Cloudy Tag Thoughts

I wish this were a teaching staff from one school.

Miguel McLaughlin from the blog Around the Corner had a very fun and relaxed Skype conversation with several teachers at various levels within the K12 spectrum. It reminds me of what an ideal staff meeting might be like if the energy and excitement that I connect to around the world were contained in one school. For several of the participants there is the same excitement versus slow change that many teachers feel.

Technorati Tags: blogging, edtech, education

I'm learning to Moodle

After giving it some thought I've decided to set up a Moodle for the teachers I team with. I've had such difficulties getting across the importance of using the read/write web tools into the staff that maybe just beginning to build a centralized learning community on line will be a good first step. This is certainly a detour from using all the various learning tools online in a loose and fluid manner, but just building connections and seeing practical applications of lessons and organization would be a good place to start. So far I've been intrigued with the thought of how this tool integrates the philosophy of constructionism and constructivism in a virtual environment.

Technorati Tags: edtech, education

The Podcasts are Coming.

I was beginning to focus on how I was going to organize my class to create podcasts, when one of my students asked for a "closing circle" which is a meeting at the end of the day in which a student has something that is important to discuss. The student wanted to bring up the idea of starting a podcasting company. Other students chimed in their interest, and so a company was born. I've been working diligently to create a bureaucracy (Kafka would be proud) in order to have an interaction and dependency between departments.

The Pod Groups

There are pods which will function as part of the process of producing the podcast. Each group will be composed of five students. I had the students write their preference and tried to honor it as much as possible. The groups will oversee a Flickr pro account, del.ic.ious account, GarageBand, and the blog at BlogMeister. I of course am the president although truth be told it was the students who decided on this. The Geek Pod will oversee the use of the technology and the Biblio Pod will monitor the use of tags and the written portion of the podcast. They will also help with the choosing of grammar problems for minilessons. I was thinking that each of the podcast groups which I will discuss in the next section will be required to submit two grammar/parts of speech issues that they had difficulty solving to the Biblio Group.  Each group will have forms which I intend on creating from screen grabs of the interfaces from the respective program or internet apps. that the students will fill out by hand.

The Podcast Groups
The second organizational structure will involve the content. The students will be in groups of at least four with two groups of three. The class brainstormed ideas that made sense to report on and we also listened to Bob Sprankle's classe's podcast to hear an example. The content will be fairly open so that even if the podcast group is say math, the students can choose to report on topics outside of what they are studying.

The importance of Student Centered Learning.
I tried as much as possible to allow the student to be involved in all aspects of production. But because these are fourth and fifth graders I wanted them to use the social aspects of the tools and take on the technical elements which can be done by an individual, myself. The part of the process that I am doing myself may change later when the students are ready. At that point they would need to learn the conversion of the Garageband file into an MP4 file, the addition of chapters using the Chapter tool that I've found easy to use, the uploading of the file to Ourmedia although I'm growing impatient with the slow uploads and access, and finally the html needed to link the file in BlogMeister.

Technorati Tags: blogs, education, podcast, technology

What have I been doing?

I can't believe I haven't posted anything since August. In making the transition to a new school and trying to "pilot" all the tools I was studying and learning about since last spring, the use of this space has dropped to a lower part of my priorities. The BlogMeister web log with my new students has taken up my free time. I don't mean writing my own articles but getting through the the thirty to forty minutes worth of reading of my student's writings per day. I can't say I mind. The web log has taken root and like a tree I've tried to nurture it by as quickly as possible posting the student's writings and comments. Many of my students still haven't internalized the skills and need to proofread and edit carefully their own writing.

The Whys and the Hows

I haven't written in several days, and its not that there isn't anything interesting happening in the blogging/internet sphere. I'm just focussed on my classroom which will have students in 4 days. Of the many thoughts floating about in my head, many involve my implementation of technology. Am I just implementing something for the sake of itself rather than looking first at the state standards and then proceeding to the tools? I think I am at that point, having taught for 5 years, that while I have not completely internalized the standards completely, I have a general recollection of them whenever I design a new lesson. I think the technology tools are for me personally motivational, and that enthusiasm carries over into what the kids perceive (just like my excitement about reading and learning). I enjoy the unpredictablility of using these tools and the team work that is required in solving problems that arise. I once had a student who I was helping to use a drawing tool with. I had added a Wacom drawing tablet and she picked up the pen and started trying to draw directly on the monitor and I told her, "yes you are right it should work that way, but you're way ahead of the people who make computers." This unpreditable aspect of young minds meeting technology is what fascinates me. They were born into a hyperlinked, interactive, multimedia world, "let's have fun." I don't want things to be predictable to the point where I don't get excited, but the problem may be that teachers won't proceed with a learning tool until they feel a greater mastery. And that's not going to happen with the rapid evolution of Web 2.0.

Onto more mundane topics, I have been concerned about using BlogMeister, in terms of its limitations for posting media such as pictures and sound, but I think for the pictures I'll set up a seperate Flickr pro account for my classroom that is separate from my personal pictures. That way if something is accidentally erased or altered I won't have to worry about it. For podcasts right now I'm leaning towards again creating a classroom account using Ourmedia account, but I may choose something else if I come across an easier to use tool. The pictures that my students use they can do so independently, but the podcast I think I will be more involved with when it comes to posting. I was'nt going to really do that much with podcasts, but I think it will help solve a problem that I've always had with process writing, and that is during the editing step the students do not read their paper but instead hand it off to someone else. Podcasts will force them to read aloud and this will help them catch their errors. It always happens that when I conference with a student and ask them to read their paper that they catch many errors that slipped through the process (technology to the rescue).

Technorati Tags: education, technology

Early Reflections on Using Weblogs Next Year

As I only started blogging with my students in the spring of this last year, I've begun the process of evaluating and reflecting on what I'll need to change for next year. I definitely intend on using blogmeister again because for elementary students it has all the features I need and ease of use. Our school is very careful about protecting our students and not allowing pictures or personal information, and with this tool I can maintain these requirements. This last year I just let the kids blog and did a brain storming session to begin with and whole class reflections every few days on what we were doing. My connections between blogging and the language arts standards were tenous since I didn't really know what to expect and didn't have clearly defined goals. I was just happy to have the kids posting and commenting on each other's ideas with out my intervention. Now I really need to think of the standards/goals of what I'm trying to do, and whether I'm going to expand blogging out of the writer's workshop model into other curriculum areas. Anne Davis has some very useful points to bring up based on her lessons learned and extensive experience with blogging. Will Richardson summarizes a panel discussion at the NECC also on the topic of lessons learned. Within his article he mentions Tim Lauer who brought up a wiki that is very easy to set up called instiki Lauer mentions that a teacher gave each student their own page which would function similar to how a weblog would work, where as I used it more as a bulletin board for an endangered animal project my students were working on and they used the wiki to post questions and assist each other in finding sources and pictures for their reports. I know I'll be doing literarture circles this year and Anne Davis also has a good starting page to explore ideas on using a weblog to do so.

Technorati Tags: blogs, education, wiki