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That’s me on the left — or at least how I’ve been feeling lately — a snake all curled up, waiting patiently, ready to pounce at a moment’s notice. In many ways, that seems to be my role as a Tech Coordinator with our K-8 teachers.

Over 2 years ago, I had the opportunity to be a part of a monthly Critical Friends Group, a professional learning community made up of 10 or so colleagues with two fellow teachers facilitating. Twice a month different teachers had the opportunity to formally present a teaching dilemma to the group, and we used highly structured protocols to help the colleague think through possible solutions, get to underlying issues and expand their thinking around the dilemma.

I remember in particular our 8th grade Spanish teacher struggling with ways to authentically assess her students’ oral skills without it being the tremendous time-drain her current system required. I vigorously suggested some technology solutions, including GarageBand, mp3 recorders, etc. as something that would benefit both her and the students, and while she was intrigued, she simply wasn’t ready. Last year we touched base about voice recordings again, but it still never went anywhere. Still not ready.

This year, something shifted. We installed an LCD projector, document projector and interactive whiteboard in her classroom over the summer, which she’s been using with great relish and success. My colleague and I expanded our roles this year, and are now directly supporting our 6th-8th grade teachers rather than focusing exclusively on K-5. And she’s ready. Simply put, she’s ready.

She approached me two weeks ago wondering about a project she does each year with the kids writing and reciting Spanish “pickup lines” or piropos. She asked whether I had any cool technology tools that might enhance this project, and indeed I did! I suggested teaching Voicethread to her kids, which would allow them to both say and write their piropos, and would provide them with an opportunity to comment (in Spanish) on each other’s work. I showed her a few examples I had collected on my new MCDS Ed Tech Wiki and she was completely sold on the idea.

Today we launched the project with her first 2 sections of 8th Grade Spanish students. Predictably, the kids were thrilled and had a blast doing the work. But most exciting for me was seeing this teacher taking so many risks, figuring things out on her own, learning alongside her students, and the lightbulb going off in a big way. She reminded me that this was the very first time she had ever even used one of our mobile laptop carts in her classroom with students, and told me about two more ways she intends to use Voicethread before the end of the year. I will post about those later.

At the same time, one of my Ed Tech partners-in-crime sat in on an incredibly frustrating grade-level meeting today. One of the grades she works with is about to start a big Social Studies unit and asked her for a way to integrate technology into the mix. She researched and prepared a suite of delicious choices for them to look at, chock full of examples, simple ideas and marvelous rich connections to the content. They couldn’t have been less interested in the ideas she was pitching, and she left feeling frustrated, confused, and sad for the students.

So what’s the take-away lesson for me? That integrating technology is, of course, a process that takes time. That we are planting seeds that may not take root right away, but that eventually will. That we need to shift our emphasis away from making changes this year and look realistically at the next three to five years or even longer. Which, of course, is impossible. Voicethread wasn’t even around nine months ago!

At a recent meeting our Head of School referred us to an image described by Jim Collins in his wonderful book Good to Great — that of the flywheel. The concept reminds us that with consistent effort over time, pushing and pushing will eventually build momentum until there is finally a breakthrough. Click here for a nice description of the buildup-breakthrough flywheel. I found the wonderful flash animation illustrating this concept at http://jimmyzimmerman.com/blog which I have embedded below:

(Snake image from http://flickr.com/photos/cpstorm/158374275/)

We’re hosting the March face-to-face BAISNet Meeting tomorrow morning, March 10. See the wiki for the meeting by clicking here.

Our 8th Graders have spent their last two times with Kindergarten buddies using technology to help create projects. Several weeks ago, the “big buddy” used Sketchup to help the “little buddy” create a dream house. This week we used laptops and a Powerpoint template to compose and publish stories together. Such fun! [slideshare id=287280&doc=kindergarten-8th-grade-buddies-1204312040114425-3&w=425]

Thanks to Andrea Hernandez of Ed Tech Workshop for tagging me for this cool Passion Quilt meme.Directions: Find or create an image that captures what you are most passionate for kids to learn about.

I decided to use an image from my own school. This photo came from a project one of our Art Teachers did with 6th Graders last Spring. They took a series of photographs that represented who they are. They then used art class to experiment with Photoshop and manipulated their photos in several ways. They also had an opportunity to comment on each other’s work. I love how this photo captures art and tech.

Learning Together, Everywhere

3 Simple Meme Rules:

• Post a picture from a source like Flickr Creative Commons or make/take your own that captures what YOU are most passionate about for kids to learn…and give your picture a short title.
• Title your blog post “Meme: Passion Quilt” and link back to this blog entry.
• Include links to 5 folks in your professional learning network or whom you follow on Twitter/Pownce. (What is Pownce?)

Tag. Your turn — what are you passionate about sharing with the kids you teach?

• Barbara Bray from Rethinking Learning
• Richard Kassisieh from Kassblog
• Anie from MCDS Book Blog
• Brian S. from Loose Parts
  
• Janice Friessen from Texas Malahini

I am a child of the Seventies. My kindergarten class was the very first group of 5-year olds who entered kindergarten already having watched the first year of the new PBS show, Sesame Street. My kindergarten teacher had to rethink large portions of her curriculum because we all came to school that year already knowing our letter sounds and numbers. Many of us were already reading. Coincidence? Definitely not.

I’ve been stuck in bed sick with my own 5-year old twins all week with this terrible flu/plague that’s been going around. After enough rounds of the card game War, enough chapters of Harry Potter, and every Disney DVD ever released, I downloaded a few episodes of The Electric Company to watch with my sons while we all coughed our heads off in unison. I have vivid memories of many of the show’s sketches (remember the silhouetted faces singing “ch…air….chair”? or “It’s the plumber! I’ve come to fix the sink!”)? Sure, I remembered that it was funny. And that it was very cool. But what I didn’t remember was how incredibly educational it was.

As my sons and I watched, I marveled at how Fargo North, Decoder indeed was teaching how to decode sentences using methods I’ve seen so often in our first grade classrooms. Or the series of skits and songs about the silent “e” changing a kit into a kite, The Adventures of Letterman rescuing a man who had been enjoying his tub only to have it turned into a tube, etc. and by dinnertime, my boys were talking about the silent “e,” punctuation and apostrophes. While they are certainly interested in letters and writing, and are showing many signs of pre-literacy, this was downright dramatic. I’d like to go on the record as saying nothing currently on our television airwaves comes anywhere close to the pedagogy, creativity and energy I watched with my sons in these Electric Company episodes. What a brilliant show! The question I’m left with, of course, is how to bring even a tiny kernel of this kind of teaching into my classroom.

But of course, the most fun was seeing Morgan Freeman, Rita Moreno, Violet the Blueberry from Willie Wonka, Bill Cosby, and hearing the voices of Mel Brooks, Joan Rivers and Zero Mostel. So for your viewing pleasure, I’ve found a little clip of a young Morgan Freeman as Easy Reader, the grooviest reading cat in town. To quote Easy, throughout my childhood The Electric Company always helped me to see that “Top to bottom, left to right, reading stuff is outtasite!”

Today my colleagues and I spent the day at The Nueva School in Hillsborough, CA. We were hosted by Matt Levinson, the Head of Middle School, and were there with the intention of hearing about their brand-new 1:1 laptop program in grades 6-8.The Nueva School is a 40-year old K-8 school located in Hillsborough, CA with an emphasis on gifted students. They currently have an enrollment of 370 and will be expanding to 400 within the next several years. This past Fall they rolled out 1:1 laptop computing for 6-8th grade on the very first day of school. There was inevitable fallout and it served as a wonderful cautionary tale about what not to do! While they got off to a rocky start, they are already putting in place some changes for next year’s rollout to 6th Grade.We had a great opportunity to spend close to an hour talking to 8th Grade students about how they felt 1:1 is going at Nueva. Students are amazingly enthusiastic about the new laptop program. They claimed that they use their laptops 2-3 classes per day, and that most of the use of laptops is not during class. Home use is both academic and social. Students expressed pleasure with the large amount of compelling software on their laptops, (ranging from the full Adobe CS Suite, to Office to iLife & iWork, Geometer Sketchpad, Flash, 3D modeling software, Mind Mapper, etc.) which they frequently explore and use in a way that would not be possible without 1:1. A few students recounted how difficult sharing sharing a family computer was prior to 1:1. “It was a living nightmare.” “I don’t have to wrestle with my brother for the computer.” They loved having the same software and platform at school and at home, which contrasts sharply with the frustrations they had transferring work electronically prior to 1:1. They appreciate how everything is backed up every 15 minutes to the server, and the Open Directory system alleviates worries about machines crashing or forgotten at home. Teachers and administrators worried at first about the distraction factor, but found that once the initial novelty wore off, the amount of distraction was limited in 8th grade. Kids articulated that laptops are more environmentally friendly, create equity between all students, help them to organize their work all into one location and communicate with their teachers.As we continue to explore the possible road to 1:1 for our own 6-8th graders, our Technology Committee has set up a wiki to keep ourselves organized. To see the wiki, go to http://mcdstechcommittee07.wikispaces.com/

At times I have to remind myself that technology integration often happens on this campus without the Tech Coordinators’ direct involvement. Such is the case with one of our 6th Grade Spanish teachers, a self-defined technology resistant teacher, who inquired in the Fall about how to use GarageBand to record a Spanish dialogue. Imagine my surprise when I visited her class webpage yesterday and discovered that she has been recording dialogues and posting them on her class web page for student assignments! Sometimes the use of technology is noisy, but in this case it felt like a quiet victory. Click on the mp3 to hear one of the dialogues she posted for students:  El libro perdido

I’ve been very anxious to begin playing with the new educational version of Voicethread, and I finally found a willing set of guinea pigs in our 2nd Grade Team. If all goes according to plan, we should begin recording student voices later this week. For $10, it has been relatively easy to set up an account, add multiple “identities” for each student and to begin recording. I really do love their user-friendly interface. So far, so good! Looking for more ways to use Voicethread in the classroom? Click here for a list of links I’ve been collecting, and feel free to add yours in the comments section.

As I wrote in “I May Be Nuts, But…” a few months ago, I am now the advisor of a 1x/week blog club for 6th Graders. Although the first meeting attracted boys only, by the end of November we had 7 girls in the club as well. The kids were completely pumped about the opportunity to create a space on the web of their own, their Division Head was appropriately concerned about sufficient guidelines and parameters, and I felt as though a loose structure with light supervision seemed like the best way to begin since it was a student-generated club. Their initial posts have run the typical gamut of 6th grade interests, ranging from “What’s Hot, What’s Not?” to music and movie reviews to an advice column. Not the kind of “thinking outside the box” type of student writing I had originally hoped for, although they were definitely having fun.

In early January, I used my commute time to listen to a podcast of Ed Tech Talk’s Women of the Web show featuring Konrad Glogowski. I was completely inspired by his story of how he set up individual blogs for his Canadian 8th Graders and gave them four glorious weeks to blog and write without any guidelines or instructions, only to write about what they were passionate about. (click here for that show’s podcast and show’s chat notes.) Newly inspired to challenge my own 6th Graders, I gave a little speech at the beginning of our most recent Blog Club meeting and challenged them to write about their passions, interests, things they weren’t writing about for school assignments. I followed up with a few examples, none of which anyone took me up on, but they got the general idea.

Toward the end of the Club, one of the quieter students asked me how to create links to individual songs in iTunes. I noticed that the two songs he was linking to were by Jimi Hendrix and Led Zeppelin, two of my own personal favorites. I asked him about his interest in classic rock and he instantly lit up and went into an animated rant about how none of his friends understand that this is the music that started it all, that has the best musicians and that everyone his age should be listening to. I looked at him and said “That’s what you should be blogging about.” He responded by saying “I can write that kind of stuff?!” YES! He lamented the fact that our club meetings are so short and I reminded him that he can write posts onto our blog from anywhere with an internet connection, including home. He immediately began typing away, and by the end he exclaimed “This club is so much FUN!” Woo hoo! (Disclaimer: he hasn’t finished his post yet. I’ll link to it as soon as he’s done.) The Blog Club’s blog lives here.

(Jimi Hendrix photo courtesy of http://flickr.com/photos/toofarnorth/134541124/)

Here’s a super simple way that a 2nd Grade teacher published student work on her class webpage using iPhoto Slideshow: 
Download 

2nd Graders using 3-D modeling software? No way! See for yourselves…here is a little project our very own 2nd Graders have been working on.  To quote one student, “Now I like going to the Computer Lab even more than lunch!!”

 Click here to see the projects.

..some 6th Grade boys approached me last month with the idea of starting a lunchtime blogging and podcasting club. After procrastinating as long as humanly possible, I finally agreed.

We had our first meeting today, and while I was thrilled to see that 12 kids showed up, I was somewhat disappointed that none of them were girls. In any event, the boys were eager to get started recording podcasts today and I had to pull back the reins a bit as we had some decisions to make. Were we blogging and podcasting or just podcasting? Was this a blog about life at school or about life in general? Was the target audience the whole world or just the MCDS community? Would each podcast episode have several segments, or would each group/topic do a separate podcast? How would we preserve the students’ anonymity?

In any event, I asked the kids how many of them had already blogged or podcasted outside of school. About 5 hands went up. The subject matter on their blogs ranged from movies to music to skiing. They divided themselves into 3 groups of 4 and got to work right away, and their emphases will be Music, Humor and Movies. This has the potential to be pretty cool.

Our home will be: http://www.mcdsblogs.org/blogclub and I’ll be sure to post updates on our progress.

It seems like my immediate circle of friends, neighbors and colleagues have discovered the blogosphere and I am having so much fun getting inside their heads and hearing about their personal and professional lives. Here are some of the newest blogs in my community:

• Loose Parts: Our twin sons’ preschool teacher recently launched this fantastic blog, where he intends to explore issues pertaining to Early Childhood Education, anti-bias curriculum, communication between teachers and parents, professional development, etc.
• The K Files: Our next-door neighbor (and close friend) is documenting her school search for a kindergarten for her daughter. She is tackling some rocky terrain, including the San Francisco USD lottery system, public school vs. private school, school readiness, language immersion, etc. Her blog is already receiving a fair amount of traffic and is stimulating some lively debate in the comments sections.
• Abby & Jon’s Pregnancy Blog: Abby, a friend and former colleague, attended my CAIS presentation last spring and decided to make her first blog about her pregnancy & and new parenthood experiences.
• Kindness Mural Project: Armed with successful blogging practices, Abby used a blog to document an amazing global elementary art project she piloted at The Phillips Brooks School last Spring.
• MCDS Book Corner: One of the MCDS Librarians, Anie S., launched a blog this Fall, highlighting what’s going on in our school’s library.

 Here’s a link to another terrific presentation from the K12 Online Conference, given by John Pearce of Geelong, Victoria, Australia:

http://k12online.wm.edu/its_elementary/player.html

I was peeking around the super-cool K-12 Online Conference website, and I stumbled upon a fantastic session given by Kathy Cassidy from Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, Canada. As the title suggests, she describes the ways in which she is incorporating blogs and other tools into her teaching. Here is the link to her conference session, here is the link to her Blogmeister blog, and click on the movie below to hear her describe her efforts in her own words!

http://k12online.wm.edu/GradeOneClassroom.wmv

Over the summer, we continued the process of creating a standard classroom technology setup in our 4th-8th grade classrooms. Almost every classroom now contains a permanent mounted LCD projector, DVD/VHS player, stereo tuner, speakers and lectern. In a growing number of classrooms, we have also installed interactive whiteboards and document projectors. Teachers’ feelings about this new equiment ranged from ambivalent to trepidatious to thrilled. We did a brief training in late-August, showcased how some of our early adopters are using their new tools at a meeting in mid-September and have been doing plenty of one-on-one handholding, troubleshooting and training. A few weeks ago, I decided to wander between our Upper School classrooms to see whether I could capture teachers in the act of using their new tools. I was overjoyed to find technology being used in a range of ways, across curricular and grade-level areas.

Below is a slideshow of the Upper School teachers (Grades 6-8) using their new classroom technology on a random Friday morning in late September. (This slideshow was my first attempt at using RockYou and the jury’s still out for me about whether I like this tool.)

[rockyou 87732222]

Why don’t we get into each other’s classrooms more often, to learn, observe, consult, grow, advise, mentor? Is teaching an inherently solitary endeavor? I certainly don’t think so, but I am a member of a new committee at school that is exploring ways in which we can rethink the concept of “teacher development” at various stages in our careers.

While several committee members felt excited about exploring peer observation, feedback and mentoring, others hesitated and indicated that for some colleagues, the concept of an open-door policy would be intimidating, inhibiting and uncomfortable. If we do decide that we value a culture of sharing, does it need to be an official “sanctioned” program with parameters and expectations? Or would it work better as a grass-roots “drop in whenever you feel like it” type of thing? Hmmmm…

The concept of “teaching in private” simply wouldn’t work for me in my role. By very definition, a Technology Coordinator must partner with classroom teachers and uncover what’s going in the classroom in order to create meaningful connections to technological tools, skills and projects. My new adventure with teaching kindergartners right in the K classrooms is having the fringe benefit of allowing me to observe my colleagues in action on a weekly basis. When I hear Doug teaching a new Letter of the Week song with his banjo, or see Richard explaining how the classroom spider will eat the cricket he’s about to feed it, or look around the walls of Janet’s room and see classrom documentation showing how they are incorporating math concepts into their morning meetings, I am growing and learning as a teacher.

We have begun experimenting with document cameras this year, and have been really happy with the Lumens DC-155 XGA Digital Visual Presenter model (seen at left) we’re putting in place all over campus. (ELMO is another popular brand — the name stuck since our new one’s red!) The coolest use I’ve seen thus far has been in a 1st Grade Science class. Our science teacher, Alice M. wanted to show our 1st Grade scientists what the underside of a snail looks like while it is eating. (They are involved in a 2-month snail study right now.) She put some watered-down cornstarch on a piece of plexiglass, put the snail on top, hung the plexiglass over the edge of a table and put the document camera underneath, shining upward toward the bottom of the plexiglass. Here’s a small video clip showing the very cool results:

Download

In January 2006, I wrote a post entitled “The Demise of the Computer Teacher,” wondering aloud about whether the entire format of the tech coordinator’s job should change. Almost 2 years later, the MCDS Kindergarten team and I are piloting a new model for Computer Lab this Fall, in which I go to the Kindergarten classrooms with 6-7 iBook laptops and work with small groups of children during “centers” time. We are all very excited about bringing the computers into the kids’ “natural habitat” and I promise to report back about how it is working!

We have two other fantastic Kindergarten teachers at MCDS — Doug and Richard. Both are also veteran teachers here, and as I discussed in the previous post, the whole K team had an incredible trip to Reggio Emilia two years ago that is helping to redefine how they teach kindergarten at Marin Country Day School.

Doug and Richard are also using classroom documentation to make the process of learning more visible in their classrooms. The ways in which they do this, however, is slightly different in each classroom. Janet posts a daily journal entry to her class website daily. Richard (on the right) posts a month’s worth of daily journals at the end of each month. Doug (on the left) digs into a few individual classroom projects each year, and documents the entire project in great detail. Click below to see an example of Richard’s Monthly Journal and Doug’s recent Earthmover Project:

Richard’s Monthly Journal (.pdf)

Doug Earthmover Project (.pdf)

One of our Kindergarten teachers, Janet D., was a self-described “technology timid” teacher for many years. She is a veteran Kindergarten teacher, who went with her team to Italy 2 years ago to study the Reggio Emilia method of early childhood education. As a result of that life-altering trip, they are revamping their entire kindergarten program to incorporate many “Reggio-like” elements into our school.

For Janet, documenting learning in her classroom on a daily basis became an important goal, and she asked for help in getting started. What began as a 1-2 hour process last fall has now been whittled down to a 20 minute/day committment on her part. The steps include taking digital photos, transferring them to her laptop, dragging them into a template she’s created in Keynote, typing up the description and student quotes, saving as a .pdf and uploading the file onto her classroom web page. Here are a few examples:

I recently presented a session at the CAIS (California Association of Independent Schools) Northern Regional Meeting in Atherton, CA. The session was entitled “Hello World! Blogging and Podcasting in the Elementary Classroom.”

If you attended today’s session, please be sure to leave a comment letting us all know how you’re intending to use blogs & podcasts in your schools. And once you’ve gotten one set up, be sure to let us know how to find you!

You can download a .pdf (with links) of my presentation (updated as of 8/07) here:
Hello World!

One of the websites I love using most with my Lower School students is Starfall, a reading & phonics website for small children. Here’s a link to a c/net article about why I love it so much!

OK…so if 2005-06 was the year of the Duck Blog, 2006-07 is the year of the Trout Blog! To see our latest endeavor, go to:

http://www.mcdsblogs.org/trout

It appears that Duck Diaries has been awarded the special Edublog Star Award (Convenors choice) as part of the Annual 2006 Edublog Awards! To check out all of the winners and nominees, go to http://www.incsub.org/awards/

I just downloaded the demo of this plugin and here are the results — yet another cool way to publish/document student and classroom work!

One of the things I love most about working with 1st Graders is watching them morph from pre-readers into confident readers and writers. It is always so much fun trying to decipher words when they write stories using “best guess” or invented spelling.

In honor of Halloween, I asked the 1st graders to write & illustrate simple spooky stories. I then used my iRiver to record them reading their stories. The unintended consequence of this rather pedestrian assignment was that it gave the adults a window into the kids’ thinking process as they try to sound out and spell words. I put all of the pieces together into an iMovie, which we then posted on our website for parents to enjoy. Here’s the link:

Download

 

I posed the following question to my colleagues on the BAISNet listserv yesterday:

Hi All,
I thought I would utilize your collective expertise once again! What are your current favorite software applications for wysiwyg webpage creation? I’ve lately been working with websites that have built-in web-based page editing, so I feel a bit out of touch. When you want to make a page from scratch, what do you prefer? Dreamweaver? FrontPage? BBEdit? Coffee Cup? Something else? Low-priced would be a definite bonus.
Thanks in advance,
Barbara

The overwhelming majority of folks from BAISNet seem to be voting for Dreamweaver, with many of us moving toward CMS technology and web-based page creation tools. Here’s my original email and a summary of responses:

I have used DreamWeaver in conjunction with BBEdit for about 7 years now. I love the wysiwyg, PHP, SQL integration in DreamWeaver and I wouldn’t part with BBEdit as my baseline text/html editor ever. I have used quite a few others (GoLive, Front Page…) but have always ended up back here.
~Chris

Ditto from me!
~Kathryn, Nueva

Go with the gold standard — Dreamweaver. Easy to understand, powerful. I have not had good experiences with FrontPage…MS adds to much fat to the html code.
-Matt

Barbara,
I still like the Macromedia tools, Dreamweaver, etc. You will probably qualify for a lab pack, about $500 for a lab set of the entire suite. Good deal.
Shelly, Hillbrook School

I use Dreamweaver, but I am really a novice. It came as a suite with flash etc.
Anne Marie Schar, Technology Director
Mid-Peninsula High School

Hi Barbara,
I like Taco HTML Edit, and it is free! It is made for the Mac OS (if that is what you have). I use it because I want my student to learn how to make basic HTML etc, etc.
http://tacosw.com/main.php
Best of luck,
Barney, The Carey School

We use the Macromedia Suite, which for a commercial product is very affordable as they charge a flat fee based on school enrollment. If you have lots of people who are doing web site development, it’s hard to beat since there are so many training resources available and you can get in deep or just wade in the shallow end of the pool.
iWeb is hard to beat in terms of ease-of-use, it’s free with new Macs, and will get better with time. Downside is that it really likes to publish to .Mac accounts and makes you jump through hoops for anything else. I’ve heard that the HTML it creates is not the most elegant.
~Steve, Castilleja

Hi Barbara,
I use Dreamweaver because it’s so simple. I have 4th grade students create a “my first web page” in Dreamweaver and if they can do it it’s gotta be Easy. Also, I use iPhoto all the time to create web pages of kids work beacause it is FAST! In the information box you can add a title and add text in the comments box. Then have it appear where you want it to appear. I can take these instant iPhoto pages into Dreamweaver and doctor them up. Here is an example where the photos and captions were done in iPhoto and
the page enhanced in Dreamweaver:
http://www.kdbs.org/lower/05-06/third/milly/milly.html
Scanned work with text:
http://www.kdbs.org/lower/05-06/third/3bpuppets/3bpuppets.html
KidPix:
http://www.kdbs.org/lower/04-05/second/2astories/2astories.html
~Peggy, KDBS

We have given up on complete web site creation tools and moved to web-based content editors instead: blogs, CMS’s, and wikis (Wordpress, Nucleus, Plone, Drupal, Mambo, MediaWiki, DokuWiki, etc.). When instructing a class to post subject-related work or a program director to maintain his program web site, these systems allow the user to get directly to the content, usually the most important part. Web-based systems also provide functional tools that most WYSIWYG coders can’t build — comments, tags, subscriptions, and more. If you are seeking to teach design, you can teach how to modify the templates of such systems or create one’s own. Creating a solid
template and a concise CSS file are more authentic tasks for today’s web world than creating a static design from scratch.
Richard

re: CMS’s vs Web development tools
I agree wholeheartedly with the distinction that Richard brings up. What’s the goal of the lesson? The content or the tools to create vessel for the content? Or both? CMS’s allow you to focus entirely on the content without having to worry too much about the mechanics of producing a Web presentation.
Hoover, Schools of the Sacred Heart

RE: Hoover’s and Richard’s points:
I’d actually say CMS’s allow you the flexibility to learn css/html, or concentrate on content — content creation is much easier using any of the CMS options in this thread, and once you have the app up and running, creating a web page is as easy as typing and hitting submit –
However, if you want to learn html/css, you can dig into the theming engine of the app — this is a pretty safe and effective way to learn design, as you can create test/experimental themes to work with, while retaining the original (aka pretty/functional) theme as a point of reference. Also, on a tangential note, the Xinha firefox extension puts a WYSIWYG editor into your firefox browser — this gives you WYSIWYG editing on any textarea, on any web page — it can come in handy. — http://www.hypercubed.com/projects/firefox/
Cheers, Bill F.

I took my first online class this summer, through Eclectic Academy. The illustrious Sara Froelich was our amazing instructor for a course entitled Adobe Photoshop Elements 4 - First Steps for Mac. The course cost a whopping $20 ( ), was 6-weeks long, and got me up and running in PSE4 in no time flat. To see the homework I posted for the class, click here.

The other fun PSE4 thing I’ve been experimenting with a lot this summer is digital scrapbooking, especially utilizing some of the wonderful premade pages and album kits available out there. My all-time favorite 2 resources for digital scrapbooking files, inspiration and resources have to be The Shabby Princess and Scrapbook-Bytes. (By the way, my new blog banner is from The Shabby Princess’ wonderful Shabby Shoppe.)

My tech department colleague and one of our 4th grade teachers took the “blog as final project publishing tool” model one step further this week. Using the identical setup to the one I used for the audiobooks and the duck blog, these wonderful teachers have created a repository for all of the 4th grade student iMovies about the California missions. But for me, the best part is that the top post is a podcast of the students, explaining how they made their movies. Talk about making your process transparent. Great job! To see the movies, go to:

http://room12.edublogs.org/

The 3 first grade audiobook blogs are now finished and posted. Hooray! The most exciting thing has been the response from the students’ friends and family. More comments and kudos keep pouring in from around the country. Talk about early writers writing for an authentic audience! I am so proud of this project and I am so proud of the fine young readers and writers in our first grade. We will definitely do this project again next year. (Can anyone say video podcasting? ) Once again, take a moment to visit, listen and comment on one or more of the 1st grade links below:

1. Banyan Room

2. Maple Room

3. Huckleberry Room

Who’s brilliant idea was it to try to upload 56 1st graders’ stories as podcasts before the end of school?! Oh yeah…mine… I’ve been trying to wrestle with a combination of Audacity, GarageBand, archive.org and edublogs to make the whole thing work for free (excluding the price of GarageBand and my time…)

To give a listen to the kids’ work (which I must say, sounds fabulous!) go to any of the 3 class sites below:

• Huckleberry Room
• Banyan Room
• Maple Room

The iRiver is my new best friend. I’m impressed with the sound quality, ease of use and storage capacity. Less impressed so far with the Snowball USB mic we just got, but I’ve admittedly only just started playing with it.

Over Spring Break, our Director of Facilities discovered that a neighborhood duck had decided to build her nest right under the Middle School play structure. Being the tech-savvy school that we are, of course, we had to create a blog for our own feathered mom-to-be. I used the comments section of the first post to track the fascinating flurry of emails that went back and forth between our faculty members today as we discussed how to integrate the duck into our classroom conversations. To see our duck’s blog, point your browser to: http://duckdiaries.edublogs.org/

On the way to preschool the other day, one of my 3.5 year old sons was talking (again) about his favorite superheroes and their alter egos. He began asking about The Flash. “What’s his real name, Mommy?” When I told him I didn’t know, his response was “We can look it up on the Internet when we get home.”

Wow…

Each Spring, the MCDS 1st Graders host the First Grade Library as a culminating project to celebrate their collective growth as readers and writers. Students hand write a series of stories, edit the stories, type them into a PowerPoint template I’ve created for the project, print the stories out, illustrate each page and bind them. Then parents and students fr

om other grade levels peruse the “library” of stories and check stories out to read and write reviews.

This year, we decided to add an audio component to the project. Each student will pick a favorite story and we will record them reading the story. The plan is to burn a CD of stories for each class, and to hopefully create a podcast of the stories that the larger community can enjoy.

I’m experimenting with our new iRiver T30, which I absolutely love in some ways, but is turning out to be a lot less M

ac-friendly than we had been led to believe. (MP3 files won’t import directly into GarageBand — Audacity is needed as a go-between.) In order to upload the kids’ audio, I’m doing a rather convoluted set of steps which I would love feedback on — I actually have no idea if this is the best way to do it. It is definitely NOT simple, and there’s no way that I’d ask a classroom teacher to do this for him/herself. So here are my steps:

1. Record students reading their stories onto the iRiver (I thought about adding an external mic, but the sound quality w as practically identical.)
2. Drag the mp3 files off the iRiver onto my iMac desktop
3. Open the files in Audacity and edit out the stuff I don’t want. Export the files as an mp3 or wav file. I’m doing it this way because GarageBand won’t recognize the mp3s directly off the iRiver.
4. Import the Audacity-created mp3s into GarageBand. Add jingle music ot beginning and end of stories. Use the Share Podcast command and save the mu4 file to my desktop
5. Upload the mu4 file to my archive.org account (I won’t even MENTION how cumbersome that process is!!)
6. Create a blog entry in the class edublogs blog with a link to each individual podcast
7. Burn a feed for the blog using feedburner
8. Publicize

I have only done 3 files so far, and it was really time consuming and a lot of steps. To hear what I’ve done so far, go to http://huckleberry.edublogs.org or to http://feeds.feedburner.com/huckleberry and see if you can get it to work.
Click here to hear my maiden attempt at uploading audio to archive.org before I had the kids do any recording.

So really — world — I’d love any advice about how to simplify this project and how to keep it relatively inexpensive and teacher-friendly.

Thanks in advance and I’ll be sure to post more about this as the project progresses.

Overview:
MCDS hosted a BAISNet meeting this afternoon, which was attended by over 40 teachers, tech department members and administrators from Bay Area public and independent schools. Folks drove from as far away as Monterey, Oakland, San Jose and Sonoma to attend the meeting. The topic was, of course, how we are implementing Web 2.0 technologies in our schools. We had 5 wonderful speakers and I have included links from the conversations and presentations below:

Blogs We’re Reading, Podcasts We’re Listening To and Tools We’re Playing With:
As an informal mixer/warm-up to the topic, I asked everyone at the beginning of the meeting to introduce themselves, the schools they were from, and if appropriate, a favorite Web 2.0 resource they are currently using. This is the list of resources mentioned (be sure to add others as a comment below!):

1. Jon Udell’s Weblog
2. Knitting Blog
3. Moodle
4. Plone
5. Home Brewing podcasts
6. Daily Kos
7. Flickr
8. del.icio.us
9. Psychology podcasts
10. NY Times podcasts
11. eHub
12. Mozilla Sunbird
13. SF Chronicle Tech Talk Podcast
14. Poker podcasts
15. Blue Frontier
16. boingboing.net
17. Edublogs
18. Learnerblogs
19. ESLBlogs
20. Class Blogmeister
21. How to set up a student centered classroom blog

Visual Search Engines:
Our first presenter was Angela Neff, Director of Technology at St. Matthew’s Episcopal Day School in San Mateo, who gave us a brief overview of what Web 2.0 is, with comparisons to various Web 1.0 tools and websites. She then presented a host of visual search engines and challenged us to break (or at least examine) the Google habit by experimenting with some of the cool tools listed below:

1. KarTOO
2. Mooter
3. Clusty
4. Grokker
5. Ujiko
6. Ditto.com

Podcasting:
The next presenter was Jason Stone, Director of Technology at San Francisco Day School, who spoke about how his 5th grade Spanish teachers and students have been experimenting with podcasting as a wonderful extension of the Spanish curriculum. While SFDS have been able to post MP3s to the website for years, they are excited about how podcasting lets users subscribe through aggregator (most students use iTunes). By using a stand-alone MP3 recorder, recording becomes really easy and not dependent on having a laptop handy. With the newest version of iLife, GarageBand makes podcasting really simple and Apple has a really good tutorial on creating and posting a podcast.

Plone Content Management Software for School Websites:
Next up was Preston Tucker from The College Preparatory School in Oakland. He took us through the stages of growth and development their school’s website has gone through over the years. As their original website grew, it slowly became un-navigable and untenable with over 600 separate pages, until finally his school asked him to move the website from a Web 1.0 to a Web 2.0 structure. After studying and analyzing many other school websites, they decided to use Plone, an open-source CMS, to develop their new site. Some of the key advantages to their new site include:

1. Calendars, pictures, and news are now easily brought to the front of the site
2. If the school changes it’s branding, logo, colors, etc. it is easy to change
3. Searching and using the site mirrors an analogy of the simplicity of Google, rather than the drilling down through the links like Yahoo
4. Non-technical users put their information, documents, photos, etc. into forms that are controlled centrally and viewable by any browser
5. Students now beginning to be webmasters
6. Plone has a number of out-of-the-box import/export features for various document types

Using Moodle Course Management for a School Website:
Richard Kassissieh from San Francsico University High School was up next to talk about how UHS has moved from using WebCT to Moodle for many of their course listings and teacher interactions with students. He has made it easy for us to review his presentation by posting an outline of it here. I also mentioned the Moodle that is being built by the New York Consortium of Independent School Technologists (NY’s equivalent of BAISNET) and how it might be an interesting model for us to consider as well. Richard also spoke eloquently about the importance of teacher blogging, how it changes writing, how we ought to visit and support each other’s blogs, and how the voices of those of us who work directly in schools need to be added to the edublogosphere (which is already well represented by ed tech consultants.) Visit (and leave a comment on) Richard’s blog when you have a minute! If you have a blog of your own, please leave the URL in a comment below or email the info to BAISNet.

Talking to Students About MySpace:
We ended the BAISNet portion of the meeting with a presentation by Brad Lakritz from Marin Academy. He recreated a presentation he recently delivered to 9th and 10th graders at his school as part of a larger panel (including older MA students) on the topic of MySpace. One especially salient point was that he equated Web 2.0 technologies as being the “reality internet” outcropping of the reality TV shows, including many very real dangers and pitfalls. His school consciously made the decision to arm students with information and statistics about web usage and the public nature of MySpace, rather than using scare tactics. He gave the example of how his 16-year old daughter felt that giving him access to her MySpace account felt as though he was listening in on her private phone calls, yet she failed to understand just how very public her online communication was indeed.

At Least They Brought Yummy Food…
MCDS has been experimenting with inviting various vendors to school to deliver some of our professional development to teachers. Following the meeting we invited a vendor to present to BAISNet and some of our own faculty and…well…let’s just say that it was not a very effective presentation. Thanks for those of you who managed to sit there f