Inspired by the beginning of a new school year and the fresh new faces that come into my computer lab each day, I hereby resolve to set a better example of blogging daily — or at least as close to that as I can manage.
I’ve been busy with learning my way around my new job, but EVERYONE is busy. Honestly, I have been doing more microblogging than before, and that’s taken time that I could have used to write a quick post here and there. (And yet, my colleagues on Plurk have actually SAVED me hours by offering quick answers to my often complicated questions. The collective knowledge of my network of online friends who are educational technology experts all over the world - my professional learning network, hereafter referred to as my PLN - is amazing! And worthy of great awe on my part.
At any rate, in order to teach my new fifth and sixth grade students the importance of blogging and commenting (and how they are inherently related), I need to step up and walk the walk. So, here we go.
Yesterday’s challenge to myself and my students was to see if we could manage to get all of the network permissions in place to allow all students in my two computer labs to create their own personal avatars on Kidzui. We did get this accomplished - sort of. As I perused the results of yesterday’s class time after the students had left, I discovered that a few of students did not follow some specific directions that I had given for the set-up of their accounts. As I was very clear about how watchful I would be over their accounts and avatars’ behaviors, I had no qualms about promptly deleting those students’ accounts and avatars. Those students and I will talk briefly about this today, and they’ll have another opportunity to follow my specific directions. I will be very clear that additional instances of not following directions will be noted and considered when looking at other opportunities for students to interact with others online; yet, if this was a “one-off” (and possibly related to the 10-minute interruption to class for a scheduled tornado drill) then no other consequences will come of yesterday’s blip. (But I must note that more than 85% of the class was able to follow the directions, and they had the same interruption.)
Anyway, today they will navigate their way around the extensive world that Kidzui has provided. Some will dabble there this weekend, no doubt. It’s a pretty cool place!
But next week, we begin our investigation into the concept of student blogging. Due to MAP testing, we’re computer-less for three days, so I plan to use that time to do some rare teacher-directed reading of a variety of student blogs using the LCD projector. This will give us an opportunity to talk about the purpose of blogging, how it relates to their learning (even state standards, wink, nudge), and why reading/commenting on other students’ blogs is an important and awesome responsibility as a part of the process.
By Thursday, when we return to our lab, I hope to have the shell created that will become the home for their blogs. I’m still waffling between using a Glogster home page for each student on a class wiki space or a cleaner/simpler student blog space. Hopefully, my PLN will be able to help me sort that out this weekend!
In the meantime, please DO leave a comment if you have any advice, words of encouragement, or suggestions for student blogs that are currently up and running and open to comments from my awesome students!
I really should wait until the website is up, but… I can’t.
I’ve hired incredible talent to put this site together for my talented teenage son.
I’ll have lots more to say about HER (the website designer) later. (Believe me when I say her work speaks for itself. You’ll be impressed.)
But for this moment I want to share a few audio files with you… Please bear with me on the awkwardness of this post… MP3 files don’t play as nicely here in the body of this text, or at least I’m dorky enough to not know how to best share them seamlessly…
Here are some recordings my son made tonight… guess I’ll have to delete this post eventually, hm? For now, let’s use the guest password of “alexander”.
Roxas’ Theme, Someone I Can Trust, and Colors of Wind are all his arrangements of Japanese composers’ original works — anime themes through and through.
The last piece, Novelette in Various Minors, is an original composition — which here is a very much re-made version of a piece he composed when he was eleven years old.
I will pull this post down soon… but I just can’t STAND the idea of not sharing with my PLN and very small readership of this blog!
I’m so excited! It’s official. Next month I am going back to working with kids and teachers, as an Engaged Learning Specialist at the middle school level!
I love the fact that my new job title places the focus on Engaged Learning, and that it is a multi-faceted position. I’ll be working with students in a computer lab part of the time, so I’m delving into the brand-new NETS publication eagerly, looking for the changes and seeing how they align with my current thinking about digital citizenship. I’ll be working with teachers to integrate technology part of the time, so I will get to apply some of that new knowledge shared by friends who attended NECC this summer and do what I love most - collaborate and facilitate. I will also be making some changes to the media center, so I am very grateful to have the insights of so many colleagues in my online PLN who have been investigating and blogging this past year about the changing role of the library.
Best of all, my new superintendent and new principal “get it”… They have used the phrases “breaking down walls” and “getting in the way of students’ learning”. Not surprisingly, my superintendent shared with me the highlights of various conversations he’s had recently with Will Richardson, David Jakes and Meg Ormiston. How refreshing to speak to an administrator who doesn’t give me a blank look when I talk about who’s on my aggregator!
This announcement is so new that I haven’t even seen the spaces I’ll be working in next year, so it’s a little hard to “envision” at this point. I’m looking forward to meeting new friends, getting oriented to a new culture, and beginning this wonderful adventure. I’m sure that it won’t be long before my To Do List grows to immense proportions, and surpasses the length of my current list of questions… so I’m getting organized now! I’m looking at Moodle and nings and wikis, and investigating student blogs and podcasting tools…
What tools have been most beneficial to you in your quest to integrate technology? What suggestions do you have for me — things you wish you’d known when you started your last new position? What would you do with a brand new opportunity like this one?
Tonight I am honored to be a part of the Great Blog Off!
My post for tonight is Social Media and Conferences. It addresses the recent controversy regarding information sharing at a major conference for educational technology. Since drafting this post, several updates to the “controversial policy” have been posted on the NECC Ning. I invite you to follow them, as all of us in this field of educational technology will. Even as I write this, a new update has been posted from ISTE on the topic.
I am honored that this post has been selected by Colleen as a guest blogger on BuzzNetworker after I submitted my original post to my Twitter-colleague Kelly at Taxgirl.
Sadly, a trip to San Antonio just isn’t in the cards for me this June. One day I’ll make it to NECC, but it looks like it isn’t going to be in 2008.
I was feeling a little left out, with all the excited twittering about it — and I’m sure this will come to a maddening cacophony in the next two weeks — until I ran across this post by Steve Dembo a week or so ago.
While I am amazed, I’m also thrilled to see that Open PD is developing a life of its own in our field.
I wonder how long it will be before this deeply impacts the factors considered as educational technology conferences are scheduled in the future. It seems ironic to attend an ed tech session and not be able to get a wireless signal, but such was the case in late April right here in the Chicago suburbs.
As recently as last year, a rather large event (one option of many offered by a big school district on an institute day) had to be moved to another convention center the DAY before the event because it was suddenly discovered that the original venue had no internet access outside of their own business office! (How do you stay in business?)
I wonder if these things cross the minds of people who own or manage reception halls and the like. Do they know how simple it is to provide wireless access in their public areas? Providing bandwidth that makes it possible to live stream multiple sessions may soon be a determining factor in which locations are considered for our field. Has anyone told them?
Summertime means many things to many people, but I daresay that it means the most to teachers.
I, for one, can’t wait to do may of the things that most of you will be doing — sleeping in just a little later, catching up on leisure reading, getting my house back under control, taking the kids on daytrips to our favorite spots.
However, like so many other die hard ed techies out there, I’ll be splashing around with new Web 2.0 tools and trying out apps that I just never seem to get to during the school year. I stuck my toe in the water with Diigo, but have I really explored all that it can do? I can’t wait to tap into my Twitter network to learn more about this. (I’m sure someone tweeted two weeks ago that they were developing a tutorial!)
But first I have to come clean and say that I haven’t yet explored a couple of the most basic spaces on the web that I should have, by now.
So, in this order, I hereby resolve to immerse myself fully (in the shallow end!) of MySpace, Facebook, and SecondLife. (A audible roar from the DEN STAR educators… I swear I heard it!)
Please put on your lifeguard gear. I fully expect that you’ll be there when I gurgle, “HELP! HElp. hel……”
Most Twitter users casually refer to this tool as a “social networking tool,” but by-and-large, the connotation within my PLN is that we connect with other educational technologists in a chatroom-like environment that mimics a social gathering at times.
In fact, if and when we actually meet some of these people at an ed tech conference, big smiles and hugs are the standard greeting — amongst people who have never been in the same room in reality.
Recently, a small informal group of us “introduced” our children via a smaller and carefully controlled Twitter group. Exchanges between the Twitter-8s has been choppy and sporadic, largely due to the busy schedules of the parents. But the kids have pursued the interest, often bumping parents off the computer “for just a few minutes” so they can tweet their virtual “friends”.
Yesterday, warm weather and an ease-up in schedule allowed the first scheduled F2F (face-to-face) meeting of a couple of these kids. The boys had a grand time riding bikes and scooters, flying kites (well, trying), feeding ducks and geese. As will happen with boys, each ended up with a minor scrape or bruise, but they are looking forward to seeing each other again.
All of the Twitter-8s were invited, but you know how weekend activities tend to swallow up the free time. Disappointment was evident in the responses of those who couldn’t make it this time. We’re hoping to get the others to join us for future gatherings. After all, this is all about social networking!
As I mentioned in my last post, there has been a resurgence of interest in the low-cost alternatives to the big name manufacturers of interactive whiteboards.
I’ve been listening to some of the Twitter-chatter regarding this subject in the past week or so, and discovered a resounding lack of satisfaction with the fact that most of the low-cost alternatives are only Windows-compatible. In a remarkably well-timed e-mail follow-up, Jim Flanagan forwarded to me this February post from Uwe Schmidt. The comments on this blog have continued for three months, so be sure to scroll down and see all of the updates!
It’s spring, and Ed Tech Directors across the country are looking at how to “spend down” those budgets.
I spent the afternoon with some of my favorite smart people, a spirited group of Technology Directors from the northwestern suburban school districts of Chicago. The collective knowledge in the room is overwhelming — not just on the “techie” level, but on the historical knowledge of where education has come from and where it should go to next in Illinois.
Other Tech Directors in the room nodded sympathetically. One questioned the use of this type of a tool as anything that increases student learning; it is all teacher-directed, and seems to be a fancier way to do what we’ve been doing (wrong) for so many years.
By some odd coincidence, my Twitter network tonight included an informal announcement from a colleague at the University of Delaware: “Built my Wiimote whiteboard pen and almost have it working!”As others added comments and followed other threads of discussions she continued updating every few minutes:
“I can barely solder and made a fair pen in about 1/2 hour.”
“Then you have to play with the software for awhile.”
“I’m doing it on Mac and trying Darwiin Remote and Wiimote Whiteboard.”
“It’s going to take a bit of practice.”
“Let me know how it works out for you. I’m still playing. Not as smooth as the videos ”
“$10 parts to make light pen, $50 Wii controller, free software almost creates a smartboard…”
It was exciting to know that what I had heard in theory could actually take form. I wondered if my colleagues in neighboring school districts had the resources, manpower and patience to experiment in this way. Yet, who can afford to ignore the potential savings if the Wii version — if indeed it delivers what the pricier out-of-the-box versions do?
Stay tuned… My University of Delaware friend and another university-level educator have been challenged by me to create video tutorials of their “amendments” to Johnny Lee’s original post.
These three photos came to me in this morning’s e-mail.
I’m still learning how to do basic things with my blog, so there’s probably a better way to embed these photos (like down the left side of the text) but what I want to point out is the tiny text line at the bottom of the third image. You can click on the image to see it. Or I can just tell you that it says, “This is India. It’s where you call when you have a technical problem with your computer.”
Seeing as they came from a well-circulated e-mail, some of you may already have seen them. But this was a first for me, and a rather timely one, as I finish off the last chapters of The World is Flat and get a little deeper into Here Comes Everybody.
Some of us have spent more than our fair share of time on the phone with the people who man the Help Desks. My most recent experience a few months ago was rather impressive. The technician I spoke to was very polite, friendly, and conversational. There was no hint of an accent in his voice – something I recall that Friedman referenced in his book. I asked, casually, about his location. Sure enough, it was India, although the company he worked for was based in Australia.
I recall being a little hesitant to accept Remote Desktop help from the other side of the world, but, well, there you are. In their hands. At their mercy. Because your problem isn’t fixed.
It worked out OK. The solution to my problem was discovered and delivered within record time. He profusely thanked me for my patience. (We’d been on a toll-free call for, oh, fifteen minutes.) But then something unusual happened.
He asked if I would hold to speak to his supervisor. Taken aback, I stammered, “Why?”
“Oh, it’s just something we do here. My supervisor speaks to our callers at random to gain information about our level of service. Do you mind, then?”
I think we need more of this kind of quality assurance here in America.
Photo credit: I can’t make out the website at the top left of each image. If you can, or if you wish to claim the image, comment here and I will gladly post it.
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