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.

 Click here to see the projects.

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

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!

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

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.

http://room12.edublogs.org/

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/

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.

Big thanks to Mike Hetherington at mhetherington.net for his crystal-clear how-to instructions on how to set up a learnerblog site for students.

“Portfolios and documentation in the classroom are used to tell a story of a child’s life at school. This story is told through multiple perspectives (teacher/child/family), and is supported with a variety of work samplings, transcriptions, and other documentation types.

Several goals are attained through the thorough, thoughtful, and successful use of a well-planned portfolio and documentation process. These are:

• A child’s developmental progress is charted over time, and this aids in revealing their quality of thinking and skill level. Documentation is an authentic assessment tool that aids our assessment of the child’s experiences, and provides an opportunity for each child to self-assess their involvement and goals.

• Parents become more connected to work of their children. Documentation reflects the classroom experience to the outside observer, and shows the respect we hold for this work. Further, it gives parents and others a glimpse of the child’s involvement in project work, social relationships, and their use of the classroom environment.

• Documentation, portfolio development, and work sampling help us to make more informed curriculum decisions. It highlights activities that provide successes, and helps us to identify needs and areas to develop. It reflects accountability on all levels.”

Debra goes on to enumerate the different types of documentation that can be used for student portfolios, including narratives, transcriptions, photographs, observations, products and work samples, self-reflections, webbing, video and tapes.

I have seen Debra and her colleagues employ technology to help document their classroom experiences through extensive use of the digital camera, voice recordings, daily emails home to parents encapsulating that day’s activities, scanning student work, videotaping big events, and using word processors to type up enormous amounts of hand-written and recorded transcripts from student interviews.

I think that once most teachers learn about classroom documentation, they clearly see the value in it and would love to send their students home not just with completed “products” (research papers, artwork, etc.) but with a description of the process used to arrive at the product. But the inevitable question is how exactly are teachers supposed to find the time and wherewithal to pull it off?

I’ve been experimenting with using a combination of a digital camera and a PowerPoint template on my laptop to try to capture classes in the Computer Lab as they are happening. The template has a variety of ready-to-go slides with 1, 2, 4 or 6 picture placeholders and text boxes underneath them. I run around during class, capturing students at work with my camera. Then I put my camera aside and move around the room with my laptop and template. I interview kids as they work, asking open-ended questions like “how did you decide how to make this?” or “what is the hardest thing about this project?” while I type their responses into the template. After class I bring the photos in to the template, matching up the kids to their quotes. Then I can print out the documentation to display on the wall or email the whole thing home to parents. But I have to say, it takes a lot of steps and I couldn’t pull it off without other teachers in the room.

There’s always voice recordings or video cameras to help with this process of classroom documentation. But again, who has time on a regular basis to pull the sound into a movie or to edit the video into iMovie during their regular teaching life?

I’m still trying to wrap my brain around the various ways teachers and students can use Web 2.0 tools to document the process of student (and teacher) learning. Blogs and podcasts seem like excellent ways for learners to reflect, experiment and to evolve in front of a larger audience. I hope to work with some of our teachers in the coming months to begin experimenting with these newer forms of documentation.

An administrator once gave me some great advice, saying that not every classroom endeavor has to be a “gourmet meal.” That if you have one or two gourmet meals every once in a while, you’ll appreciate them more. Most of the time classroom “meals” end up being nourishing, healthy and perfectly fine, but nothing too fancy. Maybe the goal of using different documentation techniques should be to showcase an occasional gourmet meal that shows, rather than tells what is going on in our classrooms and inside the heads of our students.

For a long time, I’ve been arguing that the days of the “computer teacher” are over, and that teachers will never become comfortable, self-sufficient or see the computer lab as anything more than another “specialty class” (like P.E., music or world languages) until tech coordinators stop enabling classroom teachers by enouraging the “come to the lab and I’ll put on a show” technique. And yet…sigh…I’m deep into my second year at MCDS and I fear that I’m guilty of setting up that exact dynamic. The majority of our weekly Mac Lab classes are planned on the fly in the cafeteria, then I scramble back to the Lab to set up a template or launch a website, and the teacher spends the first half of class in the role of another student while I teach the lesson. Stand and deliver. Despite every bone in my body telling me that it’s exactly the way NOT to teach this stuff. Sigh…

The conundrum, of course, is time. Time to meet ahead with teachers and grade level teams to plan out our projects properly. Time to work with individual teachers to help them explore, experiment and become more self-sufficient. Time to unshackle myself from the Lab and head into the classrooms with a projector, a mobile lab, a digital camera, to be where the authentic learning and natural fit for technology truly comes.

Yes…I know…there are computer skills to learn. Technology standards we want our students to meet. But when/where/how and by whom should these skills and standards be taught? How is your school doing it?