to gain access to computers. But the most important part of all is the interaction with the teachers and the PR that results from responding to their technology needs as quickly as possible. Those initial connections are priceless.

In 8 short years, we've gone from staff who didn't know how to turn on the computers to staff who can't possibly do without their projectors on the first day of school. This comes, in some part, as a result of training that we've done over the years in a variety of ways - everything from gathering large groups together to meeting with single teachers at their convenience to answer the questions that are burning on their minds at that point in time. One of the most significant things that helped us is the interactions among our teachers - the kind that they've initiated all on their own.

We began our technology infusion with a Model Classroom approach where 2 teachers in every building became the first to get multiple computers in their classrooms. Their role was to share what they were doing within their buildings. From there, we gradually added more computers in two more phases until every classroom was equipped. It wasn't just placing a projector in a classroom or providing them with particular pieces of software that made a teacher want to use it. It was another teacher who had found that really great website or who already had had a projector before them who sat in the staff room talking about using that projector to show the students something on the Internet or demonstrating how they would use a particular piece of software. [I still fondly recall the wonders of trying to arrange 22 first graders around a 12 inch computer screen so that everybody could see how to do something on a computer - a far cry from the projectors we have now!]

From our small beginnings 8 years ago have grown some really great and inspiring instructional uses of technology from many of our teachers with new ideas being developed, implemented or considered all the time. We still struggle with all the issues that other schools and districts struggle with [time and training in particular] and I can spend hours talking about all the things that still frustrate me. But the fact that so many teachers spent so much time making sure that the technology in their rooms was set for the first day has been really inspiring to me. I look forward to continuing to provide any support that I can to our teachers and hope that I can provide the leadership that will help them to achieve their objectives for improving student achievement in our district.

Test Scores and Professional Development

2007-09-03T17:19:00.001-04:00

Two postings are itching at my brain this afternoon. One, from David Warlick, talks about the importance of teacher's getting up to speed with technology in the 21st century. The other, from Karl Fisch, talks about test scores and what we look for in the schools we send our children to. For me, these two postings have many connections.

When Karl talks about test scores as a predictor of school quality I reflect back to the role I'm currently playing in my school district with data analysis. As the person who gathers the test scores, breaks them down by building and then by state standards and performance indicators, I see the trends in performance for all the buildings in which I function as an instructional technology specialist. But, I've also had the opportunity to sit with those teachers and listen to their discussions about various aspects of the test and why their students did or did not handle a particular skill or question well. I hear them talk about the learning goals designated for each question and then their discussion about the teaching strategies they have used or need to use more specifically in order to meet those goals. Our teachers are really focusing on their practice and what they need to adjust in order for students to improve their achievement.

What's missing from the discussion is the role of technology in helping students to develop skills. I'm not just talking about the skills needed to be successful on the test. What the scores are showing us consistently is that our students have difficulty with questions that involve higher level thinking and broad background knowledge. And, what recent history is showing me is that we don't provide enough teacher training in the instructional use of technology. Yes...I still hear the "digital immigrant" excuse - "the kids know more than I do", "I have too many things to do now as it is" and others. But, I don't really see this as an excuse. I see it more as an indicator of our lack of attention to teacher training. If we want to improve student achievement, we need to turn our focus to producing some concrete applications for technology tools supported by strong instructional practices so that teachers begin to see connections between tools, instruction and student learning. The more we work on those connections, the more successful we'll be in bringing our teachers into a more active role in preparing students for the 21st century.

Reading to Learn

2007-08-30T19:30:00.000-04:00

Our work with teachers of elementary students and the students themselves is constantly in development where technology is concerned. Our focus, as the title of this blog suggests, is to empower student learning through the use of technology. We also know that there are certain grade levels where our focus is still on learning to use the technology itself. As their skills develop, these same students will eventually use the technology tools with more concentration on the learning possibilities.

When several of our teachers began to read and implement The Daily Five, we also discussed the role that technology would play in this literacy framework that includes: reading to self, read to someone, listen to reading, spelling/word work and writing. Technology supports these through the use of various pieces of software and web based resources so these teachers have been investigating all the possibilities.

The other day I met with a 3rd grade teacher. Our goal was to take a look at some very specific things she could do to improve the use of technology in her classroom to affect student achievement. We talked about the data analysis work that she'd recently been through, summer workshops and the strategies she'd learned and the technology sources she would have available to her at this grade level. We decided that, in addition to the Daily Five, that she would begin to add a sixth component that we'll be calling Read to Learn which would place an emphasis on working with non-fiction texts.

We want students to understand main idea and details and to sort important from non-important information in non-fiction text. So, we're going to teach students how to use word processing software to do this. We'll begin by taking some short articles from Time for Kids and pasting them into a word processor. Given a question specific to the article and the main idea, we'll model and have students practice eliminating any text that does not answer the question as well as the unimportant words in sentences. By going through this process, students will have created a set of phrases of the most important information. From there, we can begin to help them summarize the articles in a few short sentences.

We've begun some important conversations about using technology to learn here. Using this strategy will help us to better use technology for information. I'm looking forward to working with this teacher and others to continue developing this concept.

Supporting Teachers -Quick and Easy

2007-08-28T19:41:00.001-04:00

One of my goals this year is to try to provide teachers with short tutorials to support the use of a variety of tools for instruction. I hadn't had a chance to use Slideshare for this until tonight. It's really quite easy to use! Here's a sample of a presentation I had created last Spring.

Cycling Our Attention

2007-08-28T16:43:00.001-04:00

I had a great conversation with someone today who was talking about helping his son to locate some information online. The first part of the conversation had to do with teaching students the skills of the research process. He was amazed at his son's difficulty in dealing with the whole search process but that's another topic for later.

Then he remarked about what else was going on while he and his son were working on this task. He said that while they were working, his son was IM'ing three other friends of his. I said something about multitasking and that brain research tells us that we can't truly be multitaskers because the brain can really only pay attention to one thing at a time. Then he said that his son wasn't trying to multitask - it was more like he was cycling through all of the different things he wanted to pay attention to. The son was working with his dad on the research, then when an IM popped up his attention cycled to that and then cycled back to the research and then on to another IM and another and then back again to the research and so on.

I had to stop and think about that process for a minute. With basically 4 different things competing for his attention, this young man (about 14 years old) was able to cycle through each one paying attention to what he needed to each time it was demanded of him. Would he have stuck with just the research task if IM wasn't open on his computer? Probably, because his dad was sitting with him. But he had 4 things competing for his attention and, by all accounts, was able to handle it quite nicely.

How many times do we cycle our attention from one thing to another whether in front of or away from the computer? Are our brains flexible enough to handle all of that ongoing input/output of information? Or does it depend on the level of engagement we have with all of the things that are demanding our attention? I'm not sure what the answers to these questions are but I think this whole notion of cycling our attention is something we all do more than we realize. Are we/our students developing habits that will hinder learning or skills that will support learning?

Instructional Practices

2007-07-21T10:21:00.000-04:00

The more I read through Strategies That Work, the more I'm reminded that everything we do is supported by our instructional practices. The authors provide several examples of lessons that teachers have done with particular pieces of literature, including quotes from students and teachers taken from the lesson itself. And I think about how the practice, the teacher's support of student thinking, the student input back to the class and to the content are all so important. But it's the instructional practice that will make a difference.

Here's how my brain is connecting with this in terms of helping teachers to use technology: if we don't teach the instructional practice as the basis right along with the technology tools, we're not getting anywhere. If I want students to use Diigo, for instance, I have to have built some background knowledge about research, notetaking, etc. as well as supporting their learning through collaboration in order for students to fully understand the power of this particular tool. If I were just to show students how to use Diigo to bookmark, highlight and annotate online material it would mean nothing because there is no real connection to anything that they already have knowledge of to pull from. But, if I spend time helping students understand the research process and I've worked to give them multiple opportunities to collaborate with each other then these experiences would give them some background knowledge to pull from. In order to learn new skills, we require practice. In order to form new understandings, we need to be able to connect prior knowledge to new information. In our rush to use any tools, whether they are so-called Web 2.0 tools or the kinds of tools of the classroom that we hold in our hands, we must have some knowledge of what it takes to learn the skills needed for these tools or order to implement them for lasting results.

That's my thought for today....and I'm stickin' with it!

I'm going to use this one...

2007-07-21T10:10:00.000-04:00

I love quotes! That's why I have a feed so I get 3 or 4 in my Bloglines everyday. Today there was one that I just had to save and I'll be working it into the workshops I'm planning for right now. Here it is:

"The shortest distance between two points is under construction." --Noelie Altito

Sometimes we forget that the learning process is always under construction. It seem especially so when we're talking about technology. Teachers feel that they can't use technology effectively if the students know more than them. Tough position to put yourself in! What about thinking about building connections between your instructional practice and student learning by constructing the best road possible? For some that construction will take a long time and will be filled with many potholes. For others, the work will go smoothly and will take only minor adjustments to perfect. But for all of us, there is a need to keep on working together to find and build the best pathway that we can.

Connecting with Literacy

2007-07-19T20:39:00.000-04:00

For me, preparing to teach a workshop for teachers is sometimes a long process. Beginning with a kernal of an idea, I create a description of the workshop that tends to summarize the concept of what I hope to get across. From there, I begin to look at all the supporting skills that will be needed as well as the background information that participants will need. This is where it gets a little messy. Many times I have so many ideas I'd like to convey but not enough time to do so effectively. So, I then begin to refine my thinking and try to let go of some of the content, no matter how cool I think it is, and focus on the simplest, most effective ideas that teachers could begin with - we can always build onto these ideas later.

Knowing about the technology is the easy part - I spend a lot of time trying to keep as current as I can on what's available online. Our district software is also familiar to me so, no problem there. Let's face it - some of the stuff on the web today is just way too cool! You get sucked into it right away and somewhere in your head you're saying, " Wow! I can't believe you can do this kind of stuff! This is too cool!" But, "cool" doesn't last too long when you're a classroom teacher pressured by the demands of the curriculum, the testing and any number of other concerns.

The real meat of the workshop, for me, really has less to do with the technology and more to do with the pedagogy - what teaching practices or research based strategies are teachers reading about, are currently in publication, or support the work I know is going on in our buildings. Even more importantly, what do I think teachers need to be aware of that they may not be aware of (new publications, new research) or that we can draw upon from their background knowledge in order to make connections to the use of the tools that we'll be addressing in the workshop?

The curriculum - research - professional literature - tools connections are important to me for a number of reasons. My job title used to be under the supervision of the technology department. That put me in a position of knowing a lot about the tools but there was also the larger misconception that I was technical support. More frequently than not, I was being asked for technical support rather than teaching support. In other words, no connection to teaching practice.

Now my job title is under the supervision of the curriculum department. That change is about two years old now. Before that occurred, I had begun to participate in the work of the district to construct better curriculum documents. By doing this, I was able to better understand the curriculum that was being established and could make some suggestions about how technology could support student learning in each of the content areas. The more I can engage a teacher in a discussion about their curriculum and their pedagogical practices the better advantage I have in helping to make that curriculum to technology connection.

As I continue to formulate this workshop, I'm using as my prime resource the second edition of a book titled Strategies That Work: Teaching Comprehension for Undersatnding and Engagement by Stephanie Harvey and Anne Goudvis. I read the first edition so when I saw that a second edition had been published I was interested to see what had changed. They've added lots of new content and I'm finding myself writing lots of notes about technology connections around the margins of the pages. Because I've been involved in data analysis related to our ELA assessments, I'm also seeing this book as a resource for strategies that teachers can use to address some of the needs we've been identifying. Another way for me to connect with the work of our classrooms!

So, I'm going to go back to work on the reading, thinking and planning and will make myself stop to reflect on my work by writing a little bit more.

Podcasting as an Assessment of the Research Process

2007-07-18T19:57:00.000-04:00

I've been thinking about podcasting for a long time - learning the tools needed (easy!) and trying to understand what it takes to really make podcasting a learning experience that makes a difference in instruction (a little more challenging!).

A while back I had worked at looking at what it takes to create a podcast and that brought my thoughts back to Understanding by Design. In their book, Wiggins and McTighe discuss lesson design using what they call a backwards design - establish the learning goals then begin to work on the assessment. Interesting... Most of us were probably taught to design a lesson from beginning to end. The problem became that, by the time you got to wrapping up the lesson, no worthwhile assessment was in sight or the assessment had nothing to do with the learning goals in the first place.

I was brought back to UbD in a conversation with a school librarian who has been thinking about how he could make use of podcasting in his program. As we began to discuss this, the conversation turned to the thought that the podcast itself isn't the point of the learning, it's really the assessment. If we use the UbD idea of lesson planning then, we need to think about the skills that need to be taught or reinforced in order for the student to be successful in completing the assessment of learning. Well...if we want our students to present information orally, then we need to teach them how to find good information in the first place. That information seeking needs some definition - what are we looking for? what questions are going to be addressed? The research process - no matter what the information task is - perfectly supports the process of creating a podcast. So we drew a visual to help ourselves think through this:What do students need to know and be able to do in order to successfully create the podcast? The students will be taken carefully through the skills with the research process.

What's the podcast going to be about? We thought about two things realizing that there are many, many possibilities:
• book reviews (taking a look at the really nicely done book reviews at BookLook as an example)
• content area focus such as Social Studies: take on the role of an early 20th century immigrant and tell us about your decision to come to the US and what your life was like after you settled in this country.

So our information specialist then has his work cut out for him but he also has a very clear focus on the skills that he'll be working to refine with his students. We're also looking at what other technology tools will support this. For example, for task definition and information seeking strategies, we'd like students to know more about using Inspiration for organizing information. For location and access, we'd like students to learn more about using search tools and library subscription sources. Not only do we want them to bookmark what they find for easy access but we're thinking that if we show them how to bookmark using Diigo then we can easily have them gather notes from their sources by using the annotation feature of this tool - this will apply to use of information. Then we'll work with them to synthesize what they've learned - probably taking some wisdom from Tony Vincent's work on Radio WillowWeb and the strategies he shares for structuring podcasts with students. And finally, the podcast! We'd like to employ some learning from 6+1 writing traits and make use of the RAFTS strategy. We'll define a role, give the students an idea of their audience (worldwide and published on the web!), describe and model the format, present the topic and explain the focus, and provide them with the strong verbs that will guide them - describe, explain.

Recent talk among edubloggers has been focused on our thinking about the product as being the end of the learning rather than the beginning of new possibilities, new learning. I believe that, with a project such as this, we'll be forming new thinking about learning with our students and will be giving them a solid foundation for thinking about the creative expression of learning and the process that's involved. This is going to be an exciting project which might also serve to be an advertisement for the possibilities when you collaborate in meaningful ways with your building's true information specialist.

Collaborating with the Most Important Resource in the School

2007-07-18T19:11:00.000-04:00

During the past two years, I've been involved in a project called PALS through our regional library system. What's an instructional technology specialist doing involved in a library system initiative? Learning! Learning! Learning! and, I hope, helping to promote the technology tools that can empower the learning of our students.

We're working toward building collaborative relationships with classroom teachers.
Toni Buzzeo worked with us for two days this week. She helped us learn about the different types of relationships that exist between teachers and librarians and begin to develop ideas for getting through the challenges of making changes in those relationships despite the sometimes impossibly inflexible schedules that exist in our buildings. After some learning with Toni, we worked solidly for a full day and a half building lessons and units designed to tap into the expertise of both the teacher and the librarian to affect student achievement. We've also been privileged to work with David Loertscher who helped us explore better ways to write collaborative plans that take learning to a higher level.

Through data analysis, we're working on helping our librarians understand the kinds of skills that students are being asked to use to perform on state assessments. Until last year, the first group of librarians to be part of the PALS project had not been exposed to any of our state assessments. Many didn't know what the test consisted of and hadn't seen any of the sources we have for looking at the data analysis related to these assessments. (OK...I know all about the evils of state assessments. If there's one thing we can gain from them it's the understanding that we're just not expecting very high level thinking from our students on a regular basis.)

We're working on understanding the relationships between the data we get from assessments, the classroom curriculum and how the library program supports the development of skills.
We've been looking at our data for the past two years in terms of the skills needed to answer questions, where that skill is reflected in our curriculum documents and what strategies we're already using to teach those skills. I think it's a good process. In some of our elementary buildings, our librarians are being included in the data analysis process for the first time ever. This is a step in the right direction. Including our information specialists in on the results of an assessment that's all about dealing with information is a step in the right direction.
One thing that makes this process especially effective is that we have some great curriculum documents in my school district. The state standards are way too broad, the performance indicators get a little bit closer. But, by having the documents that we do, we can really focus in more closely on the skills and we've been able to be more specific at each grade level rather than just a general statement that is supposed to apply to the range from kindergarten through fifth grade.

Two things I would recommend to school librarians if I may be so bold. :)
1. Start asking questions about the testing that's going on locally or at the state level. Ask to see a test booklet, think about the skills that students are being asked to demonstrate and begin to examine your own teaching practices where those skills are concerned. Get somebody to help you understand what the learning gaps are.
2. Read the professional literature about instruction and about the brain and learning. Some recommendations:

Improving Student Achievement One Teacher at a Time - Jane E. Pollock
Classroom Instruction That Works - Marzano, Pickering, Pollock
Teaching with the Brain in Mind - Eric Jensen
Strategies That Work - Harvey and Goudvis

Made to Stick

2007-05-20T19:56:00.000-04:00

It's been a long time since I posted to this blog but I haven't abandoned it - just needed some time to work through some projects in my job and absorb some reading I've been doing. Some bloggers write in their blogs as they read. When I read a book, I still work through it the old-fashioned way. I spend time with it underlining the ideas that click with me and noting any connections that occur to me. I also keep a notebook close by where I write down longer thoughts or connections to return to at a later time.

My latest book just finished this weekend was, Made to Stick by Chip and Dan Heath. For those of us who do professional development or are teacher leaders, this is one book to have on your shelf.

So many ideas are constantly floating around in my head. They coming spilling out quickly when I come across a situation where the ideas might be applied. The problem is that my background knowledge is much different than my colleagues. As a result of reading the book, I'm trying to develop a very simple core message that will filter through all of my work. For many years, I've filtered a lot of decisions about technology uses in the classroom by asking two questions: "So what?" and "Then what?" Both really center on improving student learning. The "so what?" question means this - if we want to improve student learning what difference will this use of technology make in the learning? This is the question that really makes us justify what we're doing both for present learning situations and future needs. The "then what?" question is all about how students are going to use the technology to make a difference. Many times we might send students to a computer to make a web of their ideas or search for a website - but then what? A web of ideas made in Kidspiration or Inspiration could be the start of a unit of study. A class created web placed into a shared folder can be a resource for students to return to often. As they learn new material they can return to the web to confirm or revise the web or to re-organize the ideas. Personal start pages such as Pageflakes or Protopage provide tools for organizing learning and offer tools for outlining a unit of study which can be checked by students as they progress through the learning.

I supposed these two questions are still simple enough to remain my core message as I work with teachers. As a matter of fact, I first began to use these two questions during training with teacher and still have some of them repeat that back to me whenever we discuss new uses of technology. So I guess it was "sticky" enough after all!

RSS Made Really Easy

2007-04-24T18:30:00.000-04:00

Here's a video courtesy of The Common Craft Show that explains RSS in the simplest terms you're likely to find anywhere. From their site:

"The Common Craft show is a new series of videos done in a format we call "paperwork". Our goal is to make technology easier to understand for the less geeky people of the world."

The video is well worth showing to teachers to provide an introduction to the concept of RSS but is also a really clear explanation that would help students understand it in practical terms. They're looking for suggestions for other videos that people might find useful.

Click To Play

There are two types of Internet users, those that use RSS and those that don't. This video is for the people who could save time using RSS, but don't know where to start.

Simple Shifts Make a Difference

2007-04-09T15:18:00.000-04:00

Sometimes, simple shifts make big differences. That's what hit me today when I woke up and it's been running around in my head all day long.

One way that was demonstrated to me was in a conversation with a teacher recently. We had a conversation one day about Pageflakes as a tool for pre-exposure to the learning goals for the day. Typically, this teacher, like many others, would place a list of tasks on the board or on the computer (then projected on a screen) that students must accomplish before the day's learning began. We began to think about using Pageflakes as a tool for pre-exposure to all of the learning planned for the day and she decided to use it for a little while to see what student's reactions would be. When I spoke with her about a week later, she remarked how it was having a positive effect on some of her students who now came into the classroom and saw the entire day's schedule not just a list of tasks to do. Many of these students also have the need to have the day's schedule close at hand to refer back to so they would go to the computer and print out a copy of the schedule and tape it to the corner of their desk. Simple shifts in daily routines had a positive effect on these students. Knowing was what next on the day's agenda provided the big picture that these students needed.

What other simple shifts have gone on that have now become something that we include in our instruction, that can produce powerful results for our students? One simple shift that many teachers made in their classrooms was configuring their desks from rows to clusters. This simple shift meant that students were no longer facing the front or looking at the backs of each others heads. They were now facing each other giving the teacher easier ways of inviting discussion and collaboration. Simple shifts...

Here are a few simple shifts that produce powerful results that I've listed for today - would anyone like to add others? What shifts have you noticed in your own practice? What is the power behind simple shifts? How does intent, value and purpose change as we make simple shifts?
• From full videos that the teacher controlled and showed to the whole class to downloadable video clips that the student can control and access when needed. The impact of this shifts control to the students, enables visual representation of complex concepts and these clips can be embedded into a Word document or PowerPoint for instruction or for individualized use.
• From using crayons, paints, etc. to using software drawing tools to create visual models and simple pictures. The software tools allow many more creative uses to create the visual.
• From surfing the Internet to RSS feeds. When I first started to read blogs, I would go to the links on one person's blog to get to others. Now, I use Bloglines and, at a glance, I know when newly published additions to those blogs have been created. That simple shift has saved lots of time and organized the content that I'm most interested in seeing on a daily basis. In addition to blogs, I also pull in some favorite comics, daily quotes and a feed from a local news station.
• From writing ideas down on pieces of paper to publishing ideas to the web or saving them to my Google docs. Simple shift...now I write on the computer and place it on my blog or create documents that I can access without having to have my own personal computer in front of me. Life was often complicated by trying to find those pieces of paper at just the right time. Now, I just simply log in to find it all.
• From publishing to the teacher to publishing to the world. This provides our students with a much more powerful and far reaching audience. This one simple shift is free and can be implemented in about 10 minutes.
• Talking on the phone to talking over Skype with video - this one simple shift made an impact on my youngest daughter who told me one day that she wished we had done this last year, that being able to see us when we talk makes a difference to her and would have helped during her first year away at college.
• From taking notes on paper when using the web to taking notes using Diigo. This simple shifts means that we collect and categorize our notes all in one place and can extract notes from a group of websites easily. I have to keep catching myself when I start to write things down on paper as I visit sites and remind myself that Diigo makes it easier to find these notes later on.
• The NETS standards shifted from beginning with basic skills to beginning with creativity. That simple shift changes the tone and intent of the document and places it squarely in the 21st century.

That's just a few for now. Please add to the list!

Innovation and Creativity

2007-04-08T10:59:00.000-04:00

Here's a really neat video from YouTube. When you know your craft and your tools intimately, you are able to be creative in how you use them and can produce innovative ways of presenting the use of your tools.

Challenging Issues

2007-03-19T22:09:00.000-04:00

Miguel Guhlin writes today about a posting by Jennifer on her blog My Integrating Technology Journey and he asks how others might respond to the questions that Jennifer was presented with during an interview. OK…I love a challenge! Though this gets long, it was a great opportunity to think through some of these issues tonight.

These questions seemed to fall into some categories so I’ve taken them and regrouped them into the categories that made sense to me. My answers to these questions are in italics at the bottom of each category.

Procedural Knowledge – Skills and Procedures
* You need to spend almost two months teaching how to use all the new tools and English practice will only be possible later in the year?
* How can you be sure that students won’t write dirty stuff (this was the concept they used)
Answer: Yes, I need time in the beginning to make sure that students have the specific skills that will enable them to use the tools efficiently and effectively. Once we have these skills in place, we’ll be better able to use the tools to our advantage for learning. In other words, the procedural knowledge that we build will support the declarative knowledge which is the understanding of the concepts we’re going to learn this year. Since our focus will be on the learning, I’m confident that the students won’t be thinking about writing inappropriate things. However, if they do, we’ll deal with this within the concept of the learning and how such conduct affects the learning of the individual as well as the class.

Instructional Tools/Materials
* What’s a blog?
* What’s a wiki? My question what is the wiki for???
* What’s a podcast? But we can’t incorporate them at school because we don’t have loud speakers.
* What are yahoo groups?
Answer: Blogs, wikis and podcasts are tools that allow us to be creative, collaborative and communicative – all of these are skills needed by our students to be well prepared for the work world of the 21st century. Specifically, a blog is a tool for communication. They provide us with the ability to develop and reflect on our thoughts and ideas and for others to contribute to that development and reflection. Blogs place our written expression in front of a larger audience than what has traditionally been available. Wikis promote collaboration. With their use, students will be able to collaboratively create content and will be able to continually work to edit and refine that content. The wiki, because of its ability to retain the history of those changes, will serve as a way for us to evaluate the progress of our work and our thinking as the content is developed. The podcast serves as a creative means of communicating learning of a concept. In order to create a podcast, students need to have done a tremendous amount of learning and then must be able to summarize their learning in such a way as to communicate this in a brief amount of time. Students collaborating to communicate their learning in creative ways is one way to summarize the use of a podcast instructionally.

Management of the environment
* Kids can never be left alone in the computer lab
* What happens with students that don’t have a computer home how can they follow your subject?
* If computers don’t work what will they do?
* There will be two students per computer-how will they work?
Answer: Management issues need to be taken into consideration whether we’re using technology or not. Can students be left alone (anywhere) if they are engaged in a learning task? The answer here can be yes, especially if we’ve taken the time to build understanding of the goals, use of the tools and expectations for the students’ responsibility in the learning process. The issue of computer access is not just for this class but for our school as a whole. Access at home is an issue that we have no control over and therefore, we will work to be sure that students are working outside the classroom on the planning and organizing needed before we create the product. In other words, they’ll be working through the process prior in order to create the product. Access to computers in school is something we need to consider as a school, as an educational community. In order for our students to be prepared for their future, they need to have access to the tools that they will be using. We need to work closely with our technology department and with all levels of administration to be sure that the 21st century learning tools and resources that our students need are available to them at all times. We need to also consider strategies for expanding access to technology for our students. While two students per computer is not the way that they will work in the real world and it will provide some challenges to us, I’m confident that our students are mature enough or will continually develop the maturity needed to deal with sharing the access. In the meantime, we can work together to plan for expanding access to technology within our school community.

Assessment
* Who manages and reads the blogs?
* You must correct every blog entry
* I want it to be exam oriented not to be a open classroom.
* What about assessment
* You must support the teacher and use technology as a means of allowing the teacher to improve her students practice for International exams
Answer: The “big picture” of instruction in the classroom has four important pieces. Instructional goals, instructional strategies, grading and assessment. The end result of instruction is the construction of new knowledge. Exams will come and go but what our students take with them out into the world is even more important. If we do our jobs well as teachers, we will design assessments that give us a picture of how our students have achieved the instructional goals and use their learning to construct new knowledge. Our students don’t need to be better test takers, they need to be better readers, writers, and learners.

Professionalism
* Plan your classes very well because if not it will all be a waste of time .
Answer: You hired me because of my expertise as an educator, because I have skills that you considered desirable in someone who is to be responsible for the education of children. Planning for student success and continual learning will always be my top priority. It is the most important part of my job whether I place my students in front of a computer or in front of a stack of books. My lessons will be designed to take maximum advantage of the learning situation and the learning tools. No time is ever wasted if the students are engaged in the learning process.

All in a Nutshell

2007-03-15T07:02:00.001-04:00

Nutshell - Easy to-do list, online notes and a search box Annotated

If you used Wallnote before to create notes and task lists you'll love this new version called Nutshell. You can still create notes, you can still create a list of tasks with details. But now, there is an RSS feed to all of your information giving you the ability to use it collaboratively. Nutshell also provides users with a way to search the web while creating your notes and tasks.
- post by quirkytech

Great improvements have been made here - check it out!

Teaching students how to learn - what a concept!

2007-03-08T16:30:00.000-05:00

Brian Crosby notes a really important article recently published in Edutopia titled “Don’t Weigh the Elephant---Feed the Elephant.” (Download the pdf and scatter copies around your school!) The connection here for me has to do with the curriculum work that’s been done in my district over the past four years. Our curriculum consultant, Janie Pollock, came in to the district, not just talking about why we need a well-aligned curriculum but also, what we need to do instructionally to help our students really learn content. Happily, ASCD will soon be publishing a book that Janie wrote about his very thing.

The results of a study noted in this article show that, when students understand what the article calls a “growth model” of intelligence, when it was actually taught to the students, achievement improved and students were more willing to work toward improvement. Wow! What a concept…teach the kids that they really can learn and how to learn!

We’ve been learning a little bit about how a lesson might be designed to take advantage of what we know about the brain, learning and instruction. Students need to know what the goal of the instruction is, we need to help students get ready to connect new learning to what they already know, present the new learning, give them time to apply what they’ve just learned and then, summarize their learning which brings the lesson to a close. This lesson design is totally in sync with what we’ve been reading in the research about the brain and how learning takes place.

I wrote recently about pre-exposure – this is also what we might call using an advance organizer. We have many technology tools that will help students to see the learning goals as a visual representation [PageFlakes, Protopage, Google start page] therefore helping them to see their learning goals for the day/week/month/unit as well as where we’ve connected learning together. For example, we might create an Inspiration diagram showing the major topics, vocabulary and ideas to be taught within a unit of science – BUT leave out the links so that students can create their own connections during the learning. Why not present that at the beginning of a unit? As the unit goes along, the teacher could re-visit this organizer asking students to think about how the ideas, topics and vocabulary link together and create the links on their own copy of the diagram. Hmmm…then, at the end of the unit, have students pull out their Inspiration diagram with all the connections and links they’ve made and have them write about how and why the connections were made – no right answers, just a demonstration of the learning and connections that were going on in their brains during the instruction. Could there be a more powerful way of really getting an accurate and true assessment for learning as well as a look at any misunderstandings that the student may have? If we can only "feed" students with the skills that will help them improve their own achievement, we will become better educators for it.

Responsive Content

2007-03-04T16:24:00.000-05:00

I think we all have our “gurus” – our trusted sources who have information that we need or want or will be able to inform us about new ideas, thoughts, concepts. In 1998, as I was beginning my present position in the technology department, we had a “guru” that we talked about a lot as we developed our plans to implement the use of technology in our classrooms. We were paying attention to one guru in particular because he was encouraging us to think in different ways about how we were going to approach this change that was about to happen in our schools. We needed to read and grapple with new thoughts and ideas about how to help teacher learn these new tools and how to implement them successfully. There weren’t that many people around who were doing that in 1998 so we studied the ideas that we found carefully.

Later, our guru turned to the Internet to publish his ideas and we read more - but they were simply ideas on a page. They weren't the kinds of "living" documents that we have today. And, as time went on, we managed to find our way through our previous confusion and questions and, though the writing was still inspiring, we were developing our own ideas and asking new questions.

As time went on, we found new “gurus” who were writing about technology in the classroom and they were asking newer, more important questions. They were reaching beyond classroom research, classroom experiences and into the business world and the creative world for answers. We don’t talk much about our first guru anymore. Today, I’m thinking about why that is.

Our first guru, while publishing his ideas on the Internet, differs in one important way from our newer gurus - and that was in the use of interactive tools that allow for the exchange and working of ideas. In a blog recently, someone used the term “responsive content.” That’s really a very powerful term. The first guru isn't publishing “responsive content.” If you can’t comment on ideas, edit to update or improve on ideas, or know right away when new writings have been published – you can’t respond in a way that adds value to that work or to your own understandings.

This notion of “responsive content” is powerful, not only for our students, but for our teachers as well. Collaboration among students, collaboration among teachers must have “responsive content” in order to be valuable to us. It’s that ability to respond to each other in such a way that we can add value to the ideas of others or to our own content as a product of interacting with others that makes the tools we have today so important in our work as educators.

Updated Technology Standards

2007-02-23T15:56:00.001-05:00

Greater minds than mine have already begun to deal with the update to the ISTE technology standards but I wanted to process this new information in a way that makes sense to me.

A little background first: my state's technology standards don't even come close to being usable in my opinion and so, for the past 8 years,whenever we talked in my district about technology standards, I always referred to those published by ISTE. The problem, of course, becomes that, as time went by and we gained access to a web based more and more on communication and collaboration, these standards became less and less relevant. So, this morning, I located this new draft and began to think about how it's changed and how that will benefit those of us who might use this document as a reference in conversations with both teachers and administrators.

So...a little comparison is in order~

Verbs used

Old NETS: Words and phrases such as "students use..." and "tools" are prominent implying a focus on learning (possibly) isolated skills

New NETS: The language is related to higher level thinking. Words such as apply, develop, evaluate, transfer are used implying that technology is used beyond just merely learning isolated skills.

Focus

Old NETS: Mostly focused on learning skills to operate tools.

New NETS: Mostly focused on technology as a tool for learning. Brings in work place skills for the 21st century.

Introductory Statement

Old NETS: Refers to the teacher using the document for planning "technology based activities."

New NETS: Refers to the student and what he/she needs to know and be able to do "to learn effectively and live productively in an increasingly digital world..."

Bloom's Levels (revised version)

Old NETS: Lowest levels: remembering, understanding, applying

New NETS: Higher levels of thinking, analyzing, evaluating, creating.

Standards Titles

Old NETS:
1. Basic operations and concepts
2. Social, ethical, and human issues
3. Technology productivity tools
4. Technology communication tools
5. Technology research tools
6. Technology problem-solving and decision-making tools

New NETS:
1. Creating and Innovation
2. Communication and Collaboration
3. Research and Information Retrieval
4. Critical Thinking, Problem-Solving and Decision-Making
5. Digital Citizenship
6. Technology Operations and Concepts

Although I'm just beginning to process these new standards, overall they seem to be a much better indicator of how technology supports learning than the previous document. This is finally a document that I can point teachers to that is more than "one more thing" they have to do in the classroom. It is simply what our students need to know and be able to do in order to survive in a digital world.

Kids, Books and Technology

2007-02-22T16:10:00.000-05:00

Matt Callison in California has created a great site called BookLook. On this site, students are reviewing books in the same style that some of us may remember from Reading Rainbow. His site is well designed and is a wonderful example of what kids can do with technology for the "real world." I'm sure these students used lots of 21st century literacy skills in order to produce these podcasts. Have a look at further information about this site at Progressive Educator.

Pre-Exposure from the Beginning

2007-02-19T19:50:00.000-05:00

As an instructional technology specialist, I'm trying to figure out how instruction works best in the classroom given the students needs and the tools that are currently available to support instruction. Improving student learning and improving my pedagogy are always my goals whether we're using technology or not. The ideas I'm working through tonight are still in progress - just trying to think through the pedagogy, the tools and the application to a classroom situation. So...let's pretend this is a 5th grade classroom for example. Then, let's add to that some of the circumstances under which teachers can/do operate in my district.

There are 6 computers, a printer and an LCD projector in my classroom and I have access to a wireless laptop cart with 15 computers. There are a number of digital cameras in the building as well.

We begin our day with pre-exposure to the plans for learning for the day. Information access is important to our continued learning so the plans for the day have been outlined on our class start page and are projected onto a screen in the classroom as the students walk in. Students know that this is their first stop once they've taken care of their coats.

So what? Can't we do the same thing with notes on the board? Yes! But this serves as an ever present model for how we can organize and manage information and can be accessed by students at home. Tabs can be added to further organize any content. Under each tab we can add widgets as needed for quick access to RSS feeds, podcasts, or websites specific to what we're studying.

One student each day checks the start page where the current temperature is displayed and uses Excel to track the temperature and weather conditions. The temperatures for the week are converted to a bar graph which is saved throughout the year. These bar graphs are used for a number of math skills such as computing the weekly average and then monthly average. The bar graphs are saved so that we can use them to look at the trends in temperature across seasons which contributes to our learning in science when we talk about the earth's atmosphere and how various types of weather occur. Links under the Science tab take students to websites related to weather such as the Weather Channel, Weather Underground, a local TV station's site and other supporting information.

The other 5 computers are assigned to particular students each day and they can use them to check our RSS feeds to places such as the local news, Word of the Day or National Geographic. They can also explore the other tabs on our start page for specific content areas to see what webpages are currently being displayed or to further preview learning for the day such as this picture of the character web that will be done during our reading time today.

Additonal options for class start pages include:
Google
PageFlakes

Pulling Together the Big Picture

2007-02-19T12:08:00.000-05:00

It’s my nature to be able to develop a “big picture” in my mind of anything whether it be the concepts behind the curriculum work done in my district or planning for things at home.

And so, as I think about all the issues that I’ve read about through blogs (and other sources) during the past year, I have this “big picture” in my mind about what technology use in a classroom should look like. Sometimes, it’s just difficult to bring all the words together in such a way that I can explain it. But, I’m going to give it a shot starting right now – have to start pulling all of this together in my mind. It’ll help me to get it all written down then look back at it and reflect some more.

The issues… (well…some of them anyway!)
• how to leverage web 2.0 tools for instruction without just doing the same old stuff with new tools
• attention to pedagogy or the tools – which comes first
• changes that need to happen in the classroom to accommodate the kinds of tools we now have
• changes in our students – they have access to information anytime, anywhere but aren’t experiencing the freedom to use “their” tools in school
• preparing students for a future we can’t predict

OK…I’m definitely not a researcher nor do I even begin to imagine that I have the answers to any of these issues but I love wrestling with them anyway. What keeps coming up to me time and again are some of the things my school district has been working on and discussing over the past 4 years. I’ve done little in the way of “technology training” in that time – not like I had previous to this. What I have done is to spend a lot of time working with our curriculum consultant, talking with teachers about their frustrations, suggesting small ways to keep advancing their uses of technology in support of curriculum, and, more recently, being involved in data analysis to see what issues are coming up as a result of state testing. In addition, I’ve been reading anything I can get my hands on about brain research, instructional strategies, assessment, grading, and the kinds of changes going on in the world around us.

One thing doesn’t change though - The single most important influence on student learning is the teacher. From that, what flows naturally to me is that the teacher must have a good set of instructional strategies that he/she can readily apply and must understand how students learn and under what conditions they learn best. The pedagogy will always reign supreme no matter what the “tools” are and no matter how they change and evolve.

Next time…beginning to delve into Eric Jensen’s framework for planning with the brain in mind. Yes! We have the research and we have the tools!

Beginning with the learner...

2007-02-18T16:59:00.001-05:00

Brian Crosby reflects in his blog on the work of his classroom where he has access to laptops and a multitude of other technology tools including web 2.0 tools. Once again, my mind is back to Eric Jensen's point in his book, Brain Based Learning that we learn best by immersion - and then thinking our way out. I enjoy the transparency of Brian's writing about his classroom and the learning process that he is going through right along with his students.

Jensen's point that brain based learning begins with the learner not the content is especially relevant as we continue to wrestle with schooling in the 21st century as well as with how web 2.0 tools can be used instructionally in ways that are not just taking the old and transposing it on top of something new. What tools does the learner need when immersed in content in order to think his/her way out? What thinking skills provide the best way out of the immersion of content? Jensen outlines 7 stages in brain based planning. As I look through each stage, my mind immediately connects with the web 2.0 tools that would support brain based learning and with the learning I've experienced in working with our curriculum consultant over the past 4 years.

So...I think I'm going to make that my challenge for the next few postings. If you happen upon any ideas that you'd like to expand on, please leave a comment. I love finding connections and being immersed in learning and I'd love some feedback to keep me thinking and reflecting.

Empowered Kids Making a Difference

2007-02-15T18:48:00.000-05:00

In our newspaper this morning, there was a story about a young man who created his own website. This young man, only 18 years old, decided to create this website because he has celiac disease. This made it necessary for him to cut from his diet anything with wheat, barley and malt products. Since he's also vegetarian, this presented unique challenges. So he thought that a site that catered to vegetarians and vegans with celiac disease was something that was needed. He recognized a need, then identified a way to address that need - and for this, he is to be commended.

The site, http://www.vegiac.com, serves as a spot for people to share recipes and discuss other issues involved in living with celiac disease. It's a very professional looking site of which this young man should be very proud. Check it out and see for yourself.

Winter...

2007-02-11T16:36:00.000-05:00

If you've been watching the Weather Channel or CNN (or checking Google news this past week, you've probably seen the view from anywhere within 20 miles of where I live. While we expect snow in the winter, it's been late in coming and now that it has come, it just won't stop. A full week of lake effect snow is unusual even for us. Anyway, it's given me time to keep up with blogs and such, learn a few things about a new digital camera that I have and work with a site I found to do some new things with the pictures I've taken. Here's one example from Scrapblog. It's a little quirky to work with but makes some nice scrapbook-like pages. This would be another nice tool to give even upper elementary kids for digital storytelling. I was going to embed it, but it needs to be bigger than can be displayed here. Instead, here's a link to my scrapblog about winter in Central New York.

Some other sites for working with digital pictures that do a really nice job are:
Picnik
Phixr
Pixenate

Teaching to the Test? Not!

2007-02-09T16:37:00.000-05:00

Spent the day listening to some teachers go through the data analysis process regarding our state ELA assessment and have gone through this process with a number of teachers and grade levels. It's commonly said that we're teaching to the test. I used to think that way too. For many teachers, this test absolutely consumes their time and attention from the first day of school until the test is over at last. The teachers feel enormous amounts of pressure for students to perform since the scores on these tests will eventually be publicly announced.

We've been looking at the kinds of reading passages that are presented, the kinds of questions that are asked, the skills needed to answer the questions, the strategies that we use to teach those skills and where those skills are found in our curriculum. And, I've heard it said that the questions are "bad", "unfair", and "too hard" or "The kids just can't do it." Is that really the case or is our pedagogy just not up to the task? I've begun to change my mind about just what this test is showing us. I believe it's showing us where our pedagogical practices are in need of examining.

The future that our students are moving toward is not the future that many of us were prepared for in our own schooling and the teaching role models that most of us had were models who received their own education in a very different time. Our instructional practices should not be the same practices that were used in the classrooms that we attended.

We don't need to teach to the test and we never did. Instead, we need to teach in a way that will help our students develop the skills needed to sustain and deepen learning. This will take examining our instructional practices and measuring just how well they stand up to the challenges of learning in the 21st century. There are many pieces to this puzzle that we must all put together but who better to work for than for the future of our students?

Improving Learning with Zoho Tools

2007-02-04T11:11:00.000-05:00

I've been going back to the tools at Zoho since last summer when I first found it. I was inspired to go back and do a little more investigating after seeing Will Richardson's post this morning on the new Zoho Notebook. Unfortunately, it's not yet available but a quick email to them let me know that they plan a public beta for March. If you're a classroom teacher, you should really take a look at it - the possibilities are endless!

As an instructional technology specialist working with elementary teachers, we've developed a number of content area related applications to technology over the years. One of them, keeping a daily temperature chart, supports our math program and helps our younger students learn about interpreting data from graphs. We've used Excel, the Graph Club and AppleWorks as different tools for creating these graphs. One of the Zoho tools is a spreadsheet which works just like Excel or any other spreadsheet/graphing program to create graphs from the numerical data collected. These graphs can then be published and made public by embedding them into a webpage or blog such as the one below.

If our students can create such graphs online using any numerical data, then publish it to a webpage/blog, how would that benefit them instructionally? How would it benefit their math skills, their writing skills, their 21st century literacy skills? Even our youngest students could write about sentences to tell about the high and low temperatures for the week or the differences between the high and low. After gathering several of these graphs, students could begin to explain what was happening with changes in temperature over time, what patterns they were observing relative to the time of year/seasons. Older students creating graphs to compare the number of immigrants from particular European countries in the early 1900's, could then explain what they learned about the reasons that some countries show higher levels of immigration than others. Interpreting data is an important skill that students use to think more critically about this type of information. What else could we do with such applications that only require an Internet connection to allow us to create content that is useful for learning?

Neighbors Again...but the Digital Kind This Time

2007-01-31T19:10:00.000-05:00

On Jan. 19th I wrote about how great the neighbors are in my area, especially in a snowstorm which can generally cause some frustrations of one kind or another around here. After going back to read over the post again, I began thinking about neighbors in a more global way.

Some of my best neighbors are the ones who write in their blogs. They're the neighbors who've helped me learn more through their experiences, understand more about technology in the classroom and discover all the new digital tools as they are found. Other neighbors are found through RSS feeds. They're the ones who are surfing the web and bookmarking sites in del.icio.us or Diigo and sharing them with the world.

I've been fiddling around a little bit more with Diigo lately but have been frustrated with their "blog this" feature. I just couldn't get it to work, couldn't figure out why not and couldn't find anything on the website that would help me solve the problem. So, today, one of my "neighbors" wrote a blog posting using that Diigo feature and I wrote a comment asking him to tell me how he had gotten it to work. A few short hours later I checked back on his blog and, sure enough, my good neighbor came through with what ended up being an extremely simple solution.

The best part of this story is that my neighbor, Clay Burrell, is in South Korea and I'm in New York State. In a digital world, our best neighbors are only a few mouse clicks and keystrokes away.

Problem Solving as Professional Development

2007-01-31T18:55:00.001-05:00

Always something to think about from David Warlick
http://davidwarlick.com/2cents/2007/01/30/take-it-away-take-it-all-away/

David Warlick writes yesterday:

I maintain that the best solution to integrating contemporary literacy (digital literacy, information skills, computer skills, whatever you want to call it.) into what and how we teach is simple. It’s dramatic, but its simple — because teachers will do what helps them do their jobs. Teachers will do what solves their problems.

So the solution is to give them a problem.

Take all the paper out of every classroom and replace it with access to digital content, and put digital/networked information tools in the hands of every teacher and learner. Then say, “Now teach! Now Learn!”

Of course you’re going to have to provide them with time for retooling, and a little staff development, but it will happen, when they have little choice.

This would really make an interesting problem to present to teachers as part of a professional development plan to introduce new digital tools to teachers and then help them plan these tools into instruction for the school year wouldn't it? I find that the teachers I work with have a hard time thinking about starting something new once we've gotten into the school year. If they make something new a part of their routine right from the start they're more likely to work on it throughout the year. Hmm...I love new sparks!

Collaborative Learning with Diigo

2007-01-30T18:25:00.000-05:00

This was something I wrote a while ago but saved as a draft. The blogging I refer to with Diigo is still not working for me directly. Diigo has a feature called "blog this" from which you should be able to highlight some text on a site then go directly to creating a blog posting about what you've read. I haven't been able to make it work with Blogger but Will Richardson regularly uses it on his blog (don't know what he uses). Anyway, here's the gist of this idea:

With a little experimentation, some of the features of Diigo have become much more clear to me tonight. I've been reading and commenting to Clay Burrell's blog, Beyond School. He's doing some really interesting things with his students but most importantly, he's working on turning the responsibility for learning over to his students and finding great success with what he's done so far. In going back and forth on this, it became really clear that Diigo has some extremely important possibilities for learning. For example, from a posting that Clay made last night, I added some sticky notes to his posting then made them public. Because he has a Diigo account, he was able to see all my notes. When I go to my Diigo bookmarks, I can see all the notes I made but more importantly, I can pull those notes right into my blog as shown below. What a great tool for students to use as they read and write about their learning! Here's the notes from Clay's posting:

Beyond School

Repeatable moment: With the class, we re-defined our labels--the words "student" and "teacher" were out; "learners" was in. We have to ritually repeat this to make that semantic difference cement itself in our realities.

This is really important to remember in the 21st century. When you label you and yourself "learners" it seems to subconsciously put you into that role and you begin to act within that role. - post by quirkytech

Repeatable moment: A 2:40 teacher-student ratio is more efficient than two 1:20 classrooms. Spivey and I tag-teamed, taking different roles--him delivering verbiage while I drifted amongst students to help troubleshoot, and vice versa. That was a bit of an eye-opener. We should do that more often.

Now it's not "his" students or "your" students - both of you are on the same playing level to all of the students in the room. - post by quirkytech

Laughable: Read my raptures about Diigo in this blog ("researching" tag), see the red-hot enthusiasm. Now see the natives: Virtually highlighting key ideas in virtual texts, bookmarking them, annotating how they might use them in their class wikipedia--though I need to check on how they're tagging--like it's nothing radical at all. Just a tool. (I was tempted to launch into a "When I was your age, we had to use index cards, and walk to and from school for three miles in ten feet of snow, uphill in both directions," etc. Didn't.)

YES! Big LOL! Some people I know are still using index cards - I can't imagine what happens to those poor kids who drop their pile of cards and then have to figure out how to rearrange them. - post by quirkytech

Repeatable moment 2: Spivey and I decided (which of us came up with it, I honestly forget--we probably talked our way to finding it) to reward the best of the four class wikipedias with significant bonus points for the unit grade. This class competition seemed to motivate them.

I'm betting that the bonus points will mean nothing compared to the act of real learning that's going on. - post by quirkytech

So now, what else can we do with Diigo? The sky's the limit! Thanks for the experiment, Clay!

The Power of Neighbors

2007-01-19T16:43:00.000-05:00

In the northeast, we've had an unusual winter. The temperatures have been much milder than usual and we've had very little snow. Just a week ago, we were talking about how the climate change must be affecting plants and animals, not to mention things like the sale of snowblowers, shovels, heavy coats, and people who offer snow plowing services. We've really been lulled into a false perception that we might be spared from winter's wrath all together. Until today...

That's when the husband doesn't get home until after you do and the snowblower doesn't want to start up. And...that's when it's nice to have neighbors. Shoveling about 8 inches of snow (with more coming down steadily) is really no fun even though it's a good exercise in stress relief. :) We have some great neighbors and my husband has bailed them out a number of times when their snowblowers weren't working or when the wives were trying to handle the work on their own. So, it was a welcome relief when a neighbor came to my rescue this afternoon. It's nice to know that neighbors will still be there when you need them most. All the technology in the world can't replace that.

The Power of Audience

2007-01-17T19:16:00.000-05:00

A story on the local news caught my interest tonight: an art class was featured from a local high school. Seems that their task was to take photographs of orphaned children in Honduras (I think...) and turn them into portraits and, in turn, these portraits were going to be sent to the children. Students who were working on this project were interviewed. They talked about what materials they were using to create the portraits. But, the thing that really made me tune in was one student who commented on how knowing that her art work was going to be given to and appreciated by the child (i.e. an audience outside the classroom) made this particular project so much more important to her - important to make the portrait just right. Amazing what the power of audience can do to a student's attitude toward a school project!

Creativity

2007-01-17T17:10:00.000-05:00

Several things have converged for me today that all have come as a result of involving myself in my own personal professional development i.e. reading blogs and writing my own.

Here's what came together:
1. Reading Daniel Pink's "A Whole New Mind" - sorry...can't remember who first wrote about it but because several bloggers were writing about it I started to pay attention. Glad I did!
2. A Difference: Darren Kuropatwa wrote today about a video online where Sir Kenneth Robinson spoke about creativity. Watched the video this morning while getting organized for the day.
3. Revised Bloom's Taxonomy: this one has been swimming around in my head for a while now and I've been reading "A Taxonomy for Learning, Teaching and Assessing" in which the author's discuss the revised taxonomy. This topic was also brought up on a few different blogs.

So with all this reading in mind, a conversation came up regarding what the product would be in a first grade classroom as a result of a "research" project relating to their study of animals. The teacher told me what the students would be doing with all the information she was going to help students work with. I said, "So...factual recall?" And from that simple comment came a greatly expanded conversation about what it meant to "research", why we are compelled to look for information and the possibilities for using that information in ways that allow children to demonstrate knowledge in more creative ways. So, we went from creating a flip book (that would basically allow students to merely write facts they had learned) to asking students to design a zoo in which the animals they had learned about could live and thrive.

We need to have more of these kinds of conversations with each other about creativity. Our usual teacher "script" leads us to think that if kids can tell us what we taught then we've been successful. If that's all we want from our students, they will never be able to achieve what they're truly capable of.

Our Library/Librarian "Script"

2007-01-10T14:41:00.000-05:00

Our librarians are our information specialists. In a world where we can access information on demand, they are a vital link in the instructional process. I see this more and more as I continue on in the project I referred to in the last post.

As we've worked together, we've been struggling with the concept of cooperation versus collaboration. It's really back to what I referred to in a posting on the "scripts" we follow as teachers. In my school district, we're working with a "script" that was in effect 16 years ago when I first joined the district and probably for many years before that. The "script" goes something like this: I'm a teacher and it's my planning time. Our special area classes rotate on a 4 day schedule and today it's my turn to take the kids to library and computer lab. I don't exactly know what they're doing but it's my planning time so I don't have to know." Now, this isn't meant to be derogatory - it's just the script.

However, in the past 16 years the school district has gone from 15 computers in a small room we call the computer lab, to 6 computers in every classroom, a wireless laptop cart in every building and a large lab capable of seating 25 students as well as Internet access in every instructional space in the building. We all know what kind of instructional landscape that can create and what kinds of resources that provides for us. But, one thing it hasn't done is to change the way we view our librarians. For many teachers, the librarian is still the person that we go to when we're getting ready for our [insert your own title] unit so he/she can provide us with additional books to have in the classroom that we'll refer to or put out for the kids to read as they choose. We call this collaborating with the librarian but what we're really doing is just getting the librarian to do what we think librarians do best - help us with books. Their role is so much more in the 21st century and we need to fully explore what that can and must be.

Librarians and Data

2007-01-10T14:22:00.000-05:00

For the past year or so, I've been involved in a project that seeks to develop and sustain collaborative relationships between teachers and librarians. While this may seem like a "duh" to some of us, consider the fact that many schools don't have a flexible schedule in their libraries. For instance, in my school district, the elementary libraries are part of the rotating schedule of special classes (art, music, pe, library/computer lab). In other words, they're teaching the kids when the teachers are having their planning time. And, in addition to that, for many years our libraries and labs were so small that the class had to be split for that special area meaning that, with a 4 day rotation, kids were in either the library or the computer lab only once every 8 days...not very conducive to continuing instruction.

Because of this arrangement, many librarians had never seen the data that comes to us from the state in regards to our state assessments. In fact, many had never seen even a copy of the assessment that's been given to our kids in 4th grade every year since 1999 nor the state standards for English Language Arts. In other words, no connection to the instructional needs of the students.

Now, with a few online databases, we're able to see how each building performs in relation to other buildings, to the district and to the region. One of the librarians who works with 8th grades was able to help the English teachers see that one of the areas of weakness could be traced back to when certain skills were being taught during the year. As we've studied this data together, the librarians have come to see the role that they can play in helping to develop some of the skills so that they approach teachers from the aspect of working together to improve student achievement. The original intent of my participation as an instructional technology specialist was in regards to the data - to learn more about our data sources and to assist our librarians in using the data. Because I'm involved in so many aspects of the curriculum with technology, it has also been to my benefit to better understand the world of school librarians and make connections between them and teachers. It's all been very interesting and every time we meet there are some new "aha" moments for all of us through our conversation and our sharing.

Perspective...

2007-01-09T19:04:00.000-05:00

It's all about perspective....before I started to write on my own blog, the most writing I did was in creating directions for using software, plans for professional development classes or memos to teachers - not very exciting stuff but definitely required for what I do.

So, I had to chuckle to myself today as I sat through a meeting and as I made connections between that content and other things I've been reading or learning about I kept thinking, "I need to blog about that" so my notes were more about my connections than about exactly what was being said. I was really craving the feel of a keyboard beneath my fingers all day long! :)

It's all about perspective isn't it?

Our Classroom "Scripts" -How Does Technology Change Them?

2007-01-07T20:20:00.000-05:00

I picked up a copy of The Teaching Gap by James. W. Stigler and James Hiebert this weekend and began reading through it. Part of the point of the book is in describing patterns of teaching.

Chapter 6 – Teaching is a Cultural Activity – is really sparking some thought tonight although I’m not quite done with it yet…just needed to stop for a minute and process through a few things.

The authors talk about the cultural scripts that we develop and describe these scripts as “generalized knowledge about an event that resides in the heads of participants.” We develop this knowledge through observation and participation in whatever activity it is. In terms of the classroom, we have all been students at some point and therefore, we all have scripts in our heads about how classrooms operate or should operate. It is also pointed out that cultural scripts are learned implicitly not by deliberate study. In other words, if we look at the classroom as a cultural activity we just know how to “do classroom” because we’ve always participated in it in certain ways and the activity is composed of particular features and customary ways of doing things.

To carry this thought over into using technology in the classroom, I’m thinking about where we began with computers. Most of us have probably experienced the use of computers in our classrooms or in our instruction in some form for at least 10 years. Our teaching as a cultural script 10 years ago was still much the same as it had been even 50 years ago. So, the addition of a computer or computers to the classroom had to be integrated into that cultural script. The way it was integrated into that script was to make the computer a place to practice skills or a place for students to go when the other work, that according to the “script” was meant to be done first. 10 years later we haven’t changed the script much have we?

For some teachers, it’s been difficult even to learn to use the computer themselves because it was not already a cultural activity for them. In other words, they hadn’t observed its use nor participated in its use as part of the classroom “script.” We’re still struggling to make technology part of our teaching script because it’s not something that we experienced when we were students ourselves. We’re still operating from the role models who taught us, who taught them and who taught generations before us. In the meantime, our world has changed, the technology has changed, and what our students do outside the classroom with technology has changed. The nature of our technology tools is vastly different than it was 10 years or even 5 years. But the “script” isn’t changing to adapt to what’s happening in the rest of the world.

The authors tell us, “One of the reasons classrooms run as smoothly as they do is that students and teachers have the same script in their heads.” As I think about this quote, the intent of the book and the copyright date, it occurs to me that our students and teachers don’t share the same script any longer. After all, that script hasn’t changed very much over the past 50 or so years has it? If the teacher’s script hasn’t changed but the student’s script has, what impact does that have on our classrooms? Maybe that question isn’t even worth asking because we’re already seeing that the impact is students who are disengaged from their learning, who have access to information and resources in their pockets that they’re banned from using because it doesn’t really fit the “script” that we as teachers are still operating with. Our students are developing their own script about learning through their connections to technology, through their interactions and participation in online communities or maybe we should say online cultures. As these cultures continue to develop, it seems reasonable to expect that the cultural activities will develop as well. We need to catch up!

Recognizing Change and Doing Something About It

2007-01-06T08:46:00.000-05:00

In the northeast, our winters are usually marked by unbearably cold days and non-stop snow. We usually have inches if not feet on the ground by this time of the winter. Not this year... In fact, I walked out of the house two days this week with a sweater on but no coat. Nightline last night had a report about a man whose business in the winter is operating a ski run - but not this winter. He saw the signs in the climate changes last winter and didn't even open up this winter. Instead, he's beginning to re-tool his business in order to run a water park instead. He's changing his operations based on the trends he's observing and the changes he's anticipating. Instead of just closing down for good he's making the changes that will be necessary for him to continue producing income.

This made me think about the same thing in education. Are we adjusting to the trends and the changes that we observe around us? One day, in a computer lab, there were two 4th grade students who came to school with Bluetooth devices, brought them to the computer lab and were talking with each other via these devices during their working time. Of course, the result was to take them to the principal. But, how long will it be before more children bring those devices to school, even 4th graders?

I was asked recently if I'd do a workshop during our upcoming professional development day focusing on a particular piece of software we have on computers in our elementary school. While I think it's a valuable piece of software and I constantly refer to its use as a learning tool for students - it's just not that difficult to use. If someone wants to learn to use it, I could spend 30 minutes with them and they'd be all set. Instead of using that professional development time on piece of software, I'd much rather spend that time helping teachers to understand the trends and changes going on that we may not be aware of. I already know that most of our teachers don't have any idea what a blog is. Honestly, I think the day is coming when we won't be buying software anymore. Instead, all of the tools we need will be found on the web - actually they're already there and will only continue to get better, more efficient, more user friendly. Our biggest challenge will be to keep ourselves informed and connected with each other to share those developments and share the best uses of the tools to help our students become better learners.

Collective Intelligence

2006-12-31T15:38:00.000-05:00

I really love this term, "collective intelligence" that keeps coming up over and over in Don Tapscott's Wikinomics. The knowledge that comes from groups of people communicating and collaborating together can be really powerful as illustrated in this book.

Many years ago - really before we had much technology in my school district - I attended a conference at which one of the presenters said something like, "Our kids live in an interactive world for the first five years of their lives before coming to school. And then, when they come to school, they come to a place that is everything but interactive." That had to be about 8 years ago and it's still true today in some cases. One of our goals must be to make our classrooms places that are more interactive - not just within our own four walls but within the world outside our classrooms. We know that learning is a social process, we know that the brain actively seeks connections between new information and existing knowledge. Our own professional practices can reflect this. As 2007 begins I'm looking forward to seeing how this happens in my own school district in a number of ways: a teacher who is going to begin creating podcasts with his class, a teacher who wants to start a classroom blog to give students opportunities for writing to a wider audience, modeling the use of collaborative tools such as PageFlakes, del.icio.us, a wiki and other tools to help teachers understand how those tools help to develop their "collective knowledge" and improve their own professional practice. The possibilities are exciting!

Reflections on reading...

2006-12-31T15:14:00.000-05:00

One of the greatest advantages to blogging and reading what others are writing about is that I've found out about a number of books that I might not have known about or paid attention to otherwise. This is how I found out about Wikinomics by Don Tapscott. I thought it was being released later in December but just happened to see it on the shelf one day in Barnes and Noble and picked it up to start reading during the holiday break from school.

In Chapter 1, the principles of Wikinomics are discussed---the first one being openness or transparency. This took me back to when I first began to teach 18 years ago - back in the days when there were no standards, state assessments or even a well defined curriculum. The teacher's manual and the guidance of veteran teachers were what drove my teaching early on. "Close the door and teach" was the norm and there weren't very many conversations about professional practice. We were isolationists I suppose - we had our textbooks, our worksheets, and our captive audience. 18 years later we have standards, state assessments and curriculum documents to guide our teaching - how many of our teachers are still isolated in their teaching practices and how many are transparent or open to discussing, examining and changing their teaching?

In the Introduction, Tapscott notes, "Leaders must think differently about how to compete and be profitable, and embrace a new art and science of collaboration we call wikinomics." To bring that thought into the realm of education, I would amend that to say: "Teachers must think differently about how to help students learn to learn and embrace a new art and science of education." Our tools demand it, our world demands it and our students demand it for their own future success.

Teaching and Learning

2006-12-31T11:13:00.000-05:00

Chris Walsh at EpochLearning has a great post titled, Teaching to the Long Tail of the Flat World. In it, he points out that, "21st century students will define “school” as any place that they can learn more than they could on their own." Through the use of RSS feeds, we can have access to any number of resources for learning and for teaching others. Blogging has the potential to be a "school" for many of us who blog as educators. We learn more from each other by reading what others are writing about. Sometimes we learn that we're all in the same situation and trying to think our way through to a solution. Many times I read a blog and discover that someone else's point of view matches my own. Other times, I read something and write a comment back to the author. It's through the variety of subjects addressed in blogs and through the comments that we make to each other that provides our "school" and our ongoing professional development. If I hadn't gotten involved in blogging I don't think my own professional development would have been as rich and rewarding as it has been over the past several months. We are all 21st century students if we just take advantage of the tools that help us to learn and to teach others more effectively.

Podcasting

2006-12-10T15:30:00.000-05:00

With a few teachers interested in podcasting, I've been thinking about the ways that its use connects directly to instruction, information literacy skills, thinking skills and so forth. Using podcasting could just be an electronic book report or it could be a mechanism for taking kids beyond just writing it down and saying it in an audio file. The diagram here reflects some of my thinking. (click on the diagram to make it larger)

The student as a reporter could report on classroom events during the past week or events planned and yet to come.

The student as an historian could tell his/her audience about a particular event from a particular point of view. For instance, as an American historian he/she could tell the audience about the successes of the colonists in winning the Revolutionary War or as an English historian he/she could tell about the challenges that face the British army as they try to quell the revolutionary colonists.

The student as a scientist who has just completed an experiment could discuss the hypothesis, the process and the results including an idea of how or why he/she was successful or not in the experiment.

By placing students in a role, we help them to take off the "student" hat and put on the "expert" hat in ordered to deepen the learning experience. I'm looking forward to seeing how we can make these learning experiences a reality in my school district.

Managing Change

2006-11-30T19:43:00.000-05:00

As I work throughout my school district, I constantly hear teachers reflecting on the changes and new initiatives that have been going on over the past four years and the word most often spoken by them is "overwhelmed." It makes me think about reading one of Eric Jensen's books, Brain Based Learning. Jensen writes that, in order to fully understand a concept, our brains need to be immersed in information and then we need to "think" our way out. I'm thinking this is what's going on with our teachers. They've been immersed in lots of information as we work toward our curriculum and instruction vision but we have yet to "think" our way out of all this information. While there are certain pockets of teachers (maybe they're the right brainers) who have gotten the big picture, others are still struggling with the pieces and how they all fit together. So, what's the best way to think our way through all of those pieces? To truly move forward and to empower all of our teachers, it seems that we need to find our way from the pieces to the whole and we need to do it together. Somehow, I'm confident it will happen...but when and how still remains to be experienced.

Connections to Information Literacy

2006-11-30T19:40:00.000-05:00

Interesting connections to information literacy came up today in conversations that were based on data analysis using the results of our state assessment in English Language Arts. We looked at specific skills that students need to use when answering some of the constructed response questions. This was my first experience in hearing teachers talk about these assessments and how their students had handled the tasks.

One skill that was identified as critical when writing an essay that required the use of information from both a piece of fiction and non-fiction was, “identifies and utilizes specific details from multiple sources.” As the teachers began to discuss student performance in relation to this, it was recognized that this is a skill we use in the research process and it was a great way to enter into a conversation about information literacy. And so, we talked about ways that technology supports this skill. The teachers worked through some strategies for addressing this skill and, very soon, the topic of working with the librarian to provide support in this area came up. Yes! This is just where we need to be…recognizing that information literacy is part of this assessment, part of our literacy instruction and that we have someone beyond the classroom or the literacy staff who can contribute to this instruction.

21st Century Book Reports

2006-11-25T16:29:00.000-05:00

I’ve been getting a del.icio.us feed for the tag “literacy” for that last few days to see what sites are being tagged by others. Interestingly, this afternoon there’s a site that someone tagged and titled as, “More Ideas Than You'll Ever Use for Book Reports.” This leads to three pages of ideas submitted to teachnet.com describing alternatives to the traditional book report. I was immediately struck by how web 2.0 tools and certain pieces of software could be enlisted in carrying out these ideas and would provide even more enrichment to reading particular pieces of literature. Here are a few adapted to web 2.0 – any other ideas?

1. Interview a character from your book. Write at least ten questions that will give the character the opportunity to discuss his/her thoughts and feelings about his/her role in the story. However you choose to present your interview is up to you.
WEB 2.0>> Students post these questions on their blog and other students can answer the questions as if they were the character. This could also be a podcast.

2. Prepare an oral report of 5 minutes. Give a brief summary of the plot and describe the personality of one of the main characters. Be prepared for questions from the class.
WEB 2.0>>The oral report could be recorded as a podcast or this oral report, if recorded, could become a conversation between an interviewer and a character or between two characters in the story.

3. Build a miniature stage setting of a scene in the book. Include a written explanation of the scene. OR Make several sketches of some of the scenes in the book and label them.
WEB 2.0>> Create the stage then take a digital picture and put it into your class Flickr account. If many students in the classroom create several scenes from the book, the scenes could be put into chronological order then annotated.

4. • Write a book review as it would be done for a newspaper.
• Write a feature article (with a headline) that tells the story of the book as it might be found on the front page of a newspaper in the town where the story takes place.
WEB 2.0>>As you study literature throughout the year, a class wiki with pages devoted to each piece of literature would be useful here. Now the wiki can contain these book reviews. I’m sure that, over time, it would be a great way to watch students progress writing in this genre.

5. After reading a book of history or historical fiction, make an illustrated timeline showing events of the story and draw a map showing the location(s) where the story took place.
WEB 2.0 >>Draw pictures then scan them, or create dioramas or other 3 dimensional representations of events and take digital pictures. Upload your photos to Flickr then geotag them with the locations of the events from the story.

6. • Write and perform an original song that tells the story of the book.
•Be a TV or radio reporter, and give a report of a scene from the book as if it is happening "live".
WEB 2.0>>Sounds like some great podcasting to me!

7. Create a newspaper for your book. Summarize the plot in one article, cover the weather in another, do a feature story on one of the more interesting characters in another. Include an editorial and a collection of ads that would be pertinent to the story.
WEB 2.0>>Sounds like a great way to use wiki pages! Front page, business, local news, comics, weather, etc.

8. Draw a comic strip of your favorite scene.
Macs with OS X have a piece of software called “Comic Life” that would really entice students to do this assignment.

9. • Make a mini-book about the story
•Make a flow chart of all the events in the book.
• Make a time line of all the events in the book.
WEB 2.0>>If each of these were created so that they could become individual slides (use PowerPoint and save the slides as TIFF files or use a drawing program such as KidPix where the drawings can be saved as .jpg or .gif), they could be uploaded to Bubbleshare then placed in a student blog or a class wiki.

10. Make a chart of interesting words as a whole class activity. Categorize by parts of speech, colorful language, etc.
WEB 2.0>>Have students illustrate the words using any drawing software that you have available (such as KidPix), save the pictures as .jpg or .gif, upload them to Bubbleshare or some similar service then place the resulting “dictionary” on your class blog or wiki.

Instructional Tools -where's the change?

2006-11-21T11:23:00.000-05:00

I'm wondering today about the technology tools we use for instruction. Having attended a technology conference this week, it's natural to have these questions. Having seen things like Smartboard demos, a session on the use of Blackboard, etc. I'm feeling a little disillusioned with what we consider to be "good" uses of technology. Many sessions are billed as "engaging your students with [fill in the blank]" but what is meant by "engaging" and what are we "engaging" kids in?

We seem to think that if it's "fun" for our students that it will therefore be engaging. Hmmm...I guess there's something to that... Fun in school is surely a way to draw in young kids but what other ways are there to "engage" our students through the use of technology?

We place a Smartboard in a classroom, load up a game from a website and invite the students to come to the board and choose the right answer. We find "activities" where students can drag and drop and project that image to a Smartboard and invite students to come and demonstrate that they know how to drag and drop the correct letters into a word. We locate "interactive" activities such as PowerPoint Jeopardy games, project that image onto a Smartboard and invite the students to play the game. We project a story being read aloud then ask kids questions about the story, check to see which questions we answered incorrectly, go back to the story and look for the part of the story that would answer those questions. Are the students "engaged?" I suppose they might be...for a while...but what make the Smartboard a better tool? What's the difference between putting the image on the Smartboard and sending the kids to the computer (alone or with a partner) to do the same thing or connecting a projector to your computer and working from the computer to do the same things? Using the instructional design that was demonstrated, only one student can come to the Smartboard at any one time just as only one student can be called on to answer a teacher's question at one time. What makes the difference or what do teachers perceive as making the difference? Are we back to the coolness factor of the technology? Is the technology changing the pedagogy? Impacting student learning? I just don't see anything different happening here - I don't see the technology provoking any change in instruction.

Learning and Thinking

2006-11-12T15:20:00.000-05:00

Eric Jensen has a great book titled, "Brain Based Learning" published in 2000. I'm going back to his book this afternoon in thinking about some experiences over the last few months. In Chapter 21 of the book, Jensen discusses lesson planning "with the brain in mind." He points out that, "We learn best by immersion; by jumping into the fray, then thinking our way out of it."

We've been working with a curriculum consultant who has spent many hours with our teachers talking about a schema for lesson planning that's based on brain research. But, over time, it has seemed to some that we've been covering the same material over and over again with a few different twists each time. As I listened to each presentation, I kept picking up on the "twists" that trigger new thinking while others were saying that they'd heard this information already.

This summer, we returned once again, to a discussion of the lesson schema but this time something different happened. We went back to what we had learned previously, then began to talk about the lesson schema as a "system" and what would happen if any part of that system broke down or didn't happen. This was a whole new way of thinking...this was "thinking our way out of" the wealth of information that we had been gathering over time. The conversation among the teachers was amazing and very insightful!

In talking to the consultant later and in reflecting on the presentation, I was brought back to Eric Jensen's point: these teachers needed the time and the exposure to lots of information before they could think their way out of it and it wasn't until this past summer that this could happen.

What about our students? There has been a lot written about how we should encourage and teach critical thinking skills but not much mention about how much information we need in order to "think our way out of it." How many teachers continue to rely on the readily accessible textbook as their sole source of information and is it enough information to truly "think" about? What makes it so difficult for them to use alternate resources so that students are learning from a variety of sources?

As we talk about the use of such tools as blogs, wikis, podcasts and others, I think it will be especially important to keep in mind our pedagogy, and the amount of time for our students to access and gather information before they blog, before they contribute to a wiki, before they create a podcast so that they can "think" their way to better uses of those tools. Eric Jensen reminds us that we need to ask, "What is there to learn and, how can it best be learned?"

A new web?

2006-11-12T11:45:00.000-05:00

Buried on page 15 of our local Sunday paper, is an article about the creation of Web 3.0 that comes from the New York Times News Service. The article, also online, describes an effort to create the kind of web that provides us with a complete package of information as a result of our search rather than a laundry list of possible options. Quoted in the article is Nova Spivak, founder of Radar Networks, who says, "We are going from a Web of connected documents to a Web of connected data." Some of the possibilities cited in the article include vacation planning, financial planning, and college selection.

In education, what are the possibilities? First of all, it sounds like my search time would be shorter and more precise in terms of finding the exact data I'm looking for rather than just a lot of possibilities of related information.Let 's say that I want to connect with others who are doing work in the area of improving literacy skills. I could imagine that Web 3.0 gives me more precise and better probability of finding other teachers in similar types of schools who are working on the same thing, or lists of research articles, data from schools that have made improvements and how they've accomplished their goals.

What about a Social Studies unit on the Revolutionary War? Couldn't "a web of connected data" then more easily give me both sides of the story - the American viewpoint versus the British viewpoint? Could our searches more effectively weed out the junk from the really good stuff? Wouldn't that make our lives in the classroom so much easier?

A simple Google search will reveal a long list of other articles and blogs that might be worth holding onto as this idea develops.

Conduits and Obstacles

2006-11-10T17:06:00.000-05:00

In a conversation recently, a friend made a comment about someone else being an obstacle to success rather than a conduit. How does that apply to classroom uses of technology? Are the ways we use technology designed to keep students occupied (obstacles) or are they designed to help students experience growth in their learning (conduit)?

While watching a presentation done by a vendor the other day showing access to online sources that support their printed materials, I was hearing positive comments from others around me and wondering whether they were looking at these sources as conduits to future/further learning. When we provide students with access to "technology" designed purely to occupy their time, we're merely providing what, in the end, will prove to be an obstacle to learning.

The challenge for us as educators is to examine our practices in terms of being either obstacles or conduits to the learning of our students. The pressures of state assessments would subside if we could think in those terms rather than in terms of the amount of content to be covered in order to take a test whose results won't be known for many months.

Technology and Pedagogy - connections, connections

2006-10-08T19:11:00.000-04:00

There was a very brief discussion among a few bloggers a while back around the question of what we consider first when using instructional technology: the technology or our pedagogy. At the time, I really had to think about that although I had the sense that pedagogy is the most important starting point and that was confirmed for me again tonight.

I'm getting ready to do a workshop that I titled, "Digital Tools in the Literacy Block" and to prepare I've been going back to two books that have been discussed and used by our staff recently: Strategies That Work by Stephanie Harvey and Anne Goudvis and The Daily Five by Gail Boushey and Joan Moser. In both of those books, the authors emphasize helping students to learn strategies for independent learning.

That makes me think about a posting I wrote about teaching for a time when we're not there. These authors are really dealing with the same thing. In both books, the authors discuss research done in the area of the gradual release of responsibility approach - releasing responsibility for learning to the learner with the goal of achieving independence in the use of reading strategies. I find so many connections with that to instructional technology.

The authors of both books advocate that students will learn independence if the teacher models the strategy, thinks aloud while using the strategy and provides students with time to practice using the strategy.

Couldn't we teach Internet Safety, use of blogs and wikis, podcasting, and so many other technology tools and applications using this same pedagogy? Don't we want students to use particular strategies when searching, strategies when blogging, strategies using a word processing application, a graphic organizer application, a presentation application? Shouldn't we be modeling, thinking aloud and giving students time to use these tools?

This workshop will not be about providing teachers with a checklist of items such as websites, software and worksheets that students can do when they read something online. It needs to be as much about the pedagogy as it is about the technology and the strategy for using those tools. I'd better get back to work!

Things that make you say: hmmmm...

2006-10-08T18:15:00.000-04:00

My husband received an email last week from a national organization of which he's been a member for 28 years. The email was proudly announcing that the organization now had a place online to which the members could go to register and pay dues. While that's all well and good, the thing my husband was laughing about the most was the fact that the organization provided him with a list of steps for accessing this site. What's wrong with that you ask? The list had 23 steps to follow! I asked him how he thought the organization was going to be successful in launching this service if it took 23 steps that had to be defined for the user.

It made me wonder about the intuitive nature of the technology. If a user enters this site and can't make their way around without a list of these 23 steps, then what good is the site going to be? I've been able to create a blog and several wikis in less time than it would take to even read these 23 steps.

We'll have to keep an eye on this site and just see what happens...

Gotta love Panera!

2006-10-01T17:49:00.000-04:00

This blog posting is just for fun...
While having some maintenance done on my car yesterday morning, I walked to a nearby Panera armed with books and note paper to eat breakfast and get a little work done during my hour and a half wait time. I found a nice little table, sat down, pulled out my materials, and proceeded to eat and work. Panera provides such a warm, relaxing atmosphere where no one was rushing me to leave and I really got a lot done. Sometimes home is a lot of distractions of other things that need to be done. Yesterday, Panera was just what I needed!

The leaders we choose...

2006-09-30T16:32:00.000-04:00

Who are your "leaders?" I'm not talking about your building administrator, your superintendent, your department chairman, your team leader - I'm talking about others around you on whom you rely for information, advice, assistance...

I had two separate experiences with this during the past week. As I think back over events, I'm wondering how the "leader" you choose to pay attention to has an impact on your own growth and independent thinking.

In one instance, a person has taken the responsibility independent of his/her position in a school building to be a leader and advisor and to encourage others to be dependent on him/her but doesn't have enough information him/herself to be reliable, accurate or really even helpful to those who depend on that person - and, hasn't asked the questions that are needed to gather the accurate information that others are looking for. (sorry, that's a mouthful...) So, why do people rely on or listen to this person? Is it because we have something in our nature that wants to believe whatever we hear first for lack of any other information? Or is it that we just don't have the time or inclination to look for any other sources of information? Are we following the person with the loudest voice? How does relying on this type of "leader" impact on you and others around you? What encourages others to follow this person?

In another instance, a person has taken on the responsibility to be a leader but is armed with a wide variety of knowledge, background and experience in the very subject for which he/she is leading. Some people will choose to say that's not for them, I can't embrace those ideas whether they're based in knowledge and experience or not. What is it about this second person that encourages some to follow and others to choose another path?

As a reader of this, you may have no idea what I'm talking about and that's okay. I'm really just writing this to work through some of my thinking. I'm not comfortable writing specific details of the positions that these two people hold. I'm just trying to deal with the idea of how we know when to trust someone as a leader. Even those who appear to have accurate information may not but if they're the only or the loudest voice in the room - who would you believe?

How does one, armed with knowledge, background and experience, become a trusted leader amid the louder voices out there?

Self directed professional development

2006-09-27T05:28:00.000-04:00

There are too many days of coming home from work feeling defeated, discouraged and tired. So when a day comes along filled with the kinds of experiences that evoke feelings totally opposite from that, you just have to celebrate them.

The day ended yesterday with a meeting of teachers after school who decided, completely on their own, to take their professional development needs into their own hands. This group of teachers is working on sorting through strategies for developing literacy skills in their students. They already know and are committed to the fact that their days are filled with attending to their instructional duties and to the needs of their students. But they all have this desire to work on the structure of their newly instituted 2 hour literacy block in such a way that they help their students develop independence and responsibility for their own learning during this time.

And so they met...goals in mind, planning how they will each take an active role in the group, deciding on dates for the rest of the school year, constructing the agenda for their next meeting - all in the name of learning from each other and working together. As they worked through their thoughts, every voice around that table was heard and every individual contributed their thoughts, their ideas and also the challenges that they're trying to work through to implement strategies that are new to them and to their students. It was just simply the best professional moment to have experienced!

These teachers are really learning what is for many of them a new concept and for others, a more deliberate way of working with and thinking through some strategies they were already using in a less structured way. In order to do this, they're gathering lots of information from professional literature (books), from their colleagues and from their students. They're working to construct their knowledge. In the 20th century, this same group of teachers could have had this same meeting and accomplished their goals just the same. But here's what will make the difference: they've made a conscious decision to use a blog as a tool for interaction. So, as they meet, someone will take notes which will get posted to their blog and they'll plan an agenda for their next meeting which will also be posted there. Can't make a meeting? Read the blog. Have a question burning in your mind that needs an answer now? Post to the blog. Looking for new ideas or insights from your colleagues? Check out the blog. Just learning about this group? Go back through the archives to see what they've been working on. Reading someone's post and want to share your response with everyone in the group? Comment to the blog. This one simple tool alone has the potential to make such a difference to these teachers professionally and to the instruction in their classrooms.

How else can they use technology to support their learning? A few thoughts:

• Flickr to post pictures of their classroom management tools, instructional posters, etc. Why just talk about it when you can post a picture and annotate it? The visuals are so much better than words alone.
•Wikis - meeting notes could go to a wiki instead of the blog so that, if one person takes notes and puts them on the wiki, others can add their "2 cents" to enrich and refine the description of thier work together.
• Podcasting - we could consider recording the meetings. Can't make the meeting? No time to read the blog? Download the file to your mp3 player and listen while you walk, drive, or make dinner. (Learning can occur through so many modalities)

This is empowering teacher learning - exciting stuff! More thoughts and ideas to come...

technorati tags:instruction, strategies, learning

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Teaching for a time when we're not around

2006-09-24T08:27:00.000-04:00

I was in a teacher's classroom last week - invited in for a very non-technology purpose: viewing the development of independent skills in young children related to literacy instruction. When I walked in, the teacher gave me a quick synopsis of what they were going to be doing and what she'd done so far. Then she handed me a book called "Rules in School" which is all about how and why we develop rules in school with children and creating logical consequences when rules aren't followed.

As she began her morning meeting, I thumbed through the book (then quickly went to the phone and ordered a copy for myself). I wrote down several things as I skimmed the book, but one quote keeps coming back to me: "We are teaching for the time when we will not be there." While this may seem a little too simplistic to some, it occurs to me that we can apply this in more ways than just creating rules.

"We are teaching for the time when we will not be there" brings up a list of various examples in my mind:

parenting
driving a car
teaching teachers to use technology/software/tools
helping students understand the tools of the web/the tools of software
navigating the Internet / Internet safety

In terms of the work I do in my district, I'm particularly thinking about all of the technology applications of "teaching for a time when I'm not around."

• How do we introduce/teach new software to students in a way that will help them use it independently and/or apply that information to new pieces of software they might use (when I'm not around)?

• How do we teach teachers about technology use in such a way that it's used to help students learn and not just as an electronic worksheet (when I'm not around)?

• How do we teach students to navigate an environment that really has no rules (the web) safely and securely (when I'm not around)?

• How do we teach students to think their way out of all the information that's available to them (when I'm not around)?

We're going to really need to think about our pedagogy, about how we facilitate learning rather than direct learning in order to fully prepare our students for our rapidly changing world and for a time when we're not around.

technorati tags:technology, instruction

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Blogging Curiousity

2006-09-17T15:30:00.000-04:00

There is a clustrmap on my blog that I placed there based on some of the other blogs where I had first seen them. I thought it looked like a cool tool and was interested in whether or not anyone was hitting my blog.

Now that I've seen my clustrmap grow and change over just the last month, I'm curious. My map shows me generally where you are in the world and the data tells me how many times my blog has been visited but that's not the kind of specific information I'd like to gather.

I'd like to be able to talk to teachers about blogging and show them the results of my blogging since August 10, 2006 to give them an idea of the audience that's possible with this type of tool. So, I'm keeping this message at the top of my blog for a little while and asking any readers of this blog, even if this the first and possibly only time you'll be here, to do this:

Please leave a comment to this posting letting me know exactly where you're located (country, state, province, city), how you came to find this blog in the first place and what your job is. Thanks for helping me with this. I'll see what I get after about two weeks and then post the results here for anyone else who might find it interesting or useful to you.

Teaching Students to Think

2006-09-10T16:00:00.000-04:00

I watched Mona Lisa Smile this afternoon thinking it would just be a diversion from some other work I should have been doing. Instead, it got me back to work thinking about instruction and thinking skills. At the beginning of the movie, Katherine Watson, meets with her art history class at Wellsley for the first time. She informs her students that they would be learning using a particular syllabus (not hers) and begins to show them slides (the technology of the time) of art thinking that she's giving her students brand new information (and possibly teaching as others expect her to teach). The students begin to name each piece of art, its place in history and something about the technique used by the artist. Immediately Katherine sees that the textbook is going to be of no use to her. The students have read it in its entirety and have the art pieces and their expected responses memorized - most likely, as they'd been taught to do in the past.

The second class begins much differently. This time, Katherine begins her class (using her own syllabus) with a slide showing a piece of art that's not in the textbook and the students are surprised to discover that they don't know what they're seeing. She asks simple questions, "Is it art?" "How do you know it's art?" "Who determines what's art and what's not?" Her students are suddenly empowered to think!

Katherine's technology was quite simple: she used images and she asked her students to think about what they were seeing, analyze it, defend their ideas about it. What might happen in 21st century classrooms if we used the technology of our time to empower students to think beyond what they can find in a textbook, beyond simple recall questions? We have the tools, we have the research based instructional strategies, we have learning standards and benchmarks. Now, all we need to do is put it all together. I'll bet Katherine Watson could have...

School Laptop Programs in the News

2006-09-06T18:56:00.000-04:00

An article that appeared recently from a writer for the Wall Street Journal referred to laptop programs in schools and the experiences of one parent in regards to what her child was actually doing with the laptop. As an instructional specialist and a technology advocate, I have few questions/concerns on my mind after reading this:

The article doesn't tell us anything about the school district - was adequate training provided to the teachers or are the teachers using laptops to do the same old teaching that they did last year? (and the year before, and the year before...)
This parent who was probably educated in the latter part of the 20th century was most likely taught by teachers trained during the mid-20th century so, based on her experiences and role models, what type of education/teaching style is she expecting in the early 21st century?
The article refers to the "laptop program" as a catalyst to engage and train students - but I thought that research has clearly shown that the teacher has the greatest affect on student achievement. So, if the teacher hasn't changed his/her teaching practices, no amount of hardware in the classroom and no new "program" is going to have any positive effect.
What's the curriculum that's supporting these laptops "programs?" Has that changed at all in the last 5-10 years?
Larry Cuban makes a good point - what's the true cost of 1:1 laptop initiatives and have school districts really prepared themselves for that or are we back to "the promise of technology" in our classrooms? That's what we were hearing about in 1995 and we seem to still believe that technology alone is going to change everything.

I'm sure we're going to continue to hear much about 1:1 laptop initiatives and we're going to get all the negatives until some school district somewhere does it well and shows results. I know there are successful programs out there and I hope we'll begin to hear more about their results. And I'll bet the results will be attributed to something other than the fact that a child had a laptop because we know there's a lot more to it than just that.

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Spending less on technology; buying more books instead

2006-09-04T19:13:00.000-04:00

Wes Fryer (Moving at the Speed of Creativity) recently posted a podcast of Dr. Stephen Krashen
speaking at a conference in Oklahoma. As someone who works with technology in the classroom, it's easy to key in on one of Dr. Krashen's conclusions: that we should start spending less on technology and spend that money on books instead. Given his data regarding the number of books per pupil in some school districts and the research on the effect of school libraries on student achievement, I would tend to agree with his conclusion. Under those circumstances, more books and more librarians are crucial.

We have no conclusive evidence that the use of computers has an effect on learning. But we do have research that clearly demonstrates that the most important factor in student achievement is the teacher. And, we do have research that shows us that particular instructional strategies have a positive effect on student learning. When teachers begin to use those 21st century strategies effectively along with 21st century tools, maybe we'll see the evidence we're looking for.

technorati tags:instructionalstrategies

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The Ways We Talk about Technology

2006-08-29T20:32:00.000-04:00

I read a number of blogs daily for my own personal professional development more than for any other reason. So, it was interesting today that David Warlick wrote about the word "integration." That word and the term "integrating technology" have been bothering me for a long time. When we talked about integrated units many years ago, we talked about bringing together various, hopefully related, pieces. So, in Social Studies an integrated unit on westward expansion might have meant that we "integrated" music by singing songs from the period, or we "integrated" art by designing covered wagons, or we "integrated" math by figuring out the miles that were traveled. The problem with that was that we were just pulling together various pieces that may or may not have been connected in some way and we weren't really planning for the learning or understanding of an important concept. So the music, the art and the math really had no impact on achievement.

Instead of integrating technology, we should begin first with our learning goals, choose the tools and resources that will support that learning. So, if we want our students to be better writers, we might use blogs because they can provide our students with authentic and wider audiences than we can provide within the four walls of a classroom. If we want our students to improve their speaking skills then podcasting could give students an outlet for working on those skills. Standing up in front of a classroom giving a book report can't even begin to approach that kind of experience.

We have the tools and now, many of them are free and online - we just need to connect them more purposefully with student learning and achievement.

Blogging Humor

2006-08-29T06:47:00.000-04:00

Interesting...web 2.0 is even catching on with comic writers.
Non Sequitur on Yahoo News
Enjoy!

Blogging

2006-08-27T11:37:00.000-04:00

Blogging is participation in conversation - only the conversation isn't happening between two or three people sitting around a table together anymore. The conversation goes on among a diverse group of people located all over the world sitting at a computer, typing, thinking, deleting, reworking the words and typing some more. People are blogging about everything imaginable and almost anyone can join in.

As my own blog has developed, I've been thinking about the experience and what it's meant to me personally and educationally. For me, blogging equals the development of "voice". It is about thinking out loud and communicating with others. It gives the writer a chance to express opinions, beliefs, ideas and insights. It can be a summarizing tool, it can be used to synthesize. Sometimes blogging is responding to someone else's thoughts, beliefs, ideas and insights.

When we begin to teach our students some new skill, we model it for them in a variety of ways. In learning what it means to be a blogger, I turned to a number of edublogger models and started to look at what they were talking about, how they were expressing their ideas, how they handled criticism of their ideas by others. It's also interesting to see the networking that goes one - one question or idea is expressed and pretty soon all of the blogs I'm following are talking about the same thing. This doesn't happen all the time but often enough.

In yesterday's post, I referred to a recent audiocast hosted by MIguel Guhlin. MIguel spoke with several educators (first grade through high school) about the use of blogs in their classrooms and about how they're teaching students to use blogs. As I listened to the audiocast, I began to write down some of their insights and examples of best practices. Below are a few of those...

When we use blogs in the classroom:

we provide a way to connect children to the world, to other classrooms
we can connect parents to the work of our classrooms
we provide another way of connecting digitally to each other
we need to teach students how to interact safely in a digital world
we provide our students with an authentic audience which changes and transforms writing
blogs help students to engage in and understand the social nature of communication: learning to be constructive critics, learning how to challenge each other's ideas respectfully, learning to use critical thinking skills
blogs open up new doors for information and communication

In my mind, with any new technology tool, there are always two questions to ask yourself:

"So what?" What difference is the use of this tool going to make in student learning?
"Then what?" Once I start using this tool, what will my students do with the product they're produced or the information they've gathered?

Both of these questions deserve careful consideration with blogs. The social and "open" nature of blogs is the very thing that causes many school districts to block the use of blogs on their networks but the social nature is what also contributes to its use as a good instructional tool. Class BlogMeister, created by David Warlick, is one tool that teachers can use that provides a more sheltered environment for beginning to use blogs. Teachers monitor all postings to the blog and can provide a separate page for each student to use.

In any case, there is, more and more, a need to teach safe interaction in a digital world. Imagine a student behind the wheel of a car without any instructions or training, pulling out onto a highway at rush hour - what might the results be? The same applies to putting our students behind the "wheel" of a blog - teach them the rules of the road, teach them the rules while driving on the back roads before they get into heavier traffic. The NetSmartz website is one place that educators and parents can start to find resources to address this issue.

I'm sure that, as teachers begin to explore the nature of blogs for their own professional practice, we will see more advocates for the use of blogging in classrooms, more resources for teaching safety and more discussions between teachers and district technology administrators about how to manage the use of this tool safely for effective use in our classrooms.

technorati tags:blogging, technology, studentachievement

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New Technologies: Beyond the Coolness Factor

2006-08-26T18:32:00.000-04:00

This summer has been filled with the exploration of new technologies - more specifically, I've been working on looking at blogs and wikis with a little bit of podcasting and a few other ideas on the side. So I've decided that the next few posts on my blog will be used to summarize what I've explored over the last 10 weeks.

Early in the summer, it occurred to me that there was something unique going on where blogs were concerned - people were thinking out loud, getting responses from others who had been working through the same thoughts and then those thoughts came up in someone else's blog to be reworked, redefined, rethought. The whole network at work is fascinating. So I joined in and created my own blog as a way of continuing my own personal professional development. In working on my own blog, I've rediscovered my writing skills and learned about other tools like RSS, creating a blog roll and using ClustrMaps on my blog. I've learned more this summer alone than I've learned in a very long time and I've found applications for all of it to the work I do in my school district as an instructional specialist.

Here's one example of the networking that happened within blogs: Will Richardson posted a simple question one day: "Where are the best practices in using blogs in the classroom?" He didn't write much else about it - he just was wondering aloud. This topic was picked up by several other edubloggers, and eventually it resulted in one of them, Miguel Guhlin, creating a wiki about blogging best practices. Then, he gathered some educators who have been doing blogging in their instruction and they all participated in an audiocast via Skype. This interested me so much that, when Miguel advertised this audiocast, several questions popped into my mind and I commented on his blog listing those questions. He posted those questions to his wiki and one of my questions was the first to be asked in the audiocast.

The best part about this whole thing is that I didn't have to buy one new piece of hardware in order to have this experience and the learning curve was minimal. My experiences began by reading David Warlick's blog which eventually led me to all of the other resources that I've explored. I created a free account using Blogger, I created a blogroll on my blog using a free service called BlogRolling, I added a clustr map to my blog which tracks the number of people who access my blog (interesting to collect those statistics and follow the growth), I created a free account in Bloglines to gather RSS feeds to my favorite blogs (and other news sources) so that I didn't have to go to each one individually to see if it had been updated.

In the process, I've also started working on a wiki that I'm planning to use in my work this year. (acutally, I think that's going to be part of my own personal professional development project and my goal for the next school year) In it, I've started to work on creating some content related to various aspects of the professional development going on in my district right now. Included there, I'll be listing all of the new technologies that I'm working with and this list will be updated as needed. But even more importantly, the applications of those technologies to instruction will be developed. In education, we can't jump on every new technology just because of it's "coolness factor." We have to consider its application to learning and student achievement. When we do this we begin to shift our pedagogy in ways that make those technologies more accessible and more useful in student learning and achievement. Stay tuned...more to come.

technorati tags:bloggingbestpractices, wiki, blog, learning

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Blogging as Professional Practice

2006-08-20T19:30:00.000-04:00

It's interesting to observe the network of ideas and thoughts that connect one person to another within the community of bloggers. I first started to follow this network on August 9th when Will Richardson posted on his blog wondering where the blogging best practices were. Brian Crosby, David Warlick, Miguel Guhlin, and I'm sure, many others have also been discussing the question and have begun exploring ways of aggregating the collective knowledge of teachers who are using blogs in their classrooms. This interconnected thought process among these bloggers is probably one of the very best examples of blogging in professional practice. Now, how can we apply that to instruction?

Aside from the question of best practices in blogging, many bloggers are employing pretty high level thinking skills. They summarize an article or something written in another blog, they compare their opinions with the opinions of others, they create metaphors or analogies to explain their ideas, they cite research and statistics about blogging by using images, they comment on other blogs providing recognition to the thoughts of others, they recognize common goals and work to collaborate with other bloggers on those goals, they hypothesize about various topics, they generate important questions about the instructional uses of blogs. All of these fall into the general categories of research based instructional strategies discussed in Classroom Instruction That Works.

Without a strong goal/purpose for using a blog, students will not engage in the learning that can result. So, in addition to looking for best practices, I'm also asking: What are your instructional goals and Which of these strategies would be most effective in improving student achievement by using blogs in your classroom?

technorati tags:instructionalstrategies, bloggingbestpractices, thinkingskills

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Ongoing Conversations about Blogging

2006-08-19T19:21:00.000-04:00

There's been a lot of conversation in the blogosphere lately about trying to find the best practices for blogging from Will Richardson, David Warlick, Miguel Guhlin and many others. Surely, there are teachers who are using blogging in innovative ways within their instruction and helping students make gains in achievement. On the opposite side, perhaps those teachers just don't exist right now.

As an instructional specialist, I've been following this conversation about best practices intently and thinking about how I might present this relatively new tool to teachers. I'm new to blogging but not new to technology, curriculum and instruction. But, I've been considering the impact of my personal use of blogging as well as the role models for what I think is good blogging that will provide me with the background knowledge needed to summarize the use of this tool with other teachers.

For seasoned bloggers talking about best practices, they will be approaching this conversation with lots of background knowledge, personal experience, and probably classroom experience. But, if some of us relatively new to blogging or not currently blogging were to engage in this conversation about best practices in blogging, we wouldn't possess the same background knowledge necessary to understand the implications of the discussion and, as brain research tells us, we might not be able to find prior knowledge stored in our brains somewhere to connect with this new information. Even so, that conversation could spark some new ideas for your classrooms through connections to what you know about good teaching practices.

I was thinking that, if I were having this conversation with, or providing training to teachers who didn't know about blogging,then there are some questions that come to mind for me:
1. As someone who is actively involved in blogging, explain what blogging is all about for you personally.
2. Instructionally, what is the importance of blogging?
3. What types of information should students be producing via blogs?
4. What subject areas and what instructional strategies can be applied to the use of blogs to make this a thinking tool rather than just another "thing" we can do with a computer?

Everyday, there are probably new technology tools being invented that allow us to participate more easily in the read-write web improving both our instruction, our students achievement and our professional development. Even those these tools are pretty cool, in the scheme of things, for me, it comes back to those four questions above but more importantly, what can this tool mean to student achievement?

technorati tags:blogging, technology, instruction, achievement, information

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Which comes first?

2006-08-14T18:58:00.000-04:00

I was just reading Will Richardson's blog about a presentation he did today. It prompted me to comment:

Wow - this sounds like a great place to go to school. Which do you think comes first - the technology tools or the pedagogy? Do we need to start from our pedagogy or adjust/adapt our pedagogy as the tools change?

When we first started to put technology into classrooms, there was quite a bit written about how we were spending enormous amounts of money on technology believing only in the "promise" of better student learning through its use. Now the discussion has turned to some thoughts about our pedagogy - many of us (veterans/digital immigrants) who are currently in classrooms, had mid-20th century teachers as our role models and those mid-20th century teachers were trained in a much different time when there were much different expectations for education and for the future of our students. So have we moved beyond that yet? Have we changed our pedagogy - or have we changed it enough to be more responsive to the students who are in our classrooms now? Have we really embraced the research related to "what works" in schools or are we just using that information within a still mid-20th century mindset? I'm just wondering...

Another new tool

2006-08-10T06:59:00.000-04:00

PageFlakes is the best thing since cornflakes! You should really try it out for yourself. Imagine...a home page where you see your to do list, notes, feeds to your blogs, your del.icio.us bookmarks and much more all when you fire up your web browser. The web is getting better everyday!

Diigo is another great tool - this one will be great for research projects and collaborative work. You can bookmark a page, highlight text on a web page then annotate it with sticky notes. Send it to a friend to show them what you've found!