Friendly, Free, Useful, and Safe

Friendly:

To celebrate X-Mas and reading, the SSR Committee organized a school-wide X-Mas SSR period. Two teachers and an alumnus read X-Mas stories to students while teacher elves served hot chocolate and cookies. It was a pleasant social gathering.

Free and Useful:

The world of google is bigger and more diverse than you think. And many of its free services benefit educators and students. The following list exposes you to google applications (google apps) that permit myriad teaching tools for the classroom. Caution: These teaching tools are for those educators not steeped in traditional modes of teaching but for those willing to adopt constructivist, collaborative, project-based teaching models; that is, teaching tools that prepare students for the 21st century of work. Please visit:

http://services.google.com/apps/resources/overviews_breeze/Apps/index.html

http://www.google.com/support/a/users/

http://www.google.com/educators/activities.html

More free and useful: The follwing wiki services aid poor readers and provide the educator with free textbooks documents for research. Worth a look!

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Main_Page = free textbooks and manuals

http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Main_Page = free source documents, books, speeches, etc...

http://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Simple_English_Wikipedia = for students learning english or have a difficult time reading. Check it out!

Safe: This week at Chapel, Internet Safety was preached. After a 'Don't Eat the Yellow Snow' analogy, the message conveyed was to 'minimize the risk' in the cyber-world. Since students will explore the good and the bad of the internet - and be risk-takers, it is imperative that they are taught to be responsible interent users. So educating them about the dangers of the internet, instilling safety messages and mantras, and convincing them to take a pledge to be a safe internet user will guide our internet safety curriculum.

An LMS will help teaching and learning

Reflection on my Moodle LMS training Dec 13, 2007

A Learning Management System (LMS) harnesses the learning environment and enables the creation of a personal learning environment (PLE) - essentially, a virtual teaching and learning space for students. An LMS is about creating collaborative learning environments as well. It's all about organizing and optimizing teaching and learning.

How does a tech integrator present this to teachers and ask them to use a tool the tech integrator knows little about? How does one ask them to use a tool barely test-driven by the tech integrator? With all the tech fads and all the untested Web apps, how does one bring yet another tool to teachers and say this is the one tool you'd be a fool not to use? At this point the tool can only be judged by its potential.

One could ask how this 'tool' might aid the teaching and learning process. And just because it is a technology tool doesn't mean you would not apply the pedagogical decison-making you would apply to any teaching practice nor would you neglect your students' learning styles and potentials: Why would you lecture? Why show a movie? Why do a lab? Why give a worksheet? Why do a research paper? In sum, the decsion you make should be backed by managing and optimizing the learning sytematically.

Perhaps to ensure the learning you used all the aforementioned -thus incorporating many learning modalities. You also need to commandeer all these tools to a central location.

If you're imparting learning, then you're managing it. Enter LMS, a learning management system. Imagine then if all this teaching and learning could be managed in a systematic way. Using an LMS a teacher doesn't have to go to the file cabinet to retrieve overused worksheets from years past; the teacher doesn't have to reserve the tv/vcr; the teacher doesn't have to worry if students take notes and bring them to subsequent classes; the teachers doesn't have to worry about students participating in discussions; and a teacher doesn't have to worry about the members' contribution to group projects or labs. Finally, a teacher doesn't have to worry about missed work from an absent student. Since all of these activities are managed in one place much like a woodcarvers workbench - or a teacher's office, the teacher has a constant peek of the students progress and learning -anytime, anyplace - and the teacher can keep lines of communication and feedback open -any time, any place.

So I decide to use an LMS to work with my unit titled Internet Safety. I will break my unit down into weekly increments. The weeks lessons will consist of students reading an online survey on cyber bullying; students will contribute to a classroom forum online on three internet safety topics; the students will view 2-2minute video clips of real stories of kids involved in cyber bullying and share a 150 reaction with the class online (and in the physical classroom); the students will search the WWW for a newstory on convicted cyber bullies and share the links with the class in an olnine folder called "Cyberbully Convicts"; Finally, students will collaborate using an online classroom wiki to develop an Internet Safety program for their school. All of this will be monitored, shared, and managed in one clutter free online space.

tech illiterate

Most influential blog post for 2007

http://thefischbowl.blogspot.com/2007/09/is-it-okay-to-be-technologically.html

How to use a blog for a History class...or any class

http://www.smithmel.edublogs.org/

Tooling ....and Learning

Principal

Strike a pose! Click on image and then click on "squares" on their faces. How might you use this in the classroom?

Visit Mike from Gslc's Toon Doo http://www.toondoo.com/View.toon?param=120023

Using computers to internalize learning

More important than dispensing information to your students is teaching them how to manage their learning - the latter being the more difficult to do. Since NCLB and the creation of national and state standards the rush has been on to complete these standards as though they were part of a check-off list. Standardization of education stymies creative teaching and learning thus there is a struggle between adopting constructivist teaching styles and dispensing traditonalist styles of teaching (read ...Blame Standardized tests). A compromise, however, emerges when one decides to focus on the quality of learning.

When I heard KM explain to Ms. Mac how she has harnessed her learning in History class using a combination of websites and mind mapping tools. I ascertained that she organized and internalized her learning. It is evident she has become an active learner, unlike a passive one who is given information, asked to manage it, and learn it. Also, GSLC has been working with comics in toon doo. Tooling with this comic generator has been effective because designing, personalizing, creating, and publishing their own creations are strong personalizing elements.

The fact is teacher can rarely be sure when students have learned - unless a neuroscience minor was earned; instead, it is more important to know if they have internalized their learning - and you can do this when a student begins learning how to learn: Reflecting on the process. This is the principle behind metacognition. To get your student "metacognating" identify their learning styles (we do this), focus on the process of learning (unfortunately many teachers/people are not good learners), and encourage informal, non-sequential, non-structured learning (think: constructivist learning theory).


One of the benefits of using technology in your instruction is that students view it as an exciting means to learning (for the most part) which personalizes the learning experience. Creating customizes learning environments is one way to do this. More on this next time.

Odd but true....

From ESchool News "Ed-tech groups issue urgent call to action. New report aims to spark leadership on educational technology."





"Right now, 100 million Americans have broadband access, 219 million Americans use cell phones, and the personal computer penetration rate is 73 percent. To a wireless nation that relies on technology for ordinary tasks and extraordinary achievements, it is shocking and inconceivable--but true--that technology is marginalized in the complex and vital affairs of education."


To make its point, the paper cites statistics from the U.S. Department of Commerce that rank education dead last in technology use among 55 industry sectors.

From PBSTeachers "'The controversial Federal E-rate program allocates money from telecommunication taxes to poor schools without technology resources. Some statistics suggest 100,000 or more schools have been provided with Internet connectivity and additional computers."

From Presidential candidate Jonathan Edwards: "It means that while half of urban and suburban households have broadband, less than a third of rural homes do. It means that African Americans are 25 percent less likely to have Internet access at home than whites. The Internet has been an engine of innovation and opportunity – one that started in America and then revolutionized the world. Yet, here at home, too many are denied access to it, including 40 percent of rural Americans.

As a tech Integ trying to tackle the Why educators are slow to adopt technology for their curriculums. Cite future shock as one slant to the answer.





NCES