k12 Online Conference

Colin Hill - Using ebooks to motivate writing

The teacher, Colin Hill, uses myebook.com for students to publish their own collections for primary students. They post their work and the number of hits on the document. This is a good method for getting students to establish an application for their work and for getting it into a format that gives them a sense of keeping it authentic.

As part of creating this compilation of student work throughout a unit, the students can record audio of them speaking their written pieces. This is a fabuous use of the tools at hand and the idea of this really excites me to consider this for either our King Arthur unit or our Poetry unit, both of which have a project component.

This is the link to the ebook page

It looks as if you can even make commercial ebooks, but for student work, that is really negligible.

Overall, I am interested in how much more focus and attention to detail the students will have if they know that their work is going to be published to the web. I'm thinking that a poem that they must choose from a portfolio and record would make a good class project that they can use to demonstrate their work at the end of the unit. If I upload one student poem, then that would suffice to make a complete project.

I think I'll try it.

Bloom's Digital Taxonomy

After reading Churches' adaptation of Bloom's Taxonomy (the megalith of modern education), it became quite apparent to me that the author has great desire to modernize what could be considered an easily applicable and generalized method for achieving authentic education for students.

I think that the reason that there is some need for this document is that many teachers in our society are not technology-skilled. Students often have technology abilities that exceed that of their teachers (which has happened to me on many occasions). It is for this reason that an introduction to modern web tools needs to exist for teachers. By building this guide around Bloom's Taxonomy, Churches has created a guide for the teacher that speaks in a language they already understand.

The portions that I particularly noticed were:

• Collaboration needs to be involved in twenty-first century skills
• Finding on-line or technology-based ways to involve students in all the different levels of the taxonomy.
• The fact that technology is just a tool to accomplish the same levels of understanding that we have always sought to have our students reach.

In all, a worthwhile read and a good reminder that we need to keep applying the tools that students understand in order to help them achieve understanding of our materials.

Skype

As a teaching tool, I have to say that Skype has been truly a change in how we can integrate not only other experts into our class (Lee Lowery had an author speak to her honors classes last year), but also allow us to teach using our technology directly.

I had the opportunity to teach someone how to use Sharepoint Designer over Skype. It was easy to begin a conversation and then use the tool to display my screen to them and let them ask me questions while I demonstrated personally how to do what they needed done. Though I have not had the opportunity to do this with any students yet, I have the feeling that within the next year I will have some of my web design students who would like to take advantage of this tool when they are finishing their large and complex projects.

The only concern I have for that is that we will be more attached to school time, so I imagine that some teachers will blur the lines even more between personal time and work time (an affliction that most teachers I know have).

Embedding a Video on your Blog

Hey there. If you're reading this, you may have wondered how to embed a video on your blog.

Here's what you need to know:

<embed src="" width="400" height="320" autoplay="false"> </embed>

Inside the src quotes goes the web address (go to the webcast archive, find your video, right click, choose properties, copy the address, paste the address inside the quotes)

The rest breaks out like this: autoplay="false" means it won't start till someone clicks play.

Width & Height are pretty self-explanatory and keep it small so it fits in your blog entry.

Screencast

This is a screencast that I created for my web design students. This was an introduction I made to help my students with their web site consultant projects, and I think I had quite a few views.

This was actually one of a series of screencasts that I created, the final one of which I need to re-record as I forgot to turn my wireless mic on, so it is just a random series of clicks and me typing in code for a web site.



I know this method of teaching will benefit me in the immediate future as I attempt to teach teachers how to use their tablet PC's. I will post more links soon.

Tablet PC (Ad)venture

As part of the move toward 21^st Century skills, it has been my pleasure to test and debug our department's use of tablet PC's.

A couple thoughts I have on this (ad)venture:

• Having the opportunity for teachers to use this technology means that our students are more likely to see increased use of computers in their education.


• I will have to change the way I teach some things if this takes the next logical step and moves to students with laptops


• I am going to have to teach more teachers about using this technology than I am students.


• Having great tools does not negate the need for intelligent, competent, and student-centered teachers.

Curious if you have any thoughts along those lines or other.
Please comment and let me know.

Etherpad sign-up

Hello, there. I am experimenting with Etherpad for my English class, so I thought I would throw an entry up here.

My students are studying for The Odyssey right now, and as part of that, they are creating a glossary of terms on my class' Moodle page. Each bell has a separate glossary, so that everyone will be creating entries for a couple of the heroes, monsters, or gods that we encountered in the reading.

The reason I am using Etherpad is as a sign-up for which glossary entries they will be making. See that document for my first bell class here: http://etherpad.com/QHjU9ZHM7D.

I will post a follow-up after we have had a chance to fully explore this activity to let you know how it went, but I am hoping for good things!

***Update***

Today's activity went extremely well. Aside from some side conversations going on in the chat window, the classes were extremely focused. They really seemed to get into creating something for the whole class, and they really invested themselves in their work. It was good to see them all on-task with computers in front of them, as sometimes they like to play on sites that are not part of the assignment.

In all, I would call my first foray into a whole class using Etherpad a success. It worked well for what it was, a sign-up sheet. I can't imagine I have much use for Scriblink, the other site that we were exploring, but I could be convinced...

Till Later,