Thinking About Learning

In support of my efforts to promote blogging at my school, I have produced a couple of very simple videos about blogging.  One is for teachers (embedded in an earlier post) and one is for students, introducing the concepts of blogging.  Originally I produced the videos in PhotoStory.  When I uploaded them to TeacherTube and played them, they kept hanging up with buffering.  Needless to say, this was not satisfactory to me.  Who wants to watch a video that keeps stalling?  I have spent a ridiculous amount of time trying to redo them in a format that would play smoothly.  Ultimately I used Movie Maker to upload the images, an iPod to record the narrations, and then imported those audio files into Movie Maker.  This version of the video plays just fine in TeacherTube, but the transitions are not as interesting as with PhotoStory.  Click here for Blogging for Beginners.  Anyone have any tips for using PhotoStory videos with TeacherTube?

On a personal note, my nephew, Joshua, won his school spelling bee today for the 2nd year in a row.  You rock, Joshua!!!

Last week I held a training session for my teachers that I called SMART Board 101. I was very impressed that 14 teachers came voluntarily to the session at 8:00 am on a work day. They have so much to do and so little time to get their work done! I was honored that they would give up an hour of their precious time to come for training. My faculty is a very committed group of educators, and they are excited about getting their SMART Boards. I hope that will happen soon!
For the session I used a presentation that was originally created by Marcia Jeans of Witchita Public Schools. Her district has an amazing resource site for SMART Board tutorials and lessons. Another great resource is Jim Hollis’s blog, Teachers Love SMART Boards. He daily posts useful ideas and links for teachers…awesome stuff!

I needed a little dose of nature this weekend, so I went hiking and visited some waterfalls. As I walked back to my car after observing the grandeur of Isaqueena Falls, I noticed the small, quiet stream that fed the great cascades below. That image was very encouraging to me as it reminded me of my work. Hopefully my simple, steady efforts as a TIS will eventually produce a powerful flow of technology integration!

I had the privilege Friday of attending a Panel of Peers workshop sponsored by NCR. It was a gathering of people from the business world who share and discuss best practices for eCommerce. As an educator, I was interested to see how the business world is utilizing Web 2.0 tools. I have concerns about the fact that the education establishment is not changing quickly enough to keep up the the rapidly changing digital world. NCLB has reduced the educational focus of lawmakers to test results and national rankings. This narrowness generally precludes a creative educational environment with an ability to adapt itself to the challenges of a global digital market.

I believe that the only way this will change is for there to be a stronger partnership between businesses and schools. Let’s face it…money talks. Lawmakers don’t listen to teachers about what’s best for education, but the business world has the clout to be heard. Business leaders need to see first-hand what’s going on in our schools. In spite of our poor reputation in this state, some amazing things are happening. But are we doing enough to prepare our students for this century?

Some benefits of a stronger bond between businesses and schools:

• Two-way communication about the skills future workers need and what is being taught would strengthen the curriculum.
• The presence of business leaders in schools provides good role models for students and illustrates the value of a good education.
• As business leaders become informed about the needs of schools and students, they will be better prepared to communicate with lawmakers as a supportive voice for education and the changes that need to be made.
• Career education can be greatly enhanced by a variety of business partners regularly interacting with schools.
• Businesses have resources to meet some of the needs of students and teachers. (I currently need a digital video camera to use for a variety of purposes at school.)
• As businesses invest in schools with both human and capital resources, the return that will be reaped will be a stronger educational system and a better-prepared workforce.

Curriculum Connections:
Uses of digital video:  record Readers’ Theater presentations to share online, record oral student presentations to enable students to do self-evaluations of communication skills, record book talks for vodcasts, record students demonstrating math processes to post online for students to access at home, record “You Were There” news reports of events studied in social studies, record student skits acting out favorite scenes from books.

My fifth graders are really getting into blogging.  At this point, they’re still writing about topics assigned by teachers, but they love doing it.  As of this week, all 6 fifth grade classes at my school have individual student blogs.  This has been one of my goals, and the teachers and students are loving it! 

Earlier this week we had Math/Science night, and parents came with their students to various classrooms to participate in fun, educational activities.   I was hosting some interactive computer math games in my room.  One of the dads who came in was asking me about teaching the fifth graders to blog, and he told me that this is what he does in his work.  He works for a large company and travels around the country presenting seminars teaching businesses how to use blogs, emails, Flickr, YouTube, and Twitter to improve marketing.   His blog, http://www.emailyogi.com/, shares some great tips for using Web2.0 tools in the business world. 

After talking with him, I became more convinced than ever of the need to teach our students how to responsibly use these tools in ways that will encourage them to be lifelong learners.  As I have been a little immersed in blogging in the past few weeks, I decided to put together a little video about what I consider the most important reasons to blog with students.  I uploaded it to TeacherTube, but it keeps slowing down for buffering.  Then I tried Google Video.  It plays smoothly, but video quality is fuzzy.  Here’s the Google version:

Over the weekend I went to see the movie Bucket List. No deep thinking was required; it was just a “feel good, appreciate life” kind of movie. The premise of the movie is that 2 old guys find out they have less than a year to live, so they make a list of all the things they want to do before they “kick the bucket.”

This was not a new concept for me. About a year ago, I read Kris Radish’s book, Sunday List of Dreams. This book has a similar premise, but the main character is a middle-aged woman looking to live a meaningful life after years of fear and disappointment. After finishing the book, I composed my own list of dreams and came up with a top five list. Since that time, I’ve actually fulfilled two of them and have added a couple more.

After watching the movie this weekend, I started thinking about my work. My first year as a TIS is half over. What dreams do I have for the remainder of the first year? Here’s my list of dreams or my “bucket list” for the rest of this school year (not in any particular order):

1. To have several teachers from each grade level regularly contributing to our school’s Diigo social bookmarking site as a tool for collaboration.
2. To get all 5th grade students regularly blogging.
3. To see all our Smartboards hung and teachers using them daily.
4. To engage more teachers and students in podcasting.
5. To continue monitoring the needs of my teachers and provide whatever support is needed to enhance and improve instruction.

It’s easy to lose focus when entrenched in the pressing needs of each day, but I heard in church yesterday that in order to live fulfilled lives, we must organize our lives around the most important things. I’m going to try to focus on my list of dreams.

Curriculum Connection:

Literacy/Science: Research volcanoes (Diigo volcano bookmarks). Use Open Mind 2 to collect and organize data such as location, size, history, and volcanic activity. Export to HTML to create web pages for sharing. In my opinion, Open Mind 2 is one of the best graphic organizer tools available.

I finished analyzing the results of the technology survey that I posted for my teachers with Survey Monkey. Following the example of a TIS friend, I posted the survey results on a web page so I could easily share them with my staff. I was pleased that 48 people took the time to respond. It was a short survey with only 8 questions, but it gave me a barometer reading on the local attitudes toward technology. Honestly, there weren’t any surprises. Most teachers reported that the level of technology integration in their classrooms is not very high, but they have a very strong interest in learning more about how to use a SMARTboard. As part of our district’s technology roll-out plan, every teacher in our school received a laptop and projector last semester. Our SMARTboards have also arrived, but they are still sitting in boxes in a storage room. It may be months before the contracted company gets around to mounting them. (That is a huge frustration and another story.) My teachers are eager to get their boards and want to be prepared to use them. This eagerness is an open doorway for me, and I hope to use this momentum to help my teachers see that using technology is not just “one more thing to do.” Instead, it’s a way to teach students in ways that engage and motivate them. It will also make their jobs more fun, and it will prepare students to be successful in the world in which they live. The survey results encouraged me as a new TIS. My faculty has demonstrated good receptivity to me and my ideas. I’m excited about my work, and I look forward to good things happening in my school this semester!

Curriculum Connections:

Third Grade Social Studies: Research key battles of the Revolutionary War that were fought in South Carolina. Use Google Earth to plot the locations of the battles. Use Excel to create a graph of the casualty numbers for each battle. Write a “from the scene” news report of each battle and record them for podcasts. Resource: Diigo bookmarks of battle websites.

Literacy: Post Children’s Book Award nominee books on Shelfari to encourage students to read those books and post comments. It’s an online book discussion! Check out our bookshelf. We’re just getting started with this in our media center.

One of the highlights of my week has been to have the privilege of getting two more 5th grade classes started on student blogs. We are using 21 Classes. It’s exciting to expose students and teachers to the possibilities of blogging! The potential for the expression of student learning and literacy development through blog writing is virtually an untapped resource in elementary schools. Students love to blog. It gives them a real world audience for their writing. It also allows them the opportunity to express their opinions and interact online with peers in meaningful ways. Blogs can enhance instruction in every content area. These students are excited about blogging, and it’s a great way to motivate them to write.

Curriculum Connections for Blogs:
Science: Write lab reports for experiments, discuss the application of the scientific method to various science activities, post research findings.

Math: Describe new math processes learned, post answers to word problems.

Social Studies: Commentary on current events, post research findings, compare and contrast events in history, summarize historical events, write biographical information about key historical people.

ELA: Book talks; describe specific story elements such as character analysis, setting, or plot; write poetry; personal narratives; demonstrate reading skills such as fact and opinion, cause and effect, compare and contrast, or figurative language; write biographies or autobiographies.

Yesterday I went to Lynch’s Woods to hike. There’s a trail there that is a small section of the Palmetto Trail. I had never been there before, and I ended up on a trail that wasn’t the one I had intended to hike. Even though I had a trail map, there were times when I was pretty clueless about where I was. In many places the trail was covered with a crunchy blanket of fall leaves and was only discernible because the trail was slightly more indented into the earth than the leaf-carpeted forest floor. The trail I was on intersected with several other trails, and there were times when I was unsure of which direction to take. I had the awareness that since I’d never been here before, even if I always took the correct path, I still wouldn’t really know where I was going. It was a lovely experience of silence and solitude, but I had many concerns. According to the map, my trail was 7 1/2 miles long. Was I going the right way? Would I get lost in these acres of woods? Would I get out before it got dark? Would my husband have to alert a search team to find me?

While I was hiking, I also thought of how my uncertainties mirrored some of the current uncertainties in education. There are so many unanswered questions about the future! Will the next president really understand the needs of public education? Will No Child Left Behind be revised to provide a fairer, more balanced system of accountability? Will lawmakers ever “get” that the current framework of the education establishment is decades behind the educational needs of our students and that we need to be preparing them for the 2020’s, not the 1980’s? There’s no way to know for sure if we’re on the right path; no way to know where we’re really headed, and if we’ll find our way. All that I know to do is the same thing I did on the trail…keep moving forward, make the best decisions we can along the way, and head in the direction that our hearts and minds lead us. Hopefully we’ll eventually find our way in the midst of this changing world, and we’ll make a difference in the lives of our students.

Curriculum Connections:
ELA (Word Study): SpellingCity.com is the best online word study tool I’ve seen. I found it on Rambling Reflections. Teachers can create spelling lists, and the 3 components are Teach Me, Play a Game, or Test Me. The voice used is very pleasant and natural sounding. In Teach Me each word is read aloud and a sample sentence is given orally. This website could also be used for sight word recognition. This could be a great intervention for RTI!

Math: Teach using money with Learning to Use Money. This interactive site teaches about the history of money, using coins and bills, and has practice activities.

Technorati: hiking , NCLB, education

The year 2007 is nothing but a memory now! It was a year of many changes for the women in my family. My daughter graduated from college and began a 5 year PhD program. My sister graduated from divinity school and began a new job. It was also a year of change for me. After 20 years of teaching, I left the classroom to become a technology integration specialist. I actually love my new job, but I still feel like I’m “learning the ropes.” It has taken time to get to know a whole new faculty and to learn where they are in their comfort level/use of technology. Just today I posted an online survey for my staff about their technology needs so that I can determine what direction I need to take next.

I’ve decided that 2007 was the year of changes and that 2008 will be a year of letting go. This year my daughter will be getting married, and my son will graduate from high school and move away to college. There are some other things in my life that I need to learn to let go of as well. When I think about school, I think about some ways of thinking that I need to let go. I need to stop expecting all the teachers around me to jump on board with technology my way. Everybody has their own approach and comfort level. After a conversation with a friend a couple of weeks ago, I was reminded that I also need to let go of thinking about Web 2.0 applications in terms of “cool tools.” We were talking about what it means to have technology embedded in the curriculum as opposed to just using technology tools. I have decided to let go of the phrase “cool tools” and instead focus more on the curriculum. In keeping with that thought, instead of listing the new technology tools that I explore, I’m going to try to share some curriculum ideas and ways technology can support them.

ELA Curriculum Ideas:

• Use Shelfari to post the 2008 Children’s Book Award Nominees. Encourage students to post comments and opinions of the books online.
• Do an author study by posting multiple books by a single author on Shelfari. Have students make comments to compare books, identify common details of author’s craft, discuss favorite book and tell why.
• Videotape sample model RTI Intervention lessons to be used for training.