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.

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

The conversation is shifting

I haven’t blogged in many, many months for various reasons. I made a promise to myself, though, that after T+L in Nashville I’d give it another go.

The biggest idea that I took away from T+L is that the conversation is shifting. This observation has been further supported in conversations with teachers and administrators while currently conducting a technology audit. The conversation used to be about whether or not technology made a difference, how to get across the idea that it’s not about the “wires and plugs,” but about the motivation, differentiation, student engagement, and teaching efficiency that happens when a teacher has all the modern tools available and knows how to properly use them. The conversation has shifted, at least in my experiences lately, in that no one is denying the importance of using these tools anymore. In recent conversations, people are no longer questioning “why technology.” When I ask teachers about their vision of the future of education, I now commonly hear words such as “facilitator,” “projects,” “collaboration,” “seamless integration.” Teachers are aware of 21st Century learning skills, Prensky, the flat world, and other ideas that I can recall at one time only hearing in the “techie” world. Is it possible that the echo chamber has spiraled into mainstream conversations? Are we close to a tipping point in changing outdated methods of education?

ISTE Webinar

I received this email today from ISTE:

WEBINAR: Teaching with Digital Images!

 

I wanted to make you aware of a high-interest webinar to be conducted by ISTE on Wednesday, February 21. Featuring the authors of one of ISTE’s most popular publications, Teaching with Digital Images: Acquire, Analyze, Create, Communicate. (Glen Bull & Lynn Bell). Learn more and register at www.iste.org … lower-middle of the homepage. I hope you will register and participate.

First post

Hi all! My old blog, http://samandeliz.livejournal.com, seemed to be a place where I was posting more day-to-day personal stuff instead of educational technology. Since I need to get to know WordPress anyway for some consulting work I’m doing, I thought I’d start a new blog dedicated soley to education.

More to come….