Not So Distant Future

   In his workshop, Will Richardson mentioned that one way to network outside the campus is to become “clickable” or findable on the web.

You could create your own blog (at edublogs.org or blogger.com) or a wiki (at pbwiki.com or wikispaces.com)–or you could create a learning laboratory for your students on PageFlakes.

Page Flakes (similar to Google home page or My Yahoo) lets you create your own personalized news and media page.  You could create one for your class or subject area, and pull in only articles, video, and photos that relate to the topic you were studying or to your course.

The example Will gave involved a unit on Darfur, where he pulled in information from many different sources.  Each time a student views your  page, it updates the information for them.

You can add pages, delete pages, delete areas of the page, rearrange the page, etc.

You can try it without joining–try the “add a flake” button at the top of the menu or try clicking “edit” above each area to customize it.

If you wanted customize it to a particular unit, you can use the “Add feed” feature and just enter the website that you want it to pull information from.  

So if you wanted to pull in information from a blog or a news site, you just type the url and it finds the “news stream” or feed, which you can then add to your site.  (Or you could use the RSS feed feature if you want to try something more advanced.)

Creating a flake would allow your students to access your page from home or school and see the content you were interested in them knowing more about.

flickr image from: http://www.flickr.com/photos/supamb/

A lot of thoughts were raised during Will Richardson’s presentations yesterday, but a few that stick with me–

Do our students know how we learn?   and who is in our learning network?  who do we connect to?

On one blog he mentioned,  Blog of Proximal Development, Konrad Glogowski had a discussion recently of that very topic.  He encourages us to ’step out of content’ and show that we are learners, too, because that is a way to ignite passion in our students.

Will also asked who is in our network–who we learn from?  Our students certainly network and work online–from im-ming their friends here or contacts they have made online in Facebook, online gaming sites, etc.   (A research site more of them have begun using is Cha-Cha, which allows them to submit a question and have a guide help answer, but the guides may be almost as young as the students themselves.)

So, perhaps one way we can expand our horizons is by expanding our learning network.

Will shared some of his “network” with us, so if you are interested, here are a few sites to check out.   I’m adding a couple of my favorites also.  If you’re new to this, just pick one that appeals to you and check it out.  Make it a “Friday blogging” habit to read one new thing…..

Karl Fisch’s blog Fischbowl  –Karl Fisch at Arapahoe High School is always readable  and thought provoking(also check out some of the teacher’s blogs on the sidebar to see teachers learning to blog or sharing their teaching thoughts.)

Practical Theory–Chris Lehmann, the principal at the new Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia shares his thoughts, struggles and experiences.

Also, if you don’t have or get Edutopia, I’d highly recommend it.  The magazine is free and you can order it from their website, or you can subscribe to an email newsletter, OR read the articles online(where they have great videos, podcasts, articles, etc.) 

Bgblogging–Will recommended Barbara Ganley, at Middlebury College, who shares her (and her students) reflections–some fascinating reflection from the college level (and a blog I was unaware of).

2 Cents Worth– David Warlick travels worldwide and writes about conversations on web 2.0, shares photos, videos and podcasts from conferences, and always has 2 cents worth.

Another excellent one Will highlighted is Clarence Fisher’s blog Remote Access.

I’d be interested to know sites in your “network” or thoughts and comments on the presentation!  And remember, even adding one site to read each week is a step….

I’m thrilled to say that Will Richardson is coming to our campus for the day tomorrow to share with our staff.

One of the reasons I am excited about this opportunity is because of what he calls butterflies.   He’s interested in those possibilities about teaching that get you so enthused that you have butterflies in your stomach as the ideas start flowing and connecting.    When working with students, aren’t those the best moments, too–when students start connecting ideas together and the class just flows?

A couple of months ago, Will directed readers of his blog to this quote from Chris Lehman, principal of the Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia:

It’s really not about the computers. School 2.0 is older than that. School 2.0 is the tradition of Dewey. School 2.0 is born out of the idea that active, engaged, constructivist learning will lead to active, engaged students and people.

That is what gives me butterflies–thinking about how we can help students become more active and empowered participants in their own education.  It feels like we are moving as a campus towards some important conversations.

I’ll be interested to see what the day brings.

In our Project Technology workshop this week, we shared how to use Photostory (free from Microsoft), and shared a project that our English 3 AP classes are doing relating to the book The Things They Carried. 

The project was initiated by the English 3AP teachers a few years ago.  Students are given a name from the Vietnam Memorial Wall, and are asked to find information about the individual .  This year in order to create projects that could be shared outside the campus and have more of an authentic audience, students were asked to create a Photostory, Microsoft Producer Project, iMovie, digital movie or Powerpoint about the individual(although we were trying to move most students away from traditional uses of Powerpoint).  

Joel (our computer coordinator) and I created a wiki with directions for the different software students could use and did a presentation for all 15 classes involved.    We tried to emphasize the visual part of the presentation and presentation “zen” since sometimes students overemphasize text and special effects in powerpoint, to the neglect of the visual elegance of their design.  Since these are real people, we wanted to emphasize the appropriateness of the music, tone, and presentation.

Ultimately, each student will post their project on the wiki  so that it will be an online tribute to the soldiers.  So the audience for this project is very real.

Students seemed mostly thrilled to be moving away from powerpoint, and particularly for this project, having “bullet points” fly in about an individual’s life seemed somehow not fitting.

The research part of the project posed some difficulty for the students, because some soldiers had quite a bit of information posted about them online, and some did not.  Students had to be resourceful and learn how to dig for information in local museums, on military history sites, on sites about Vietnam, etc.

So that we would understand what students were experiencing, the teachers, Joel, and I, took a name as well and created a presentation that we shared with the students.  The soldier I selected is Lesley Ayers.  (To see the presentation full screen, right click on the image when it plays and select “full screen.)

ayersfinalfin.wmv

I’ve already decided I want to edit mine and tell the story in a different way, so I’m going to keep working on it.  We’ll keep you posted on the project and the students’ results!  For more links to the software used, check out the sidebar on the Vietnam wiki.

  I was fortunate enough to hear Molly Ivins speak at the University of Texas in November, when she won the Mary Alice Davis Distinguished Lecturer award.  

Her concern that night was the future of journalism; specifically, the future of newspapers.   I have thought of her insights often the last few months.

She was aware that because of the instant availability of news online, that newspapers were going to have to change, and she felt that because large conglomerates have been purchasing many urban newspapers, their main concern has been profits, and not the reporting.   Because newspaper profit margins had increased in the 90’s, owners now have the expectation that newspapers should make higher profits than they had made in the past.  So reporters have been laid off at many large newspapers, and there is more use of “headline” stories, etc.  

She felt that the antidote wasn’t firing good reporters–the antidote was newspapers becoming independent entities, and  in-depth reporting  was what newspapers should focus on.

How does all this relate to schools and to this blog?   Access to information online is changing everything–from businesses, to newspapers, to television….to, yes, schools.

We need to pay attention not only to our students’ interests (would the Boston incident yesterday have happened if anyone there was aware of what their teenagers were watching on t.v.?), but also how access to everything online may ultimately change our schools.

So, thank you Molly, for your insights.