All three presenters in this session provided great insight to some of the tools available in our Web 2.0 world and the benefits of their use. I particularly found Alan Levine's piece of tremendous use for me. Alan Levine shared his "50 Ways to Tell the Dominoe Story" in this presentation. What a great resource! I will be using this resource with teachers that are looking to use some of these tools in their classrooms as well as my course for pre-service elementary education teachers at Saint Joseph's College.
I have used some of the tools Alan describes in the past but really enjoyed seeing some examples of the other resources I was not familiar with. Digital Storytelling is a topic many of the teachers I work with are interested in. This will provide them and their students many ways to demonstrate their work. It is particularly useful that Alan included notes on each tool.
I find myself trying to get more and more of the work that I do, as well as my students and colleagues, online in places where they may be shared. I have found GoogleDocs and Wikispaces to be great tools for this. I have moved my "Technology In Education" course from WebCT to a Wikispace wiki. All of my students at SJC do their course reflections and more on blogs hosted by Uniblogs. It is amazing to see how the students react to comments that occasionally come in from people they are writing about. It creates some tremendous teachable moments for them as they see how the power of RSS truly shrinks their world.
tag: k12online07nt01, k12online07, alanlevine
Friday, April 18, 2008
K12 Online Conference "More Than Cool Tools" Keynote
Clarence Fisher: Classroom 2.0 Keynote
"Geography is becoming irrelevant"
This comment by Clarence Fisher really stuck with me as I watched his K12 Online Conference Keynote for Classroom 2.0. It's not that the statement is so earth shattering for me, but more because so many schools put their heads in the sand when it comes to that simple statement. The greatest asset that technology has brought to schools in my opinion would be connections. Technology connects us to information, people, and places. These connections can be down the hall or around the world.
I'm in my 6th year working in one to one environments in the State of Maine and it still amazes me that so many schools in my state do not allow students to use (or provide them) email let alone many Web 2.0 tools. When I am asked what has changed the most in classrooms due to one to one computing my first response is always "collaboration". One to one access allows instant collaboration between students, teachers, the community and the world. Classroom 2.0 is definitely about collaboration. The tools that Clarence mentioned (wikis, blogs, voicethread, and more) are all about collaboration, communication with an authentic world-wide audience, and sharing. I also would like to thank the folks at Edublogs, Wikispaces and Voicethread for providing access to teachers to use these exceptional tools for free.
If we going to provide our students an education that prepares them for their future they must have the tools they will use in their future. Students must be taught how to work collaboratively with others near them as well as from away. When we teach those skills geography becomes completely irrelevant. Clarence's students can collaborate with students from around the world and make geography irrelevant. Many schools that provide tremendous access to technology in their classrooms leave their kids "in the bush" as Clarence's students would say because they squelch connections. That is a shame in today's information landscape.
Image Citation:
Image: 'Released to Public: Sinai Penninsula and Dead Sea from Space Shuttle Columbia, March 2002 (NASA)'
www.flickr.com/photos/39735679@N00/491430005
tag: k12online07cl01, k12online07
Thursday, April 17, 2008
Death By PowerPoint
Our annual Career Fair occured at my school this week. I like to get around at events like this and take pictures to post to the school Flickr account and web page. As I cruised around during the last session of the Career Fair I noticed some consistent occurances.
First of all I want to make it clear that I am not writing this post as a negative response to any of the presenters. These are all local professionals who graciously gave up their time to be part of this event. It's always a great experience for our students to interact with professionals from their community as they start to think about correct pathways through high school and college. I am writing this post for the purpose of looking at student engagement and what teachers can learn about presenting to their classes.
Teachers need to realize that bullet pointed presentations are a sure fire way to lull their audience (students or other teachers) to sleep. This does not tend to provide for an engaging experience for anyone (including the presenter). Many of the presenters who relied on this form of presentation style left the event feeling as though their profession was dull. This is most unfortunate. Their profession isn't dull, their presentation was. The organizers of the event really try hard to get the word out to avoid this sort of presentation. But society some how has made people think that when one presents, one must come with the presenter tool that the pro's use - PowerPoint. There were some examples that used a variety of media (including PowerPoint) that were exceptional. The key was how the presenter engaged his/her students. So despite the title for this post, I want to discuss presentation style.
The successful presentations had the following in common:
- Presenter connected with the kids by speaking with them (not to them).
- Presenter used visual aides (pictures, models, tools, and more) to help students understand.
- Presenter posed questions to the students to get them involved in the presentation.
- Presenter used slides that supported what they were saying - not slides that were what they said.
- Presenter showed passion for their profession.
Here are some great resources for presenters (and teachers) to use as they think about how they present information to students as well as other audiences.
Life After Death by PowerPoint by Don McMillan
6 Do's to Open Your Presentation by Bert Decker
Better Beginnings: How to Start a Presentation, Book, Article... by Kathy Sierra
How to Give a Great Presentation by D. Keith Robinson
Seven Steps to Better Presentations by Jeffrey Veen
Anything at Presentation Zen
tag: student engagement, presentations
Monday, April 14, 2008
NE Tweet Up: April 13, 2008
Thank you Liz Davis for organizing this event. I truly enjoyed meeting all of the people who joined us at The Grog Restaurant in Newburyport, MA. The Grog didn't have wireless access so we ditched our laptops and enjoyed plenty of grog ;-).
We hope to have another meeting of the New England EdTech Twits soon. Liz is now looking into arranging a follow up to Educon to occur around the BLC Conference in the Boston area this summer.
Thank you Alice Barr for sharing your photos.
The group included people from Maine, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, and Connecticut. Hopefully more of New England can be represented next time we get together.
Front Row: Beth, Alice, John, Steve
Back Row: Karen, Maria, Beth, Colleen, Liz, Linda, Sonja
Way Back: Mike, Mike
tag: netweetup
Tuesday, April 1, 2008
April Fools
When I was checking out my Google Calendar this morning I noticed a new feature...
What's new with Google Calendar
Just launched!
Wake yourself up with our new Google Wake Up Kit!
Do you have trouble getting out of bed in the morning? We do, too. In fact this problem became so serious at times that it sometimes resulted in lacklustre attendance at team meetings. To help solve the problem we've created an innovative solution called the Google Wake Up Kit.
"I could never wake up on time to get to our team meetings. But thanks to the new Google Wake Up Kit, I'm always on time now!"
Pedro C.
In combination with the kit, you can receive a new type of notification from Google Calendar, called the "wake up" notification. This notification is relentless in ensuring your timely awakening from restful slumber.
Thursday, March 27, 2008
Photoshop Express Available Today
Photoshop Express Beta is available today as a free account. It offers 17 tools to manipulate digital images. Photoshop Express is nowhere near as powerful as it's desktop brother, but it does provide a great tool for most people to edit their images. PS Express also provides easy copy and paste image location capabilities to post pictures (like the one to the right) to your blog. I took this image from our recent trip to Disney and edited the image using PS Express. I look forward to seeing how this tool will grow. Hopefully, Adobe will add drawing features and layers to PS Express sometime in the near future.
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