Subscribe Free
Add to my Page
On a quiet day here in Sparta, when everyone is geared up for the long weekend full of Thanksgiving meals and shopping, Ryan Lollgen and Steve Schels had something else in mind for their United States History Classes.
Ryan had made contact with Dr. Pauline Maier, the Dr. William R. Kenan Professor of History at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, after having read some of her work. A simple email and phone call to the contact information she supplied landed Ryan and Steve, and more importantly, their students, access to one of America's preeminent historians.
On Wednesday morning at 10am, we used Skype to phone Dr. Maier at her office and conducted an hour-long interview with her with questions generated by the students. The podcast of the event is available for your listening above, and while not the cleanest audio in the world, it is well worth a listen by anyone interested in a unique conversation about the American Revolution.
Maier was featured prominently in PBS's documentary Liberty a few years back, the ebullient style with which she exhibited in the documentary really came through in the phone interview. Her enthusiasm for the topics the students brought up was refreshing for us to hear, and her perspectives were poignant and insightful.
Perhaps the greatest part of the process was that she was genuinely interested in not only the topics, but why the students wanted to know these things. Her answers to the questions the students asked were above and beyond what we all expected, and reflected her desire to help the students view history as a dynamic and changing process. Here is a quote from an follow-up email she sent to Ryan: Ryan,
Congratulations again on getting your students so involved in American
history. There's nothing like encouraging them to ask questions to avoid
the sense that history is a boring collection of dead facts arranged
chronologically rather than an exciting inquiry into human experience. My
hat is really off to you and the other teachers I have known who, like you,
are doing good work preparing students to think and, not incidentally, be
informed citizens of the American Republic. What was the line attributed
to Franklin (perhaps mythically)? I think as he left the convention,
someone asked him what kind of government the Americans would have, and he
supposedly said "a republic, if you can keep it." We need to know what a
republic is and what it demands of its people if we want to keep it.
This was a unique event for us to participate in, one that showed how we can easily bring experts into our classrooms just by reaching out to them and extending the invitation. Much like Dee Peselli did with Kyle MacDonald a few months back, all it takes is a teacher who wants to provide a memorable experience for his or her students.
Cross-posted at Tech Dossier.
Technorati Tags: sparta, skype, MIT, expertvoices
Friday, November 23, 2007
How do you spell MIT?
Tuesday, November 20, 2007
Strike the Match
Last year, I workshopped until I was blue in the face, talking about RSS and social bookmarking and whatever else I could to help teacher efficiency while researching and planning. This year I backed off and let things go in their own direction (slightly).
This post just appeared today on Tech Dossier, our district technology blog, from Angela Deluccia-Davis, and it really made me smile. Now, truth be told, Angela is an early adopter, and one of our biggest technological evangelists, but she is also a realist, and an AP teacher. Her margin for error with experimentation is very low. Her post details briefly the introduction of Google Reader into the AP position paper that she does every year.
One thing I love about how she introduced it is that she clearly states that not all of the students are using it---it's a tool. Some will use the tool, others will not. No grades will suffer if you choose not to use it. I would like to see where this goes.
Flickr image credit: "Aha," by Jason Pinker
Technorati Tags: google, sparta, techdossier, rss, education
Tuesday, November 6, 2007
Period 3-4 Ustream.
Here is the Ustream chat for one of the Just One Less conferences we held two weeks ago here in Sparta. The dialogue for this one included people from around the globe.
[09:52:35]
[09:53:44]
[09:53:53]
[09:53:57]
[09:54:02]
[09:54:11]
[09:54:15]
[09:55:41]
[09:56:04]
[09:56:14]
[09:56:32]
[09:56:43]
[09:56:54]
[09:57:18]
[09:58:31]
[09:58:38]
[09:59:10]
[09:59:51]
[10:00:03]
[10:00:27]
[10:00:31]
[10:01:24]
[10:02:27]
[10:02:38]
[10:03:28]
[10:04:25]
[10:04:36]
[10:04:37]
[10:05:01]
[10:05:02]
[10:05:05]
[10:05:14]
[10:05:22]
[10:05:34]
[10:05:45]
[10:05:49]
[10:06:44]
[10:06:47]
[10:06:57]
[10:07:09]
[10:07:42]
[10:08:08]
[10:08:36]
[10:08:49]
[10:09:13]
[10:09:13]
[10:09:24]
[10:10:17]
[10:10:34]
[10:11:02]
[10:11:15]
[10:11:41]
[10:11:49]
[10:12:48]
[10:12:56]
[10:13:26]
[10:13:29]
[10:13:41]
[10:13:44]
[10:14:29]
[10:14:41]
[10:14:50]
[10:14:51]
[10:15:50]
[10:15:57]
[10:16:04]
[10:17:07]
[10:17:32]
[10:17:41]
[10:18:42]
[10:19:01]
[10:19:45]
[10:19:55]
[10:20:05]
[10:20:12]
[10:20:23]
[10:20:26]
[10:22:00]
[10:22:36]
[10:22:46]
[10:22:57]
[10:23:26]
[10:23:44]
[10:24:13]
[10:24:27]
[10:24:35]
[10:25:45]
[10:26:11]
[10:27:11]
[10:27:23]
[10:28:08]
[10:28:19]
[10:30:03]
[10:31:09]
[10:31:20]
[10:31:27]
[10:32:37]
[10:34:04]
[10:34:14]
[10:34:22]
[10:34:37]
[10:35:05]
[10:35:30]
[10:35:56]
[10:36:22]
[10:36:30]
[10:36:36]
[10:36:54]
[10:37:56]
[10:38:02]
[10:38:13]
[10:38:33]
[10:38:40]
[10:38:50]
[10:39:53]
[10:40:22]
[10:40:30]
[10:40:48]
[10:41:01]
[10:41:06]
[10:41:09]
[10:41:41]
[10:41:43]
[10:42:27]
[10:43:20]
Tuesday, October 23, 2007
Fall Professional Development Workshops, so far
While we are painfully late in getting these out to the teachers, here are the courses I am offering to our staff this fall. Please let me know of a few things as you read this:
- opinions on the descriptions and appeal to the classroom teacher.
- resources I can use to further strengthen the offerings
- how you might want to adapt them into your offerings
- if you are interested in participating via skype or any of the myriad conferencing options we have now.
Presenting with Google Earth in the Social Studies Classroom
Teaching has become such a visual profession, with great emphasis placed on the context within which you present the material to the students. Using traditional methods of presentation such as PowerPoint can be augmented with several emerging technologies. Google Earth allows teachers to create dynamic, visually engaging presentations that employ the use of video, image, and geographical interfaces.
The Classroom Blog: How to move your students writing to a secure, online community
Our definition of literacy is quickly changing, so much so that we really need to rethink what it means to be "literate" in this century. According to a study commisioned by the National School Board Association, more than 50% of high school students have produced content on the web. Whether that means they are posting to a MySpace or Facebook page, or building a website or wiki, our students are active online. Just as with anything else we teach them, we need to be able to teach them how to create good content, content that has real value both in design and delivery.
Blogging with your students is a great step in this direction. Student writing proficiency and their desire to write will amaze you when you give them the freedom to create on their own blog. We will use 21classes to create your classroom blog. Depending on your level of comfort, we will allow your students writing to be viewable to others, or just to registered members of the site. Other topics to be discussed: online safety, online collaboration, and copyright.
The Media Rich Classroom: Using Video to Engage and Assess students
We have a multitude of resources at our disposal on a daily basis, and our students live and consume digital media on a daily basis. How can you get that media into your classroom in a manner that allows for thoughtful discussion and dissection? This workshop will focus on ways in which you can embed media into your teaching style without completely redesigning everything you do. Primarily, we will look at unitedstreaming's Quiz Builder, which allows for the creation of independent assessments based on videos. These assessments are completed online by your students and the results are emailed to you.
This class will also utilize YouTube, Google Video, TeacherTube, PBS, and other video sites that allow for the legal playback of material on a website or in educational materials. Participants in this workshop will leave with several assessments created, and lessons augmented by video and other digital technologies.
Feedback Matters: How student feedback can change your lesson design: before, during, and after
We spend a good portion of our school year assessing our students on what have learned in our classrooms. But how often do we assess them on how they learned best? Asking students for feedback on your classroom practices, lesson design, and subject choice can lead to great strides in your professional practice. A simple five-question survey, skillfully designed, can yield feedback from the students such as what presentation mode the students enjoyed most, what articles mattered the most to them, or what area they would like you to have spent more time on.
The Wiki Way: Using Wikis as Collaborative Environments
Several teachers in the district have begun to use the power of wikis to enable their students to work collaboratively on web pages centered around a particular subject or project. Sites that use “wiki” technology are turning the ideas we have held about online research upside down. A Wiki is defined as:
a type of web site that allows the visitors themselves to easily add, remove, and otherwise edit and change some available content.... This ease of interaction and operation makes a wiki an effective tool for collaborative authoring. The term wiki also can refer to the collaborative website itself (wiki engine) that facilitates the operation of such a Web site, or to certain specific wiki sites, ...and on-line encyclopedias such as Wikipedia.Wiki technology lends itself inherently to collaborative learning and creation. The very idea that several students can work on a body of information both simultaneously, independently, and from any location where they have an Internet connection, immediately extends the classroom beyond the 40 minutes that we see them and beyond the physical walls of our classroom. Participants from any content area will benefit from the balance of student freedom and teacher control afforded by wikispaces. Some examples of projects that teachers using wikis have created are: classroom study guides for full and half-year courses and even individual exams, collaborative projects with other schools in other countries, choose-your-own-ending stories, and student-driven tutorials for all levels of mathematics.
Internet Safety: What you need to know about keeping your students safe online
If ever there was a hot topic among educators, it is the issue of how to keep yourselves and your students safe as they venture into the realm of online content creation. We wrestle with our fears and those generated by the media regarding the dangers of online activity, but we long to connect our students to the growing amount of quality information, interaction and creative outlets that the web offers. Where is the line?
This workshop will delve into common-sense strategies to help you feel more comfortable about using the internet in the classroom, working with your students in an online collaborative environment, and teaching your students true online ethics.
Google Docs and Spreadsheets: Track Student Writing and Foster Collaboration through Google Docs
Working with students as they learn to become writers is often a trial and error process, and we struggle sometimes with the ability to track changes in their revisions. Also, sometimes we have students that truly need more than just a conference or two to set them on the right path to creating a quality piece of writing. What if you could write alongside your students from the very first sentence to the final revision? What if you could provide scaffolding for the students to help them organize their thoughts and see the changes they make to that structure in real time?
Welcome to Google Docs and Spreadsheets, where you can collaborate on a document with a student from the outset, and track changes in their work as they complete it. This application, free from the folks at Google, also allows for a permanent storage place for student writing that is secure and trustworthy. Have a student that loses work, CD's, or flashdrives? Google Docs automatically saves writing every 30 seconds and allows the students to access their writing anywhere they have an internet connection. If you are serious about improving the quality of your student writing, think about taking this workshop.
SearchSmarter: Increasing Online Productivity through more efficient research
How do you judge the worthiness of an internet site? When we search for information, or ask our students to search for information, we need to be able to use as many filters as we can to eliminate excess choices that detract from our task at hand: we need to search smarter. The percentage of students who venture beyond the first three or four hits on a Google search is minimal. As those charged with teaching them to delve deeper, providing them with failsafe strategies for making those top three quality sites is imperative.
Using simple Boolean search strategies, as well as alternative search methods and search engines, this workshop will arm you with a multitude of methods for helping your students find a higher percentage of useful information with their searching. You will also be shown how to create a custom search engine that limits the sites that students can search to only those you want them to access.
Introduction to Social Networking and Personal Learning Environments: Using Smarter People to Raise your Level of Thinking
Professional development is often thought of as being the "sit and get" variety, however, with the emergence of new social networking software professional development can be taken to a whole new, interactive level. This workshop will explore the power of using a network to help you learn "socially," through the use of professional networking sites, social bookmarking, and RSS, participants in this class will learn to find intelligent people in your field and "attach" themselves to them. As they learn and acquire resources, so will you!
Some of the applications used in this class will be the Classroom 2.0 Social Network, del.icio.us bookmarking, and Google Reader. Teachers and staff with familiarity with any of these applications are strongly encouraged to attend.
Copyright or Copy Wrong
As a district we are entering a phase where our student work is becoming increasingly public, as is the content we create for educational purposes. At what point do we as teachers leave the protection of "Fair Use," and enter into the area of copyright infringement? This is information we need to know.
Our society, and especially our students, are becoming increasingly a "cut-and-paste" society, where information, pictures, audio, and video found on the internet are viewed as free for the taking. This is far from the truth; having a clear understanding of what is copyright and what is "copywrong" will help you steer yourselves and your students away from potential legal issues down the road.
Additionally, this workshop will explore the idea of Creative Commons, a non-profit organization dedicated to "creative works set free for certain uses. Like the free software and open-source movements, our ends are cooperative and community-minded, but our means are voluntary and libertarian. We work to offer creators a best-of-both-worlds way to protect their works while encouraging certain uses of them — to declare 'some rights reserved.'"
Technorati Tags: professionaldevelopment,, education,, school2.0,, sparta,, chalkdust
flickr photo credit:"Fresh Development Business Card - Front" pickledshark's photostream
Friday, October 19, 2007
The UStream Feed
Below is the presentation from NJECC "Web 2.0, Meet Sparta Township Public Schools," via UStream and the slides to match. For some reason I could not get CamTwist to show my desktop on UStream. Maybe I need another tutorial (thanks Robin).
In all, I thought it went well, but it always seems that I could talk forever about the pedagogical advantages of some of the tools available to us. However, I could tell by some of the expressions from the audience that 40 minutes was just enough. Let me know what you think.
SlideShare">Thursday, September 20, 2007
The Wearing of the Hats
Since school began, I have been meaning to get this post together because I am amazed by all of the various different tasks and roles I play throughout a day. Here is a snapshot of my day yesterday, broken down by how it was spent between the hours of 8am and 4pm:
- Met with a teacher to discuss how to use OnCourse, our online lesson planner. The meeting took a turn at the end and we ended up editing her class website to update the information to reflect its current state.
- Sat down with AP Language and Comp teacher to work through how to set up her students on an experimental (for us) LMS called SAKAI, which was very cool because I had gone to a training session on it over the summer and was able to recall much of what I learned. No small feat.
- Taught a class of juniors and seniors about wikispaces so they can begin creating their own textbook.
- Answered email and fixed student records and updated data in our Genesis, our SIS.
- Met with colleague during lunch regarding multimedia project he is working on.
- Helped teachers set up folders and mailing lists in Outlook.
- Presented an overview of new technologies to a middle school team of teachers and walked them through setting up their online gradebooks.
- High school faculty meeting
- Meeting with a teacher to discuss setting up blogs for two of his classes in American History. Discussed the impact possible and the different responsibility he will have. Both very excited.
- Answered emails and went to pick up the boy.
Flickr image credit: "The Hat Shop," Franco Falini's photostream
Sunday, July 22, 2007
Me, Removed
Have you ever been intimidated by your blog? Strangely, I have stared blankly into my scribefire box over 10 times in the last few days, trying to find something that fits nicely. Call it writer's block, but this is terrible. There is so much going on in my world that is worthy of at least a note, but, alas, it just won't come.
This is meant to be the chisel to break through whatever I am going through. I'll break it down by topic to make it easier on me.
Introducing: Teen Book Sleuth
Two weeks ago, my colleague David Gorecki and I ran the 2nd Annual Sparta Academy of Digital Media, where we take a group of students through the process of creating digital media. We usually break it down into movie making and web creation. With all that I have learned this year via this blog and the various people who I have the pleasure of reading, it was truly a great opportunity to let students explore their interests and learn some great skills. Out of the 16 students that we worked with, only one chose to focus on website creation. That in itself is telling. However, the student that did, we will call her Teen Book Sleuth after the site she created, really blew us away with her ability and interest level. She worked for most of the week using FrontPage, but after talking with her and getting the OK from mom and dad, we set her up with an account at weebly.com. She transferred her content from FrontPage to the weebly site and customized it to include a blog.
To say that we were surprised at her writing ability is an understatement. She is a wonderful writer and and avid reader. Her site is set up as a review of books in the Young Adult category. I can only imagine what she will produce as she moves along in her studies and her reading. Please visit the site and leave a comment on her blog. She is expecting you.
Connective Writing Workshop
I am in the process of putting together resources for a workshop on connective writing on Monday and Tuesday of this week. The wiki is nearly complete, and I will release the address when I finish it up. To that end, I would like to thank Sheryl Nussbaum-Beech, on whose wiki at APBC I have relied on for resources. What I have found in the past is that teachers respond very well to other teachers who have done something successfully. In that light, I have asked some people from the edublogosphere to participate in the workshop via Skype. Already, I have two people who will be skyped in (one on Monday and one on Tuesday). If you are interested, let me know and we will work something out. It would be a great honor to have some of you talk to the staff I work with.
This workshop is a pivotal one for me, as I would really like to use it as a springboard to get a cohort of teachers blogging from out district. As it is now, very few have taken to it. I am not distressed over it, but blogging and connecting to the myriad resources available through blogging will be a key way to move our pedagogy forward here in Sparta. That's a lot of pressure, but I think it's warranted.
Thursday, June 7, 2007
Presentation at NJECC
Today two teachers that I worked with on a recent wiki project are presenting at NJECC, and I just threw together a quick presentation using spresent. Also, below is a podcast of the interview their students did with author Edward Bloor.
Subscribe Free
Add to my Page
