the media window

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!

Wendy Wolfe presented solid information on several web2.0 tools that can be used in the classroom. I was able to see her presentation at MEMO last year as well, but it was good to be reminded of these tools again in this K12Online 2007 conference presentation. They are as follows:
Toondoos is an online comic creator. It really looks great, but the drawback for me at a large elementary school is that students need an email account in order to register and use this site.
READ.WRITE.THINK comic creator is more user friendly in terms of accessibility and I DID have my students use this website last spring. They were pretty excited about creating their own comics, and they got to print them out to take home which we don’t do too often (printing) in the lab. I also had them use MakeBeliefsComix which was a bit more complex than the READ.WRITE.THINK site.
Another website that was presented was Gcast which allows you to easily create and save podcasts from a variety of sources, including your telephone. I remember now that I tried it out after the MEMO conference, and it was easy to use but I haven’t found a way to incorporate it into a lesson as yet.
The website that I had forgotten to check out and was glad to be reminded of was Gliffy. According to the website, “With Gliffy online diagramming software, you can easily create professional-looking flowcharts, diagrams, floor plans, technical drawings, and more!” Now I may think of a way to use this with students, but truth be told, I was really thinking of using it to get some creative landscaping ideas down for my own yard!

I just finished leaving the following comment on the VoiceThread presentation by Kevin Jarrett and Sylvia Martinez titled Second Life: K-20 Educators Exploring Virtual Worlds – Panel:
“Thanks for this amazing presentation! The information you have is rich and thorough. I learned more about why I  have experienced frustration at times when attempting to connect with educators in SL. The links to wikispaces, and other great ideas you presented will help me when returning to SL.”
Chris Dahl
The presentation is extremely thorough and covers every aspect of Second Life that an educator interested in using Second Life for professional development or with middle and high school students would need to know. The frustration that I wrote of above was from my not really understanding the purpose of some of the “education” related places in SL. Now, I feel better knowing that there are wikis with information and ideas for people like me who are able to walk and talk (not to mention fly!) in SL but aren’t always sure where to do that or for what purpose. I will definitely visit some of the SL places that were mentioned in the presentation.
My experiences in SL have been good, bad and indifferent. It is a format that appeals to me however, and I keep looking for its potential. I have attended a few of the socials on ISTE Island and went to the final keynote speech at NECC 2008 through ISTE SL as well. I need to remember to check various calendars for meetings that might be useful to me. One good time at ISTE island was figuring out that I was chatting with someone I had met at my regional media conferences in real life. She is a media specialist at the middle school level and that evening was interested in the Teen Grid in SL. That is of less interest to me as I teach elementary media, but  I was also able to send the link to this informative presentation to her. There is extensive information there on what the Teen Grid is about and how educators are using it. I really enjoyed and appreciated this exhaustive look at Second Life in Education!