Complete (and New Perspectives)

Kites from the Sigur Ros film "Heima"

     So its finished! Two years and my Masters Degree in Educational Technology is done. It feels odd remembering bits and pieces of courses at the beginning: figuring out where the North Bridge was in the map of the inside of a computer; designing a web-quest on the Transcontinental Railroad; creating and exploring new web 2.0 opportunities; and discovering new methods for reaching a variety of learners.
     I could go on and reflect on more than a hundred things I've learned in the past two years, but I don't think that would be entirely beneficial at the moment. What most impressed me; what I most think back on and appreciate above all else are the relationships and interactions with people from all over the US. Yes, they were short. Usually just 8 weeks. But its all about learning new perspectives: seeing things from another point of view; learning what frustrates others; learning what it takes to work together with people you've never met, let alone never seen before.
     21st century learners are going to experience working and collaborating with people of different race, ethnicity, religion, and geographic location if they aren't already doing so. Learning to collaborate - actually working together to achieve a purpose - is not simply about tolerance and respect, its about listening, learning, and opening one's self to the potential of a broader spectrum of understanding. Its admitting that your way may not be the best way, just a possible solution. Its about gaining the humility to accept your own ideas may be embraced, altered, denied, or tinkered with. 
     As an 21st century educator/learner its my responsibility to not simply understand this but to practice it as well. The last two years of online coursework, Skype sessions, discussion forums, and collaborative projects have provided some excellent practice and experiences. Thanks to each of my classmates for having shared. You offered new perspectives in so many different facets of education. You've given me a lot to think about and it will always be greatly appreciated!

  (image collected from http://earthlingsoft.net/ssp/blog/graphics/SigurRosKites.jpeg)
   

Create & Share

   A list created by Kristen Paino on a List.ly page titled Digital Storytelling/Content Creation iPad Apps got me thinking about the importance of the importance of utilizing iOS or other handheld devices for creating as well as consuming. Yes, iDevices are excellent for gaming and there are a ton of great educational games that can and do support standards. But we'd be amiss to start bringing carts of them into our classrooms simply with this purpose.
   Kristen's list contains excellent tools for digital storytelling in several different ways: drawing and writing, narrated slideshows, puppet shows, and more. Creating takes the iDevice a step further (not to mention taking Bloom's Taxonomy a few steps higher!). Like any form of creation it engages the student on a new level with their knowledge and experiences. It lets them interact with what they know in the digital world and provides the opportunity to share those creations on a wider scale.
   Of course creating on any iDevice sometimes gets folks confused with how to get the finished product to somewhere where others can see it. While a few creation-based apps allow you to export to Flickr, Youtube or other video/photo sites, some merely create an image, video, or e-pub (ebook). Dropbox is an excellent tool to link even a whole class set of iDevices together. There's a public folder in Dropbox that will allow you to copy a public link, post it, and share your created content. We use a Posterous blog to share some e-books our 5th and 3rd graders created this year. You'll need an iPhone, iPod, or iPad to view them. So check out the list, try an e-book or digital story creator app and get your kids creating!
 

iDentical iPods: Getting Ready for Next School-Year

  I'm a little particular with the iPods we use during Technology. Because I have students ranging from 4 years old through 5th grade using them,  I've found the organization of folders to be very helpful. The problem though is having 30 iPods synced identically (apps sorted into folders as you see fit). The benefits of this are having the ability to quickly direct students where an app is located (especially in the primary grades) and demonstrating how students can manage their own iPods.
   So the problem still exists: how do we get 30 iPods to look identical? Its actually not a big problem, though the solution is time consuming. Basically, it involves setting one iPod exactly like you want the rest to look like, syncing it to your laptop, letting it backup, then restoring every other iPod to that backup. Here are the steps:

1) Sync 1 iPod with the computer it normally syncs with.
2) Organize that iPod the way you want the entire set to look (hold down on an app until it wiggles. Move one app on top of another to create a folder. Name that folder and hit the home button or create new folders)
3) Plug it back into the computer and allow it to backup and sync.
4) Unplug that iPod and plug in the remaining iPods (if you have access to a charging cart/case use that - if not, you'll have to repeat steps 5-8 for each additional iPod)
5) Right-Click (two finger tap on Mac) on the next iPod in the iTunes sidebar. Select Restore from Backup.
6) From the selection panel, find and select the last backup of the iPod you used in steps 1-3.
7) Click restore.
8) When iTunes completes its restore process, rename that iPod in the iTunes sidebar.  I use Mobile Cart 02, Mobile Cart 03, etc...(click once on the iPod to select, then click a second time to rename). The iPod will now have its unique name but look just like iPod 1.
9) Repeat this process for each iPod.

 Another quick tip for staying organized with iPods that look the same is giving them a numerical lock-screen wallpaper. Tony Vincent (Learning in Hand blogger and mobile tech extraordinaire)  has a number of photo sets with numbers specifically for this:
http://learninginhand.com/blog/wallpaper-ipod-touch-with-numbers.html
1)Create a photo album in iPhoto or in a folder in Windows for the Number Wallpapers.
2) in iTunes with your iPods plugged in, select Pictures from each iPod's menu. Locate the album and allow it to sync to each iPod.
3) On the iPod itself, locate the newly synced photo album, select the iPod's number and set it as the Lock Screen wallpaper.

8 iOS Apps for the Summer!

   With summer coming, parents are getting ready to have their kids at home ALL THE TIME! iPods, iPhones, and iPads will certainly be getting a workout with new apps.  As a technology teacher, one of my pet peeves is seeing iPods loaded with nothing but mindless games. (Not that there isn't a place for them, its nice to get lost in a good game of paper toss every once in awhile!) I understand the need for games, but at the same time there are some great apps that kids can have fun with and be engaged in learning away from school. I teach elementary-aged kids so this list will target that group, however some apps can certainly be used by anyone:



1) Bugs and Buttons
Price: $2.99
Age Group: Kindergarten-1st
I learned this year that kindergarten students loved sorting! Add creepy cockroaches and bees and its all the better! This is a fast-paced, graphic-rich game of sorting, yep, bugs and buttons! Oh, there are bug races too.

2) Finger Physics
Price: $.99
Age Group: 3rd Grade and up
Balance, Puzzles, Problem-Solving, and tons of levels. Its one of those time-consuming games but in an engage-the-brain way.

3) Paper Bridge
Price: $.99
Age Group: 3rd Grade and up
Another puzzle game. This one gets tricky pretty quickly. There's a tutorial prior to level 1 that infers the idea of a "Truss Bridge". Good problem solving again!

4) Puppet Pals HD (iPad) and Puppet Pals Pocket (iPod/iPhone)
Price: Basic Edition is Free, Director's Pass is $2.99
Age Group: K-5
The basic edition provides 1 theme with characters where the director's pass provides a lot more options (not bad for $3). Kids can also create puppets out of their own photos and create their own puppet show with recorded audio. Get the imagination going with this one...lots of fun!

5) Sonic Pics
Price: $2.99
Age Group: (K-3 with guidance) 4th Grade and up
If you're going on a family vacation or just going out to the park, put the iPod to use by snapping some pictures and putting together a narrated video about it! Do your kids create stories on their own with sketched pictures? Photograph them and put them into Sonic Pics. Have them read and record their story.  A great way to tell digital stories and save memories.

 6) Survival
Price: Free!
Age Group: 2-5
This is probably the best free app I've seen in awhile. Created by the ARK organization for the protection of endangered species. Learn about lots of interesting animals, sharpen your reading skills, and try to survive for as long as you can! Oh yeah, this fits in really well with (at least South Carolina's) 2nd grade science standards on classifying animals (mammals, reptiles, fish, etc...)

7) Flip It!
Price: $2.99
Age Group: Kindergarten and up
Remember drawing a stick figure walking or skateboarding in the back of a notebook then continuing the motion on the next pages 'til you could flip through it? That's what this does. Add background images, colors, duplicate pages, etc... Great for sequencing and planning out stories. Plus its just a lot of fun to make animation.

8) Comic Life (iPad only) Check out Comic Touch for iPod/iPhone
Price: $4.99
Age Group: 2nd grade and up
Create full comic books telling original stories or documenting your family vacation. These developers know how to make a great app. Excellent tools, pretty straightforward to use and lots of templates to create memories.


That's it for now. Most of those are apps that we've used in our school over the last year or two. The students have really shown engagement with them and created some excellent projects. So, if you've got a phone, try out one or two (or all) of these apps with your kids over the summer. Give them a challenge then show off their work to the family when they're finished...or better yet, share it with the world!

Facebook, a School-Year Later

   So a back at the beginning of the school-year I wrote an entry about our school and district beginning an initiative to post on Facebook as a communication tool. I created attendance area pages (South Carolina schools are organized by county. Attendance areas contain a high-school, one to two middle schools, and several elementary schools) and each school was asked to have a Facebook page. Our school took that a step further: our principal encouraged teachers or grade-levels to set up pages as well for communication purposes. They could even use those pages in place of an end-of-the-week newsletter so long as a post was made by Friday. I can't speak for the individual teacher pages or grade-level pages, but our school page has been quite successful. The image of the graphs  is our weekly reach: basically how many people see our page, share something, how many friends of friends of ours can see the pages, etc. While we have about 777 "likes" we have a total weekly reach of close to 3,000. Basically that means that a lot of our "likers" are sharing our stories or their comments on our stories are showing up on their friends timelines. That also means a lot of good publicity and community building through our Facebook page.
     When this initiative first came up a lot of folks were concerned about community members using it as a sounding board to complain about whatever they had to complain about. We've actually seen the opposite. We've seen more questions resolved by the community itself than our page admins. For example, someone posted a question about an event time. Very soon after two other people posted responses completely clearing up the confusion before we even got to respond.
     What our school pages have done is amplify the support and corroboration that already existed within our community. It gives it a common area to converse, leave comments, and share their support. It also supports our "Green" initiatives as we get to cut down on printed newsletters (newsletters do get sent home to those without internet who opt to receive them). It also creates a clear, quick line of communication between teachers, administration, and parents.
     We have three admins of our school FB page and we all keep pretty close tabs on what goes on with comments. We have pretty tight reins on the pages meaning that only admins can make original posts and upload photos/videos. We also keep our comments "compact" meaning that a viewer has to "expand selection" prior to seeing the comment thread. This keeps any "unruly users'" posts from being seen right away without us moderating first. Our principal has really taken the lead on this: posting; moderating; and updating.  She also reviews the comments and really only keeps ones that pertain to school and not personal issues (which doesn't happen much).
    So overall its been a highly positive experience. The communication between our school and the community has opened wider and it gives us the opportunity to quickly relay what has been going on behind our doors. If you're toying with the idea of a school or classroom pages, I would highly recommend it.
      
   

Podcast - End of the Year Projects

In this podcast edition, we explore four Web 2.0 tools to liven up student projects, boost creativity, support deeper interaction with knowledge, and provide huge opportunities for online community sharing.

End of the Year Project Blues

Image from:
http://www.planetpals.com/images_recycle_crafts/shoebox.jpg

   So its approaching the end of the school year (at least for those of us in South Carolina) which means its time for those "end of the school year project blues". Students scramble to create posters, dioramas, papers, and my personal favorite (yes, that was sarcasm) a PowerPoint. I'm realizing that I've probably not done all that I could to prepare my students for this point in the year. I know I shouldn't have that much of a problem with PowerPoint, because it does have great features and can do a lot more if we think outside of the box with it - but here's my biggest problem:
   I was browsing over a student's work and noticed the language was that of a seasoned biologist talking about animals, not an elementary student's. When I asked if he wrote it or copied it, he said "I copied it". No problems, easy to do, learned and demonstrated absolutely nothing except how to copy and paste. This is unacceptable and its the reason why I said moments ago that I don't think I prepared my students properly. And here's why:
   I think that many web 2.0 tools like podcasts, blogs, digital storybooks, and even silly animated movies on Kerpoof challenge students to interact with their knowledge more than creating a presentation for exactly the reason demonstrated by my student. Its so easy to copy and paste into a presentation, its different when you have to add some creativity into the mix, give a personal opinion about something, or listen back to your own words and thoughts about a topic. Its more challenging, but I think if we direct our students in that direction, they'll come to find out its much more rewarding.
  The podcast associated with this post talks briefly about four potential options for projects; four tools that offer creativity, interaction with learning, and the potential for sharing online with friends, family, and the world. The tools covered are:
1) The website Kerpoof.com whose Make a Story and Make a Movie feature provide unique tools to share knowledge.
2) The program Audacity: a free and powerful audio recorder perfect for recording podcasts. If a student finishes a recording, why not host it on SoundCloud with an account for your classroom, or challenge the student to add appropriate content photos to the audio with Movie Maker and load it up to Facebook or Youtube?
3) The iOS apps Book Creator (cross-device) and Book Creator for iPad (iPad only) for e-book creation. Students can export their books as PDF's or share the e-pub file via email or Dropbox.
4) The online presentation tool Prezi: Yes, its for presentations but its setup makes it a bit more difficult to simply copy and paste text. Students would have to consider sequence, organization, and how to be concise (which gets NO consideration usually with PowerPoint).
  The challenge I'm presenting myself with for next year is to spend much more time on ethical research (yes, even in elementary school this is really important), and practical uses for the tools that we've spent time on in class.
   I think we'll have some fun with that!