Showcasing Student Video

School Video News (SVN) Student Filmmaking invites your students to submit short films (documentary, drama, comedy, scary) and trailers, along with their bios, to help launch this new site. The deadline is June 1, 2012. To submit a video, send an email to SVN that includes a link to where the video can be seen. The site will be a free companion site to School Video News (SNV-TV).  If you and your students are interested in filmmaking, register now.

 

Learning Videos from MIT & the Khan Academy

It’s called MIT+K-12, and it means exciting learning about engineering, robotics, technology, bacteria, and other topics in science, engineering, technology, and math. MIT students are creating 5-10 minute videos, which can be viewed on the MIT+K-12 YouTube Channel. So far 75 films have been completed and about half have been posted online. Many of the films are also on the Khan Academy site.

Online Learning: Resources to Get You Started

According to an Ed Week survey, 93% of those who responded to a poll about virtual learning felt that “educational providers need to integrate more accountability measures to ensure that virtual education works effectively,” and 57% answered that their districts hadn’t made comparisons between those involved in virtual learning and those learning in traditional ways. In addition to the problems of exploring whether virtual education is working are the problems of knowing what types of virtual education are best for your students’ needs and how to bring online studies into the curriculum.

Education Week Spotlight includes a free pdf download featuring the implementation of online learning. Included in the interactive contents are topics relating to blended learning, accountability; teaming for virtual learning with other districts; criticisms of virtual learning; advantages of virtual learning for autistic, gifted, and at-risk students; school-Internet relationship’s impact on virtual learning; and resources for implementation.

The Nerdy Teacher Wants You to Reflect

Nick Provenzano, the Nerdy Teacher, offers his Year-End Tech Reflections in Edutopia. He suggests that those of us in education should take time to think about the tech tools and lessons we used with our students this year in order to determine how to make our use of technologies even better next year.  As summer vacation approaches and with our school-year memories fresh in mind, we should ask ourselves questions such as:

What tools did I use and how did I use them?

What tools helped me accomplish what I wanted with my students?

What wouldn’t I use in the coming school year?

What are my goals for my students and for me for the future?

Show Me Is a Favorite

At a recent meeting of K-12 tech coordinators, librarians, teachers, and administrators, the free app, Show Me, was touted in several sessions. The app helps you create and share “whiteboard-style” lessons when using iPads.  With Show Me, you can send lessons to students, and your students can create materials as they work with each other. A gallery of lessons is being developed as teachers share what works for them.  Show Me also provides a Video of the Day that gives examples of excellent ideas for use of the app.

Open Source Tech Tools for Teachers of Elementary Students

OER or Open Educational Resources are moving into elementary schools, because according to Karen Fasimpaur of Techedge, they make sense both because of budgetary issues and because of their flexibility. Some of the open sources she suggests are: Free Reading, a reading intervention program for students in k-6; Teachers’ Domain, a place to find video clips, interactives, lessons, and more from PBS; and Curriki with its more than 45,000 resources. Other OER sites Fasimpaur suggests would be valuable for teachers of elementary students include: /OER for K-12 LiveBinder, The Kids Open Dictionary, Learn NC, and OER Commons.

Technology Megatrends

One hundred “global thought leaders” working with the Horizon Project met in January 2012 to talk about research relating to technology and education. They came up with 28 megatrends of which 10 were considered the most important. These megatrends are bringing about significant changes in our world, our interactions, and the way we learn. Although you can read more about the top ten in the New Media Consortium’s Communique´on the Horizon Project, some of the trends include the following:

• People expect to work, learn, socialize, and play whenever and wherever they want....
• The Internet is becoming a global mobile network....
• The technologies we use today are increasingly cloud-based....
• Legal notions of ownership and privacy lag behind the practices....
• The Internet is constantly challenging us to rethink learning and education, while redefining our notion of literacy.
• There is a rise in informal learning as individual needs are redefining schools....

Techedge offers information on the megatrends as they relate to young learners and asks, “After Megatrends...What Next?” Some of the solutions suggested to help teachers with tech expectations of their students are: using LiveMinutes for online discussion, Audicity for interviews, ShowMe for “re-imagining the learning process”, UStream for video capture, and Dropbox for file sharing. For additional information, check out the very useful article by Pat LeMay Burr, “What Young Learners Expect and How Technology Delivers”.

Teacher’s Secrets Series

Direct your students to the Power to Learn Teacher’s Secret Series. There, they will learn not only how to make their assignments target the content you expect but also how to create reports and projects that have all the elements you are looking for. We all know that students can get carried away with the pizzazz of technology and forget the essentials of an assignment. This series, which so far includes PowerPoint presentations and podcasts, should help students to avoid the pitfalls of including animations, video, fancy colorful type, and graphics that do not enhance the target content. The series is in the Computers and Homework section of Power to Learn, so while you are there you might want to browse through the list of articles to see which others might be of use to you and your students.

Why Learn iBooks Author?

Why write your own text with iBooks Author? According to Burt Lo and Joe Wood in the T|H|E Journal article, 7 Reasons to Learn Apple iBook Author Now, the January announcement of iBook Author was a “big day” for educators making use of digital devices, especially mobile devices, in classrooms. California CUE (Computer Using Educators) has been hosting tech events to encourage educators to put this new software to work.  During these workshops and the CUE convention in Palm Springs, Lo and Wood along with the educators and administrators in the sessions, came up with the “WHYS” Mac users running OSX Lion  (10.7) should start preparing their own book with the Author. These include the ability to organize and integrate interactive materials, Weblinks, video clips, presentations, 3-D objects, photo galleries, text, spreadsheets, presentations—materials you’ve probably already collected, directly into your text. Students can use Author, as well, for publishing, writing, and creating portfolios and reports, and schools can develop professional materials with them.  The created work can be shared free or for a fee at the iBooks Store or shared within a school or district. Educators looking for resources for their iBooks may turn to a library of “interactive objects”.  iBooks are easy to create, publish, update, and share. I’ve started making an iBook, and find that Lo and Wood are right: the iBook Author is a winner.

Change and Choice in Technology

With new technologies coming at us so fast, it’s difficult to decide what choices to make. If you are a school administrator, you may be attempting to be a change agent for innovations you are sure will be perfect for your school. But before you do, think about the consequences of what you are doing. Will your teachers “buy in” to your ideas and if you think they won’t, or at least some won’t, how do you get them to make a turn around? According to Dean Shareski, Tech & Learning, teachers as professionals need to have a choice about what they do. As Bob Tschannen-Moran in his book, Evocative Coaching wrote, they don’t “resist making changes; they resist the people who try to make them change.” Therefore, it seems that teachers need to be given time to move forward and make their own investment in technologies.  So what do you do when you want to, for example, give all students iPads to work on their studies? Some teachers will take off with the digital device, while others may ignore them no matter how much in-service education they receive in how to use the technology. I’ve often said that educators are for change as long as the change doesn’t affect them.  Some administrators believe that you have to force change for curriculum innovations such as this, because if students are given digital devices, they, and their parents, will expect teachers to make use of them, and if some teachers have excellent content on course pages such as Moodle, parents and students will expect all teachers to do likewise. For some change, perhaps the time has come when teachers simply have to accept the change and work with it as best they can. This doesn’t necessarily mean that they are being forced to change the way they teach or the content covered. It does mean that they will be using different tools for inspiring learning.