Women of Web 2.0, Cheryl Oakes, Jennifer Wagner, Sharon Peters, & Vicki Davis have asked me to be a guest tonight on their live webcast. On their web site they describe themselves as:
“…four women who not only love using the tools of the Internet but also love sharing the tools with others.”
I’ll share what my class has done and is doing right now using Web 2.0 tools and more. That’s tonight (Tuesday) 6:00pm Pacific Daylight Time – 9:00pm Eastern.
Here are the links to video of Grace Corrigan’s (Christa McAuliffe’s mom – the teacher in space’s) visit to our classroom. Well worth the time. You will see me occasionally intrude into the presentation because I put the laptop running the Skype feed in the best possible spot if I wanted it to be in the way. In my own defense It’s where it is when Celest joins us and it just didn’t occur to me I know dumb.
Full disclosure – I edited out the 5 minute plus – “school announcements” that overwhelm Grace’s presentation. I also cut it into 2 seemingly obvious chunks. The first is Grace’s presentation to the students – although I didn’t get the camera turned on right away so I missed the beginning – the 2nd part is the question answering part. I think you will agree that Grace connects well with the students.
Thanks again to Lee Baber and her students at YouthBridges who Skyped the event for us and added their questions. All in all a great experience. Enjoy!
The sound is not real loud (but not bad either) because the camera was in the back of the room. I boosted it as much as I could but depending on your speakers, you might need headphones.
Click the photo below to see the vidcast of Grace’s presentation: 13 + minutes
Click the photo below to see the vidcast of Grace’s question and answer period: 24 + minutes
I received the following email today:
“Please pass this along to anyone you know, this needs to get out in the open.
Recently Marines over in Iraq supporting this country in OIF wrote to Starbucks because they wanted to let them know how much they liked their coffee and try to score some free coffee grounds. Starbucks wrote back telling the Marines thanks for their support in their business, but that they don’t support the War and anyone in it and that they won’t send them the Coffee.
So as not to offend them we should not support in buying any Starbucks products. As a War vet and writing to you patriots I feel we should get this out in the open. I know this War might not be very popular with some folks, but that doesn’t mean we don’t support the boys on the ground fighting street to street and house to house for what they and I believe is right. If you feel the same as I do then pass this along, or you can discard it and I’ll never know. Thanks very much for your support to me, and I know you’ll all be there again here soon when I deploy once more.
Semper Fidelis,
Sgt Howard C. Wright
1st Force Recon Co
1st Plt PLT RTO”
Now to most of us this had “RED FLAG†written all over it. But the person who forwarded it to everyone on our staff just saw a seeming injustice and wanted to help spread the word. To me this is a lesson on why we cannot just avoid teaching kids the tools and spaces of the net and how to use them effectively and ethically. This also points out why we must spend more time on teaching critical thinking and analysis – how to question what we see and read and hear – I won’t link to it here, but this is a similar lesson to what many have taught using the MLK web page that is really a white supremacist site in sheeps clothing. Teaching students to be critical thinkers needs to be done anyhow, we leverage that when in doing so we teach students to use powerful tools that will enhance their learning in a myriad of ways.
The end of THIS story is happy by the way, because after getting feedback from a number of us, the sender followed up later in the day with this:
After sending the e-mail this morning, I did some investigation and found the following. Sorry if it upset any of you, as it seems to have
caused a stir. I had received the e-mail several times and simply passed it on, something I will make sure not to do in the future! Always research first…Comments: It’s unclear whether Starbucks ever actually refused to donate coffee to U.S. Marines in Iraq who requested it, but if they did, it wasn’t because, as the above email claims, “they don’t support the
war and anyone in it.”Marine Sgt. Howard C. Wright, who authored the email in May 2004, subsequently issued a mea culpa (currently being distributed by Starbucks in answer to queries) in which he said:
Almost 5 months ago I sent an email to you my faithful friends. I did a wrong thing that needs to be cleared up. I heard by word of mouth about how Starbucks said they didn’t support the war and all. I was having enough of that kind of talk and didn’t do my research properly like I should have. This is not true. Starbucks supports men and women in uniform. They have personally contacted me and I have been sent many copies of their company’s policy on this issue. So I apologize for this quick and wrong letter that I sent out to you.
In its own response to the email rumor, Starbucks explains that while the company has “the deepest respect and admiration for U.S. military personnel,” corporate policy prohibits direct donations to U.S. troops because the military doesn’t fall under the strict definition of a public charity. Individual employees are free to donate their weekly pounds of take-home coffee, however, and according to Starbucks’ statement many have done so.
Learning is messy!!!
Years ago I came up with an idea for a writing prompt that I felt was pretty “schema neutral“- all kids would have experience enough to be able to write a story about this prompt. I call it “A Day As Your Shoes.” Several years ago Corbett Harrison, who among other things had the concept for and started the Writing Fix web site and still maintains it, put my prompt on the site. He made it an interactive prompt to mimic how I have students brainstorm their ideas. Since all students have experience with shoes (at least in this country) and going to school – they will all be able to bring schema for this story.
This year to add to the motivation and creativity I had the students make the covers for their stories by taking pictures of their shoes and using Fd’s Flickr Tools – Magazine Cover to design their bookcover. We took pictures with a digital camera and downloaded into iPhoto on their laptops. Each student designed several covers so they could build at least some expertise with the software before putting together their final product pictured below.
I finished the last of four 4 hour classes I taught on Flickr, blogs, wikis, writingfix.com, digital video, TeacherTube and Skype (and a few other things) last night. To demo Skype I made a connection with Chrissy in New Zealand. I had never met Chrissy or been to her blog, but she was the first to answer my request. What a way to make my point of how easy using Skype is. I typed in her Skype name, clicked on it and 10 seconds later there she was along with her class. She announce that she was from our future since it was 11:30 Wednesday for her and 4:30 Tuesday for us. She shared how she uses Skype with her students – making connections with other classes in other places and that was it. Just simply cool. I sent her a thank you email and expressed the hope that we could possibly have our students work on something together, especially since the time zones make that possible.
On the other hand, I was supposed to join the WOW2 usual Tuesday night chat to demo how that works by having Cheryl Oakes, Jennifer Wagner, Sharon Peters, & Vicki Davis respond to a question or two. I entered the chat just fine but every time I tried to listen in I was knocked off their site … I’ve been on before … from home, no problem. I was running late and didn’t have time to problem solve for long – so I apologize if I disrupted things there : ( – Dang and my track record was doing so well too.
Update: 4/29/07
Find a link to the podcast below (my first ever podcast btw).
Friday, Grace Corrigan “graced” our classroom with a visit, and that might seem like just a cute play-on-words, but if you had been there you would agree. Grace is Christa McAuliffe’s Mom (Teacher in Space tragically lost on the Space Shuttle Challenger debacle). I was told to expect her about fifteen minutes after school started and she appeared about fifteen minutes before school started, so much for my, “We’ll get the students in and settled first” plan. But it didn’t matter. They came in and found their seats, some said hello – I had explained to them the day before that because we were Skyping her visit and trying to record it and video tape it, that I would be busy and they would have to monitor themselves and each other – they did a great job!
Lee Baber and I (mainly Lee) got the Skype connection to work – we had planned on meeting over Skype the day before to check the connection and discuss what to expect etc. – but both of us were so busy that that never happened. We did manage to connect about an hour before, after I managed to interrupt another Skype session her students were doing.
We had a bit of a tentative start, I intro-ed from my end and then one of Lee’s students did an intro for the podcast they were doing – and Grace was off – well for a few minutes anyhow. Right as Grace was engaging the students, our school’s morning announcements began. But that didn’t stop Grace, she just kept on going right through – today’s lunch menu, Thought-for-the-Day, and a scolding for leaving too much trash outside after, “outside lunch” the day before. I noticed at this point that Lee had sent me a text message on Skype, “Brian, we seem to be picking up some kind of noise; what is that? “Just morning announcements,” I texted back. “Oh,” replied Lee, who I’m sure was really impressed at this point at the professional manner in which the presentation was going. And that impression was reinforced a few minutes later when the office called me over the loudspeaker to tell me to do my attendance (even though it was done). You have to understand that we complain all the time how loud things come across our PA system, but there is no way to adjust it or turn it off.
Anyhow, undeterred Grace continued – she showed them a short film about Christa and continued on her theme of “Reach For The Stars!” She took questions for about 25 minutes, took a photo with the class, shook hands with any student that wanted to, autographed a picture of Christa for us, and was gone. I scanned the picture and printed out a color copy for every student in my class. 18 of my students were able to ask her a question, and at least half that number of the YouthBridges students asked a question too.
I want to thank Grace Corrigan, Lee Baber and her students and Paul McFarlane a high school English teacher that started and runs the Lumiere Film Festival – and he teaches our school district’s Digital Video Class with me – he chose my class as the one for Grace to visit.
My class began blog posts about the experience and their field trip the day before to Animal Ark. Lee emailed me that she thinks the recording went well – thanks to her and her students. All-in-all a super experience for all involved. As soon as the podcast is edited I’ll put a link to it here. Once I get a chance to edit the video, and if it is any good I’ll post it. I just wish Celest could have been a part – a few students mentioned that too.
Podcast – Click here for podcast of Grace’s visit.
Recorded 4/27/07 Length: 31:51
David Warlick, Chris Lehmann and others have posted about teaching computer applications. I’m not sure if I’ve been “doing it right,†but for years I’ve taught computer applications sparingly. If I had just started out using tech with students I’d probably claim it was because with all the testing and all that entails I don’t have time to teach applications. But years ago when I wasn’t so encumbered I didn’t spend much time on applications either – or maybe I should say I spent only as much time on it as it required so that students could do the work and meet the requirements of the project or assignment we were working on. Much of it was “on the fly.†A student or their group would want to know how to do something and I would show them on the spot (or a bit later depending on time). Inevitably someone else would need to know and either I would show them, or the expert from the first group would show them. Of course very often I would note that soon they were doing things that not only had I not shown them how to do, but didn’t even know you could do – so sometimes rolls reversed and they were showing me something.
Years ago when iMovie first came out we did a project where every group in my sixth grade had to produce a video about a geology topic (What is a rock? What is igneous rock?..) After we had been working for weeks most groups had finished all their shots and were ready to edit. However, 2 groups were still finishing up so I quickly ran around and downloaded each group’s video onto a laptop and showed them how if they clicked on a clip and pressed play you could watch that clip. I didn’t have time to show them more. I went back to work helping the 2 unfinished groups get their final shots set up and of course it took much longer than planned (it was very “messyâ€) I soon realized that the finished groups could have watched all their clips 5 times over – and yet a class that was prone to being noisy and off track if they didn’t have very specific things to do – was literally “humming†– just low talk and deep concentration on the laptop in their group.
I kept wondering exactly what they were up to. I would ask and glance at their goings on and they were still viewing clips, but it wasn’t until later that I had time to visit each group to see what they were doing. I was amazed! Each of the 5 groups that were done had figured out how to pull their clips down to the edit strip and put them in order. “How did you even know to do that?†I asked them. Shrugged shoulders and “I don’t know, we just did,” was always the answer. Their only frustration was that they thought the videos would be dumb because the beginning and end of each clip had stuff that needed to be cut out and they didn’t know you could do that. When I showed them that … the real excitement started.
The same is happening right now with my fourth graders. We spent some time this week cut and pasting URLs from web pages about animals into an Appleworks document because I plan for us to make numerous wiki pages and that is one skill they will need to have. I also showed them the shortcuts for copy and paste (command “C†and command “Vâ€) and they wondered why I hadn’t taught them that before. My answer? “You didn’t need to know that before, and we didn’t have time.â€
Learning is messy!
I heard about this earlier today. Google is offering free wifi that is easy enough that you can install it yourself (or you can opt for professional installation for a price). What implications will this have for schools and learning? How will school districts react? What about the general public? What is your reaction? Almost to good to be true! Share any thoughts you have about how we could leverage this to make a difference in students’ lives.
Learning is messy!!!
Ten days ago we had the opportunity to link up for an interview with the 8th grade students in Lee Baber’s class at YouthBridges in Virginia. The participants included Lee’s class, my class in Sparks, Nevada – Elderbob Brannan in Texas, and Celest (a student in my class that has leukemia and attends class via video Skype) from her house. We were scheduled to begin at 9:30am Pacific time, but everytime we all got on … the Skype call dropped. Lee finally figured out that it happened every time Celest Skyped in – so she just Skype called her – I got her Celest’s phone number and Lee called it using Skype – problem solved. This was not terribly interesting for my students – but was a great lesson for them how things don’t work and you problem solve (or at least try) and just maybe you get things to work. Elderbob has posted the interview as a podcast if you’d like to hear it.
Update: Lee Baber has posted the podcast at YouthBridges too.
Lee’s students had written questions and sent them to us days before the interview so that my students could consider answers beforehand. This should have worked well, and it did, just not in the way I expected. Most of my students are second language learners and one of the things we have REALLY been working on is understanding a question before you try to answer it – ask about what you don’t understand. My students did not do a good job of this and they realized this after the interview when we de-briefed about it. They felt the questions were hard to understand – and I asked them why they didn’t notice that beforehand … they finally realized it was because they didn’t think about the questions deeply enough when we went over them in class and it wasn’t obvious to them until afterwards when they knew they had had difficulties answering them.
This is true “Messy†learning. Now I can remind them and “beat them over the head†with what happened and they will have the schema to know what I am referring to and hopefully become better thinkers – and this is just about as important a skill as I can think of – being aware of what I know and don’t know which is such a common issue with elementary students and even more so with kids of poverty and second language learners like my students. They will also be able to notice themselves that they have improved and that awareness is key. Lee and I have already talked about another possible Skype discussion and I hope we really mange to follow through so my students (and hers) can use what they learned from this experience.
Elderbob’s audio recording will be something we can go back to as a benchmark – what was good and what wasn’t. We already have reaped the benefits of this experience. We have been working for quite awhile on stories about being our shoes for an entire day. This week we read them aloud to the class and we reminded ourselves about how much easier it is to listen and enjoy an oral presentation when it is read with feeling. They did a great job.
We’d like to thank Lee and her students at Hillyard Middle School and Elederbob Brannan for getting us together.
I am posting below the debrief notes my class recorded immediately after the interview:
What was hard?
Set-up took a long time – tech issues. Made it boring at first.
Hard to hear.
We were just sitting and listening.
Not that many questions and the questions were hard to understand.
Too long between questions – dead air
What went well?
The Youthbridges students got it to work!Lots of students got to say something.
New way to use Skype – more than one person.
Got to talk about something good we have done.
We got to learn about other people in other states.
The experience of getting to talk to people we don’t know.
Felt like people were interested in something we had to say.
What could we do to improve the experience?
Work on giving more detailed answers, more articulate – explain more. People will find that more interesting to listen to.
Be more willing to answer – just try.
Speak-up – talk louder.
Think more about the questions and ask about what we don’t understand – ask for clarification. Give more thoughtful answers. This would make it less boring – be active thinkers/learners.
Have a better way to get students to the microphone more quickly.
“ … an overwhelming 97 percent of students, but just over half of teachers, say they think cell phones should be allowed in school for emergencies and for connecting with parents.â€
So says Eschool News in an article where they quote the 4th Annual “Speak Up†survey.
The survey, “ … released at a Congressional briefing in Washington, D.C., on March 21, collected ideas and views from more than 270,000 K-12 students and 21,000 teachers from all 50 states. For the first time, the survey also included parents, and some 15,000 parents took part. Participants were asked about their views on such topics as technology, math and science instruction, 21st century skills, global collaboration, communication and self-expression, and schools of the future.â€
Here’s a surprise:
“According to the survey, students cited communication as their No. 1 use of technology.â€
The article is chock full of interesting findings like:
“When asked how well they think their school is preparing students for working in the 21st century, 48 percent of parents and 47 percent of teachers said well. More than 50 percent of parents said not well.”
– I’m not going quote them all here – go see the article yourself or the Speak Up survey itself.
