Ruth’s Ruckus2

With all of the rush in December, I never got a chagnce to post the new voicthreads that folks did.  Ms. Bass at Victory used Voicethreads to do a project on animal adaptations.  It’s her kids first attempt at Voicethreads.  I think they did pretty good for a first try:

Then of course there is Mrs. Taxson over at Brighton who is always pushing the envelope.  She worked on a Voicethread with her first graders all on her own.  I heard about it AFTER she was done and needed help putting it on her blog…take a look at her post.

Dear New Teachers-

Please give us some feedback on your activities from this week.  You’ll need to be on a PPS computer to get to the survey…

http://survey.pps.k12.va.us/TakeSurvey.asp?SurveyID=72137352272LM 

Ok.  So I’m trying to blog live instead of taking notes that will never get transcribed.  So right now we are all taking out our phones and waving them at him.  We list the devices that we are holding in our hands:

• Telephone
• Clock
• text messenger
• still camera
• video camera
• video player
• GPS device
• Podcast (Gcast)
• Music Player

These are tools that all of our kids have all the time in their pocket at school.  It’s a powerful device and the kids bring them to school VOLUNTARILY!!  We will not debate whether or not cell phones should be in school.  Even those in this audience will admit to taking them away.  We need to teach kids appropriate uses.  We don’t want to fight this - we will lose this debate.  We ought to just make this work.  Parents are not going to give up a device that allows them to track and monitor their kids.

There are twice as many texters as there are emailers.  16% of homes in US are exclusively wireless - they have no land line phones.  30 countries exceed 100% penetration in cellphones…US is behind because we had land lines before others did.   Lots of third world countires allow cell phones, businesses allow cell phones, but they are banned - by your local high schools.

Location based technologies can become location based teachable moments: Write a review after you watch the movie, take a picture of rectangles on the bus.  If our non-working hours have been ruined by cell phones, why can’t our students??

Uses for cell phone technology:

• Live feeds from cell phones www.qik.com - use IP cameras for school security (Cisco gets it)
• Pre/post lesson videos uploaded to a secure site for parents to watch (like youtube, but secure)
• Teacher’s video lesson plans or other instructions for the sub
• Report on the outcome of a meeting
• Create a video challenge for your students
• Video message sent to parents (like phonevite, but in video)
• Use the phone to video student presentation and then send it to the kids parents
• www.Jott.com  - turns voice into text (Hall records to twitter from Jott)  You can use the same technology to post to Google Clendar -Administrator could use JOTT to document intervention- Jott will transfer voice to email, blogs, twitter etc.
• GCAST for podacasting - Student can use it to interview subjects for a report - using their own cellphones - Have students call in to answer challenge questions, answer a prompt, students can recite times tables, or play the piece they were supposed to practice.
• Langugae arts: Text a story in six words
• Polleverywhere: Free app use cell phone to text and answer a poll

Text message 34381 and they’ll give the food chain and menu item, they will send you the nutrition breakdown.

Go to discoverymobile.com you can get the quizbuilder via cell phones.

handouts:

http://DiscoveryEdSpeakersBureau.com

Ok.  So I’m at the Discovery Educator’s Network National Institute and this is the first day… So I thought this might be like the WHRO Tech Trek experience - I’ve done it before, so I thought I could do it.  It’s kind of a formula: professional development followed by project time and then presentations.  I’ve done it before…well not this way…

 After lunch and the welcome we got an assignment:  Find the members of your group and create your own Boom De Yada video in the next 2 ½ hours. I was with the Mid-Atlantic group and we were rather successful.

Talk about a jump start to our week.  This is even faster then tech Trek the Next Generation…

Ever wonder what a TRT does during the summer?  I mean, TRTs are responsible for staff development…there’s not a whole of teaching staff around during the summer, so what do TRTs do?  Well it depends on their contract.  Some school divisions hire TRTs on a 10 month contract – they are around when the teachers are.  Other school divisions have TRTs around during the summer to do teacher academies and other special projects.  If you are a TRT in Portsmouth, you could be in either situation.  I have the distinct pleasure of working all summer.   It’s great for me – I always know what my summer job is going to be … and there is no learning curve…

So this summer I am working on 13-14 projects in an attempt to get ready for the opening of school.  It’s a lot of work, and there are days that I am not sure I will get it all done, but my goal is to close 2 projects a week and beg for mercy when the others don’t get done.  Our summer project list was huge…Here’s a picture of it…

 I started a class on Web 2.0 about three weeks ago.  Sometimes the VDOE offers classes for TRTs.  I guess they think that they should help us decide the direction that we ought to be going.  I try to take as many as I can because I want to make sure that I am at least keeping pace with what the VDOE has suggested.  The classes have been interesting, but in general they seem to be things I have a pretty good handle on already.  I think the classes are great for learning about what is going on in other school divisions and for networking.  So I will continue to take them as I have the opportunity. 

We are supposed to post to our blogs weekly about the course content, and of course since it’s on my blog, this assignment has fallen to the way side.  So here’s the post that I was supposed to do last week.  Required reading for this week is some older posts from Richardson and Dembo, both of whom I read (when I am reading).  The posts introduce the idea of conjugating the word blog.  Blog (noun), blogging (verb), and what the concepts we are talking about really mean. 

Just to summarize, a blog is the site where you read what has been written and perhaps comment on it.  Blogging on the other hand is the act of reading, reflecting, and writing about what you read.  Which then might be read by someone else who reflects and then writes about what you have written.  The continuing circle becomes what we know as the blogosphere.  Dembo then asks a question:  When we take this practice into the classroom, are we rehashing the same old skills are we teaching something new?    Is the skill set required by students who blog different from what students are required to do in a regular classroom. 

I am pretty sure that this is a new skill set.  Especially if we allow students to choose whose reflections they will read.  I could be said that they might have the same outcomes reading and reflecting on The Diary of Anne Frank, but I beg to differ.  Blogging becomes alive in a very different way then the reading, reflecting, and discussing that goes on in a regular classroom.  Blogging allows the student to choose what direction the discussion will go in.  It requires them to thoroughly think through their thoughts and opinions as they have to be expressed in writing.  Too a student in a class will add to the discussion a partial thought and be unable to fully express it.  Another student adds to their thought in an attempt to assist and then the conversation has may be seeded with thoughts that the student was in no way thinking.  If one of the participants hooks on to that idea there is a fundamental shift in the conversation that may never come back to the partially expressed thought of the first student. A student’s blog is her own.  The conversation never gets away from her and she is able to bring it back to her point and clarify to her audience. 

In the three years that I have had this position, I have been trying to get a tested grade to really co-teach a lesson with me.  They have wanted a demonstration, have used me a s a glorified babysitter, even planned to use me as a sub plan…but that has changed. This year I have co-taught in sixh grade (science isn’t tested, but I’ll take what I can get) with Mrs. Trumbauer.  Now I have co-taught with Mrs. Matthews.  While Mrs. Matthews has expressed the desire to wok with technology, we haven’t really shared the responsibiliy for a lesson before.  Getting ready to review for the SOL, we came up with this:

We interrupt the previous post to inform you about the upcoming Social Studies Blog Workshop. Ruth and I will be showing some of the social studies teachers the effectiveness of using a blog with students, teachers and other users. Those who are interested in learning more about our workshop please click on the following link: http://ppsblogs.net/ruthokoye/workshops/intro-to-blogging-for-social-studies/

Deloris Eure-Nutt

TRT for Hodges Manor and Lakeview

http://ppsblogs.net/nutt

This is my fist day at NECC in Atlanta.  I’m in an advanced blogging workshop by David Warlick.  At first I thought that I was gonna regret spending a Sunday doing this.  I heard lots of chatter from folks that I told that I had registered for this.  I mean I heard everything from the classic “You really don’t understand how to relax” to “You paid how much?”.  But the bottom line is it’s important to me to lead this charge the right way.  I’ve learned a lot about blogs and blogging from books and sites, but taking this class has already paid off in more ways then one - and it’s only 11:00.  The session started with the Chris Lehman, principal from the Science Leadership Academy in Philedelphia.  He set the stage.  I mean, why do this if you if you can’t say why you need to?

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