Many of you know Al Beamon, he taught 4th grade for many years at Brighton before he became a TRT. Quite glad he joined our team as he’s a really talented guy with great aptitude for the job. every once in a while Al shares a resource that he has found and is using over a James Hurst Elementary. So Al’s most recent share was for animal habitats. GlaxoSmithKline has created a website on animal habitats. Check it out I’m sure it will be helpful.
Whew!! I’m trying to clean out my inbox. The email upgrade has made life very different for many of us. If you need help with the new interface, let me know or you could take the OWA 2007 class that is being offered in the Tech Tuesday lineup.
So anyway, I’m cleaning up my email and I ran across some info on a great site. The Virginia Trekkers are a group of Instructional Technology Resource Teachers who are creating resources for elementary students. The vodcasts and interactives are primarily targeted towards social studies, but where there is an cross over with other core areas, they make sure to get that in as well. Check out the site…there is something for everyone K-6.
So during my SL adventure tonite, someone made a reference to Wordle. I learned about this application earlier this year, but never posted about it (that I could remember). I think using this application would be a cool way to teach students about Main Idea. The application make a word cloud from your text. Words that occur with more frequency are larger in the cloud. Like a tag cloud. I think this might be a great application to help students learn about summarization too. So I took my post about Warlick and turned it into a wordle:
Apparently it’s quite the buzz. I’m so excited!! Eighteen months ago, I asked the Instructional Technology department to provide a blog portal for teachers at PPS. I just knew that if we built it, they would come. And now it’s happening…we’ve had 6 inquiries about blogs in the last 2 weeks. I’m actually redesigning my blog workshop so that I’ll be ready to give the workshop in our “Tech Tuesday” lineup this fall. There are so many ways that teachers can use blogs. My personal favorite is the virtual literature circle. Here are a couple of examples…
I’ve got bunus points because I’ve got Plurk open!!
Learning to Speak Native:
Reference to Prensky: Natives are multitaskers, they prefer graphics BEFORE text etc… they think differently because they grew up connected. Our schools were not created to accomodate these kids. If educators want to reach NATIVES we will have to “just do it”.
We’ve had an information explosion…161 Billion GB of information. Another key trend flattening the world. Open sourcing and tools on steroids (like cell phones). Also Wikinomics - everyone helping to build something better than they can do on their own. Look at the www.curriki.com project or the fact that some things like Gmail are in perpetual beta …not everything is a final draft. The idea is finding innovative uses for things and not necessarily inventing everything. This is the intersection of tools, experts, and knowledge. It’s the idea of a listserv vs. plurk. It’s a conversation and it’s personal. It’s impromptu professional development. You get ideas and professional development that you didn’t even know you need. People share discoveries, request info, social and personal connection, explore new things, professional development opportunities in real time. We are all DEN STARs and we are supposed to share, so we should use these things. VA has a guide on social networking in grades k-12? I need to get my hands on it…Apparently it’s published by the DOE?
Networking allows us to learn how o do what we do and using WEB2.0 allows us to share what we are learning in bigger audiences. So now teachers are becoming as connected as the students we teach. Then we start doing the same things kids do to try to stay connected at work. If you give a man a fish, if you teach a man to fish, ic you connect a man to a fishing community he’ll have variety in his diet.
Natives attends conferences using Live blogs, podcasts, backchannel, skypecast, twitter, ustream even in second life. During packed sessions folks who stream it out can help folks who want to attend. Then you can sit is second life next to others who couldn’t physically be there. www.mogulus.com a virtual broadcasting studio in your computer? www.qik.com plays nicely with mogulus and you can do truly mobile recording. Can’t get parent’s to come to an assembly during the day? broadcast it live and then they can attend while on break at work. Create an on demand video library…
Find a way to share the info that fits you and stay connected.
So second grade went to the farm. I’m not quite sure which SOL they were focused on as I found a couple that they covered. The great thing about it is that Ms. Kurrus planned ahead and reserved my Hamilton cameras to take with them. We met the day before the trip to square away some details about the project. I decided to use the three step integration process that I showed the teachers in January. I took some time to teach the class about the cameras and was pleasantly surprised that most of their questions served to clarify their responsibilities. The students took the cameras to the farm and took some really good pictures. Not only did they document their activites while at the farm, they took great pictures of their process. Don’t take my word for it take a look:
I couldn’t have done a better job of documenting their trip myself…those cameras are pretty amazing too…
Last week it seemed like everyone was working on plants. One of my first grade teachers, Ms. Marks, asked me to add some plant interactives to the Victory Portaportal. The second grade went to the farm and looked at plants and the fourth grade was charting the growth of some seds they planted a few weeks ago. I thought Mrs. Petry’s use of the Promethean board for student graphing was cool and I wanted to share her kids’ work with you.
Mrs. Taxson asked me to do a review activity with her class, so I decided to try out the VoiceThread application with them. They had fun, I had fun, we all had fun!! Wanna see what we did? Check it out:
Thanks to Chrissy for the tutorial on embedding VoiceThreads. I would never have been able to figure it out on my own.
Overall I thought the conference was great. I found out about it through a colleague who I met while working on my ISTE NETS-T certification. I actually got to meet Anita at the conference!! It was nice to actually meet someone who I had spent 18 months studying with online.
I went to eight sessions while at the conference. I took notes, but summary is a great strategy…
Sara Armstrong talked about assessing 21st century skills. It was very interesting that she brought together three models of teaching 21st century skills that overlapped. While I have studied all three models: The partnership for 21st century skills, ISTE’s NETS, and the enGauge model; I had never actually looked at them side by side before. I found the overlap surprising since I had never considered them in the same light and yet not surprising as they are all models for teaching 21st century skills. I was dumbfounded when I realized that I failed to make that connection before. Sometimes you can’t see the forest for the trees…Sara also posited that the digital native/digital immigrant dichotomy might not be the best way to conceptualize our relationships with technology.
My second session was a panel aimed at helping administrators think about use of technology in education. Goochland schools talked about blogs and online learning. They have an elementary principal that blogs about goings on in the school. He has a strategy that he uses where he takes his IPOD and microphone out through the school and interviews students after different events. He records student reactions and uploads them to the blog. He uses these podcasts to drive traffic to the blog and find that while there parents, students and other stakeholders read and comment about various events, situations, and policies and it helps the school climate. Henrico talked about blogging and while I have a handle on educational uses of the technology, I found they had some strategies that I had not run across before and/or had misunderstood. They have teachers who simply moderate their blogs, assigning the major portion of posting to the students who all have various user status for the blog. Some very interesting ideas were thrown out which were timely for me because I was preparing for my own inservice on blogging. Powhatan discussed their strategy for raising the bar in terms of tech integration with their teachers. Their teachers are required to turn in a technology portfolio every three years - kinda like recertifying for TSIP. TRTs are assigned to the teachers with the lowest tech skills. Teachers who want “additional stuff” have to spend time troubleshooting and helping other teachers integrate technology. Ten percent of the teachers in Powhatan are tech leads.
I was not impressed with Larry Anderson’s presentation, and quite frankly didn’t understand what point he was trying to make. He talked around a lot of the issues in the air but I don’t think he ever really made a point.
Karen Richardson talked about the need to change how we perceive assessment. She challenged participants to not only consider the purpose of assessment but to look at it in the context of the skills that Sara Armstrong discussed in the morning. She asked us to rate our schools in terms of what they are measuring well (after she removed straight content area knowledge out of the focal point). It was a great exercise. Of course I new that my schools weren’t doing a whole lot of anything that wasn’t content area related. So of course I need to ask the question ‘what are we preparing kids for at my schools”? Obviously we are not preparing them to be successful in the 21st century…
I sat through Spotsylvania’s presentation on data mining. I totally misunderstood the thrust of their presentation from the conference program. I was glad that I was sitting at a table with my laptop…I got caught up on my school email. I do have to say that I liked their explanation on how to use data: formative assessment informs instruction and is data that can make a difference in this year’s students while summative data is data that shows instructional trends. I couldn’t help thinking that their take on the SOL was so much healthier than what I am usually exposed to. Wondered if we are even able to establish and look at trends in data here in Portsmouth given the rate of teacher turnover, constant changes in placement and instructional strategies and materials. Since they all effect our data, how good can our data be?
The next session I went to was about professional learning communities. A school in Henrico had used PLC models for teacher professional development about technology. I would LOVE to facilitate something similar in one of my schools. It’s always better when teachers drive their professional development - they get more out of it.
After lunch I got caught up with Anita discussing the keynote and comparing war stories. I caught the tail end of a presentation on adult learners. At least I know where to get the notes.
The last session I went to was done by a professor at VCU who talked about using Web 2.0 communications technology to help beginning teachers establish networks. I found her thoughts on digital natives and immigrants to be interesting. She said the primary difference was that digital natives lead connected lives whiel digital immigrants tend to stand alone.
Getting all of that down on paper and synthesized feels good - like a weight has been lifted. Wait ’till I tell you about David Warlick’s keynote!!
Given the teacher turn over in the building from last year to this year and the shuffling of positions, we had to revamp our Orchard strategy at Brighton. Professional development has been a little tedious these past few months, but persistance pays off. Mrs. West teaches 6th grade inclusion and we had a great session last Monday after school. We discussed ways to use Orchard for reteaching her small groups that would need help in Math. We looked at some reports that would be helpful and made some instructional decisions based on the data that we had from the benchmark simulation tests the students had taken a few weeks ago. (I used our pacing guides to create 15 item tests to assess what the kids retained from the first nine weeks of school.)
I am very excited to say that Mrs. West stopped me in the hall today to tell me how well her remediation strategy was working. She used an Orchard skill tree to reteach her small group some number sense concepts. All of the students experienced significant increases in pretest/postest scores for the skill tree. She’s sold on Orchard. I just hope that she spreads the word to all of the other teachers who are using Orchard for the first time this year.
Many of you know Al Beamon, he taught 4th grade for many years at Brighton before he became a TRT. Quite glad he joined our team as he’s a really talented guy with great aptitude for the job. every once in a while Al shares a resource that he has found and is using over a James Hurst Elementary. So Al’s most recent share was for animal habitats. GlaxoSmithKline has created a website on animal habitats. Check it out I’m sure it will be helpful.
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