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June 12, 2008

Teach and Learn 20

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Teaching and Learning 2.0

The teaching and learning 2.0 class has been so much fun. It will be interesting to watch what this group is able to do with these tools. As part of the class I created a quick podcast as a demo. Listen to the podcast

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May 15, 2008

Time for Change

The embedded video below has information that should give the world of education some things to consider. Are we using available technology to teach 21st century skills? Are we using available technology to engage students? Are we using available technology to make global connections?

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May 09, 2008

Photo Story test

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April 15, 2008

garden co

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April 14, 2008

bannerco

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April 11, 2008

Picture formatting

One of the things that I have had a difficult time with is layout of a post that contains a picture. I would like to wrap text around a picture to eliminate large areas of white space that normally shows up when adding a picture to a post. When adding a picture you do have the option of some minor formatting. These options do allow you to set a picture to the right or left, and with this setting, the text will wrap around the picture. This makes for a much better visual display of a post that contains an image. I do like this very much.

There is a very good YouTube video that describes, in detail, how to do this. It also contains instructions for some advanced formatting by using html code input. It is not extremely difficult, but it does require code entry. It is a demonstration within Wordpress, but I have tested the same process in Elgg, and it works exactly the same.

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April 07, 2008

sidney

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April 01, 2008

chadron

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March 23, 2008

Learning 2.0

I have had the opportunity to visit a number of our member schools and share an overview of many of the training sessions that have been my focus during the past two school years. Much of what I want to share with teachers are the possible benefits of a variety of web 2.0 tools that are being made available by ESU #13. In a previous post I spoke about the concepts of communication, collaboration, produce, publish and audience. These five concepts form a circular learning environment that could be seen as learning 2.0. Students would have the opportunity to use a variety of web 2.0 tools to communicate and collaborate with others that have common interests or are participating in similar learning activities. Once the communication and collaboration progresses, the opportunity to actually produce some type of output could arise. The use of web 2.0 tools makes the next steps really exciting. The product that has been created can be published, and the audience for the work is world wide. If an active community can be developed, the published work should lead directly back to starting new communication and collaboration.

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February 29, 2008

Teacher Web Presence

Teachers in the ESU 13 region have used Manila in the past to easily create web pages to support classroom instruction, and share information with parents. We have been searching for a Manila replacement for about a year, and selected the multi-user version of WordPress. During the last month numerous teachers have received training and begun creating content for their WordPress sites.

Here are the sites created by Gering and Kimball teachers;
Scott Plummer
Clint Schleicher
Julie Van Dyke
Mary Robinson
Randy Johnson
Kristy Keller
Russ Hamer

Mark Burson
Nancy Olsen
Ed Montgomery
Carolyn Montgomery
Laurie Janicek
Leta Liesch
Mark Wilson
Emily Brooks
Troy Unzicker
Kimball Library

Many of these sites are in the early stages of creation, and may not have much content at this time.

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February 16, 2008

Flat World Professional Communities

Given the rural setting of the region served by ESU 13, the use of web 2.0 tools to create professional learning communities has real potential. Many of the schools we serve are very small, and a grade level or subject area teacher may be the only person in that district with that specific assignment. The region is also very large, and demands a real sacrifice in time and travel to attend scheduled meeting. If teachers in the region are willing to make the commitment to participate, a variety of professional learning communities could be developed. I have been encouraging this type of professional communication for about a year, with very little movement. As I continue to post entries and read numerous other edubloggers’ posts, it is amazing to see the opportunities this technology could provide. Once teachers become comfortable sharing with others from the region, they may expand their vision to include educators from around the world. I did a little research on bloggers in my blogroll, and even in this limited list, found this group of bloggers really does flatten the world. We all have the opportunity to participate in professional learning communities with anyone, anywhere, anytime.

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February 04, 2008

Open Courseware

I have been experimenting with a variety of open source applications during the last few years. The ESU is currently running Moodle (Learning Management), Elgg (Community Building & Blogging), WordPress MU (Blogging), phpESP (Survey), and Gallery (Photo Storage). The whole open source community is very intriguing to me. The creators of this software are willing to share what they have developed. There are open source options for nearly any application you may currently be running on your MAC or Windows machine.

The open source environment has now moved into the course development arena. One of the first items I became aware of is the Free-reading.net site. Free-Reading is an "open source" instructional program that helps teachers teach early reading.

The long term success of the open source environment requires the contribution of a large community of people.  The technology is in place to allow anyone that has an interest to become an active contributor.

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January 23, 2008

Gering

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January 21, 2008

Teaching the MySpace Generation

The fear of students' use of social networking sites, such as MySpace, is eliminating what could be a valuable learning opportunity. Student use of the internet in general, and specifically social networking, continues to grow. I recently became aware of a couple of wonderful resources to help adults understand digital kids. Wesley Fryer has created a wiki devoted to internet safety and social networking for parents. A recent PBS broadcast, "Growing up Online", is also available to view online. If schools are going to be to be given the opportunity to use these valuable learning tools, teachers, parents and school policy makers must understand appropriate uses of this technology.

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January 11, 2008

ISTE Technology Standards

The new International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) technology standards for students give educators a great model for using technology for teacher and student learning. What I found most interesting about what they had designed, is that the call for technology operations and concepts is the final standard. I’m guessing that this was done intentionally, but from a technology trainer’s perspective, this was a brilliant move. I did a short presentation for one of our member districts last week, and asked “what do you think is more important to a student’s future success, content knowledge or the skills listed in the ISTE technology standards for students?” To a person, they said the ISTE standards. This should give us some direction. How do we modify our current courses to equip students with the skills identified in the ISTE standards and still meet the current accountability requirements that are in place?

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January 06, 2008

New Year…New Hope

I did not post any new entries during the Christmas break, but I did spend significant time reading, listening, and watching posts from some of my favorite edu-bloggers. One thing that was common to nearly all sites, was an optimism that web 2.0 tools can have a positive impact on teaching and learning. Another similarity was a lack of specific curriculum references, but numerous references to 21st century learning skills and information-communication-technology literacies. These topics, plus the “Right Brain” and “Flat World” issues that impact education will be my focus as the new year begins. My hope is to build active learning environments for students and teachers in the ESU 13 region.

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December 19, 2007

Flash Movie

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Camstudio Video

The video below was created using an open source video capture application called Camstudio. There are a few issues that will have to be addressed if we plan to expand the use of this technology beyond a select few. The default file type of AVI generates a huge (20MB per minute) file. I have not had time to explore other video settings that may help this situation. One recommendation  I saw was to use the divX codec to compress the file. I have not been able to make this work at this time.

 

Click here to play videoCreate a Post [video/x-ms-wm]

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Create a Post

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December 18, 2007

Second Life in Education

Second Life is an online 3D virtual world created by Linden Labs, and was originally launched in 2003. Second Life provides an online world for users to play and interact in, allowing residents to create their own virtual spaces. Recently there have been numerous examples of the educational opportunities that can be realized within this environment.  Sean FitzGerald and Jo Kay have created a  Second Life in Education Wiki that has a wide variety of resources for any educator interested in exploring Second Life.

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December 16, 2007

Building an online learning consortium

Online learning has recenty seen dramatic growth at the middle/high school grade levels. Michigan became the first state to require high school students to take at least one online course for graduation. ESU #13 is planning to incorperate online and hybrid courses into the current two-way interactive schedule. Over the last two years the ESU #13 Moodle site has become fairly active. It is currently being used to supplement face-to-face course, but planning for actual online courses is scheduled to begin this week. An email was sent to member schools seeking teachers that might be interested in beginning to use online courseware. With the rapid growth of online course delivery at the post-secondary level, students should be given the opportunity to participate in this type of learning environment as part of completing their secondary course studies.

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December 13, 2007

audio file

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Elgg Communities

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December 10, 2007

Students 2.0

This is going to be great! A group of students from around the world writing about education, teaching, and learning. The logo below is linked to their website, which contains a "What", "Why", "Who", and "How" section. This is an exciting post for me. I have been reading EduBloggers for some time, but the time has come for student voices to be heard.

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