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The BAISNet listserv had a recent threat requesting suggestions for online tools to make Timelines. Here are the links I’ve collected over the years:

Here’s a great way to explain how “cloud computing” can/should work in a school setting:

To Meet the Demands of a New Age from Steven H on Vimeo.

I have the great luxury of working with a group of 8th Graders and another teacher for the final three weeks of school on an intensive Film Project. Here is a one-day chase film they made, keeping in mind the concept of camera positioning and not “jumping the line.” Enjoy!

Change is in the air…I can smell it! We just launched two projects, one in 5th Grade, one in 8th Science, both involving yet another assignment involving PowerPoint/Keynote. My colleague and I have been working on a resource list for teachers & students, chock full ‘o examples and reasons why the old-style bulleted list slide shows are a thing of the past. To see our resource list, loaded with examples and links, just click here.

An old camp counselor of mine, Robert Goodman, is singing the same tune. Joyce Valenza just wrote this blog post on the very same topic. And having attended the recent CAIS 2009 Regional Meeting, I must say that there were far fewer “death by PowerPoint” presentations to sit through.

Hopefully our students will take the new thinking around designing electronic slides to heart. I promise to post examples here when projects are finished!

Terri Gross did a marvelous interview with Lawrence Lessing on Fresh Air yesterday. He’s a Stanford professor, a columnist for Wired Magazine and is a chair for Creative Commons. I’ve already listened to it twice…here’s the link:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=98591002

(Image courtesy of http://flickr.com/photos/creativecommons/362748137/)

Here’s a terrific video that’s making the rounds on a bunch of blogs I’ve been reading lately…I love it!

I just finished reading a post on WebLogg-Ed describing the Rip-Mix concept. I’ve been looking for the right terminology to describe an experience I’ve been having recently and “Rip-Mix” may be just the ticket…

Lately I’ve been reading Girls Like Us, a biography of Carole King, Joni Mitchell and Carly Simon. The book is laden with references to specific songs, regions in Canada, neighborhoods in NYC, musicians I’d never heard of, historical events, etc. What I’m finding is that it’s impossible to simply curl up with this book unless I have my laptop right next to me. As I read, I’m listening to snippets of songs in iTunes, looking up locations in Google Earth, searching for photos, reading articles, watching obscure vintage YouTube videos of these performers and listening to a custom-made Pandora station as the soundtrack as I read. I usually read as a way to “unplug” at the end of the day, but with this type of book I’m finding it virtually impossible.

Clearly, it’s time to switch to fiction for my next bedtime reading!

I’m clearly getting addicted to these videos. Here’s a really good one by David Truss at Pair-a-Dimes:

I just saw this meme on Andrea Hernandez’ Ed Tech Workshop blog…here goes:

I’m sitting in a meeting in an 8th Grade English classroom right now. I grabbed Born Confused by Tanuja Desai Hidier off the shelf, which I haven’t read. Here goes:

“And I wiggled my sack onto my back and walked on.”

I have been (sporadically) blogging since 2006! For the first time this summer, I had the opportunity to try blogging with my colleagues, which you can read more about here.

This past Fall, our Upper School (grades 6-8) Division Head decided to incorporate some Web 2.0 tools into her administrative repertoire. Rather than passing out the thick 3-ring binder with paperwork at our August division meeting, she created a series of Google Docs which she updates monthly. Before each Division Meeting she sends us an iGoogle tab with the Google Docs front and center, and features widgets on the tab that teachers might find useful and interesting (Spanish Word of the Day, This Day in History, NASA Image of the Day, etc.)

She has also been asking us to bring our laptops to each division meeting, where we have been taking the first 10-15 minutes of meeting time to leave comments on a blog she set up for the division, in part to address inevitable technical issues on the spot, and partly as a way to ensure that everyone contributes. Several colleagues immediately balked, asking “why are we taking valuable time away from our meetings to type our thoughts instead of talking face-to-face with the people here in the same room?!” She persisted.

This month she posted a series of questions on the blog ahead of time about some Fall professional development events we’ve participated in. She asked us to leave comments on the post PRIOR to our division meeting. Here’s a comment I just noticed this evening:

“I must confess that my initial reaction to the blog requirement was not especially favorable because I couldn’t quite see the advantages of pecking away at my keyboard instead of sharing oral comments in a face-to-face setting. Upon further reflection, however, I realized that this served a need for which I have long advocated: some sort of a public forum for colleagues to share their thoughts about guest speakers and large-scale meetings. For example, I was disappointed in certain features of J’s presentation (e.g. she rushed through the more nitty-gritty material in the second half of the talk and she passed out 22 pages of hard copy to each individual while espousing sustainability at all levels.) On the other hand, I am encouraged to hear through the blog that many of you felt inspired and well informed by what she shared (which has modified my own reaction to the presentation.)”

And here’s another:

“I think this is a great process (the blogging) because it frees up time for other things in meetings. I will defer to the teachers about what those things should be, but it seems like a good use of time to prethink and communicate with each other and not rehash all this in a meeting setting.”

Alas, yet another example of one of the most important personality traits an administrator ought to possess which I sorely lack…patience with the process.

(image source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/soulphoto/365740316/)

Two weeks before the Thanksgiving Break, Richard Kassissieh, Director of Technology at Caitin Gabel School invited me to “virtually” attend a meeting he had organized for his World Language teachers. One of his Spanish teachers has been experimenting with Voicethread for the past several months, and he wanted to share with his colleagues. Knowing that I am a Voicethread enthusiast, Richard thought it might be interesting to have me at the meeting as well. So for the first time, I Skyped into the meeting and “sat” in the corner of the room, listening, learning, and contributing to the conversation in Portland, OR from my own desk in the San Francisco Bay Area. I know that Skype is no longer a new technology, but the concept of inviting someone from “the outside” into our meetings in the role of co-learner was completely transformational for me. Thanks so much for the invitation, Richard…we can’t wait to bring you to one of our meetings!

• Read Richard’s account of our meeting here
• See the list of Voicethread examples I provided here
• See the list of Voicethread examples from Caitlin Gabel here

Here’s a little reality-check:

I’m sorry I didn’t find this clip before the election…

check out the Generation WE website

This video was recently made by 3 MCDS 8th Graders who went on a road trip to Nevada with their parents to help campaign for Obama. One more example of how so much learning happens beyond the walls of our schools…

Sometimes the simplest ideas in teaching truly do produce the most glorious results. Our Director of Diversity approached me in August with an idea — she was bringing the marvelous “In Our Family” portrait exhibit to our school for a month, and for the opening evening she was hoping to include a family storytelling component where participants could have the opportunity to tell a family story, record it, and burn it onto a CD. She was picturing stories along the lines of the amazing StoryCorps project so many of us have grown to love during our morning commutes with NPR on the radio. Better yet, I suggested, why not open the storytelling opportunity up to teachers, staff, students, parents, anyone in our community and put all of the stories on our own blog/podcast?

The results? We’ve been working on the project for a little less than a month, the opening of the Exhibit was this past Friday, and you can click right here to hear the unbelievable, poignant, funny, touching stories our MCDS Community Members have shared. We now plan to continue the story recording process during Grandparents Day and throughout the year.

 

Our Math teacher decided to start with a blank Voicethread page on which he can explain and review math concepts. He used his new Wacom Bamboo tablet for the writing.

I’m just amazed by the never-ending ways we’re finding to use Voicethread. Here’s a new one created by our Art Teacher and her 7th Graders:

One of our math teachers is experimenting with using VoiceThread for pre-Algebra homework with his 7th graders. Here are the initial results. He’s our first teacher with a classroom account ($60 for the school year) which lets his students log in with unique usernames and allows him divide his students into different class groupings in order to track their contributions to the site.

Every June my ed tech colleague and I meet and plan and strategize, saying “This summer will be different! Our new computer image will be flawless! It will be cloned onto every machine without a hitch! We’re so organized this year, nothing can go wrong! We’ll come back in August ready to focus on curriculum and teaching!” And yet, each late August, we return to campus to find that the image had problems, that Leopard won’t print on our Windows print server, that a bunch of machines were overlooked, that several of the student laptops are mysteriously missing and several more are missing keys on the keyboards.

Is it us? Unrealistic expectations? Too many things to roll out at once? Disorganized folks on the tech end of our department? Faulty equipment? I fear that the answer is one of those annoying “it’s just the nature of technology…” type of things. But sigh…it’s the beginning of the school year and we’re backpedaling, scrambing, covering, and improvising despite our best-laid plans. Breathe…

Every Fall I try to pick one or two new tools to pilot with teachers and students. Last year was the Year of Sketchup and Voicethread, which we successfully used with students in a number of grade levels. The year before that we experimented with Edublogs and Garageband for the very first time, and both tools are now practically indispensable in many classrooms. For the Fall of 2008 I will focus on iGoogle, Ning and Scratch. Here’s how we’re planning (so far!) to use these three tools:

1. iGoogle – Our tech-savvy Upper School Division Head has made the radical decision to go paperless with her fall teacher “notebook” at our upcoming division retreat. Rather, she has put all of the important parent letters, schedules, meeting agendas, etc. into Google Docs. She will then send each of us an iGoogle tab with the Google Docs gadget front and center. Also on the tab will be a variety of gadgets she wants to highlight as possible teaching tools. Each month she will send us a new tab with new gadgets, always keeping the Docs front and center. As we’ve been playing with this idea, I’ve been creating my own personal tabs to keep track of my favorite new gadgets and an aggregator for my favorite blogs.
2. Ning – On the heels of the fabulous Building Learning Communities conference this past July, two of our 7th and 8th grade teachers have decided to set up Ning Learning Communities for their students. One teacher is an English teacher and looks forward to giving each of her students their own blog space through the Ning, and hopes that it will become a safe place for her students to experiment with their writing. A math teacher plans to use his Ning as a place for students to discuss homework, work on group projects together, and to show their step-by-step work somehow. Can’t wait!
3. Scratch – My Ed Tech partner-in-crime, Jen Cronan Flinn, and I attended a full-day seminar at MIT this summer and had the opportunity to learn how to use Scratch, the latest educational programming software to come out of the MIT Media Labs (home of Logo.) We are excited to pilot Scratch in several grades, and one of our goals is to come up with ways beyond math to integrate this fantastic program.

I love attending conferences with colleagues. Truth be told, the content and location of the conference are so much less important than the time spent together off campus, with time to free-associate, dream and collaborate together. But as it happens, BLC08 is turning out to be simply fabulous. We’re trying something new — a shared blog in which to post our individual and collective experiences at the conference. Check it out by visiting http://mcdsatblc08.blogspot.com — what a simple-but-elegant way to reflect and converse!
blc08

I leave SF early tomorrow morning to attend the Building Learning Communities conference in Boston, MA. Five of my MCDS colleagues and I will be attending together. I absolutely can’t wait. Haven’t heard of this conference? Visit http://www.novemberlearning.com or watch this video:

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:

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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!

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