Not So Distant Future

  If you’re attending Internet Schools West and visiting my blog for the first time, welcome!

To find pages on web 2.0 tools or the link to my conference notes, check out the wiki page.

My presentation slides can be found on Google presentations.    If you’re interested in using VoiceThread in the library, here’s an example on databases versus google.  And here’s an example of using TeacherTube and digital video to convey a lesson on the authority of sources to students.  

Or here’s an interview we did with our own teachers about staff development if you are looking for something to share with your administrator about the value of using digital video.

Thanks for coming to the session!

Image:  Point Lobos State Park, California;  Internet Schools West 2007

My plan this evening was to write a beautifully coherent post about many of the websites, tools, and strategies that I’ve heard about at Internet Schools West the last two days.   But just as I was starting to write, there was an earthquake here in Monterey, so I had to leave the room and sit downstairs for awhile. 

So…it’s a couple of hours later, and all is now calm, but to distract myself, I’m going to post some websites that I learned about today, in no certain order.  (I’m not even going to go into the fact that I was logged onto twitter, and that’s how I left a message for my husband that there had been an earthquake, because A  T & T phones went down here for bit, nor that others on Twitter from elsewhere in California were quickly exchanging information, while the local tv channel here kept on showing Charlie Brown.)

So now that I haven’t mentioned all that, onto the web tour–

Similar to the School Library 2.0, the California School Library association now has a self-guided web tour for teachers, to be explored over several weeks, at their Classroom Learning 2.0 site.  A great way to get teachers started with web 2.0.

Podscope allows you to search podcasts by the words spoken in them.

Gaggle has free email accounts for students that teachers can supervise.

From Gary Price, who writes Resource Shelf–

Reuters uses metacarta to map news headlines.

For free online books, he suggests you check out the Online Books Page.

For an incredible number of news feeds from around the world, check out NewsNow.  Click on “regions” on the toolbar to the left to get news feeds from international sources.

Newspaper Archive will give free accounts to teachers for back issues of newspapers going back at least 100 years.

And finally, to make podcasting even easier for your users, phonecasting allows you to submit a url of a podcast, and it gives you a phone number to put on your website.  When users dial the number, they automatically hear the podcast!  If you are trying to get teachers interested in listening to podcasts, there are many already posted, that you can just dial in and listen to.

Another interesting thread during the conference which I would like to explore was about remembering our customers.   Lee Rainey reminded us that only 8% of technology users (according to the Pew Internet Survey) are what he calls “omnivores.”   And up to 50% of users would rather not be using technology very much.   I’m going to explore this more later, but it is a good reminder to select tools and web applications that are going to be helpful, significant, and user friendly for your audience.

   Yesterday morning (since I woke up at 4 a.m.–still on CST, evidently), I walked down two blocks to the cove at Pacific Grove(near Monterey, California).   If you look closely at the photo you can see the seals balanced on the rocks here, scooting themselves onto the boulders in the cove, while the waves crash up against them.  They move slightly with the waves, but adjust themselves by lifting a fin, or raising their tail, and somehow manage to stay balanced on the rocks.  Meanwhile other seals frolic and play in the water nearby.

It struck me that these abilities–the ability to adapt and the ability to play– are qualities we need to nurture in education. We have to learn to be flexible–let the waves move among us, and adjust ourselves to find our balance moment by moment. But we do have to be able to adapt to changing tides, boulders that erode, and changing  patterns in the bay,  in order to adapt and prosper and to help our students adapt and prosper. 

And we can’t forget to have fun–fun with our students, fun with learning, and fun with tech tools that can bring vitality to a lesson or project.

Our closing session today ended with an interesting spontaneous dialogue with a network administrator, the workshop presenter(Dr. Mary Ann Bell), and other librarians, discussing how the different interest groups could really open a dialogue about internet filtering and web 2.0 use in schools. It really strikes me that we need systems in place that allow us to be like the seals–to be flexible, balanced, and yet prosper and be capable of adjusting to each wave that comes by.

Because–seals aren’t all identical, nor is every rock they perch on the same.  And the sea itself, the larger environment, is changeable.  Each wave that comes by is a little different–each year that passes is somewhat the same, yet brings new ecologies into play.

What are some ways we can encourage flexibility and play among our teachers, administrators, students, and systems, so that we, like the seals, can balance in our oceans?

I was planning to live blog the IL Schools West conference, but unfortunately the one room we are meeting in doesn’t have internet access because we’re not in the conference center, so, I’m taking a quick fire minute break to post an update!

I feel like my limbs are missing since I haven’t been able to blog anything, check email or twitter all day long–I realize how entertwined my work has gotten with my online network!

One of the most interesting sessions I saw today was Aaron Schmidt’s on gaming in the library.  His presentation was clever–he showed images of different video game characters to test our visual literacy(what score would our students make compared to us?) and challenged us to think of the ways that video games help students with skills of reading, collaborating, team building, planning, etc.

I’ll be posting more about that later!

Also I learned of a new Classroom 2.0 self-training site that I’m hoping to share when I get back.  It’s similar to the Library 2.0 program from the California School Library Association, but for teachers.

More later, as I am getting ready to head back into the conference room to hear Mary Bell talk about blogging.   Here’s Mary with her library action figure in the audience from my presentation earlier, which was about web 2.0 tools that librarians can share with their administrators(available on my wiki sidebar)!

   Little does she know we have the action figure on our front desk as well! 

Something about being in a different place, or maybe a place so rich with literary history, makes you realize that learning isn’t just something that can go on in school, but all around you.

The Monterey area is like an outdoor learning laboratory–you hear sea lions barking at night or can watch them from the wharf, you can explore tide pools or watch sea otters swimming off shore–or you can look out and see farms much like John Steinbeck must have seen 75 years ago.

Being away from familiar sites makes me realize how much the world around our students wherever we live is a learning laboratory.   There is much potential for us  to expand our thinking about what school “looks like.”

On the plane, I watched Brian Crosby’s K12 Online presentation video on “obstacles to opportunities” which was awe-inspiring.  I think what I found so moving about it was the way he has expanded the world for his students and what opportunities they will now believe are open to them as a result of his teaching.

I’ll be sharing ideas from the Internet Librarian conference this week that we can use to open up our schools and libraries so that they can become  global laboratories for our students.   (Edublogs is having some difficulties by the way, so if my blog becomes unavailable during the conference for any length of time, you can follow me on technolibrary.tumblr.com, which is a scrapbooking site where I’ll share my thoughts.)

In this “must read” post, Joyce Valenza challenges librarians to climb on the front of the wagon-train and be leaders of this new educational expedition.  But I believe her challenge applies to all educators as well.

Thanks to SC Morgan from Twitter for the tip!

(The only comment I’m not sure I agree with is that the outside world isn’t reading our blogs, because I do think they are!)

But I think that clearly, change is something we must embrace, support, and investigate.  Maybe we can’t keep up with everything–but we can try, each in our own way, to be open to what’s coming down the road, and when we find something new that seems worthwhile, say “Yes, let’s see what that can do for us!”

I’m heading to the Internet Librarian conference this weekend, which for me is always a mind-bending experience– to see so many librarians embracing the technology in their workplace, stretching it, testing it, and finding new ways that it can support our program is really invigorating.

I’ll be sharing what I see “coming down the pike” from the conference.  See you there!

p.s. The link is fixed now!

“Our speech can be powerful, or we can be shouting in the wind. Never in the history of humankind have we had so many means of communication–e-mail, cell phones, faxes, television, radio, newspapers–but we still remain distant islands. There is so little real communication between the members of one family, between the individuals in society, and between nations. This is because we don’t know how to listen to each other.” Thich Nhat Hanh, Art of Power

At recent workshops, I’ve heard a few teachers comment that face to face is still important, and that using technology somehow limits communication. These comments have troubled me for a couple of weeks.

Of course, face to face communication is still vitally important, but what is face to face about? It’s about communication. It’s about human compassion and support; it’s about caring and understanding.

But I don’t think communication is mutually exclusive. I’ve found that technology can be a great support to communication, when we think of expanding students’ encounters with others unlike themselves. It can allow students to reach outside the walls of their school and develop an understanding of another human being. My post yesterday about the fires in California is an illustration of that.

As Clarence Fisher said in this week’s WOW2 chat, “tools aren’t that important–it’s what you can do with them.” His vision of using technology with his elementary students is to build relationship and to promote the connection between students.

When a teacher or student is learning about a classroom in another country, checking time zones to set up a time to communicate via Skype, asking another student about what school is like in their country, finding out what season it is somewhere else–all these experiences improve the hope that we can communicate globally. These experiences which help our students have a more global understanding, can make them more compassionate and thoughtful people, the kind of students we want to send out into the world. Because when students are more connected to the world, they can speak more thoughtfully to others.

As Hanh also points out, what is central is listening to each other–listening to each other with compassion and not making pat judgments or spouting hasty stereotypes. Books have the same capacity to deepen students’ thinking and understanding. But it’s not just that we put our students in contact with books or with technology tools, it’s that we help them learn to listen deeply, to understand, and to respond thoughtfully.

The amount of information available to all of us is overwhelming and greater than ever before. It’s overwhelming yet invigorating and empowering at the same time. And it is a powerful way to build relationships across time and space.

But as a part of that we must help our students to learn when to slow down, to listen, to absorb, to take in (just as we have to learn that) to ponder, and to craft what they say, so that we are not all just shouting into the wind.

Image credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/sidereal/338781967/

At our campus, we’ve been involved in a several week workshop on 21st century skills and web 2.0 in particular.  Today teachers were exploring and signing up for a web 2.0 tool, to join and participate on the web. 

  All during the workshop today, I was seeing Twitters on my twitter account from Jennifer Wagner and Sylvia Martinez, both in California, including pictures of the smoke moving closer and closer to Jennifer’s school, which I shared with the teachers in one of the workshops.

Yesterday I ran across a Google earth map set up by a local California news channel,  showing the location for San Diego residents showing areas where the different fires were, where evacuations were going on, and where large animal evacuations were also occurring.   And the same channel is broadcasting information for local residents on Twitter as well.

Tonight when I got on Flickr to locate a photo for a project, the first photo I saw was an incredible photograph of the fire, and then another one, equally incredible.

These tools and others like them are becoming a mainstream way that we get information, and share in the human community.   As we share these images, videos, and comments from people we know across the country, the events become even more real to us and to our students. 

While some people think that these tools isolate and separate us, I believe they allow us to be more a part of a global community, to empathize with those far away from where we are, and to get a real glimpse of their experiences, all of which makes us more mindful human beings.

Image credit:  http://www.flickr.com/photos/slworking/1706914596/

What if you held a conference and attendees came from every part of the world?   The K12 Online conference concludes this weekend with just such a culminating event–a 24 hour around the world online chat known as “When Night Falls.”

 To “illustrate” that event, the conference organizers have invited participants to join a new flickr group, When Night Falls, and share photographs of night falling around the world.  

The photographs already posted are from places as diverse as Canada, Australia, Bangkok, and even Texas.   It’s  awe-inspiring to look through the photographs and realize that educators from all of the places pictured are attending this conference–it makes it much more concrete how global the conference is.

So, add photos from your corner of the world–Join flickr if you aren’t a member, then head to this wiki for instructions on how to add your photo to the group.   Remember to tag it with k12online07 and whennightfalls as well.

Join the global community and watch night fall around the planet!

Image credit:  http://www.flickr.com/photos/superkimbo/1027339192/in/pool-whennightfalls/

  Some great things going on around here–I’ve been so swamped with professional development and our library renovation lately that posting to my blog has been limited.  But I did want to highlight a few cool things going on around here, some of which are coming out of our staff development or from workshops from last year.

Math teacher Bob Witowski came by Thursday to invite me to participate in a text message assignment he was conducting with his students on Friday.  He asked students to text an algebra problem, and try to get answers from both inside and outside the campus.

The idea was inspired by Darren Draper’s Pay Attention video, which we shared last week at our staff development workshop on 21st century learning.

Other interesting web 2.0 efforts on campus this year–

Our ap government teacher Kris Phelps has embarked on her first blog effort the last few weeks, and there are some fascinating and astute comments by her students on a post about Facebook and politics.  They’ve made some very insightful comments which I hope to follow up on.

Our American Sign Language teacher Barbara Vinson is creating videos teaching ASL vocabulary on TeacherTube to help students review, and her students are preparing to do an assignment using Microsoft Producer –combining static photos with digital videos of themselves signing about the photos.

Also, thanks to Darren Draper’s suggestion, English teacher Bill Martin is using NiceNet for students to write about books they are reading for ISR.  In fact, a number of our English teachers are also using the threaded discussion boards built into the School Center software which our campuses uses for book discussions.

 And I have to say, something about watching everyone put on headphone mics last week at our staff development workshop for a self-guided tour of web 2.0 sites, reminded me of my dream in last week’s post of the future teacher.  It was empowering for people to grab headphones and explore sites and find tools that would be useful for their classrooms or listen to K12 Online conference presentations of interest to them.

This is just a sampling of some of the web 2.0 tools teachers on our campus are finding helpful in extending the learning in their classrooms.  I applaud every teacher who is trying something new, and continuing to model life long learning for their students.  And isn’t that the point–extending learning beyond the school walls, beyond the school day, and extending the learning in a way that is meaningful and significant for students?

Update: info on cell phone assignment directly from Bob Witowski:

On Friday we did a lesson where the kids had to get someone to text them an answer to a math problem from the unit we are studying. The only real rule was that they could give the person at the other end the answer to the problem. Some of the kids used their picture phones to send a picture of the problem to someone. If the person did not understand how to do the problem the students were to teach the person how to do the problem (learn by teaching). This lesson exceeded our expectation by really engaging the students in the lesson. We had one  child that has not said two words all year get really excited about getting a correct response from someone!Here are some of the results:1. We recognized the first person in each class to get a correct response.