Teaching Tools! Free!!

Just a few interactive teaching tools that are out there.

Great Web 2.0 tools include a very user friendly format for making arcade games with your questions and answers.
http://web20teach.blogspot.com/

Pull this site up on your smartboard and you have a countdown timer!
http://e.ggtimer.com/


Downloadable PowerPoints for the following games
math jeopardy 3rd grade.ppt Millionaire.ppt Squares.ppt Password.ppt wheel of fortune.ppt Survivor PPT Template.ppt weakest Link.ppt


Zoomerang allows you to create an online survey with up to 20 questions and 100 responses for free.

Try them out. I know I love the ones I am using.

P. S. Let’s not forget Pete’s PowerPoint Stations with MANY PowerPoint templates.

Virtual Classroom

Sorry I have been gone for a while. I went to Greece and Turkey on vacation. It was an amazing trip. It gave me an entirely new perspective. I highly recommend it. I really didn't deal with the technical side of life. But I am back.
So, lets talk about virtual learning space. Moodle provides a free virtual classroom space. There are over 678,000 registered users all over the world. Have you ever used Moodle? I have used Blackboard and it is very understandable and usable. Moddle is free. I was wondering if anyone out there sees a need or desire for a personal learning space or is it only of value for long distance learning. Would you be more likely to use a virtual learning space, a blog or a wiki?

Resources for Teachers

There are MANY resources for educators online. A lot of them are very good. There are many communities for teacher and sources to share information as well as collaborate on projects with classrooms all over the world. Some of the ones that have bubbled to the surface are:

Microsoft has The Innovative Teachers program http://co1piltwb.partners.extranet.microsoft.com/mcoeredir/mcoeredirect.aspx?linkId=11667889&s1=13c05137-b00a-947c-66fb-84d219980c5c

IEarn has projects with other teachers around the globe. I copied a list of some of the projects below;

SEEKING PARTNERS: iEARN PROJECTS AND ACTIVITIES
1. iEARN team in Sierra Leone invites participation in Helping Youth Say No to Gun Violence Project.
2. Read and contribute to Kindred, a global family history project.
3. Join schools in Morocco, Oman, Palestine and the USA in the Electronic School Magazine Project.
4. New Connecting Math to Our Lives through Photography activities.
5. Join classes in Qatar and USA creating Solar Cookers.
6. Hello iEARN food lovers - class in Moldova seeking partners for group of adult students - ages 20 years old.
7. Participate in the PEARL Online Journalism Festival.
8. iEARN schools around the world fly kites for peace.


RESOURCES, CONTESTS, WEBSITES AND ANNOUNCEMENTS
9. iEARN signs MOU with Elluminate, Inc.
10. iEARN school in USA wins Goldman Sachs Award.
11. English language teacher resource features iEARN classes in Egypt and Thailand.
12. Enter the 2009 SIGtel Online Learning Award Competition.
13. Participate in Xperimania for a chance to win resources for your science classrooms.
14. Call for entries: 2009 My Hero Short Film Festival.
15. Early Childhood Education Online Tools.


UPCOMING EVENTS
16. Annual YouthCaN Conference in NYC, USA, April 4-6, 2009.
17. iEARN-India National Conference in Pune, May 2-4, 2009.
18 iEARN-Morocco (MEARN) to host 16th Annual iEARN Conference and 13th Youth Summit, July 19-25, 2009.
19. World Children's Summit in Yokohama, Japan, August 10-12, 2009.





MIT has a program to teach about computer programming called Scratch. It is very user friendly and fun to work with. It allows for as much or as little creativity as one brings to it. It is a free download which means at school the IT department needs to install it. http://scratch.mit.edu/

Thinkfinity offers lesson plans interactives and more.

http://thinkfinity.org/
Thinkquest.org Think.com is now part of ThinkQuest -- A learning platform where teachers and students create learning projects, participate in a website competition, and browse a library of student projects.
There are tons out there and each has it’s own twist. I don’t want to overwhelm but there are a few to look at. Enjoy and let me know what you think.

Cell Phones

The question I have been mulling over is where and how we can use the omnipresent cell phone in classes. Hall Davidson from Discovery School does a presentation on cell phones in education. He starts by having people take out their cell phones and answer a question. You can go to http://www.polleverywhere.com/ and get an account that with a downloadable spreadsheet that will update with every vote. Users send a text message or go to a website and vote and it updates on the spreadsheet. You can watch people vote. A personal account is $15 and presenter is $65.

How about a quiz on the cell phone? Students can text in the answers. Imagine how motivated your students would be to do a quiz on their cell phones.

Gcast is a great site to create podcasts. Now, I understand that it would take energy to create these podcasts but it meets the kids where they live. To start out I am hoping to get advisory groups to make weekly ‘Remdawg” podcasts with info, news, maybe challenges, interviews, etc. They can choose the topic, music and content. I wonder if we can get the kids to embrace this. I think it could be a powerful connection to the school and the community.

Other uses for cell phones in classes might include using Twitter to connect group work, blog posts, accessing pictures and doing searches. Qik.com lets you share live video. Jott.com offers voice to text. There are sites that translate and many, many more options.

Step one is to embrace the technology instead of banning it. So, that being said, do you see Remington Middle School encouraging the use of cell phones in classes any time soon or do you see that in the far distance?

Tech Blogs

In an attempt to write an article for the blog for this week, I started surfing. There are some amazing blogs out there. Made me wonder what I am doing writing this, however. Not to be so easily deterred, here I am again.

Some of the blogs I found and what they are doing this week.

Yes Tech! has a great article on President Obama’s. This blog covers a wide range of topics about technology and education.

Webblogg-ed, Will Richardson, deals with Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and the future of education. Will Richardson is well known for trying to push our education system into the 21st century.

Media Matters- Hall Davidson’s blog. Hall Davidson works with Discovery School and works with video and long distance education. He has great topics like how to merge two movies so it appears that someone is, for instance, walking up to a dinosaur.

Ning in Education This blog is most concerned with using social networks for education.

Moving at the Speed of Creativity Wesley Fryer- His most recent post was about how race still matters for dropouts and student identity. His range of topics is pretty broad.

These are just a few of the better known blogs on computer education. They all have great ideas to ponder but none is the end all be all. Hope you like them.

Available Resources

We have Inspiration on the machines in both labs. It is a program that designs graphic organizers but few teachers use it. It allows students to represent a topic on the organizer as a picture. It allows an unlimited number of choices of types of graphic organizers. Students work with this software in computer class.
Photoshop is loaded on the machines in the lab and should be used by no more than 10 at a time but it is an amazing program and some of the kids who want a challenge would LOVE it.
We also have a camcorder that is dedicated to teacher use to record school activities. It is rarely used.
So, we have some resources that we aren’t using. Any thoughts about how to get them circulating?

webinars

Sorry, I am not feeling 100% and got a little behind in my blogging. I will try to do better.

I recently attended a webinar offered by PBS on teaching and learning with digital natives. It was pretty cool. A LOT is going on all at once. There were over 160 attendees including Kathy Schrock. Not that I am a groupie or anything but I was impressed. The chat with 160 people goes at lightening speed while the presenter is speaking so it is a test of multitasking but was a great experience and every direction I looked or listened there was great info. That webinar is archived at pbs.org as well as another on Changing Views of Race.

The next webinar is Remixing Shakespeare for 21st Century Students, the next webinar in the PBS Teachers LIVE! series. Mark your calendars for March 18 from 8-9:30 p.m and it looks great. In April, there is one on 21st century resources for Earth Day and May is Effective Technology integration.

. You need to download a little program and then you will be in the “classroom”. I hope you will attend one and let me know about it. They are really well done

"Grown Up Digital" by Don Tapscott’s

I have been reading this book over break. I am not done yet. It is a very interesting view of the world. Tapscott looks at how the "Net Generation", those that grew up with the Internet, are impacting and changing the world. He identifies characteristics of netgens. His view gives some insight into not only the future but our own generation and others around us, such as the new president.

Netgens have a need for speed, transparency, resources at their fingertips. Baby boomers, myself included, are deeper thinkers and need quiet to focus. I found it VERY enlightening to think through the concept that baby boomers are receivers of information because they grew up with the television. Netgens want to manipulate and personalize everything. I found myself aguing with the author about some of his perceptions of netgens because the majority of my students are not as focused on technology as the author perceives, however, they are very much immersed in it. I have many dancers, skateboarders, soccer, baseball, football players, cheerleaders, etc. Those experiences are the focus of their lives and so they don't develop the same thinking that those who spend hours and hours online do.

So, the real question is how to teach them and what to teach them. They don't need the factual internal database we have. They will be able to look up the capitals of the states, etc, online anytime they need the info. We need to teach them thinking skills but honestly, in at least one of the areas of thinking that they will need, they have more skills than their teachers do.

Okay, let me give you one fun link, Backyard Paradise, before I go. It is a Pbs.org site and was one of Time.com (Time Magazine)This one would be great for younger kids but I was simply impressed with how it all works. It really speaks to the interactivity of the internet.

More later.

Images and editing images online.

There is nothing a kid likes any better than messing with photos. Since the days when that meant drawing a mustache on an image, it has intrigued and engaged kids. First, you need an image. There are a lot out there but Flickr is the quintessential image sharing site. We need to be careful to warn kids that even if they find it online, it does not make it fair game for their use. They can use it for school but they need to cite their source. Someone worked hard to make the image and we need to give them credit.
· Flickr Learn More tour (6 steps)
· Mediamazine Flickr Tutorials

Once they (or you) have an image you can edit it with Fotoflexer, Picnik, or one of many others. Mytheme.com creates animations. That is fun, too.

I am playing with sites that let you make yourself into a cartoon but I am not happy with the results yet. Photo Illustration Maker is pretty limiting and Cartoon Me is similar. I think I expected it would take a photo and make it into a line drawing like on Photoshop and fill in colors but that isn’t how it works.

Next week is vaca and I will not be writing. I hope you have a joyful and restful break.

Cybertrail

I was reading an article from popsci.com about an experiment trying to be anonymous for a week. It was pretty interesting. I am old enough to have read Orwell’s 1984 when it was still well in the future. I remember thinking how impossible and terrifying it was that there would be a time when your every move would be traceable. Today is that day. At work, every keystroke is tracked and can be brought back up. On line, every websearch, every site you visit and everything you do at that site is residing on a server somewhere. You are photographed by surveillance many if not most places you go. When surveillance cameras don’t get you picture, some interested bystander with a cell phone is snapping a record.

Early in my experience working with computers I discovered that there is a LOT of info online about me and most other people. Not all of it is accurate and certainly, not all is up to date. So I researched how to get rid of the old records and found out that I could spend some time contacting the servers that host that information. The problem is, they got it somewhere, public town records, public hospital records, public employment records, etc, and if I ask them they will take it out of their database but it will bounce back the next time they search for information. I would need to find out where they got their information and request anonymity and that might not be possible if they are public documents. If the info is inaccurate I would need to prove it, etc., etc.

So, what do we do? Not much. It is a trade off but privacy is slipping away from us at a rapid rate. If we choose to live in our society we trade privacy. This is a concept that has little meaning for children born in the digital age. I discuss it with them regularly but they see no need for concern. It makes me question where we are going? Will all be transparent? Is that okay? What do you think?

Learning communities.

A couple sites have grabbed my interest. Edutopia has a headline article on creating 21st century learning communities for teachers. Somehow, that is what I am hoping we can do here at Remington. I just don't know how to nudge it into being but hoping this format might help. Any thoughts?

Secondly, this is a quote from Classroom 2.0. Looks interesting!! "PBS Teachers® and Classroom 2.0, with support from Elluminate, are partnering on a series of free monthly webinars designed to help preK-12 educators learn new ways to integrate online instructional resources in the classroom and engage students in curriculum lessons. Join us Wednesday, January 28th, at 8:00pm Eastern Time (US) for "Looking for Lincoln: Changing Views of History, Changing Views of Race" with speaker Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Join the event."

What types of web applications would you like to talk about?

The range of sources and topics is pretty broad. One site Rezed, is a source for learning and digital worlds. This includes Second Life . Second life is a site where you become an avatar or digital representation of yourself, sort of a cartoon representing you. You go through the digital world. I didn't get too far into it because it was eating time like crazy but I understand there are real banks, school and businesses that work through Second Life. I know you can go to conferences, workshops and classes, etc. That seemed a little out of range of my students. I felt the same way about Twitter, a site where you post short messages of what you are doing at any given moment. But when I read about the power of Obama Twittering during the campaign it becomes very interesting. Weblogged is a wiki, online editable database of information, written by Will Richardson, that offers much on blogs, podcasts, wikis, etc. Maybe you have a topic you would like to discuss or a great website on a read-write website. Come on and jump in. We all want to know.
P.S. Russ, I didn't get back to your blog and wiki until later and want to say they are great. Love, love, love the picture and the "feel" of your blog. I subscribed. Do you find it take a lot of time?

Conversation

I think I would like this blog to evolve into a conversation with the staff of Remington and other people interested in the future of computers/the Internet and education, especially middle school education. The areas I am thinking we might discuss include "web 2.0" aka "read-write web", wikis, blogs, podcasts, Google Maps, Google Lit, integrating some or all of this into middle school classrooms.

Here is an example, I have found that a group of teachers have started a group, the Flickr Ed/Tech 365 group that take a picture a day and post them on Flikr. The pictures can be used wtihout restriction for school. They invite us all to join and use Creative Commons licensing so that everyone can share the wealth

Please reply to this post and tell me what you think about a conversation in this format and what you think about the Ed/Tech 365 project. Thanks.

Happy New Year!
I hope you had some time to relax during the past week or two. I took some time to do a little reading about kids and computers. Much of it centered around how parents can supervise, guide and monitor. This is a question with many levels. Let’s break it down.

First of all, there are many ways to monitor your children, for example, you can set parental controls on your computer and on your Internet access, similar to setting controls on you tv viewing. You can purchase a firewall to restrict certain types of content from coming up but what about IMs or text messages? There are programs that you can buy that will send you information about or copies of your child’s IMs or texts. My Mobile Watchdog or any number of spy programs, such as FlexiSPY, allow you to monitor your child. It may require a little shopping but the programs are out there.

The next question is, do you really WANT to know everything your child is doing? Where is the line? You want your child to develop independence but you want them safe and confident.

It needs to be a developmental decision, starting with close monitoring and gradually releasing control. It also needs to be clearly spelled out to the child that you are entrusting them with great responsibility. Whether any of us like it or not the current youth have much more thrust at them and therefore require greater responsibility. As parents this new era forces us to evaluate each child and each circumstance individually.