the media window

Carol Midthun and I took the K12Online 2007 class together, and below is a copy of what we wrote as our final reflection on the conference. I would highly recommend attending the K12Online 2008 conference which is coming this fall, to learn more about the role of technology in education, but if you decide to take it for credit be prepared to be jump-started into the world of web 2.0. The reflections that I wrote and posted on my blog really helped me to better understand what web 2.0 can mean personally in my own teaching, and it gave me a path that I can continue to follow as everything web2.0 (and beyond) continues to evolve.

” The amount of information presented for this course was amazing.  The contributors were very knowledgeable about their content and the quality of presentations was excellent. The format for this course encouraged collaboration, helped both of us to develop our personal learning networks, and grow in the area of professional development.
This has been a good experience. The resources were user friendly and set up in such a way that allowed us to watch the presentations in audio or video format. Not only that, it was great to have a 24/7 access to all presentations. Now that we are more familiar with the format we have discussed using this and the previous year’s presentations with the staff at our schools during staff development meetings.” Chris Dahl, Carol Midthun

I would also add that it was helpful to me to do this with a study partner, even though watching the webcasts and writing all of the reflections was really a singular experience. We kept each other on task and headed toward completion while eating bagels and drinking tea. It also gave us a chance to talk about and play with some of the tools we had heard about in the webcasts. I don’t know that the format could be changed to allow for more interaction among those taking the course, as it is spread out over time, but that would be one thought I have for  consideration.
This experience has transformed my attitude toward using web 2.0 tools. It has also made me more confident in understanding how to create my own personal learning network. I felt that it was important for me to give back something to the K12Online community and so I have also volunteered to help in some way with it this year.

This presentation by Vinnie Vrotny is titled Expanding Horizons Engaging Adult members of Your Community Through the Use of PLN’s , and it is a great overview of Twitter! If you haven’t set up an account to use this tool and aren’t sure what it’s all about, Vinnie gives a solid explanation of both. He gives clear direction on how to go about “following” people and encourages us to make sure we have our profile page filled out so that the person you choose to follow can decide from your profile whether he or she will follow you back. Basically this is how you grow your Twitter network, although another key component (especially to having people follow you) is to make sure you “twitter” something as well. So, as I said this is a really good solid intro to the “Twitterverse”.
Since this presentation was made, the development of Twitter as a PLN for many educators has grown tremendously. I think that most would agree that they have learned a lot from following the twitters of many of the other educators who send out useful information, links and reminders of countless other great pieces of information! I have also been aware of the growing pains of this PLN, as how people use Twitter has come under scrutiny by many educators and it has been the subject of many blog posts with ensuing comments. Being a quiet, observer type of person, my own personal experience with Twitter has had its ups and downs. I didn’t understand it at first, but once I knew how to follow some of the wonderful technology educators, I was hooked.  For awhile it was as if I was GLUED to my screen in order to read the information! Then, I made a few attempts to send out my own twitters and that was not always successful. So, I might respond when people ask for others to “say hi” to so and so, or I might post when I am listening to a live EdTech Talk show, or attending a good event in SL, but I tend to shy away from the requests for information on websites, or Web 2.0 tools now. I really appreciate the information I receive serendipitously from others, I try in a small way to contribute, and I don’t mind the noneducational twitters that come across. Fewer people follow me than I follow for those reasons I’m sure. But, as we are all in different places in terms of who we “know” and what we know regarding this wild Web 2.0 world I just hope that is taken into consideration by those whose opinions regarding these matters influence many others.

My final note on this is that Plurk is now coming into the PLN arena, but I cannot and will not look at that until I finish taking the K12Online 2007 graduate class! Now, the good news is that this is my last reflection for the class (those of us who did it wrote 21 reflections in all)! So, I may be looking at Plurk and all of the other cool new tools I saw in these presentations before I know it! WOOT!!!

The focus of this inspirational presentation by Sylvia Martinez was on the student and how we as educators need to enlist and include them in their own learning. We need to stop seeing the obstacles and start looking for the opportunities to do this. Teachers and students can be allies and mentors in their own buildings, and as it is natural to have students who want to help, it makes sense to extend that inclination and make it happen in more ways. Her feeling is that we educators, who have discovered and embraced the Web 2.0 concepts can understand students better from our rediscovery of our own passion for learning. So, in the spirit of Web 2.0 we need to enhance and encourage the collaboration concept and extend it to including our students. Her idea is that students are capable of doing many things in the school setting that we take on ourselves, and that we need to provide more opportunities for them to “advocate,evangelize, maintain, support and enforce”. I really am rephrasing what I think is the essence of the presentation, and I’m not sure that I can do it justice in a few words, as I found it very thought provoking.
I also agreed with her thoughts on digital natives (students who have only known the digital world) and digital immigrants (those who remember when there was no television, or microwave ovens or …well you get my drift) as she strongly suggest that no matter what, the students still need teachers to make sense of their digital world. The fundamental needs of students are still there, but the ways the needs are met may have changed. Simply put, instead of journals, book reports, posters and such we also need to give students other avenues such as blogs and wikis to show their learning and express themselves in ways that are meaningful to them.
I really enjoyed this presentation as I found it to be inspiring and also done in an entertaining way.

The title of this K12Online 2007 presentation by Jeff Utecht is Sustained Blogging in the Classroom. I have to say that I am happy that I chose this presentation to watch because it has to do with the practical side of student blogging. As teachers, I’m pretty sure we’ve all been in the situation of trying out something that we know is good for us and for our students, maybe it just a cool factor, but we don’t keep doing it because it feels “extra” and it’s not a part of the structure of our classrooms. So, Jeff Utecht has some great ideas to try to keep you and you students blogging. One important tip is to move blogs from the role of a journal to that of a conversation. His contention is that blogging is perfect for that because it gets students to read, which we want them to do and also to write. Not only that, other students will respond (creating conversation) and provide meaningful feedback for that student.
Jeff highlighted the classroom blogging in two teacher’s classrooms, Mark Ahlness and Clarence Fisher. It is really helpful to see just how each organized the student blogging experience and also helpful to see that they were by no means identical. We need to create the situation that fits the needs of the students and the teachers working with the blogs. I especially liked Mark Ahlness‘ idea of allowing the students to choose between reading a book, magazine or blogs during his class silent reading time. Clarence Fisher changed the physical arrangement of his classroom to betterfacilitate the things he wanted to happen there, including blogging.
There is so much more in this presentation, including the idea of setting up personal learning networks for students, modelling good blogging by maintaining one of your own for your students, and having students create the rubric for great blogging that they want to be assessed by when it’s time for grades.
Another piece that I valued from this was the explanation of how to introduce blogs to students. He suggests that you have them just read other blogs first, then second have them add comments to blogs and then finally have them start their own blogs. This makes perfect sense, as they learn what a blog is about before they are responsible for creating one. I think this is a simple concept, but I’m not sure that is how I would have structured my first lesson this school year, so I am really happy to have that information.

This K12Online presentation was in two parts. The first was on Spresent and was presented by Kurt Paccio and the second part was about Splashcast, and was presented by James Gates.
I was not at all familiar with either of these Web 2.0 tools. I was interested in learning more about them, and I thought that the Spresent webcast was very interesting. Unless I need individual email accounts for each student, which I did not check yet, it would be a very excellent resource for presentation pieces. What strikes me is that eventually schools may eventually not have the resources to provide software such as Microsoft Office. In that eventuality, or if they realize that it may not be required anymore, we need to know of the resources such as Spresent that are available to us. Like others who commented on the K12Online presentation page for this particular presentation I couldn’t access more than the audio for the Splashcast presentation by James Gates, so I listened to the audio. It sounded like another excellent product, and when I visited the website it appeared that way as well. One question I did have was of its’ suitability for younger students. From the home page alone, it is not something that seems to be the best match for the elementary student. But they are both certainly something to keep an eye on and I am happy to be made aware of them.

I think that each of these tools is great for the individual educator who is looking to access free, online tools that will help them to polish and present a fantastic final product. They may not be the best choice for the student population in an elementary school setting.

This is my reflection for the K12Online 2007 reflection on Sharon Betts’ presentation titled Oodles of Googles.
Sharon Betts’ presentation gave an excellent overview of the capabilities of GoogleDocs and then some! I have used GoogleDocs and also  Google notebook fairly often, but have not used all of the capabilities that were demonstrated in the presentation. What I appreciated learning about here was how you can form groups and have discussions. I think that would be useful especially if we could get our media group formed as a discussion group when we work on any document together. I have only used GoogleDocs to collaborate in writing shared documents. I love it for that especially with my usual collaborator for online classes, Carol Midthun We most often will meet at Bruegger’s Bagels with our laptops. We can then talk, eat, drink coffee or diet cola and also write together! I think the first time we tried this it felt a little odd (kind of like dueling laptops) but after awhile, it felt very comfortable and we settled into summers of bagels and writing together. I signed up to use the notebook, but so far it hasn’t been a tool that I could use. If I was an undergrad college or high school student, I would want to know about these tools however. As an elementary media specialist, I hope that middle and high school students are being introduced to these useful tools.

As an aside, I did try to use the presentation tools in GoogleDocs to create a lesson that I was doing with my students last year. It ended up a little quirky. Enough that I couldn’t trust the right information or slide to come up reliably, that I went back to good old Powerpoint for the rest of the year. Second and third graders get restless and aren’t as willing to wait for the tech so there are times when the tried and true make sense.

The K12Online 2007 presentation by Patrick Ledesma is titled The Technology Specialist as Teacher Leader: Strategies to Ensure Successful Technology Integration and Student Learning in Schools.

Wow, this was a solid, step by step presentation of how to have a successful experience integrating technology into your school. Patrick has a well organized presentation which begins by suggesting that we first seek to understand ourselves and our schools. Make sure you know what role or roles you play in your setting and know also what your strengths and weaknesses are. The three main roles he mentions are repair person, helper/assistant to teachers and an instructional leader. It is his suggestion that most of your time should be in the instructional area. In order to spend more time as an instructional leader/collaborator it is a good idea to “manage your environment”. To do this you should have a system in place to prioritize repairs and also teach teachers how to do simple troubleshooting. I liked his idea of setting essential goals and dream goals for the year (or a shorter amount of time). Last year my goal was to introduce an online web service called Weebly to the staff and show interested teachers how to create and maintain their own web pages. I liked it because it gave them a way to interact with their students and parents, and I did not have to maintain the page for them. All I needed was their link so I could put that on the school website.

He also had good suggestions for collaborating with staff. Another idea he presented which makes good sense to me is that we shouldn’t sell technology to teachers, but we should sell them on the impact technology can have on their teaching and student achievement. Another idea I took from the presentation was the importance of creating models of you teacher collaborations and build on them from year to year. You should also use them for collaboration with other teachers, show them at staff meetings and host them on the server for others to see. I think this would be a useful presentation to share with your principal and other people in your district who are involved in promoting technology integration.

The K12Online 2007 presentation titled Me Blog, No Way! is by John Pearce, an Educational Consultant in Australia who put together a short, humorous look at educators who do not blog at all with their students or for themselves. In an entertaining way he emphasized the need for teachers to provide literacy in using new technologies such as blogging or the students will learn through less structured forms. I think he made several good points and put forth good encouragement to educators to use new technologies to teach literacy with our students.

I then visited his blog called My Other Blog to gain more insights on his ideas. I found it a thoughtful, lively place and I especially appreciated his post about images and copyright titled I Want a New Image. The problem of students (and others!) using images illegally or without attribution has long been around. He mentions two new places to find images that students can safely use. One that I had heard of and used is FlickrCC which was created by John Johnstone to help with finding images from Flickr that have Creative Commons licensing. Another flickr search tool, that I hadn’t heard of was called Compfight. I have only had a bit of time to look at it, but it offers some interesting possibilities as well.

Lastly, I really liked Pearce’s idea of tagging pictures in Flickr with the common tag,  pics4school. If they had a Creative Commons licensing and enough educators contributed pictures to Flickr and tagged them in this way, we could create a large image bank for educational use. What do you think of that idea? I might give it a go on some of my own Flickr pictures.

Webcasting for Educators: Expanding the Conversation is the title for the K12Online 2007 presentation created by Women of the Web 2.0 (or WOW2) hosts Cheryl Oakes,Vicki Davis, Jen Wagner and Sharon Peters. Each of them presented different aspects of their show, WOW2,  EdTech Talk and the umbrella organization called WorldBridges which was founded by Jeff Lebow and Dave Cormier. So, all of that for me was quite informational as I have listened to these webcasts for awhile now, but haven’t put all of the pieces together yet as to how they came to be.

It was interesting to see what goes into creating the WOW2 show and to see the tech tools they use, such as Skype and Nicecast. For instance, they have a chatroom or backchannel for their listeners who want to add text commentary to what is being discussed on air, but I didn’t know that the hosts are also using the Skype chat for their own backchannel to help make the program go more smoothly. Jennifer Wagner, as founder of WOW2 mentioned that it was created to present a female voice in the ed/tech arena and also encouraged others to try creating their own webcasts, via instruction from The Webcast Academy. I appreciate the commitment of time and knowledge that is evident from everyone involved in producing these webcasts. I love to listen to the programs on EdTech Talk, including WOW2. I occasionally make a comment in the chatroom, but I’m not sure I could actually put on a show as all of these talented people do. One thought I have had, however is that if I were to take the training at The Webcast Academy, it would be an excellent way to better help my students do something similar. In other words, I might not have to learn along with them as I would at this point if I wanted to try and sort of podcasting with kids.

I thoroughly enjoyed listening to the presentation by Arvind Grover and Alex Ragone titled EdTech Talk: A Network of Homegrown Webcasters.  You can listen to it here, or you can catch it on a VoiceThread presentation that Alex and Arvind added, which is fun as there many pictures that show the people involved and also the “high tech” equipment necessary for them to do their webcasts. I left an audio comment for them on their VoiceThread, which pushed my envelope a bit as I am more used to the written word. EdTech Talk is a great resource for anyone interested in learning more about integrating technology into their classrooms or the latest web 2.0 tools. According to their bio page on K12Online 2007, “Arvind and Alex host a weekly web radio show at www.edtechtalk.com that explores the intersection of education and technology.” It was interesting to learn more of how this program and WorldBridges came to be. I recognized many names in the Ed Tech talk presentation from other places–blogs, Twitter and even Second Life. As I have watched more and more of the K12Online presentations this has occurred more and more! I think it’s fantastic that edcational/technology people have found a way to connect with likeminded people in a variety of ways online. If you have an interest in live webcasting and podcasting however, EdTech Talk is the place to go. In addition to the weekly offerings of live shows (which you can also listen to later in a podcast), they mention that they offer a Webcast Academy to teach others how to create their own webcasts and podcasts. The live shows have a chatroom where listeners to the progam can chat online, add questions for the hosts or guest speakers. The presenters of this emphasized how important the live aspect of the program is. It can add an element of surprise and interest to a program as they never know who will drop in via Skype or chat to comment on the program. Over the past year I have listened to several of the programs offered, including EdTech Talk’s weekly Sunday update, Women of the Web (WOW) and Teachers Teaching Teachers. Here’s a link to the EdTech Talk calendar if you are interested in checking them out!