SHEN DITIC

Reasons to use NBC News archive (annual subscription required) One of the largest archive in the world.

Radio brodcast from the 1920’s and newsreels are included in the archive.
They are sorted by subject and level.

Currently thy have specialty collections on, African american studies, womens studies , etc. Developing Native American and Hispanic collections also.

Video Clips are correlated to state standards and you can browse lists by state standard. Students are watching reports that are primary documents. Transcripts are available for every clip.

With the presentation station rollout resources like this would be invaluable to our social studies teachers from 8th grade on.

Decision 08 setion - with clips current to the election including the political ads that air (and historic ads).
Lesson on analyzing political ads and compring past ads with present. (Daisy ad that aired only once during Johnson v. Goldwater(1964) :fear mongering example compare this ad to Hillary Clinton’s ad for 3am)

The child in the hillary comercial was shot 10 years previous and she is actually 18 and works for the oboma campaign and was interviewed on today and that is also in the archive.

Content areas and categories are updated daily. Most major stories are put into the archive by the next day.

When textbooks are published they are already a year out of date, this archive does not have that issue.

Class discussion based on relevance using video clips (ex: economics - using the current climate and clips from the news to explainhow economics affect kids life)

Sherwin Collette
Chief Technology Officer: Montgomery County Public Schools
Activclassrooms: 1,245+ Teachers: 11,486; Students: 137,745; Schools: 200;
Free and reduced Lunch: 25% 

A social nework for their district (parents, students, teachers)

Professional Development very important - not just tips and tricks.

Focus on the fundamental change in the way teachers teach.

Built Professional development program designed to get teachers using the technology as quickly as possible.
Focusing on Student centered learning (inquiry based)
Focusing on the culture not the technology.
Budgetary Dance, rooted in Digitizing classrooms.

“Interactive classrooms are central to our vision”

District/building leadership have to demonstrate the use of them in their practices. Complete buy-in at all levels. When you see it in action, when you see the impact on students and how it’s changing instruction, that when it’s successful. Teacher inspired student centered learning.

 

Mike Horan: Director of Instructional Technology, Sarasota County Schools
Active Classrooms 3,000; Teachers: 3,055; Students: 42,045; Schools: 40;
% Free & Reduced Lunch 36%

1 week of getting your board you would have hands on training with a follow up training 3 weeks later. (paid each teacher for 30 hrs of staff develompment, most choose to do it with the active board)
Modeling in all training environments - expectations of teachers and administrators to use effective teaching techniques with the technology on all occasions.

3 Days: 750 flipcharts created and shared with colleagues.

Must centralize funding to make it happen as a district initiative.  Listen to and implement what teachers are asking for.

1. Laptop on a 4 year refresher
2. Projector
3. Document Scanners 

“‘Brick walls are not made to keep people out, they are made to see how badly you want something’…the same situation applies to implementation of IWB’s”

Have to get teachers to buy in and take strong ownership and get teachers involved as it is a considerable expense. 

Jill Hobson, Director of Instructional Technology, Forsyth County Schools GA 
Activclassrooms: 2,400+ Teachers: 3,500; Students: 30,000+; Schools: 30; 
Free and reduced Lunch: 25% 

Demonstrated children using promethean boards at parent nights, BOE nights, etc. (Also, not used as the focus, but as a tool in regular context) -Builds support and enthusiasm

Had all stakeholders involved in Decision making process

Kid help teachers because it is now so pervasive seemless integration.

“buy it and they will come”
“Bad implementations in classrooms had more to do with bad pedagogy in basic teaching” - Jeff McCoy 

Jeff McCoy, Director, Office of Instructional TEchnology, Greenville County Schools, SC
Activclassrooms: 2,400+; Teachers: 3,500; Students: 30,000, Schools: 30
% Free and reduced lunch: 2nd lowest in GA 

“All stakeholders will tell you it improves student engagement.  Now looking at how it changed student achievemnet after 3-5 years after deployment”

“Key Selling Point was instant assessment (activote, activexpression)- Derek McManus, NY STATE Architect.

 ”Not only engaging for students but it’s also engaging for teachers” - Jill Hobson 

Attending his session at the National Educational Computing Conference thought I’d blog some notes to share with you.

Designing Rigorous and Globally Connected Assignments

- We need to have a paradigm shift in US education. We need to communicate globally using IM, Chat, blogs with students in other countries.

-We should have open ended exams where student can used all of the research resources on the web to complete their test rather than “closed book” test.

Both of these skills correlate to real world business skills that are desirable to international conglomerates.

 What you now say is heard round the world (Popes speech about new sins - caused global protests)
If you search google for turkish reaction to popes speech - all website results are from english websites by default. If you add site:tr you get only websites in turkey and their reaction. Our students use internet all the time but truly don’t know how to effectively search.

Step onemaking students globally relevant/employable
- teach our students how to use these tools more effectively

add view:timeline to Google search and it organizes results by recent results (for more up to date information)

Give students problems they need to find the answers to, not memorize the answers.

Check out free literacy sources from Alan novembers web site

Job #1 for students- Have a student in class be designated questioner(researcher) who look up answer in realtime for class.

Create custom search engines in google that students can access and only the results you choose are in that search engine. Faculty members should make these custom google search engine for their students.

Screencast podcast with screen captures to illustrate points. Screen cast has a cost to it (hosted like youtube) . Use camstudio to make the instructive video so kids can teach other kids with examples from prior years students. So kids could watch those video prior to learning it in class. Introduction of the content would be done by the students and children could review.

Job #2 for students- Curriculum design team - Students would prepare curriculum in a digital medium (podcast, dvd, video, etc) for students to use to learn and review material.

 Jing project is software to make visual conversation.

Students should go to Instructional Technology PD classes with teachers as they can learn the software/material with the teachers and provide aid when using the software.

 Battery just died on laptop (think it’s toast, so I had to take the rest of these notes with paper and a pen, ick!

We need to redesign the job description of children and learners.

All student work need to be stuff that other students will use. Kid created content they own the learning.

Job #4- (I know I missed three due to the power crisis) Official Scribe team

Student should work collaboratively when taking notes to accurately reflect what went on in class. A small group of students can use google docs to collaborate on daily/weekly notes for the class that other students can use to learn and review. This collaborative building of a document is an essential workplace skill.

“Too many kids are using their laptop as a$1,00 pencil”

Discussed sample of a 3rd grade classroom who wrote a wikipedia article on a local historical site that wasn’t already in the encyclopedia they then watched as people around the world added to and enhanced their original work each time discussing the changes that were made their value. (teacher added rss feed for article so she could see whenever changes were made.

 Job 5 or 6 Global collaborators - Used site kiva.org where people can loan money to people in the developing world. Connected the students donations to the culture they choose to donate to (tied to the curriculum) and to the financial aspects of investment and rate of return. This would work great with the 9th grade curriculum.

He then ran out of time before getting to the other roles of students and referred us to the article his presentation was on at november learining students as global contributors to see the example projects used in the presentation go to the live links sections

Conference is very hectic getting shut out of a lot of session that I would have like to attended. About to participate in the Promethean users forum for districts deploying promethean IWB’s. Will try to find an outlet and post an article about that.

Click here to view/download the word document.

Terrific article–thanks for posting.  Also, wanted to give a brief update as to Monday’s meeting.  Thanks to all who participated.  The committee agreed that we need a high school teacher as, for some reason, that level was missed.  Sean Gnat has had several inquries and will move forward with inviting an new member.  We establsihed several ad hoc subcommittees and appointed Committee liaisons to put together a cross seciton of reps to do very strategic reviews and recommendations.  These committees are thus far identified as :

Peripheral Committee, Liaison, John Bullington.   Projector distribuiton committee, Liaison, Dean Mayes
Data bases Committee, Liaison, Lisa Correa  Software review committee, Liaison, Jon Conover
Distance Learning Committee, Liaison, Sean Gnat
Online Learning Committee, Liaison, Steve Smith
VOD/Cable Committee, Liason, Brian Whitley

We will be establishing a survey of staff perceptions and needs that can be completed at department or grade level meetings.

The next District Committee meeting is November 8 at which ad hocs will report any info they have garnered.  The committee selected Dec 11 for a subsequent meeting date.  They will be 12-3–locations to be determined.

Here is a link to an article in edutopia July/August 2007 issue where students were asked “What tech do YOU want to see in class?”

http://www.edutopia.org/student-opinions-classroom-technology

I am filled with great joy this morning as I spend my time pouring over articles and books written with the specific intent of showing teachers how they can use new technologies to engage their students in learning.  The article I’m currently reading is entitled: Unleashing Potential with Emerging Technologies,  by Sara Kajder.  The article begins by exposing a very common misconception about what effectively using technology in the classroom looks like.  The author is introduced to a teacher (described by the principal) as someone who “gets how to use technology with kids.”  Sadly, what was happening in this teacher’s classroom was little more than a rehashing of a traditional English lesson.  These particular students were fortunate to have laptops which they carried throughout the day (instead of text books), but these laptops stayed closed through most of the lesson.  After the traditional ‘going on’s’ of an English class transpired the students were instructed to open a document on a network server, resave it with their initials (to avoid overwriting each other’s work) and finally to make comments on the document, referencing a book they were currently reading.  Clearly, this is a new cover on the same old book; an educational project that has been happening for at least a hundred years, but spiffed up with a superficial stamp of technology.

The author goes on to give voice to my thoughts about what we should really be doing with technology.  The power behind technology is that our students are already intrinsically motivated to use it.  Most kids chat online, many read and write blogs.  The ubiquitous ipod has lead to the phenomenon of pod-casting - where audio and video data can automatically be downloaded to a computer and then transferred to a portable audio device.    Why not hook into what they are already doing?  Kajder writes of teachers with classroom blogs, where there are no “required number of pages” or “mandatory font sizes” instead the focus is on what the student needs or wants to say.    Posts are written by the students (they must be approved by the teacher before they go live)  In one particular classroom the teacher uses a daily recorder to summarize and synthesize the content of the day’s lesson.  Then other students react to that with comments, which naturally leads to discussion and debate.   Their thoughts can easily be enhanced with photos, audio, and video or any combination of digital multimedia resources. 

Similarly there is an inherent usefulness to using pod-casts for audio intense learning.  To that end I intend to teach homogeneous classes this year on pod-casting.  LOTE teachers will be able to create vocab lists that the students will be able to hear as well as see.  Setting short phrases to music, will allow the teacher to subconsciously instill the natural stresses of foreign words into their students.  Music teachers will be able to excerpt musical concepts from classical compositions to show their students  the natural evolution of music, or illustrate a theoretical concept.  Choir directors will be able to create virtual “practice CD’s” for students to learn their parts with.  The possibilities are only as limited as the teachers’ imaginations. 

The key to approaching instruction in this way, is to listen to what are students are telling us.  How do they spend their time when they are not at school?  They are writing, they arelistening to music and to pod-casts…so how do we commandeer that for our own purposes?

Each of the four groups presenting their “ideal classroom” expressed an interest in the following categories. Please feel free to add specific examples to your comments.

1. Student Access (Laptops or Desktops; Palm Pilots or Cell Phones…)
2. Assessment (Designing Instructional Programs around our students’ needs)
3. Distance Learning
4. Defining Perpherals (What they should be, where they would be stored, how they would be accessed).
5. Smart Boards and mimio-boards
6. Communications

We also spoke of the need to communicate what we are doing to the teachers we are representing as well as hear their suggestions.  Please suggest concepts you would like to get at with the faculty at large, and possibly suggest survey questions to tease out this information.

Dr. Snyder would like us to pursue the 5 year plan aggressively leading to the due date of the TOP proposals (the first week of December). We would like to begin seeing the manifestations of our efforts next fall. She stressed both the importance of adding technological hardware, and personnel to support it.

Our first exercise was to construct our ideal classroom (if money were not an object) and to discuss what the instructional implications of our hardware “wish list” would be. For example, if all of our students had laptops and we had wifi access in these classrooms, our teachers would not be so limited with the direction of their lessons. When teachable moments present themselves, new content and resources are never more than a few mouse clicks away. Students would not need to be given hardcopies of worksheets, as these could all be distributed and collected electronically.

I’ve placed a sample district technology plan from the Rush Henrietta school district in the shared G drive > Instructional Services > Office of Instruction > District Technology Committee.  As our committee progresses we will put any other files created/used by the committee into this folder. If you do not have access please email me here:  John Bullington