The Staff Development and Technology departments at ESU 13 will deliver a workshop on implementing Classroom Instruction that Works: Research-Based Strategies for Increasing Student Achievement by Robert Marzano, Debra J. Pickering, Jane Pollock, and technology tools that will support the strategies. There are a number of websites that are devoted to this topic.

Nebraska Educational Service Units 

Educational Technology the Works

Jordan School District Utah 

Cherry Creek Schools Colorado

Bedford County Department of Education Tennessee

There are also numerous examples and links to other resources on these sites, but I also wanted to include a couple of specific tools here. This will help me to stay organized, since all resources that I plan to share will be located in this blog entry.

Compare and Contrast Map (ReadWriteThink)

Summarizing & Note Taking (ESU 13 Wiki) 

Reinforcing Effort & Providing Recognition (Educational Technology that Works)

NonLinguistic Representation  (bubbl.us)

The Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development (ASCD) has created a study guide that could be used in a variety of ways.

In many instances, Internet Safety has become the the sole topic of focus of schools and parents, when dealing with digital citizenship. Yes, internet safety issues should be included in a comprehensive digital citizenship curriculum. But not allowing students to participate in online collaborative learning experiences will likely have a much stronger negative impact on their future. Vicki Davis “Why is Digital Citizenship an Issue?” and Nancy Willard “A Web 2.0 Approach to Internet Safety” have posted valuable information related to this topic. Most students are actively involved in using a variety of digital communication tools. If schools do not begin building this technology into the teaching and learning process, they are missing the opportunity to model and teach appropriate uses of these tools.

The K-12 Online Conference 2007 starts tomorrow!

Given our location, many of us may never have the opportunity to attend a national conference. The K12 Online Conference (http://www.k12onlineconference.org/) has oustanding presenters from a number of countries. The entire program is being delivered online. This means you can attend every session from anywhere you have access to the internet. There are a variety of sessions available. Most of them have a video of the presenter or a screencast of the concept being presented. The topic strands for the conference are "Web 2.0", "New Tools", "Professional Learning Networks", and "Obstacles to Opportunities."

I downloaded a couple of podcasts from the EdTechTalk site last night while watching the baseball playoffs in a motel room. Listening to this content is a great way to fill a five hour drive home, and get excited about what cool things are being done in education. One of the sites that was talked during the podcast was Worldbridges. After getting home, I found a little time to explore this site...Amazing! There are numerous video posts, and links to a wide variety of blog sites. The second half of a presentation by David Cormier has a interesting demonstration of an open source version of second life that can be run, and completely controlled locally. This is definitely something I need to learn more about. I have been hearing and reading about educational applications of using second life, but now it's time to move beyond surface knowledge and dig in. There is also a keynote presentation by Will Richardson. He has a great vision of how web 2.0 tools change the way people learn, and in turn the way we should be teaching today's students. One of the things he said during a panel discussion was that the learning has traditionally been a dependent experience. Educators are no longer the gatekeepers of information. Students now have the ability to independently design their learning. The real irony in this statement is that many students are participating in extremely large and diverse collaborative learning communities.

In preparing for my upcoming workshops, I have been doing some research on the individual topics. Here is a link to the flyers for the workshops. Although the topics of the workshop are fairly distinct, I began to notice that there were a handful of key terms that kept jumping into my mind. The workshop topics include Blogs & Wikis, Moodle, Digital Citizenship, e-Portfolios, and Right Brain & Flat World. I have also been gathering information on the new ISTE NETS (student technology standards) and 21st Century Skills. The terms that kept coming to mind were communicate, collaborate, produce, publish, and audience. I plan to incorperate these five terms into each of the workshops. It will be interesting to see what people think if they are able to attend multiple sessions. There is great power in these words when tied to web 2.0 tools and put in the hands of students.

The educational leadership for the state of Nebraska is moving toward the inclusion of technology and 21st century skills in core content standards. Dr. Doug Christensen, state Commissioner of Education, created a short presentation to share his thoughts with ESU technology staff worked through issues related to this topic. This may be a little over simplified, but in looking at ISTE NETS and 21st Century Skills, if educators would embrace “Communication and Collaboration” in online learning communities most of the other skills could be easily attached to these two topics.

This is an interesting video on how the definition of information has changed in today's digital age. The video was created by the digital ethnography working group, a team of cultural anthropology led by Dr. Michael Wesch, exploring the impacts of digital technology on human interaction and human interaction on digital technology. This is only one of numerous videos that have been created by this group, and can be found at their site.

This is also my first attempt at embedding a video into one of my posts. It took a little research on the Elgg site, but it does seem to be working.