Ed Tech Co-Op

Second graders designing exhibits for the National Museum of American History, teachers dressing up as endangered species telling their stories as a part of a school-wide thematic festival of learning, and middle schoolers using the arts and multimedia to share their understanding of To Kill A Mockingbird are just a few of the highlighted instructional strategies and assessments being used at Alexandria Country Day School.

My school's blog, Adaptive and Innovative Practices at ACDS, is jammed packed this week with excellent lesson and unit plan ideas. The purpose of the blog is to share with our parents but I think it is time to share with a broader audience. Take a look!

Essential Question: How do we support teachers in finding ways to effectively integrate technology in their teaching?

David and Mark are joined this week by Tom Pantazes, Instructional Technology Resource Teacher from the Williamsburg-James City County Public Schools and Alex Roosenburg, Primary School Learning and Technology Coordinator at the Washington International School. Tom works between two elementary schools to support teachers in curriculum-based technology integration.  Alex supports teachers in grades PK-5 to weave technology into their instruction.

In this show, David, Alex, and Tom share strategies and approaches they use to support teachers in curriculum-based technology integration.  Despite the differences in their settings, a number of common strategies surface in the discussion.

Tips of the Week:

Essential Question: How can we determine the value of technology in schools?

David and Mark are joined this week by Tom Pantazes, Instructional Technology Resource Teacher from the Williamsburg-James City County Public Schools. Tom works between two elementary schools to support teachers in curriculum-based technology integration.

In this show, we discuss a recent New York Times article In Classroom of Future, Stagnant Scores. The article offers a potent critique of the lack of measurable impact on student test scores in schools and school divisions where technology has been a focus.  In this discussion we discuss the challenge of measuring impact only by standardized test scores and discuss alternate approaches to assessing the value of technology in teaching and learning.

Tips of the Week:

Tom shared two sites with us.  Code Academy is an interactive and social Web site that helps folks learn to program.  He shared that he's been trying to learn java script and has found Code Academy to be a fun and helpful resource. Socrative is a smart response system that can be used to engage students in interactive discussions and games using a variety of devices including laptops, smartphones and tablets. It looks like a really interesting alternative to dedicated student response systems.

Mark shared Edmodo, an education-focused, private social network designed for schools. He's used it for three semesters in undergraduate, graduate and doctoral courses and really likes the flexibility and Facebook-esque feel to the service. In Edmodo, you can create student groups, communicate with the whole class, small groups or individuals, post resources in a shared library, and assess work with the builtin gradebook. It's actually a pleasure to use.

Essential Questions: How might we see iBooks transform the etextbook market? Might the “i” in iBooks mean individualized books?

In this show, Mark and David discuss the possibilities and implications of Apple's new textbook intiative for teachers and schools. There have been a number of articles and commentaries posted about the project, some of which can be found here:

• Macworld podcast that overviews the announcement, along with some great links -Discussing Apple's education event
• Fraser Speirs on Macworld offers a quick overview and commentary on the three aspects of the Apple announcement - Apple's announcements further iPad revolution in education
• Serenity Caldwell from Macworld provides a nice hands on with iBooks Author, the tool to create iBooks for the iPad - Hands on: iBooks Author effortless to use, but iPad only
• Apple and the Digital Textbook Counter-Revolution by Audrey Watters at The Digital Reader
• David's insightful post on Lessons Learned - iBooks and One's Personal Learning System
• Interesting critique from Matt Burns at TechCrunch - iPads and digital textbooks do not belong in classrooms yet
• MacBreak Weekly podcast: The iBook discussion starts at 25 minute mark.
  
• Tom Ashbrook's On Point radio show: eTextbooks
  

Links referenced in the show:

• Kno - etextbook service and app
• ExploreLearning - powerful math and science interactives for the classroom
• Valley of the Shadow - digital archive focusing on two communities in the Civil War

Links of the Week:

David - Teacher librarian Elizabeth Lockwood designed an excellent multimedia project to teach her students about the Caldecott Medal and to teach them many ICL skills - http://acdsipad.blogspot.com/2012/01/mock-caldecott-learning-project.html

Therese Mageau’s “Make It Stop!” editorial in the latest The Journal pointing out the onslaught of attacks by the mainstream press against educational technology. Very clear points. I find that in many cases the reporters don’t have a background in education let alone educational technology so they don’t understand the needed professional development processes and leadership to make the money spent on technology make a difference in learning. Even tech leaders like Leo Leporte of the TWIT network misreport when they talk about educational technology.

Mark - Scholastic provies a great way for kids to post, share and consume book reviews by kids for kids - Share What You're Reading

Essential Question: What are the key trends in ed tech for 2012?

In this show, Mark and David are joined by Dr. Karen Richardson, executive director of the Virginia Society for Technology in Education.  Following on the heals of the December VSTE conference, Karen shares three key trends she has identified for educational technology in the coming year:

• Mobile devices (e.g., iPads, iPods, etc.)
• Bring your own device initiatives
• Social networking policies for schools

Tips of the Week:

Mark - Zite app for iPad and iPhone is a great way to expand your horizons for educational blogs. Starting with a list of feeds from Google Reader or other RSS readers, Zite builds a "personalized magazine" of feeds from a variety of sources. Beyond a simple RSS reader, however, Zite learns over time what you're interested in reading and pulls in posts and articles with similar keywords to the articles already in your feed. Users can further "train" Zite to find interesting articles by clicking a button that will pull in more articles for the particular keywords, sites, or authors that you indicate. Mark found Mindshift from KQED - an excellent blog of substantive and thoughtful articles on technology in education.

Karen -  Storify is an interesting web-based service that enables users to create stories based on social media from a variety of sources. The site states, "Storify gives you a view of the world through the eyes of the people on the ground where news is happening. Our users bring together the best text, photos and video from social media to tell stories that help make sense of the world." For more information on Storify, visit the Guided Tour or view this example created by Ed Week on the impact of NCLB.

David - Two great sites for educational animations are RSA Animates, Open University animations (see right side of page playlists). David also came across the Work Skills for 2020 project from the Institute for the future. It appears to be an interesting alternative/complement to the 21st Century Skills framework.

 

I am a real believer in finding ways for my students to use technology to make their thinking and their ideas visible. My futuristic hope is that we will have a mechanism for our words to become images, graphs, animations, mind maps, etc. on a display as we communicate our ideas. While we have the tools to manually do this today, it can be a fun and creative adventure but it takes time to produce the product. Wouldn't it be something if our political leaders, CEOs of companies, school principals, teachers, etc. in explaining important information have their ideas automatically appear on a display for the audience to further connect to? Oh, yes, we have PowerPoints/Keynotes and markers with whiteboards but the communication process definitely slows down as we turn our backs to the audience, think, and then scramble to write our ideas out usually in the form of words. Even image rich presentations do not engage the viewers as animations expanding in real time would. What a terrific way to build understanding and to make it easier for one's audience to really engage and ask questions of the speaker. To see the answers to questions expand across the screen truly would be something leading to further understanding and discussion. Who knows, maybe the 10th generation of Siri will have a vast "visulation" database of ideas and concepts to draw from to then display. :)

Jim Reese of Washington International School and Project Zero (PZ) was on an earlier Ed Tech Co-op podcast where his pick of the week was the book Making Thinking Visible which communicates the research on visual thinking from PZ. I purchased the book and have a set aside some time today to start reading it. Something tells me that the book will prompt a lot of thinking on my part.

A recent Washington Post article listed a couple British sites that make thinking visible through animations. The Royal Society for the Encouragement of the Arts (RSA) produces a series of voiceover animations where an illustrator using a whiteboard expands upon the ideas of the off screen speaker. Another resource from the article is the Open University use of animations to offer explainations on several topics. Both efforts make thinking visual.

Here are links to these videos housed at YouTube:

RSA Animates Channel
Open University Channel (the animation playlist is on right side of page)

Another article that caught my attention was a post from the GigaOm site. "The 10 Key Skills for the Future of Work" post drew from The Institute for the Future and their work predicting what the jobs of the future will be and the skills needed for those jobs. We have our 21st Century Skills framework and now the Future Work Skills 2020 that this group has produced.

Here is a listing of the Skills 2020 that Jessica Stillman of GigaOm put together in her post. Many of these skills are similar to the 21st Century ones but some of these go further in cognitive processes and various literacies. As we developed our skills for Information and Communiction Literacies (ICL) several years ago at Hong Kong International School, I am seeing how this new listing will help me further develop the ICL construct. I can see a wonderful opportunity for one's school learning community to come together in small and then whole group to discuss each of these skills to make meaning of them and to then paint the picture of what teachers are doing in their respective classes to help students learn them.

• Sense-making. The ability to determine the deeper meaning or significance of what is being expressed
• Social intelligence. The ability to connect to others in a deep and direct way, to sense and stimulate reactions and desired interactions
• Novel and adaptive thinking. Proficiency at thinking and coming up with solutions and responses beyond that which is rote or rule-based
• Cross-cultural competency. The ability to operate in different cultural settings
• Computational thinking. The ability to translate vast amounts of data into abstract concepts and to understand data-based reasoning
• New-media literacy. The ability to critically assess and develop content that uses new media forms and to leverage these media for persuasive communication
• Transdisciplinarity. Literacy in and ability to understand concepts across multiple disciplines
• Design mind-set. Ability to represent and develop tasks and work processes for desired outcomes
• Cognitive load management. The ability to discriminate and filter information for importance and to understand how to maximize cognitive functioning using a variety of tools and techniques
• Virtual collaboration. The ability to work productively, drive engagement and demonstrate presence as a member of a virtual team

 

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Essential Question (continued): How can Curriki help support learning in your school?

In this show, David and Mark continue their discussion of Curriki and provide thoughts and feedback to lessons posted by Mark's students from William & Mary.  For each of the lessons below, we offer a brief summary along with some lessons learned and ideas to consider.

• VoiceThread Lesson for German III - created by Emily Oscar
• A Multiple Media Approach to Introducing "The Crucible" - created by Sam Lee
• Creating Graphs from Data Sets - created by Katelyn Salonish
• Exploring Climatic Factors of Major Cities Using Glogster - created by John Zachary

We invite you to join the Ed Tech Co-Op Curriki community to explore these lessons and more.

Tips of the Week:

My wife the librarian emailed me the other day looking for information on the ESPRAT+G approach to the teaching and learning of social studies. I had put together a website to share with my students and she wanted to share the link with a social studies teacher at her school. As I have been reading the social studies lessons posted at our Curriki Group by Mark's students, I figured it might be helpful to also share the link here with Mark's students and interested readers.

I smile that my wife Margaret was asking me for information on ESPRAT+G because it was her work with Don Zimbrick 20 years ago at the Saudi Arabian International School in Riyadh that was the start of using this construct as far as I know.

I posted a couple of years ago about ESPRAT+G in my personal blog and included a link to the website that describes it. Here is a link to that original post.

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It really is worth taking the time to read through the lessons of Mark's students that were recently contributed to the Edtech Co-op Group. You will find two sections: Technology Integration Lessons and Technology Expert Modules. I will share comments in our next show about the technology integration lessons and offer some comments here on a couple of the technology expert modules.

The modules are extensive descriptions of tools and how they can be used for learning. Mark's students describe the technology and give examples of their use. While I read several blogs that share terrific tools, they rarely give full descriptions of their use or examples from the classroom. This a nice value added by Mark's students.

Here are links to a couple of the modules:

Google Lit Trips> I was talking with my middle school son about The Pearl which he was reading for class. We spoke about some of Steinbeck's other books and the nature of life during the Depression. I tried to describe some of the photos of the time period and the geography of the dust bowl. It would have been nice to have a Google Lit trip at my disposal to further paint the picture. I can really see my son digging into his next school literature study if he could map out the events and bring in images to help him further make meaning of his reading.

Virtual Cell Animation> This module offers several supporting sites to help one plan how to use this simulation tool. As we are piloting iPads at my school, I can defintely see our using these simulation apps as well as the web-based versions.