K12Online2007 Conference Reflection #7

This presentation was

Obstacles to Opportunities“Pushing the Envelope or How to Integrate Web 2.0 Tools on a Shoestring”

Lisa Durff

Hagerstown, Maryland, USA

Blog: http://durffsblog.blogspot.com/

I met Lisa on Edtechtalk.com, but I had never seen what she looked
like. She looked thinner and younger than I envisioned her, but her
voice was instantly recognizable.I loved how she used her coffee seem very personal.

What were the main points made during this session, the “takeaways?”
Lisa talked about several free tools:
Blogs
Wikis
Electronic meetings with other classes
E-mail
Google Reader
IM
podcasting

In terms of your own professional development, what did you gain from the session?

This is a great list of foundational Web 2.0 tools to use in the classroom. I can be pretty sure that I am using lots of technology in my classroom if I am using these tools. Money is not the barrier keeping me from using these technologies. So why don’t I use them?

What questions did you have after this presentation?

I wonder about how PodOmatic compares to hosting student podcasts on our class blog.
How do I teach my kids to take notes, so they can use Notestar?

How will you apply the learning to your professional situation?
I’ll have to try out Flashmeeting that she recommended to meet with with another class
Many of the free tools she mentioned, I already knew about. However,
most of them I have not used. I’m glad she mentioned Classblogmeister.
I would like to try it out with my class next year.

What other resources (including reading material) are relevant to this session?
Gmail
Free email account for teachers.
Gaggle
Free email accounts for students.
Meebo.com
Gathers all your IM accounts in one place. I have contacts in AIM, MSN,
& Yahoo. With Meebo, I see them all. Students contact me through
Meebo outside of school.
Classblogmeister
This is the home of our school based blogs.
Notestar
A free notetaking application which is useful for research papers.
PodOmatic
Podcast host which we use. They do have their own recorders, but we do
use Audacity, then upload to this site. The primary wing does not have
wireless, so this works well for us.
PeanutButterwiki
The wiki home for most of our student wikis. I have found that each
middle school group needs their own wiki for uploading space (they need
those images).
Wikispaces
Home for my wikis and a few student-accessed wikis. They prefer the
PBwikis and I prefer the wikispaces. Wikispaces does have
advertisements.
Google Reader
My RSS aggregator, which collects all my subscriptions in one place. I
can quickly scroll through blog updates, grade student work, and listen
to podcasts.
Flashmeeting
Conferencing software similar to Elluminate. Uses video and audio to connect participants for free.
Audacity
Free audio editing software which uses the llame file to export to mp3’s.
Twitter
Social network allows 140 characters per message. Great for short posts and/or questions.
Skype

Free VOIP, voice over IP, allows connections with text chat, audio, or video.

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K12Online2007 Conference Reflection #6

This conference presentation was

Obstacles to OpportunitiesCrossing the Copyright Boundary in the Digital Age”

Karen Richardson

What were the main points made during this session, the “takeaways?”

Karen uses an interesting approach. Instead of having one long
video, she starts with an introductory video, and then points us to her
wiki that has other videos licensed under creative commons and uses
them as part of her presentation. She is using the sharing spirit of
creative commons to show us how it works, not just tell us. Excellent!

Eric Fadin’s video using only the words of Disney characters is ingeniously funny. It’s funny to hear copyrighted characters to talk about the unfairness of copyrighted laws. It is a concise and creative way to explain copyright law and fair use.

In terms of your own professional development, what did you gain from the session?

An excellent explanation of copyright, fair use, and creative
commons. I already use Creative Commons, but it was great to find more
sources of creative commons media.

What questions did you have after this presentation?
How do we get the word out to others who have not heard of Creative Commons?

How will you apply the learning to your professional situation?
I want to show my students to the disney video, and then discuss whether the author broke copyright laws. I will teach my students about CC, have them use CC sounds, images, and video, and give them the option to CC their own publishing.

What other resources (including reading material) are relevant to this session?
I explored some of the other links on the wiki. There is a LOT there.

Video: Presentation Introduction

Copyright, Fair Use and Public Domain: Introduction by Eric Faden

Hall Davidson’s Copyright Quiz at TechLearning.com
Davidson’s very detailed guide to traditional copyright
a chart of the guidelines
Wikimedia Commons
Internet Archive
Open Source Audio
OER Commons

• Yellowstone National Park has placed nearly 13,000 images in the public domain so they are available for use without permission.
• All the digital photos published on the National Archives website are in the public domain.
• The Library of Congress
  is a little harder as they don’t own copyright, but generally if the
  material was published before 1923, it is in the public domain. And,
  the Library of Congress just added over 3,000 photos to flickr, the
  photo sharing website: http://www.flickr.com/photos/library_of_congress/ Most have no known copyright restriction.
• Speaking of flickr, many of their photos have a creative commons license. You can search by license here: http://www.flickr.com/creativecommons/
• Open Directory Listing of Public Domain Sites: http://www.dmoz.org/Computers/Graphics/Clip_Art/Public_Domain/
• Thirty Years of News from NBC: http://www.hotchalk.com/index_bhm.html
• The Fair Use Blog: http://fair-use.org/

del.icio.us / witchyrichy /Copyright

1. PDTool

2. MiT5: Collaboration and Collective Intelligence

3. Creative Commons

4. WHEN WORKS PASS INTO THE PUBLIC DOMAIN

5. U.S. Copyright Office - Fair Use

6. U.S. Copyright Office

7. YouTube - Creative Commons - Wanna Work Together?

8. A Visit to Copyright Bay

9. Karen Richardson’s Professional Website

10. techLEARNING.com | Technology & Learning - The Resource for Education Technology Leaders

11. Copyright Tutorial for Kids

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K12Online2007 Conference Reflection #5

This presentation was about:

“Release the Hounds”
by Chris Harbeck

What were the main points made during this session, the “takeaways?”

1. E-Portfolios
   • Wikispaces site with a page for each student
   • Links with their blog posts
   • Math problems for their parents with detailed answers
   • Parents left comments
   • Start early and slowly, gradually add multimedia
2. Growing Posts
   • Students add to one post that grows as they learn.
   • Evaluation - self, peer, teacher
3. Scribeposts
   • Describe what they learned in class today.
   • I should be
   • By year-end, the students have a written their own textbook.
   • They write for a global audience and can add graphic
   • They tag the next scribe at the end of the past.
   • The teacher comments occasionally on the posts.
   • Quiet as well as loud students have a voice.
   • Students challenge themselves both at school and at home.
4. Unprojects
   • students must show their knowledge by remixing it in a form and with a tool of their choice.
   • The teacher gives control to the students within the guidelines.
   • Students teach.
   • Some give minimal effort, but others excel.

In terms of your own professional development, what did you gain from the session?

E-Portfolios may not be as hard as they look.
If Chris can use these tools so effectively with his students, maybe I can at least try them with my 3rd graders.

What questions did you have after this presentation?
I don’t understand why growing posts use one post instead of several posts to show a student’s growth over time?

How will you apply the learning to your professional situation?
Maybe I’ll try e-Portfolios with my class this year to showcase my student’s learning with technology.

What other resources (including reading material) are relevant to this session?

Scribe Posts
http://thescribepost.pbwiki.com/

Growing Posts
http://sp8mathzone.pbwiki.com/

Eportfolios
http://room17math.wikispaces.com/

Unproject Sites
http://spfractions.wikispaces.com/
http://spunproject07.pbwiki.com/

Release the Hounds Wiki
http://releasethehounds.wikispaces.com/

What is “Take My Hand”?

“Take My Hand”

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K12Online2007 Conference Reflection #4

This presentation was about:

“Design Matters”

by Dean Shareski

What were the main points made during this session, the “takeaways?”
Dean makes 7 points about the role of design, creativity and learning.

1. Creativity
2. Innovation
3. Planning Matters
4. Imagery
5. Whitespace & transitions
6. Constraints
7. Significance

In terms of your own professional development, what did you gain from the session?

No Child Left Behind has pushed art and creativity out out of the classroom for the sake of the test. Finally, someone is pushing it back in.
I like Dean’s points focusing on making focused points, his concise notions about how to be concise, and his visuals about how to use visuals in presentations. Drawing attention to the main ideas is more important than using all the gadgets.

What questions did you have after this presentation?
How do you teach design? Do I teach art, writing, photography, video production. Dean’s frame of reference for learning by design seems to relate to video production. Video is a complicated process. How do you build up to it? Drawing? Writing? Photography? What structure do you use?

How do you assess creativity? Do you assess the design of product? Do you assess only the content?

How will you apply the learning to your professional situation?
I like the ideas, but I’d like to know how to get started. I’ll take Dean ideas about presentation back to my students’ writing. We’ll then take the writing and turn them into pictures and eventually into movies. I know that making videos is a complex endeavor, so I’ll try to start small and grow from there.

What other resources (including reading material) are relevant to this session?
You need to check out these other ideas about design that influenced Dean. Dan Pink’s a Whole New Mind and Sir Ken Robinson’s Tedtalk.

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K12Online2007 Conference Reflection #3

This presentation was

Classroom 2.0 Keynote “Classroom 2.0 or You live where?”

by Clarence Fischer

What were the main points made during this session, the “takeaways?”
Clarence challenges the notion that school should look the same as it did 20 (or even 50) years ago. Time and place doesn’t matter. Connections and relationships matter. Computers are just tools. It’s what you do with them that matters.

In terms of your own professional development, what did you gain from the session?
I agree that connecting people is a very important part of education, because it is those people who can build relationships with people that will succeed in life, not those that pass tests well.

School is the only place where we sit in rows and fill out worksheets and call that productive. As Clarence pointed out, employers will want workers who can be creative.

Classroom 2.0 should prepare students for the workforce when they graduate. The way school approach education now many times is not cutting.

What questions did you have after this presentation?
What about effective teaching practices? Even though Clarence mentioned that technology is a tool not the answer to education’s ill, he did not really talk about effective teaching practices. He may have made the assumption that teachers in Classroom 2.0 will use effective teaching practices, but that is not always the case. Technology and effective teaching practices, like Marazono’s Big 9, go hand-in-hand, but you should not talk about one without talking about that other. It is the constrictivist teaching methods that have been proven to increase student achievement, not technology itself.

How will you apply the learning to your professional situation?
It is very hard to break out of that traditional school mold, but we must do it for the good of our kids. I plan to use more web 2.0 tools with my class next year. I want to try blogging with my students so that they will be writing for an audience outside the classroom. That would be even more exciting if the audience spoke back to them through comments on their blogs. I want to know more about how to introduce blogs to my students.

What other resources (including reading material) are relevant to this session?
I think a big Web 2.0 tool that would be relevant to this presentation is blogs. Clarence talked a lot about relationships and connectedness and blogs are a great way that he has his class connect and reflect.

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