wordle.net - Great for every subject

Thanks to Chris, the math coach, from Todd County, I would like to share a website that builds word clouds based on the input from you, your students, a blog site, or delicious tags. Chris used the site to enter all the words students used to define the word angle as he was determining prior knowledge. Then after an activity to build understanding of angles, he asked them again to write their definition of an angle. The two word clouds were totally different. He was able to quickly assess the student understanding of angle and to also find their misconceptions using wordle. You could also use this site to find focus in your work, to find the main focus of a blog or a delicious site. I tried it with the TIE Teacher Blog we are now in and found that children and students are the main focus. I was very happy with that result. Our focus in the teacher blog should always be on our students. Try it out at: http://wordle.net
Marcia

Compount Interest Simulator for Personal Finance Class

Here is a great new tool in the Illuminations site from NCTM that provides a good learning experience related to economics. The Compound Interest Simulator applet will allow you to investigate savings account earnings, credit card debt, and a stock market simulation. How well this can relate to the real world and the economic situation we are in now. Group your students into these 3 areas, have them experience the tool, then have discussions about what would be the best alternative for them as they see what is happening today in our economy.
http://illuminations.nctm.org/ActivityDetail.aspx?ID=172

Marcia

CogDogRoo for Storytelling on the Web

Have you been thinking about having students create their stories on the web, but aren't quite sure where to start? Well, here is an excellent site to help you use the web tools that work best for you. http://cogdogroo.wikispaces.com/StoryTools has 50 Web 2.0 Ways to Tell a Story!!
The advice given at the site: "the mission is not to review or try every single one (that would be madness, I know), but pick one that sounds interesting and see if you can produce something."

Thanks to Alan Levine for his hard work in bringing all the best tools for web-based storytelling to one location.

Marcia Torgrude

PB Wiki offers free upgrade for one year

PB Wiki has plenty of great tutorials for getting started and working with wikis, plus a few TeacherTube videos featuring testimonial from teachers using their service. To learn more about their free upgraded wiki for teachers (for one year), click the link below.

PBS Mass Media Resources

PBS Site: Children spend the majority of their days consuming mass media. On average, children spend four-and-a-half hours a day using television, video games and computers. Yet children are not provided with the tools needed to evaluate and analyze the media messages they see.
Teachers have the ability to engage students in media literacy — the ability to access, evaluate, analyze and produce both electronic and print media — by dissecting pop culture and advertisements. Media literacy education can help students build critical thinking and analytic skills, become more discriminating in the use of mass media, distinguish between reality and fantasy, and consider whether media values are their values.
This section provides extension classroom activities related to the games on Don't Buy It. The activities are intended for children in grades 3 - 5 and offer suggestions to incorporate media education into your curriculum. http://pbskids.org/dontbuyit/teachersguide.html

Smithsonian New Partner with Thinkfinity!

Thinkfinity.org is proud to announce the launch of its newest Partner: “Smithsonian’s History Explorer”
Today the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, in partnership with Verizon’s Thinkfinity.org, launched “Smithsonian’s History Explorer.” The museum’s new education Web site offers free, standards-based, innovative resources for teaching and learning American history.
Resources available to teachers, parents, students and others include lessons, activities and interactive games that can be searched by grade level, keyword and historical era. Learning activities feature objects selected from the more than 3 million artifacts in the museum’s collections and draw on the expertise of the museum’s renowned curatorial staff making “Smithsonian’s History Explorer” a unique educational experience.
Students can sharpen their critical thinking skills by exploring objects such as a Native American buffalo hide painting, take electronic behind-the-scenes field trips with museum curators to learn how exhibitions are produced or play online matching games where they can discover the seven roles of the President or how to build a sod house.
Teachers will find a wealth of standards-based classroom activities, interactives, media clips and museum objects that can be easily be integrated into any K-12 curriculum as well as professional development opportunities that will help them bring history to life for their students.

“Smithsonian’s History Explorer” was developed under the guidance of a teacher advisory group and made possible by a grant from the Verizon Foundation. The site is accessible at http://historyexplorer.americanhistory.si.edu and via http://thinkfinity.org.

Discover Great Ways to Incorporate Video

The Discovery Education streamathon will take place September 23 from 9am-9pm (Eastern). This 12-hour marathon consists of a series of one-hour webinars. Each webinar is focused on Discovery streaming; however, there are lots of great ideas for Web 2.0 resources and how to use video in the classroom. Register individually, or see if someone in your building can set up a computer in a lab so you can just pop in and watch for 15 minutes, or watch together with your colleagues.

Learn about integrating video into Powerpoint during your free period. See
how to integrate Web 2.0 into the Builders over lunch. Share the latest in
digital storytelling techniques with your colleagues in the teachers lounge.
Come for 1 hour or spend the entire day with us!

For more information, or to register, visit:

http://blog.discoveryeducation.com/3rd-annual-streamathon/

Global Learning Communities

Global Learning Community
Lester Holt and two teacher who created an outstanding global learning community with their students spoke about the wonderful possibilities in your classroom. One of the teachers said if you wait until you are an expert with the technology or the techology resources, you will never use it in your classroom. You need to dive in with your students and learn with them. Here are some links provided during this session. Social studies, current events, history and language arts teachers will love icue.
NBC News has provided a great global learning environment free of charge. Check them out.
http://takingitglobal.org/
http://iearn.org/
http://www.icue.com/
http://www.hotchalk.com/nbc.html
As one teacher stated:
Its not about the technology, its about the relationships, the connections globally.

Transforming Technology Projects from Good to Great

Gary Stager
www.stager.org/necc
Projects need to be student directed and student led.
Books to improve project based learning - http://constructivistconsortium.org/books
Elements of a Project:

• Purpose
• Time
• Personally meaningful
• Complex, including serendipity
• Connected
• Shareable
• Access and Constructive Materials

Questions Worth Asking:

• Is the problem solvable?
• Is the project monumental or substantial? - a pile of worksheets is not a project
• Who does the project satisfy?
• What can they do with that? - the project needs to lead to bigger questions or theory

Visual Literacy: Equipping Students for the Visual World

Lynell Burmark
http://educatebetter.org

See to Learn - Visual Literacy Book on CD in full color
lynell@educatebetter.org

Visual Literacy - Reading and writing about pictures or producing images intentionally and purposefully.

Images:
What can you observe?
What can you infer?

We want to believe what we see.
Text can be visual - the image of certain text has great visual value such as FedEx.
Most people's eyes are drawn to color and image before black and white
Using ads - put together an new ad on the side effects
Ask your students: Why do you think the ad didn't show the facts of the side effects?
Have the students name the Simpson family from a picture
Now have them name the first 5 freedoms in the Declaration of Independence
What we see we remember. If only the Declaration of Independence had a hit TV show!
What is visual goes to the long term memory.
Eye to Brain - 1,000,000 fibers
Ear to Brain - 30,000 fibers
Humans process visuals 60,000 times faster than text - use images
Keyborard - sequential - text
Camera - simultaneous - image
Words can only recall images we have already seen.
Start a lesson with images!!
A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words - Lesson in Thinkfinity - Divide the room into groups - have students talk as one of the images in the picture as the horse, the dog, the grandma, the mother, the children in the images. What are they thinking?
Use images to set a timeline in history. A way of testing prior knowledge.
Progressive Story- Use a series of images and have a group of three students create a story. As each image appears, each student continues the story based on the image on the screen. This is a great way to review, have students provide the images for the story, or great for speaking assignment.
Multi-Media Learning - Richard E. Mayer - check out this book
Image with a Voiceover is what makes the learning most beneficial
Recall and retention are boosted 42%
Transer, application is boosted 89%
The voice over could be words, music, text boxes, video
Sullivan Ballou Lettter on YouTube - excellent example
Resources for Images:

• go to Lynell's site - http://educatebetter.org - contact Marcia for Login and Password
• Also for her handouts
• Pics4Learning - another great website for images
• morguefile is a great place for hi-res images
• flickr - can build a community for gathering images -Social Networking

Don't do stacked in time, do adjacent in space!

Using Second Life with Distant Learners: Virtual Office Hours

Wednesday, July 1
Presenter: Abbie Brown, East Carolina University

Office Hours: establish regular office hours for your online students - a great way for teacher and students to communicate - he has audio and voice

This is a report of the results of a multi-year participant-observation study using virutal reality (second life)

Second Life- Developed by Linden Lab in 2003

Access Abbie Brown's powerpoint in NECC's resources online.

What is Second Life:

• People can meet and converse using ext chant or voice
• Special events are held
• Wild West of networked computing technology
• High bandwidth
• High end video card required
• Constant software updates Limited media throughput

Meaning of Second Life:

"Educational technology is the study an ethical practice of facilitating learning and improving performance by creating, using and managing appropriate technologyical proceses and resoruces." Januszewski and Molenda, 2008

"Bleeding on the cutting edge so othrs don't have to." - Brown, 2008

Gartner Hype Cycle - Gartner is an information technology research and advisory firm headquartered in Stamford, Connecticut

What can this do for students:

• cutting edge experience
• opportunity for informal networking
• increased feeling of social presence
• emotional experience
• I was looking at someone and someone was looking at me

Need to purchase Second Life land - premium membership to second life - to have your own office - he pays $72 a year.

Research: Participant Observation

• Experiment with building and scripting - allow for play time

His Experiences:

• Good - adding new dimension to online communication, group interacdtions
• Bad - learning curve is steep, his students may not appreciate the preponderance of exposed virtual skin
• Ugly - He was accosted by a big, naked man on Orientation Island - this is a public space so there are inherant dangers

Further Research Needed

brownab@ecu.edu

Create Live Web TV for the Classroom for Global Audiences

I attended this presentation of Will Richardson's at NECC 2008. Some of you may recognize his name as the author of Blogs, Wikis, and Podcasts. Today's topic taught the participants how to stream our own Web TV show. To model his activity, he actually broadcasted his session; perhaps you watched you watched and maybe caught a glimpse of someone you know.
Will's ustream channel: http://www.ustream.tv/channel/weblogg-ed-tv
By combining ustream with the use of Twitter, one is able to reach thousands, make connections, and get involved in profound conversations related to education, politics, history. Will shared a story about a 13 yr old, who using his Twitter connections, created a great ustream webisode on the night that Hilary Clinton was supposed to lose but ended up carrying the state. Many people were logged in and the conversation (using the chat feature) was tremendous -- all created by a teenager in the basement of his house. Just think of what could be done in the classroom!
After a webisode is over, the ustreamer can take his/her recording and post it online into a wiki, web page, or even a blog. If I want to relive today's presentation, I need only to visit Will's blog and pick up some more tips.
There are no limits to how many "shows" you can make, and even better, the shows can be password protected. If your social studies class created live performances of a Civil War re-enactment, you could safely share the show with the parents, grandparents, or others who were unable to attend by assigning a password.
Will also uses Mogolus Studio to broadcast his show.
Will then introduced David Jakes, an IT coordinator who discussed how technology can add to the learning experience. Jakes suggested that to buy the software for a streaming network the cost would be around $15,000; he emphasized that we have something here at our disposal so let's take advantage of it.
He went on to show a couple of examples of how streaming video is being used in the classroom.
David introduced Jim McIntosh who is ont he advisory board for Channel 4 in the United Kingdom. This channel orginated the "Big Brother" show. He offered that the mostly highly successful downloaded educational video is Sir Ted Robinson's appearnace at TED. The point being that TED Talks are high cost productions, but using the internet and streaming doesn't require all of this cost. McIntosh also shared that in the U.K., the young children are not watching television. Why? They want to to watch their own shows on their own time so they use streaming to pick and choose what they want to watch when they want to watch it. On that same note, he said that people in the U.K. no longer want to watch the rolling news, unless in the event of some horrific event or huge newsmaker. Otherwise, people want to use the internet and get news from all over. He pointed out Alisa Miller's TED Talk, "Why We Know Less Than Ever About the World," which addressed this issure for Americans.
Jim shared this site: www.myspace.com/yeardot
Steve Dembo took over the mic. He offered comforting advice to we participants that we shouldn't feel intimidated by these tools as they are fairly new. Steveshared the website "CometNow.com." It is pc only and can be used with cell phones. He also shared Qik.com as another site for mobile streaming, which will send out a Tweet that lets his followers now he is streaming.
Lots of good information here today!!!

The Art of Digital Storytelling

BernaJean Porter from Digitales presented this topic. Ms. Porter is a wonderful presenter; she's very accommodating and makes the participants feel comfortable in the learning environment. Most importantly, she knows her stuff. The concept BernaJean introduced is not new - storytelling; however, the mode is. The internet is filled with free websites that teachers and students can use to create stories to explain concepts in math or science, show character development in literature, or even to create their own original stories. Visit my del.icio.us for links to the many available comic sites: http://del,.icio.us/jrising/comics
Digital storytelling offers a different form of assessment. We may have students who write beautifully, filling their papers with deep content and correct grammar. More than likely, each of us knows a few students who can relate a story verbally, but when it comes to putting it on paper, the whole thing changes. Those students will benefit from this alternate assessment mode. In addition, it's fun.
In this session, I sat next to an educator from Alaska. Her school purchased a site license of Comic Life (a one time fee); it is available for Mac and Windows platforms. This teacher shared with me that by using Comic Life for story-telling, they have seen their native students flourish. Now those students are able to share who they are and to do so with a medium that all can connect with. What a great way to get everyone involved!!!

How Do You and Your School Address Plagiarism?

NECC 2008

Doug Johnson, MN

also keynote at Laptop Institute in Mitchell in June 08.

Doug offered alternate ideas rather than just a plain old research paper, such as movies, interviews, advertising campaigns. He also added that our attitudes must change and we need to accept new ideas.

Doug shared several thoughts on the issue of plagiarism. The first step is to have a clear guideline in place of what plagiarism is. Teach the students the difference between paraphrasing and using as one's own words. Having a CLEAR CUT POLICY is mportant.

eMINTS--a fresh breath for tech integration

Find great resources at the eThemes part of this page--thematically organized websites!

This professional development program provides the training and a framework for teaching content standards with technology effectively. Based in Missouri, it has expanded to a number of states including Utah, Nevada, and Minnesota. This program meets the NSDC standards for professional development and focuses on student achievement. Learn more by visiting the website.

NECC-David Thornburg-Open Minds: Open Education and Open Culture

dthornburg@aol.com

Open Source:
The challenge....
Technology is changing faster than classroom practice
Before Given current classroom practice, how should technology change?
Now Given current technology, how should classroom practice change?
Now, more than ever, we need access for every learner in the world.
Bringing the tools to all children, it must be:

• Scalable
• Sustainable
• Low cost hardware and open source OS and critical applications are the ONLY way the goal can be achieved
• Proprietary titles costs must be scalable and sustainable
• Single platform software is anti-child

Children need to be able to use the same software on whatever platform they've got!!
Don't serve the platform, serve the child!

Hardware:
Open source cell phone - Neo1973

Why open source?

• Applications are robust
• Service calls are minimized

Freedom Toaster Kiosk

• Burn CD of all software using on your school computer and put on your computer at home

Linux is the operating system in Brazil schools - by the end of next year 52 million Brazilian children will be using the Linux system - federal program is computers for all.

Break borders with software:

• CMap - collaborative brainstorming on the internet - free - suggestion button analyzes the words you have already typed and goes to the web to pull in words that connect to your words to share ideas that might help you brainstorm when you are stuck. Download the stand alone client on any computer you have. Share your Cmpas with the world - for viewing and/or editing - Getting the power in the hands of the kids

What about copyrights and cultural artifacts?

• Creative Commons allows you to grant people the rights to use your materials totally free

Tropicalia is about cultural mixing: building networks, not walls.

It is xenophilic, not xenophobic.

Open source goes beyond technology to humans.

The way you keep good jobs in this courntry is not by building big walls, but by attracting people with big ideas!

Sunday Keynote - James Surowiecki - Wisdom of Crowds

June 29 Keynote
President of ISTE opens:
Connect, Convene, Transform
5 Actionable things to transform:

1. Be an advocate for change - politicians need to hear from us - find the briefs at ISTE
2. Share your knowledge and passion - with other teachers, work as a group, inform parents and administrators
3. Showcase your and your students' work - community leaders, legislators, chamber of commerce
4. Dream big - have high expectations for students, your classrooms, and your school
5. Use available resources to effect change - ISTE is a good start - NETS for Teachers, Students, and Administrators

Keynote Speaker:

The Wisdom of Crowds - Book - http://www.amazon.ca/Wisdom-Crowds-James-Surowiecki/dp/0385721706

James Suroweicki

http://www.randomhouse.com/features/wisdomofcrowds/

Blogs about JS - http://wordpress.com/tag/james-suroweicki/

Under the right conditions, groups of people can be very intelligent, even smarter than the most intelligent person in that group.

Technology enables us to make the work of groups much more powerful. A power that has never before existed.

Jelly Bean Experiment - Guess the number of beans in the jar. The group will be very accurate on the average. Better than any one person in the room. No one person is smarter than the group on the whole.

Prediction Market - Using markets to forecast the outcome of a presidential race - this prediction market has outpredicted the Gallop Poll. Favorites in the markets have won every single race. Set up markets - Google - predicting new offices, new product launches, etc. have matched perfectly to acutal results.

If you get a smart enough crowd, you can accomplish amazing things.

See this in action on the internet - web 2.0 - wikipedia (construction of an online encyclopedia by people continually- collective intelligence) , Flickr (tagged photographs that construct a taxonomy of photos, no one is in charge, collective enterprise of categorizing photos), delicious - for webpages), Google ( how good it is at finding the information searched for, how does it do this?)-relies on the collective intelligence of the people on the web, surveys the internet and asks for a vote on that particular page, and comes out with the answer)

Google found a hidden intelligence - tapping of crowds on the internet.

Think about diversity within groups - age, experience, ability level - they can add knowledge and question to groups that wouldn't normally get asked. The group would be less likely to make the same kind of mistake. That is perfectly okay because the errors they make cancel each other out.

Working in homogeneous groups doesn't work well because they easily succomb to group think. They hear their own opinion echoed back at them. Harder to identify their flaws.

The presence of a devil's advocate in a group makes the group decisions work better. BUT, you can't have the same person as the devil's advocate all the time.

Build a diverse team from the start.

Independence - Think for yourself, rely on your own knowledge By nature or nurture, we are imitative. We tend to imitate what others are doing. Imitation works a lot of the time, but you have to move beyond imitation because you are not getting at the collective intelligence of the group.

In conditions of uncertainty, you lose the ability to work and think collectively.

Best group decisions emerge out of conflict. Get people comfortable with the idea that an argument can bring about a good solution.

Groups are smartest when the people are thinking as individuals as much as possible. If you are a leader do not dictate in advance what others are going to say.

Look out for talkative people. Other people tend to talk back to these people. There is no connection between how much someone says and how much they know. :-)

The people that have the information we are looking for are unlikely. Wisdom of crowds comes from casting your net widely. The internet allows this. It also allows us to incorporate the opinions of those that would be uncomfortable exerting their influence face to face. It allows people to say what they really believe.

Technology can play a fundamental role in group work.

Collaborating in a Blogging Triad - NECC - 6/29/08

June 29 - 12:30-3:30
Triad - CIT, Librarians, and Administrators
Focus on Science today since their students were weak in this area of content
Research

• Cener for Applied Research in Educational Technology - CARET - http://caret.iste.org/
• Educational and Library Research Services - and http://www.ers.org/
• 21st Century Skills - Teacher as "Orchestrator of Learning"
• Clip - "Shake it Up" from Teacher Tube
• Clip - "Blogs in Plain English"
• Will Richardson has some great information

Resources

• Educause Learning Initiative - www.educause.edu/eli/
• Class Blogmeister - http://www.classblogmeister.com/ - for student blogs with high level of security - posts and comments are approved by teacher - email David Warlick for a school code to register at classblogmesitern- works for all classrooms in your school
• Edublogs - http://www.edublogs.org/ - no teacher control of student created blogs in this site - but has a wonderful interface and is great for the classroom.
• NISD Video Support for Edublogs - www.pavenet.org/Edublogs.org/Edublogs.org.html - learning blogging via video

Student Blogs

• Powell ES - Math Specialit's blog on Hands-on Equations with Student Video - http://powellmath.edublogs.org/
• Luna MS - Blogs as Book Reports with student Audio - http://lunabooktalks.edublogs.org/
• Holmes HS, Stevens HS and Warren HS - Cuban Missle Crisis - Propoganda -http://propaganda.edublogs.org/2008/03/12/comment-here-on-cold-war/#comments

Elementary Science Blog

• Worked in teams or triads - investigating a curricular blog based on Elementary science objectives. They used both Class Blogmesiter and Edublogs
• Triad Model - Started with the end in mind - improving achievement in science and writing.
• Not adding to the teacher plate - used the unit that was already being used in science - Ocean Ecosystem
• Worked from Essential Questions
• Class Blogmeister Version - done with administrators - to build their capacity in blogging www.classblogmeister.com/blog.php?blogger_id=1101588newlimit=25
• Edublog Version - http://oceane035788.edublogs.org/
• Used real world experience from the Texas Newspaper to begin the lesson - an oil spill off the coast of Texas
• Make a Prediction Post
• The Food Chains Post
• The Food Chain Disturbed Post
• Narrative Writing Post
• What Can You Do? Post
• Using blog along with the materials they are already using in the lesson
• Blogs lend themselves beautifully to differentiated instruction
• Made a special effort to have a web publication form in place as students began to use blogs for their class work.

Digital Citizenship

• Located databases and web sites suitable to 4th graders reading abilities prior to the unit using the assistance of the library media specialist
• EBSCO database was used - also could translate all articles to another language to work with ESL students
• Britannica Links - Britannica Online
• Library Databases
• Related Links - www.nhptv.org/natureworks/nwep6d.htm and http://oceanlink.island.net/biodiversity/foodweb/foodweb/html as examples of related links
• Streaming Videos - http://www.discoveryeducation.com/

Our Turn

• We formed Triads - administrator, CIT, Librarian
• We made comments about the ocean oil spill
• My new partners are: Kristal and Adrienne from Courtry Club Hills, IL
• Both are principals or asst. principals making decisions on the use of Blogs with their teachers and teacher teams.

GPS, GoogleEarth, and Digital Images

I am attending this session at NECC today, which is being presented by Pamela Leland and Kelly Kuntz from Oregon. To get started, we walked through Hemisfair Park snapping photos with our digital cameras and using a GPS to note our coordinates. We then uploaded those photos to Panoramio, a photo sharing site. Panoramio is free, only registration for an account is required.
Then we began using Google Earth to pin our locations and entering our pictures. Ideas offered by the presenters for using this in the classroom include:

1. Finding the author of a book they are reading for class. Perhaps locating where that author was born, raised, attended school, and so on.
2. Teaching geography using geographical vocabulary. Preparing maps.
3. Make observation that can be addressed with data, and collect, organize and display relevant data to answer them.
4. Make observations. Based on these observations, ask questions or form hypotheses, which can be explore through simple investigations.
5. Understand and explain the use of a simple mechanical device by following technical directions. 6. Show the world to the students. Panoramio has pictures posted by other users. If you would like your students to get an idea of what the Eiffel Tower looks like, your own 3 pictures from your trip may not be enough. Open Google Earth, select Panormaio under Geographic Web, and one can find many pictures of the landmark from all angles, at diggerent times of the day and season.
These are only a few, but I think by visiting Panoramio and Google Earth, you will come up with ideas of your own on how to apply this to you classroom. A huge advantage is students can snap digital photos, upload them, and they've instantly become creators on the web! Another nice thing about Panoramio is that the site automatically resizes the photos, which makes things uncomplicated.

Presentation Website

Text Fixer Saves the Day!

So I'm doing the typical summer activity for teachers--catching up on email and articles and all that stuff I said, "I'll work on it over the summer," when I get to this link about Flickr, and it looks really good and I'm all excited to check it out. But no matter what I do, the link won't work. Then it dawns on me: the link is on two lines. When I try to copy/paste it into my browswer, it keeps cutting off the second line. My brain is too far into summer vacation to remember the full text of the second line, so I keep going back and forth and trying to get it all--AAAARGH.

Then, aha! The light finally comes on. I can use Text Fixer to save the day without having to open a word processor (so time consuming! could take a whole minute!). I go to the website, paste in my text, click the Remove button, and voila! Instantly I have a single line URL that I can now paste into my browser, and the information about which I was so excited is at my fingertips. (See example screen shot below)

Happy Summer Surfing!