McREL is blogging!

I’ll probably be blogging more at the McREL Blog than I do here. Check out the new McREL Blog at http://www.mcrel.typepad.com/.

Changing Office Procedures

For a literature review in our office, about two dozen people are charged with reading hundreds of research studies and summarizing them. This actually comes after an even larger group has the task of searching for research studies and coding them to see if they are appropriate for our review. Most of these studies are in PDF format and not all of us have the full version of Acrobat. The amount of paper that would mean if all of us physically printed out each study – even if we shared hard copies – is mind-boggling. Before I started my task yesterday, I searched for the best way to make notes and highlights on a PDF.

What I found was a resource called http://a.nnotate.com. It’s free (up to a certain limit) and has some features that I really like. You can color-code your various highlights as well as tag and make notes for each highlight. When you’re finished, all of your highlighted text shows up on one screen along with the tags and notes you used. Clicking on the text takes you to that place in the document. While it took a couple of hours to search for the resource, then get comfortable using it, it’s well worth not using hundreds of reams of paper.

Are there other similar resources out there that you are using to annotate PDFs? If so, please share.

When you actually make a difference…

While sitting in a very quiet, serious discussion one afternoon this week, I snuck a peek at my BlackBerry and found this email from a former client for whom I had conducted a technology audit:

Elizabeth,
We are all very excited that our district is going to have 18 classrooms with 1:1 computing with
the ASUS EEEPC 1000 ’s laptops ! We received another EETT Grant that was going to provide laptops
for 4 classrooms through a competitive application process within the district.
The applications were so good, the district decided to take care of the 14 more classrooms.
The kids and teachers are really excited about this opportunity. I have heard some great stories
about what happened in the schools when they found out that they were selected for the program.
Teachers running and dancing in the halls; one teacher was so excited and so red in the face, the
students were afraid she was having a heart attack! There is still joy in learning!

I just wanted you to know how the spark you ignited here is becoming a bigger flame.

I wish you could do research on the impact of our laptops in the classrooms! Then we could
visit more often and share more stories.

Thanks for all you have done for us.”

Needless to say, I wanted to jump out of my seat and do a little running and dancing myself! What makes this email even more special is that this tech audit was conducted almost 2 years ago. Being a few degrees removed from the classroom, I miss that immediate feedback I used to get from the kids, knowing that what I had attempted to do had meaning and value. I’m going to tuck this email away for those rainy days when I feel that I’m having the same conversations with the same people, yet nothing is happening. Thank you – you-know-who-you-are – for sending this.

Teaching Literacy in the Content Areas

I recently co-facilitated a 3 day workshop on Teaching Reading and Writing in the Content Areas. Having a background in elementary with my strongest areas in science and math, I wondered how much I personally would be able to bring to this workshop. Anyone can learn a PowerPoint, but making the learning come alive is what really makes a workshop worth attending.

Luckily, my co-presenter had a strong background in secondary literacy and was able to take the lead on the content. Where I came in was with my knowledge of technology and Web 2.0 that make literacy and writing so much more engaging and collaborative. The result was a wonderful meshing of content and skills….traditional, research-based methods with exciting methods of communicating.

We started off simple: when Dana showed different strategies for activating background knowledge, I demonstrated Inspiration, Bubbl.us, and BrainPOP. In addition, every URL and handout was already uploaded to their wiki, showing the power of using quick, easy tools to make access easier. (No longer do we have to make a long list of things to email to people; we simply upload it to the wiki instantaneously.) They used the wiki throughout the workshop, uploading their own examples of Concept Definition Maps and Semantic Feature Analyses.

Perhaps the greatest moment for me in the workshop was on the second day, when we talked about Teaching Writing in the Content Areas. I showed them Digital Storytelling and how powerful movies can be to motivate students to write. We watched as they explored MovieMaker, many for the first time, and created their own short movies.

The final day was my favorite. They took all that they had learned and began building their own tools to use in the classroom. Most created a classroom blog and it was incredibly exciting listening to them talk about how they planned to use the blog for literacy in their content areas. It was exciting hearing them troubleshoot with each other and show how to do something new with the interface of the blog. Some went on to create wikis to help facilitate collaboration and to provide access to documents and Web sites for their students.

There was so much learning going on: my learning of secondary literacy strategies, Dana’s learning about technology tools, and the participants learning how to put all of this together in order to improve their instruction. It was adult learning at its best.

Present Like Steve Jobs

I’ve really gotten into some reading to help me think about my presentations with teachers and how to make them more dynamic. I want to model what I’m talking about when I say that we as educators need to think about our 21st century “audience” and how to best engage them.

A couple of resources that I’ve really enjoyed include Dan Pink’s A Whole New Mind and Garr Reynold’s Presentation Zen.

I was planning on summarizing a great video that I watched called “Present like Steve Jobs,” but then I found this one from the same author, Carmine Gallo, that’s even better.

Two ways I plan to use this information: 1) to inform my own practice working with educators and 2) to share this information with teachers and see how they can apply these tips to their own teaching practice. We are all teaching an entirely different generation of learners and these eight practices can help us (me) think differently about getting my message across succinctly and elegantly.

VoiceThread for Students Who Are Hearing Imparied

I gave a demo yesterday to a group of very tech-savvy educators in Sioux Falls of how VoiceThread could be used with various learning styles. Some of the participants had already heard of the resource and several had used it with their students. One project in particular really caught my interest.

One teacher (I’m so sorry that I don’t recall her name!) works with students who are hearing impaired. For a unit on Romanesque vs. Gothic architecture, she had her students take pictures of various cathedrals and buildings in the Sioux Falls area, then use VoiceThread to make comments and to draw on/highlight areas on the photo that classified it as Romanesque or Gothic. One student used the voice comment feature to work on his voice inflection for feedback from his teacher. He then used the video comment feature to sign those same comments to his fellow classmates. How cool!!!

You can check out this project at the links below:

http://voicethread.com/share/81027

http://voicethread.com/share/81021

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Tags: voicethread, multimedia, differentiatedLearning

Correction

One correction from yesterday:

The Learning 2.0 Conversation was facilitated by Ben Wilkoff. (I’m not sure how/why I assumed Budtheteacher.) It was a great conversation that I hope continues. Some key points:

1. How do we keep alive the momentum of conversations like this? How do we help them to expand beyond our own community?
2. How the physical structure of schools and classrooms are so indicative of the prevailing Industrial Age model of education.
3. TIE and NECC – possibilities
4. Are we, in our current roles, helping to push and model Learning 2.0?

(Later)

5. What would a Web 2.0 starter package look like for educators just getting their feet wet with all this? Some ideas that were tossed around were Google Reader – frontloaded with a couple of subscriptions (Warlick was mentioned, as he was one of the first bloggers many of us had read), del.icio.us, and Twitter.

Thanks, Ben and all, for a productive Sunday evening!

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Tags: future, web2.0, learning2.0

What did I do this weekend? Learn? Work? Play? Yes.

Sometimes you have those weekends where all of your interests, job descriptions, and sense of play all come together for you. This weekend was just that for me.

I don’t often partake in weekend web casts. Sometimes I just want to drink good coffee, make some omelets, water my plants, etc. This weekend, however, I listened to the Classroom 2.0 web cast hosted by Steve Hargadon. I’m so glad that I did!

I’ve long been a fan of del.icio.us and use it in every workshop that I give. I cringed Saturday morning when I heard everyone talking about switching to (or adding) Diigo. I’m still learning this resource and its capabilities over del.icio.us, but it’s so fun getting your head into something new like this. Also, after listening to the webcast, I gave Flock another try. I think I still prefer Firefox, but I’m using both simultaneously right now to make sure.

I also edited a couple of my websites that I haven’t touched in over two years. One of those is a Fibonacci WebQuest that I made towards the end of my Master’s program. Since I had already left the classroom after I created it, I never actually put it to use. For an upcoming afterschool conference, however, I’m going to resurrect the WebQuest and use it with the participants. It was intimidating but exciting to open up DreamWeaver and refamiliarize myself with all of its capabilities (or at least some…) It’ll be interesting to actually use the WebQuest with adult learners and see where I might need to make some tweaks.

And the fun continues: tonight, Bud Hunt (aka “Budtheteacher“) is going to continue the conversations started at Colorado’s Learning 2.0 conference last month.

So tomorrow morning, when people ask what I did this weekend, I can honestly answer that I worked all weekend…or learned…or played…..

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Tags: web2.0, professionalDevelopment, diigo

A success story of internet safety

About a year ago, I worked with a teacher in Nevada to help him create a wiki for his 3rd grade students in which they would collaborate on state reports. I’ve kept tabs on the wiki and watched it grow tremendously.

A couple of days ago, I left a comment on the “Georgia” page, offering the student my Flickr pictures from my travels in Savannah, St. Simons, and Athens. I received the following email from the teacher today:

“Let me tell you a story: I wasn’t at school on Tuesday, so I didn’t have a chance to tell my students about the email I received from you on Monday. When I got home Tuesday evening and found your email that said that you had commented on the Georgia site, I decided to check it out. There was no comment at all. I thought that was strange, so I checked my bloglines account, which is the way I do a quick check on what the students have been doing on their reports. I found your comment and printed it off to bring to class today. This morning I talked to the class and found that the students had checked their comments yesterday, and when they found things from people they didn’t know they just deleted them. I explained who you were and showed them a copy of “Using Technology with Classroom Instruction that Works” including the group picture at the back of the book. The class felt bad about it, and I gave the student who was working on Georgia a copy of your comment. While I thought it was kind of humorous, I was really impressed that they did delete the content, since it goes along with beware of strangers.”

I am SO proud of these students (and their teacher) for acting wisely given the situation. Now that they know who I am, I plan to go back and add a few comments to their wiki, but I love that there are these success stories out there to counterbalance some of the horror stories that get such attention.

Kudos to Gary & his class!

Thoughts on FETC

I just got back late last night from my first FETC. I had attended T+L, NECC, Colorado’s TIE several times, but this was my first state-wide tech conference besides Colorado’s.

Two sessions that I really enjoyed were “The Lessons of Chaos” from Stevan Kalmon at The Council on 21st Century Learning. Stevan was one of my professors in my Master’s program at UCD. I had lost track of him since graduation and it was exciting to see the new directions he’d taken.

The other session that I really enjoyed was “e-Mission: An Adventure in Distance Learning” by Jackie Shia at e-Missions. This was a fascinating simulation using video conferencing software with “mission control” in West Virginia. I was on the volcano team and had to relay incoming data regarding a potential eruption to the communication team. The evacuation team had to organize getting the inhabitants on the island of Montserrat to safety. They had to deal with realistic obstacles such as limited vehicles available and few existing shelters. I was so engaged, that I had to tear myself away at the end to prepare for my own presentation.

My biggest “ah-ha,” however, came during a discussion with another participant about how he was taking notes. Most sessions I attended (and my own session) did not provide bulky handouts. There were a few fliers and pamphlets, but no one did the PowerPoint print-outs. Since we didn’t have a place to upload our handouts, this forced everyone to come up with their own solution. For my session, I put all pertinent information on a wiki and directed participants to my del.icio.us account. During my discussion with the other participant, he said that he and a friend were using Google docs to take notes, then publishing them with the tag “fetc.” For my own notetaking, I found that if I had my del.icio.us account open in one tab, Google search engine open in a second tab, and my Amazon account open in a 3rd (for capturing books that I should read), that sufficed for gathering any information I needed.

How great it would be if we taught this sort of thing to our kids! Educause is on the right track, I think, with their recent publication “7 Things You Should Know About Google Jockeying.” This is exactly what I was doing as I was listening to speakers…looking up unfamiliar acronyms, getting more information in quick snippets. And not one person questioned whether or not I was paying attention ; )