"Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness" is a wonderfully concise phrase encompassing our inalienable rights. The third of these seems less basic than the previous two, so I find it interesting that Jefferson included it. And it's interesting that it is a pursuit rather than the thing itself.
When CEOs of successful companies are asked about "getting the right people on the bus," on… Continue
There is an interesting article about an elementary classroom using twitter with students in the summer '09 CES magazine. The teacher has students compose the tweets, and parents can follow the account: http://twitter.com/Room302. There are many other examples of twitter being used in classrooms, like… Continue
Added by Demetri Orlando on September 28, 2009 at 2:40pm —
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Two blog posts came to my attention this morning (via twitter)...
Sheryl Nussbaum Beach blogs about the difference between working to "reform" education vs. "transforming" it (a similar thread to the idea of evolution of educational practice vs. revolution), and she insightfully identifies social connectedness within the culture of school change process… Continue
Added by Demetri Orlando on August 1, 2009 at 12:30pm —
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Dave Cormier and I were on EdTechTalk this past Thursday discussing the use of social networking tools for professional development. Alex, Arvind, & Vinnie are thinking about how they can extend to more faculty the type of experience they've had with the Nussbaum-Beach/Richardson PLP. The show can be listened to here. Some of the issues/questions that emerged… Continue
This morning my 9 month old daughter had yet another new sound to say. This time it was "ba, ba, ba." Her acquisition of the sound of the letter B made me realize she is slowly working her way through the alphabet. Her first letter was D, as in "da, da, da" to my great delight and my wife's chagrin ;-). She then moved on to a hard G, as in "geeeee, geeeeee, geee." She's also done F with a solid "fuh, fuh, fuh." There were also a few days experimenting with the clickking and popping noises she co… Continue
Every day I learn things by reading colleagues' email list-serve messages, blogs, and discussion boards. I am constantly inspired by people's willingness to share their knowledge and expertise. The use of participatory technologies like nings and wikis gives us more capability to group, organize, categorize, and index this stream of conversation flowing across discussion boards and email lists. It is a human impulse to want to collect and organize things. For me, this extends into the world of o… Continue
I continue to think that problem-based-learning deserves much more of our attention. I just came across this great video (below) that has a high school student describing her school. It's really well done. It describes three projects done by students at this Edvisions school.
Edvisions says this about their approach to schooling:
"EdVisions fundamentally different approach to teaching and learning focuses… Continue
Added by Demetri Orlando on December 27, 2008 at 5:00pm —
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Just came across this post by educator Paul Hamilton from British Columbia. It includes a video interview with a class of 6th grade bloggers. He says, "In my six years of teaching grade 6, before the era of blogs, I never saw such high quality writing by so many motivated writers."
Motivation is so important, and lacking in so many classrooms. I've only just begun to read Disrupting Class, but like how the… Continue
I'm drafting an article about the use of Diigo [which is a shared bookmarking and web highlightingng browser add-on.] The intent of the article is to talk about "social scholarship" -- how we personally (or with students) use diigo in a collaborative way to further our knowledge/learning. What better way to do this, than to seek to collaboratively write an article- so it's on a wiki page, and we'd appreciate your adding to it (or editing what is there) if you are a diigo user. If you're not, you… Continue
Added by Demetri Orlando on November 26, 2008 at 1:30pm —
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If you haven't yet explored shared bookmarking it's well worth it. The video "social bookmarking in plain english" does a nice job of explaining the concept.
* access your bookmarks from any computer (they're no longer tied to just one computer)
* share your bookmarks with others and see what others are bookmarking
* you apply "tags" (keywords) to sites as you bookmark them, and then can search based on everyone's "tags" whi… Continue
Recently I benefited from Alex sharing his student survey questions in this community. To reciprocate, I want to share the survey questions that I developed off of his to assess our tablet program. The link to see the survey at surveymonkey.com is: http://tinyurl.com/5tqwnx. One question I forgot to include on the survey was to ask whether they back up their files and how often. Next time I do this, I'll add that one. What other questions would you add to… Continue
Just came across this video of a student reading his Myst inspired writing. Myst is a computer game. Thanks djuler for tweeting the link.
I can't help but think this approach would be a great writing motivator for some kids. I suppose the challenge would be in redirecting kids who want to write about blood and mayhem of less civilized games. Continue
Added by Demetri Orlando on August 19, 2008 at 7:30am —
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...musings of a technology integration specialist...
Within "technology integration" we speak of the adoption curve and we feel good about our "tech-savvy" teachers- those early adopters who can take a complex technology tool and make it work in their classroom. Unfortunately, this is only 10 or perhaps 15% of any given school's faculty. Reaching deeper into the educational practice and culture of a school takes effort at a greater order of magnitude. It takes the development of rapport between… Continue
I came across a few new videos thanks to Pam Livingston who queried the ED-TECH list-serv for videos to show a group of principals she is working with. I hadn't seen Dan Meyer's video about how a projector changed the dynamics of his teaching. More importantly than just the projector, he discusses how his u… Continue
Thanks to Tim Fish for passing along this link to an Atlantic article, Is Google Making Us Stupid?. I love how Tim provokes important and interesting conversations. He's good at pulling the pin on a big issue (grenade) and tossing it out there!
The first part of the article says that people don't read in depth (books, articles, etc.) any more, they just skim and flit across the hyperl… Continue
Monday night was the first class of a summer term course I'm co-teaching online for Hopkins. The first week is very intense because we are networking everyone together by having everyone set up a blog and subscribe to everyone else's blog, set up a del.icio.us account and add everyone else to their network, and then try to deliver some content on top of this. :)
Monday was a little overwhelming, but everyone handled it really well. I'm looking forward to reading their blog posts as they reflect… Continue
15 (?) year old Arthus (a student in Vermont), over at his blog, posted a prescient list of his top 5 traits of good teachers. It includes passion, creativity, integration, flexibility, and connection. It is very well articulated and something I'd like to share with the teachers and students at my school. We spent some time at my school this past year preparing an evaluation instrument to be given to students, but th… Continue
Added by Demetri Orlando on May 26, 2008 at 10:16am —
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Ning has an initiative to provide advertising-free sites to teachers that want to use a ning site with students in grades 7-12. To apply for an ad-free ning site, you first create your site, and then you go to the Help Center and submit a help request to have the ads removed. Use the subject line: "Ad Removal Request for grades 7 - 12 Education Network." Be sure to include your… Continue
Added by Demetri Orlando on May 13, 2008 at 9:00am —
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Miguel Guhlin wrote a great article about an emerging practice in conferences-- encouraging off-site participation. These same technologies could easily be applied to a classroom situation to allow anyone from anywhere to virtually participate in the learning experience.
Miguel writes, "What if you could broadcast learning at will via the Internet to a world of learners? How would that change your conception of learning? What if you could interact with pe… Continue
Added by Demetri Orlando on March 21, 2008 at 10:00am —
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We are in year 2 of a 1:1 tablet program. Two of my 3 English teachers want to go back to paper for essays because they are not happy with either MS Word comments or using a stylus to grade in ink (Word or Journal). Has any one had any success wit...
Hey Cheryl! How's life at EFS??
You know we use Edline. This year my faculty tech development focus is on Google. Since I have to "walk my talk" I am going to put all of the resources and notes on Google Sites. So far it's pretty simple. I'll kee...
Liz,
I think you're right about large groups. Every time we consider large group activities, my inner voice keeps saying, "training is dead." Technology in the classroom has become both so pervasive and expansive, that's it's very hard to get a h...
Well the simple answer to "What are the students using?" is Facebook, and they're relying on their friends to cut and paste/redirect information.
I wonder how something like AlertThingy would work for teens?
But, for now we're supposed to be usi...
Our ad-hoc technology planning committee devised a five year plan. We started with the self assessment of basic competencies that we identified that all teachers should master in two years. Next, teachers self assess their student's use of technol...
I wholeheartedly agree, Liz: we don't expect our students to sit there and be lectured to, and to come away transformed, why should our faculties? I love how you're putting time into planning ahead of time. At our school we're moving away from the...
Thanks Preston. I think a 6 to 1 ratio is a great suggestion. I don't know how many will take me up on the offer to work together on this project. So far I have 4 people interested.
Wow Barabara it sounds like you are doing great stuff at your school. How big is your population? How many people are on your staff? (I am the only tech integrator at my school.) Do you have any resources you can share? I would love to see the set...
Hi Cheryl,
Our teachers mostly use our hosted Moodle server for their course websites [our art teachers use Dreamweaver, and we have some legacy sites from FrontPage.] A few teachers use private nings and wikis. I like the integrated nature of Moo...
We are using Rapid Web Developer which runs on the First Class platform. It is OK. Has some quirks, but mostly does the job. Allows teachers to upload video and photos, will podcast (we haven't tried it yet--new this version), has a class calendar...
We are implementing a one-to-one PD approach this year. Last year, our technology planning committee (comprised of teachers of varying tech levels, instructional technology faculty, and division heads and school head, determined that teachers shou...
"If you want to improve instruction, what could be more obvious than collaborating with fellow teachers to plan, observe, and reflect on lessons." (Lewis, 2002)
We know how to improve teaching; we know what works. When we fail to have an impact i...
When the goal is implementation, you are correct when you say one-on-one support is required.
I applaud you for thinking of ways to individualize professional development and provide needed support. I teach instructional design, and this intense ...
