Week 5 - Collaboration is the Tool

After reading the article by Sean Capelle called "It's Not About the Tool:  Why Online Student Collaboration Should Focus on State Standards" I was thinking about my own classroom and how sometimes I get so exctied about the tool such as bloggs and wikis and other web 2.0 tools that I forget the actual purpose of using them.  There is so much push right now about connecting everything to the Common Core Standards.  This article really made sense to me in that we really need to have the standards guiding what we do with the web 2.0 tools as opposed to the tool guiding what we do.  I am always paying particular attention to ways of using the tools in mathematics.  I have found that most things can be easly worked into Language arts and science and social studies but it is sometimes difficut to work them into the mathematics. 

The common core standards for mathematical practice, states that students need to be able to create viable arguments and critique others work.  I think using this standard with one of the content standards could easily lend itself to a blog question that is very open ended in mathematics and students could give their answer and then back it up with the reasoning.  As I write this post it is giving me the idea of creating a blog for my classroom where the students would be given a question at the beginning of the week.  They would then have until the following monday to post their answer to this question with support for their answer.  They could then comment on one of their classmates answers.  This would give an avenue for students to meet this standard but also a fun way to do it.  It could also teach them how to be good digital citizens.  There would need to be a bit of tweeking as the project went along for the students who don't have access you would have to give them time in the day to complete this task and you would need to review how to write a good response, but it would be a great learning experience for both the students and the teacher.  I am excited about giving this a try at my school.  Don't forget to check with your technology department as far as what the students have permission already and what you need to send the parents to get their permission.   I will keep posting as this project takes shape and share our successes and failures.

Week 6: My Digital Story using Animoto

Many Faces of Jacob

Week 5 - Midterm Reflection

Learning Objective 2:
Promote and demonstrate effective use of digital tools and resources. Familiarize students with Web2.0 tools that may be used professionally or within the classroom environment to establish deeper learning experiences through proper curricular standard driven development.

I have been involved in a lot of the new technology that has come into our building and I am always looking for ways to use it.  I have found that through this class I have seen many uses for the new tools that have been introduced.  I have already been thinking about starting a blog for the craft ideas that I have and love to do.  I know this is not tied to education but in a way I think it could be.  We are starting an enrichment program at our school and I would love to be able to teach kids a craft but then also have a place where we can share our ideas.  I like the idea of a blog for this because it would give kids and people who are interested in crafts a place to share ideas.  I also like the idea of embeding podcasts with directions into the blog.  I think if I can make this idea work then I can probably find some cool ideas to use this in the classroom. 

Learning Objective 5:
Establish a core personal learning network of technology leaders to follow. Utilize this new network of educators as personal professional development.

This is an idea that I feel I have only started to develop but have definetly made strides towards using a PLN to develop my professional development.  I like the idea of Diigo and I was reading an article that described an easy to understand way to use Diigo or Delicious to find others who have used tags to identify sites.  The other thing the article talks about is how to use Twitter to find and follow people to building your network.  I have this basic understanding and I am looking forward to trying this out. 

Learning Objective 6:
Use knowledge of digital tools and technology applications to facilitate experiences that advance learning, creativity, and innovation in both face-to-face and virtual environments.

I had originally gotten an incomplete in this class because I had issues outside of class but also because it was very overwhelming with all the tools and how to make it work and how to follow all the parts.  I feel now that I am understanding more about how all these tools are connected and the overarching idea of these tools is to help build a personal learning network to help your learning and understanding of the tools and technology.  This in turn will help me to use them in my classroom.  The more a person is confortable and familiar with a tool they are more likely to use it on a day to day basis.  I was at a workshop about how to use the new Apple Book Air recently and when they started sharing some sites and information the first thing I did was open my Diigo account so I could save them to the site and be able to find them again later.  I loved the use of the tags because I know I will be able to go looking for the sites but all I need to remember is what we were doing at the time.  Then with the article I read about how to use Diigo better made me realize that I can search other peoples sites to find more that will help in my lesson planning for school. 

Overall I am very excited about all the tools we have worked with so far and I am looking forward to the rest of them.  I am especially looking forward to being able to use them in my school.  Since we started the blog through Blogger and Google Reader to keep track of the blogs we are following, I have this idea to introduce it to my collegues as school.  I would like to be able to introduce this to my collegues as a way for use to communicate about things we do in our classroom to help our students because our time to meet face to face is so very limited.  I think we could accomplish a lot and have a great way to share these ideas with each other.  Once this class is done and I have time to work on the presentation to my collegues I am going to bring the idea to my adminstration and see where it takes us. 

Week 4 - Digital Media - New Learners of the 21st Century

The PBS video "Digital Media - New Learners of the 21st Century" was really interesting enlightening on how areas are helping students to reach their potential with the tools of the 21st century.  

I particularly like the quote in the video about "If we teach today's kids the way we taught them yesterday we rob them of tomorrow".  This rang true to me as we are working towards new ways to integrate technology in our school.  I have found that the more I want to integrate the harder it is becoming mostly due to resources.  There are tools in our school but sometimes the bureaucracy about obtaining it makes it very difficult to want to use the technology.  Yet this is what we need.  I feel that if the administration and the Superintendent are not feeling the same way then it makes it even harder for the teachers to get what they need.  Funding is always an issue but there are so many ways around that now with grants and sales.  If the whole building or district could work towards a common goal of 1 to1 technology use then it would be so much better for the students.  

I feel very strongly that teachers need the resources available to them on a day to day basis.  The idea of signing out and sharing netbooks, or ipods or ipads or even projectors is ridiculous.  I was part of a grant that our school got to research the use of 1 to 1 technology verses technology that was shared between two teachers.  The grant was the ARRA Title IID and Somersworth was awarded approximately $250,000 to conduct this research.  I was part of the beginning of the research and then was moved to another grade level so I was not able to keep the technology that was part of the grant.  Having gone through the year with having the technology accessible whenever we had a question or so forth was extremely useful, the students were engaged and behaviors were rarely a problem.  The following year I did not have the technology readily available so I found it very difficult to integrate it more because I had to hunt down the cart and then make sure that no one else was using it and then make sure that I got it for the day that I wanted it to be with my lesson.  It became very frustrating so I found that I did not use technology as much as the year before.  The schools in the video that show students engaged and wanting to learn because now the learning is taking place with materials that they are much more familiar with than we can even imagine.  It really gives them the support and desire to learn how to do something when they can get the information right away.  I think this is what our schools need on a regular basis.  We need more technology in our classrooms and we shouldn't have to worry about will the tools be available on the day or time that I might need them.  

Week 4 - Google Reader and Social Bookmarking

Google Reader was better than I had expected.  I was wondering how to keep track of all the blogs for this class and how to remember which ones I had commented on and so forth.  By having Google Reader everything you need is at your finger tips.  It has made it easier to keep up with all the readings and comments to people's blogs.  I find myself asking now, where do I find good blogs and resources that will help me professional and personally.  I want to find some sites that I can follow that will help me stay up to date with the uses of technology in the classroom as well as sites to help with the content.  I am a math teacher and sometimes we forget that there are new ways to teach the same information that has been around for centuries.  So to have a few sites to follow will be exciting.

This is a great lead in to how social bookmarking is going to work.  I have found that as I was writing the first paragraph I was answering my own questions.  Social bookmarking with diigo.  With the idea of sharing resources through social bookmarking is a great concept.  Students could really use this idea when working in a group on a project or even using it from grade to grade.  This would give them a place to reference back when they were working on something and then a few years later they could go back and reference it again for a different class or to refresh their memory. 

 

All of these tools are great to have and use but our job now as educators is to educate our students on the hows of each tool.  We also need to educate our students on the drive to be "Do-it-yourself" learners.  We need to teach them the proper uses of these tools and how to be a good digital citizen.  They need to learn more about how to critic the information for validity.

Week 3: A Portal to Media Literacy

The video of A Portal to Media Literacy is refreshing.  I like how Michael Wesch describes the walls of the classroom and if they could talk what would they tell us.  He breaks down the idea of what school is and how learning in the new media age is changing; how we view the institution of school. I think this is important for educators to see as the information highway is changing how students look and interact with the world.  They are more connected to the world than we as adults could have ever imagined.  Because of the students being so connected, we as educators need to harness this spirit and help them to learn using this connectedness.  At one point in the video he described how the students are taking in information while in the large lecture hall type classroom and never discuss the information.  But then when they are in a small classroom setting where interactions can take place the students are still expecting to just received the information.  They don't know how to interact with a discussion or how to ask those thought provoking questions that will lead to a better understanding of the topic.  

The interactive classroom is where we as educators need training and we need to train our students how to ask questions and how to make deeper connections and understandings of the topics.  By using the media literacies, all students can interact and develop deeper understandings by contributing to the ongoing discussion.

Week 3 - Vitrual Learning Communities

Virtual Learning Communities are best described in the e-book, Connections:  Virtual Learning Communities.  I like how Richard Schwier describes the term communities as a metaphor and how our perception of a community is very different from our reality of a community.  We are all part of a community in some way.  It makes me think about how our principle is working to create our middle school community.  We are a community because our common interest is that we work and learn in the middle school.  He is promoting the family aspect of the community in terms that we are all here to help each other and to learn from each other.  This is the idea that Schwier was trying to get across about a good virtual community.  I think of this idea he has created at our middle school can easily be transferred into the virtual learning community of our online interests.  Using virtual learning communities to build on our "Do-it-yourself-learning" is a great tool where the learning can take place.  

There are so many ways to connect with these Virtual Learning Communities.  I did a google search to see what would come up with Virtual Learning Communities and there were 4,990,000 sites that came up.  The first VLC was one about Everyday Mathematics.  It is described as a place for educators to meet and support each other as their students are learning.  This is a prime example of how a VLC can be used.  I would love to see a VLC come to my school.  I think this would be a great place for us as educators to connect and support each other with our professional development and our own desire to learn.  One of the issues faced in the middle school is not enough time to connect with our colleagues to discuss the curriculum or even to share ideas around a common topic.  I think the VLC would be a great way to accomplish this task.  

The only question now I guess is how to promote a VLC in a school?  How do you involve teachers to share their ideas and thinking to help each other learn more about a topic?  Is there a great way to entice educators who may not be technology savvy?  What is the best way to "hook" them into contributing?  This is a question that came up in chapter 2 of Connections: Virtual Learning Communities.  VLCs are only as good as the contributors.  If the contributions are not what people are looking for then they will not come back.  So how do you educate educators that may be skeptical about contributing? 

Week 2 - KWL and Reflection

The  Connected Educator is a book that I have found to be refreshing.  I have had a lot of connections with the first chapter and the discussion about the New Media Literacies that all students and teachers need to know.  I was part of a group in New Hampshire who explored the New Media Literacies as the Early Adopters.  It was a learning experience for me to get an understanding of what the literacies were and how we could use them.  I also found that it was my first real experience with online learning.  I did not do as well with the online learning as I had hoped to do so I am working hard on each experience to get the most out of the online learning experience.  I loved the idea of the Ning that the New Media Literacies had set up to help people develop their understanding of the literacies through challenges in the learning library.  It really helped make it real and useful as a learner.  It was great, as well, as a way to introduce the literacies to our students.  

The interactive tools they have included in the book is really helpful to me with giving me ways to make the connections with the material.  The checklist/scoring guide to see how you measure up with the new literacies was helpful yo me to realize that even though I know them all and think that I am including them in my lessons, I really am not.  So now I find myself thinking harder and looking for more ideas on how to accomplish the task of integrating the new literacies in my classroom.  I also liked the google map and how it explains how to use the tool to put your information.  I have already started thinking about how to use this interactive map idea with my social studies class.   

Interesting enough I have realized that I don't have a very big digital footprint.  After watching the video about our digital footprint, I went online and googled my name and realized that there is a dentist out west that has far more information on the web than I do.  I have a Facebook account and use it to read and keep up on my friends but I don't write on it very often.  I have a Twitter account that I don't know really how to use. I upload pictures to Shutterfly but have not shared the information with friends and family.  I have realized that I need to update my digital footprint and start to participate more in the world now as opposed to waiting to see what will come up next.  

Sharing my KWL chart :
What I know:  I feel that I am knowledgeable in the area Microsoft applications like word, excel, and powerpoint.  I have used wikispaces to create wikis for my classes and for groups that I have been involved with as a way for all of us to share information in one place.  I have used Glogster in my classroom.  This is a great tool for creating projects but also a good way to have a collecting point for a digit portfolio.    

What I want to Learn:  I want to know more about ways to use technology more efficient in my classroom.  I want to teach my students how to be good digital citizens so I need to find good ways to make this happen.  I want to find better ways to use my interactive whiteboard as well as the document camera and laptops.  I would love to find a way to get my students to interact more through a blog or wiki to enhance their learning experience in the middle school.