Goals for the Future Part 3

Use Ustream. As with Sketchcast, I'm not yet sure of all the ways I could incorporate this site. Check out my silly first video.

Goals for the Future Part 2

Use Sketchcast to help my students outside of the classroom. Check out my first sketch below; it's nothing pretty and I actually teach three subjects, not just math (I'm not sure why science and social studies didn't show up).

Goals for the Future Part 1

Use Google Maps more...I mean...just use Google Maps with my class. A cool idea comes from We Tell Stories, a digital writing project from Penguin UK. Six authors have been challenged to create new forms of story - designed specifically for the Internet and that "...take full advantage of the immediacy, connectivity and interactivity that is now possible." The first story is told by following the story through Google Maps as it unfolds.

Obviously, there are numerous ways to do this same type of thing in the classroom. I'm thinking of doing something similar in social studies--Paul Revere's Ride, hiking the Appalachian Trail, Lewis and Clark's journey, the Trail of Tears, etc.

Goal #1 - Embed Google Maps into my classroom blog.

Comments: A Great Way to Test Ideas

Will Richardson's Weblogg-ed blog has to be the most widely read educator (or former educator) blog in the blogosphere. So when he rants on a topic, you can pretty much guarantee that after clicking the comment link, the discussion you see will be rich.

I've taken an interest in 21st Century learning this year so his recent post on 21st Century skills for educators sparked my interest. As usual, the content of his post was thought-provoking, but the comments of the folks around the world who put in their 2-cents worth are just as enlightening. On a blog like this, with such a large number of readers, adding your opinion to the discussion becomes a great way to test your ideas. Throw out an idea and see if anyone reacts; if you're lucky, someone will affirm your belief or, even better, push back with something that makes you rethink your position. Heck, even if you never leave a comment, but have a definite opinion on the topic, your bound to find something while reading over the dozens of comments that can help you form a more complete opinion. By the way, I simply read the comments without contributing.

Having access to this community of educators, discussing and debating important topics, is extremely exciting. If only we could replicate this kind of dialogue with our students!

Technorati Tags: Will Richardson, education, teachers, blogging,

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The Ask an Expert Blog

I've really been looking for ways the past few years to take advantage of the connective capabilities of the Blogosphere. My efforts have lead me to create projects and assignments that require my students to comment on each other's work, inside and outside of school. My hope is that they will begin connecting through their blogs outside of school, thus taking learning beyond the classroom.

A more recent (as in the past few days) effort has been the development of the Wyoming Ask An Expert Blog that I set up for my students. Through this blog my students are connected with an astronomy instructor from the University of Cincinnati Clermont. Each day I post a question that they have about space and can't answer myself. The instructor then comments on the post, giving his answer. His comments have been extremely insightful so far and if you have any desire to learn more about space, then I highly suggest making your way to the blog to see what he has to say.


Technorati Tags: astronomy, education, teachers

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How the Smartboard Has Changed My Teaching

This has been one of the busiest years in my career. It's odd that this is the case considering it's my eighth year--shouldn't things be getting easier! Teaching three subjects is enough to keep anyone busy with all the planning and grading. The grading is bad, but it's the planning that has overwhelmed me this year and the blame for that goes right to my new Smartboard! This technology has pervaded my teaching. Almost every lesson I teach now includes the Smartboard in some way. As a result, I've had to create many lessons anew and the time and effort to do this is wearing on me.

Something else that has resulted though is that the Smartboard has changed my teaching. Here's how:

• The projector provides me with a visual anytime I want. As a result, I teach few concepts without having visual support. But because the visuals are always on the Smartboard, it has become the focus of attention and I often find that I am as well. So in a way, I think my teaching has become a little more traditional but...
  
• There is a great deal more interactivity when I am the focus. That's the purpose of the Smartboard--it gets kids out of their seats to manipulate the objects on the screen. One of the reasons I've become more traditional is that I make every effort to take advantage of this interactivity. My kids are always out of their seats manipulating objects on the screen. As a result, my lessons have forced kids to be able to categorize, analyze, etc. which means...
• There is a greater effort to make kids think critically. Today my math students were given three triangles. They had to look at the triangles, identify their properties, and then slide them under the correct heading (e.g. all sides congruent, one obtuse angle, no sides congruent). After they had them under the correct headings, they then had to classify the triangle. We repeated this exercise with quadrilaterals.
  

I love my Smartboard. It is an amazing tool that has made my teaching better. My lessons are more engaging and there is rarely a time when my kids can't visualize what I'm teaching. How wonderful will it be next year to have a year experience under my belt with this technology!

Photo Credit

Technorati Tags: Smartboard, education, teachers

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Web 2.0: It's All About the Products

Despite my best efforts, I just can't seem to get an out-of-class community going with my students. There just isn't enough interest. Between sports, music lessons, and other extracurricular activities, they just don't seem to want to get on the Internet late in the evening to complete anything extra for school. This is supposed to be the Net Generation, kids who grew up surrounded by digital media. For years I have read about how much time they spend on the Web consuming and creating information, interacting with one another, and playing video games. Yet, I'm not seeing all of this enthusiasm.

My students come to school as seasoned users of technology. I teach in an affluent school district where the vast majority of my students have access to the Internet. However, by all indications, playing on the computer does not seem to be at the top of their list of free time activities.

So what is it that gives me this impression? This year I have continued two of the projects that I started in my math class last year: the Scribe Post and Photo of the Week. The Scribe Post was a popular activity for my math students last year; however this year my students have very little interest in completing them (they are not graded assignments for me). And even though I offered incentives for completing the The Photo of the Week, very few of my kids complete it. Outside of these two projects, many kids are using Think.com to post interactive features like surveys and debates that the other students in my classes can respond to. Many of them do not get any responses. The fact that there is an audience (outside of me) for their work also does not seem like a motivator for my students either.

There are a few kids who are very enthusiastic about Think.com. My impression is that because the work relates to school though, the vast majority of my students are not interested in it. What gives?

All of this leads me to believe that for teachers and students, the real power of Web 2.0 is in how it allows us to create such phenomenal products so easily. My students just completed a variety of products for a project in social studies. There were digital stories, PowerPoints, posters, dioramas, essays, webpages on Think.com and much more. In my opinion, the best products were the webpages. It was easy for students to combine visuals with text, add links, and even insert interactive features.

So far, Web 2.o has been a disaster for building a community, but a blessing for creating products.


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More on Videophilia and Nature

Epistemic Games is another one of the blogs on my blogroll. They've also read the article about the decline in national park attendance and its correlation with a rise in videophilia. Here's their take on the study by the Nature Conservancy.


Technorati Tags: education | video games | nature | Epistemic Games

Wired New: Teaching Teachers About Wind Power

If you read this blog, it should be obvious by now that I get quite a bit of good information from Wired News's blog. The particular blog that I read is updated so often (at least 20 times a day) and has such a vast audience that just about anybody can find something interesting to read from it.

Lately I've been interested in teaching my kids about wind power. We have an electricity unit coming up and I thought that building a wind turbine that actually generates electricity would be an excellent way to extend the curriculum. So it was really nice to see on the Wired blog an article about Michael Arquin, a former teacher and founder of the KidWind Project, a small company dedicated to improving the quality and quantity of wind energy science education throughout the US. 

I had visited the KidWind website before to get ideas and price some materials. The site is an excellent place to begin AND finish research on the implementation of wind power project in the classroom. It has lesson plans and an online store so that teachers can purchase materials for building small turbines.

Technorati Tags: windpower | education | Wired Magazine

GPS and Geocaching

Yesterday I attended the eTech Ohio State Technology Conference. It was jam packed, the busiest I've ever seen it, and many of the sessions were standing-room only. As a result, I didn't get into a couple of sessions that I really wanted to check out. However, one session made the whole day worth it for me. I don't know much about GPS and Geocaching, but Jeff Good's presentation on the topic got me excited to learn more. Here are some of the important points from his presentation.

• There are three elements to GPS:
• Satellites
• Ground Stations
• Receivers
• GPS knows your position and tracks time; as a result, it can calculate distance, speed, direction, and even elevation. You can also use the unit to navigate from one location to another.
  
• Geocaching is when someone hides a treasure (logbook, trinkets) and then provides the coordinates so that GPS owners can find them. Geocaching.com is a site that connects hiders with seekers (my words). Type in a zip code and get a list of all the items that are hidden within that area. You can also type in an address and get a list. Click on a result and get the latitude and longitude so that you can import them into your computer. Directions are given as to how to find the cache. Clues are provided.
• A cache can be more than just a treasure. He gave an example of a group of students who went to a nature preserve and recorded the coordinates of several different types of trees. Then others could download the coordinates of those trees and when they found them on their GPS units, would be able to identify the type of tree. Other types of caches: traditional, multi-cache, reverse cache, earthcaching.
  
• Several people also mentioned that one of the benefits of geocaching is that it gets you out into the area around your house. We often are oblivious to some of the details of our surroundings, but with geocaching you can discover things that you didn’t know were around you.
  

Technorati Tags: education | GPS | geocaching

Wired News: Nature Giving Way to Virtual Reality

"As people spend more time communing with their televisions and computers, the impact is not just on their health, researchers say. Less time spent outdoors means less contact with nature and, eventually, less interest in conservation and parks.

Camping, fishing and per capita visits to parks are all declining in a shift away from nature-based recreation, researchers report in Monday's online edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences."

Wow...It seems that Richard Louv was correct. In his book, Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Kids from Nature Deficit Disorder, Louv spoke of precisely the same issues that are covered in the Wired article. One of these is the decline in national state park visits. From the article:

"By studying visits to national and state park and the issuance of hunting and fishing licenses the researchers documented declines of between 18 percent and 25 percent in various types of outdoor recreation.

The decline, found in both the United States and Japan, appears to have begun in the 1980s and 1990s, the period of rapid growth of video games, they said."

Now I can't say that I think the declines are caused by kids playing video games, but I definitely buy into what is being written about kids spending less time outdoors. And it scares me to death that this is leading to less of a concern for nature and conservation. Hopefully, parents will catch wind of studies like this and books like Louv's and provide their kids with more experiences like the one I wrote about this past summer.

Technorati Tags: education | video games | nature

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