I had a funny, when-I-was-their-age moment. I had found my way to this Teachers Network website and saw this headline: IF U CN RD THS U CN LRN TO RITE, which linked to an article about adding a twist to the typical “what I did this summer” essay by having students start with texting their responses. For some reason, I flashed to an old, rainy day worksheet I used to have that gave a list of vanity license plates that the kids had to decipher. Maybe they represent the original text messaging, and a little googling showed that having students create personalized license plates for themselves or other characters was a popular lesson plan. Everything old is new again, this time around with a few more characters allowed.
Category Archives: New Media
In Just 45 Minutes…
I head to campus to begin another semester. I am teaching a course called Designs for Technology Enhanced Learning. I have taught some version of this course to pre-service teachers for the past five years. It began as a one-credit class that focused on technical skills, but as the students have become more familiar with the tools, the course has morphed into a two-credit class that focuses more on how to use the tools in the classroom. I am more excited about teaching the course this semester because I really feel like I have hit my stride with it.
The one area where I am a little concerned is with the additional of a online personal learning network component. This is clearly something that others are thinking about as well since my first look at Twitter this morning led me to Will Richardson’s post on the subject. I am going to have my students join a the VSTE Ning network and participate for the whole semester. This assignment replaces the blogging they used to do as I grew discouraged with that assignment over time. It became increasingly quantitative (x number of posts and x number of comments) and few students seemed to ever realize the potential power of blogs to support their own learning and reflection. The Ning assignment is much more open ended: get involved in the community on a regular basis. I have invited Sheryl Nussbaum Beach to come in as a guest speaker since she’s my hero when it comes to these communities. I’m hoping she can provide some motivation for them to get involved AND stay involved even after the course is over.
The other part of this assignment is that I am hoping it will motivate my own learning and involvement in an online community. I tend to live on the peripherals of these groups. I was never much of a “joiner” in the real world and that habit has remained in the virtual one as well. Like Will, I am very much in the midst of examining my own practices and also looking towards life after my degree is completed. So, while I am nervous about this assignment, I am also excited to have an opportunity to really engage in an authentic activity with my students. I’m just hoping they will feel the same way!
And now it’s time to get ready…I’m walking to campus this morning to benefit myself and the environment but that means an early start. Class begins at 11 and if you want a sample of what we’re doing, here’s my agenda.
My “Best of NECC” Post
I know I’m late on this but I spent the weekend getting caught up on my real life and doing some prep for this week. But, I wanted to highlight some of the things I learned at NECC. NECC is always overwhelming for me and all the digital stuff (blogs, wikis, flickr, twitter, etc.) really just make it worse. Too much noise. So, my strategy this year was to pre-register for sessions and to volunteer, both in an attempt to make NECC smaller and more manageable. It turned out to be a good strategy…I didn’t have to worry about getting a seat and I had a chance to really connect with new people. I found the poster sessions at which I volunteered on Monday morning terrific. The presenters were all HP grant winners, and their enthusiasm about their students ‘ learning was intoxicating! Real teachers, real students, real stories with some excellent action research to show that their students had not only been engaged but learned something as well.
At the last minute, I ended up doing two hands-on workshops to fill in for another presenter. While it took away from some of my own time at NECC, I found the experience quite enlightening and encouraging. Both the sessions focused on a tool and its connection to content. In my hurry to pull together the sessions, I focused on the tool with less concern about the content. (In my defense, one workshop had participants making videos in just three hours so I was a little worried about getting it done.) What I am pleased about was the excellent feedback I got from the participants. Most were happy with the experience, but several reminded me that there had been content and that was really why they came with their interest in the tool being a secondary concern. Good for them! I certainly agree and was reminded of how easy it is for techies like me to fall into the tool trap, forgetting that we are dealing with educators. If I have a criticism of NECC, it sometimes seems to be more generally focused on technology tools rather than how teachers might make effective use of them in their classrooms. Maybe that’s the point of a tech conference, but for those of us who have to go back to K-12 teachers, the difference between twitter and plurk are probably not that important.
The best session I attended was the Technology Leadership Forum. Its focus was on emerging technologies but most of the speakers were from school divisions that had adopted the technologies so they could talk about how the tools intersected with teaching and learning. I was particularly intrigued by Camilla Gagliolo’s presentation on using Nintendo DS2s in the elementary school. I’m not a gamer but may have to invest in one of these as they have curriculum related software and some potentially powerful applications. (OK, see how easy it is to slip into the tools discussion!)
The keynoter for the forum was Richard Baraniuk, Rice University, talking about The Future of Open Courseware. This is a topic close to my own heart since I sit on the Board of Directors of the Virginia Open Education Foundation (VOEF), begun by Mark Burnet, who is even more passionate about it than I am. Rich began Connexions, an open courseware compendium. It’s an amazing collection of online materials, mostly written in the form of textbooks. They can, if you like, be printed and bound, for the cost of about $20! It’s an amazing example of collaboration, and I found myself babbling to him about our Virginia project. I sat on a Joint Commission on Technology and Science Committee last year where we discussed the possibilities of open source textbooks and this year, the work continues with anyone who is interested encouraged to get involved.
VOEF has established a pilot site where we are collecting resources related to Virginia standards. If you’re intrigued and would like to get involved, just send me an email and Mark and I would be happy to talk to you.
Battledecks
I think Tom and Jim, who blog at Bionic Teaching, are two of the freshest voices in educational blogging. I’m a little late on commenting on this post about Battledecks, a very funny and challenging powerpoint karaoke game played at the SXSW festival. What makes Tom’s post particularly helpful is he includes ideas for how this might be integrated in a variety of different classes. And, he makes an important caveat: you can’t do this well with just bulleted lists of information. I’m a visual learner so went looking for video of the Battledecks competition.
Here’s the video from Rocketboom:
I’m already thinking about doing this with my undergrads on Monday! Or, at least show them the video.
Morning Musings
I usually reserve morning blogging for my personal blog, but I have a few tidbits to share.
Netvibes Universe: Finally, Netvibes has created a way to make a public page. Here’s mine. It was fairly simple to move whole tabs between my personal and my public Netvibes.
Twitter Troubles: I follow several blogs by librarians. Remember, I like anything that combines books and the web, and librarians are all about books. Of course, now they are also about all forms of media, but I will always associate them with the big brick building on Duke Street in that housed the Lancaster County Public Library, my first library. I was surprised to find this post from Steven Cohen at Library Stuff about taking a Twitter break after evidently offending someone with his Twitter posts last week. It is a reminder that Twitter is different from bantering with our friends at the bar. It is public and we may not always know all our followers. But, does that mean we have to worry about offending them? If you aren’t happy with my tweets, stop following me. Hmm…another one of those dilemmas of social networking that I think we will each have to work out in our own way. But, at the least, we should be having conversations with our kids about how to use these tools to build stronger relationships.
More Books on the Web: Chris O’Neal and I posted a blog about books and social networking software over at Spiral Notebook. Of course, if you know me, you know that I wrote about LibraryThing. Last evening, I stayed up late to work on planning a trip to England. I was mostly working on the London bit: don’t want to miss any of the famous literary sites like Poet’s Corner at Westminster Abbey. In poking around, I found a great website called “Get London Reading.” The goal of the program, which began in 2006, is to get Londoners to connect to the literary past of their own city. They produced a lively, well-written “Rough Guide” to the London literary life. It includes information about the authors that have called the city home and also highlights books that have drawn their settings from London. I spent a very fruitful few hours reading it, wishing I had more time to read, and putting markers on my London map. I also wished, just for a moment, that I was back in the high school English classroom where I could incorporate Google Maps into our study of English literature.
Here’s the map so far: