Free Downloads of Page, Draw, Photo, Web, and Panorama Programs

To demonstrate to you how easy Serif products are to use, the company is offering free downloads of starter programs of their products. These include: PagePlus for desktop publishing, WebPlus for Web design, PhotoPlus for photo editing, DrawPlus for graphic design and art work, and PanoramaPlus for creating panoramas. There are also free content packs, which include templates you can use.  While you are on the Serif site, be sure to check out PagePlus X5, updated PagePlus software that lets you design just about anything, for according to Serif, “It’s more than a desktop publishing program.“
The Serif products work with Windows computer systems.

Your Vision of Students Today

Professor Michael Wesch’s YouTube Channel is asking teachers to document, through video, special moments in teaching and learning. If you would like to participate in his new video, which will probably be titled, The Vision of Students Today, do your filming and upload a two-minute clip to his channel before February 15, 2011. Your students will enjoy helping you find that critical learning moment to share.

Kids & Technologies: How Student Learn

A fourth grade teacher, knowing of my interest in kids and technologies, advised, “You’ve got to read Rewired by Larry D. Rosen. It explains so much about what those of us in education need to know.” She was right. This book and other resources by Rosen give us a glimpse into the “psychology of technology” so that we will be better able to understand how our students learn. According to Rosen, the iGeneration, those students born in the 90s, expect “instant access” to information and people.  These are kids who are constantly connected through digital devices and believe that anything is possible. Additional Information about Rosen’s books is available on his site and at Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

Pros and Cons of Using Social Media in Your School

THE Journal’s article Keeping It Clean by John K. Waters, provides excellent information about sites like Facebook and MySpace and their use in schools. Could someone put up a fake social media page and make it look like it is your school’s official page? Yes, says an administrator at Blaine High School in Anoka-Hennepin School District in Minnesota, who adds that the person who did it has yet to be identified. The page seemed harmless at first, but then caused problems. Anoka-Hennepin decided that the best thing to do was to establish an official district page with individual pages for each school. The pages target parents, teachers, and administrators and are not pages for students to interact with school personnel or each other. In the Palo Alto Unified School District in California, students use social networking to learn about school events and to access teacher pages. Palo Alto installed LinkExtend, which includes KidSafe and ways to alert users about problem links. Some educators, like Matt Levinson (From Fear to Facebook: One School’s Journey) suggest that Facebook should follow Google’s example and provide a place that “teachers and students could use ... as a teaching and learning tool securely.” That’s what Edmodo does. It’s a free network that doesn’t require students to give private information. Teachers sign up for it and interaction is directed by teachers.

Free Online Professional Development

If you’d like to learn more about technology and teaching with technologies, all you have to do is to check out the opportunities online. The January issue of THE Journal provides a nice list of professional development links for you.  To upgrade your skills, why not try ASCD Webinars, OK2Ask, Educator’s Professional Development, Classroom 2.0, and Teachers’ Domain? Of course, there are other places to investigate for professional development. Think podcasts, blogs, and for-pay online Webinars and courses. In today’s world you can learn on your own, what you want, when you want.

Helping All Students Through Teacher Websites

Chris Alper-Leroux’s Best Practice piece, Using Instructional Websites to Differentiate, provides suggestions for teacher sites that go beyond the usual “class syllabi”. As a Grade 8 Earth Science teacher, she and her co-teacher have found that using multiple methods for students to access content through their website is engaging for students and results in fewer behavior problems. They use online texts and texts on CD and post “textbook audio clips to the site....”  Their site also features chapter introduction videos; text chapter sections complete with audio, images and vocabulary videos; mid-chapter reviews, and practice tests.  According to Alper-Leroux, [T]he anywhere, anytime availability of a learning-goal based instructional Website, organized to match the sequence of a chapter or unit, allows in-depth, structured remediation for a student working with adults in resource rooms, study skills classes, support periods or outside of the school environment.”

The Best eSchool News TV of 2010

eSchool News picked what it considers its five top videos of 2010 and has them ready for you to view. They include Karen Cator, Director of Educational Technology for the U.S. Department of Education, discussing the National Education Technology Plan; AASA (American Association of School Administrators) Executive Director Dan Domenech on the divide between school reformers and public school educators; Gotta Keep Reading in which students from Ocoee Middle School dance for reading; New York University’s Diane Ravitch tackling current issues in education; and Alan November of November Learning at ISTE (International Society for Technology in Education) talking about the philosophy and culture of our schools. November, for example, tells how during his early years of teaching one of his students broke into a computer lab. November realized he was breaking in to learn and understood that the “structure of school wasn’t really designed to support different learning styles.” All the videos are excellent; Ocoee Middle School reading dancers will have you dancing and smiling along with them.

Are Assessments Improved with Online Learning?

Education Week’s Ian Quillen reports that the “interactivity, flexibility, and digital permanence of online curricula” has led researchers to believe that testing will change as well. The future may include interactive assessments that will tell us both if students have mastered content and how they mastered it.  Instead of the test at the end of the unit, semester or year, assessment will be ongoing as it integrates into curricular content. For additional information on assessment through use of the collection of continuous data, check out Assessment: Measure What Matters in the Transforming American Education Learning Powered by Technology report.

Would Online Courses Save Your School Money?

To ease budget problems, Ridge High School in Basking Ridge, New Jersey, will eliminate one of its instructional periods. Students, however, will be able to sign up for online courses and earn credits after successful completion of the courses. They can select from about 3000 courses, but have to have approval from the school administration to sign up. Fees of from about $200-$500 will be charge for taking each online course. One school administrator estimates that about 10% of the school’s 1700 students will choose to expand their studies with these courses. For its online courses, Ridge subscribes to the Virtual High School Global Consortium. To learn more about the Virtual High School experience, take a look at a Day in the Life on the Virtual site.

How to Start a Mobile Learning Program in Your School

On the eSchool News site you can access the Webinar archive, “Launching a Mobile Learning Program: What Every School Leader Should Know”.  Using the archive you’ll learn about Lake Tahoe’s Netbook program and how it saved the district money and saved teachers time in addition to increasing “student engagement and enthusiasm.” Leading the session are Dr. Jim Tarwater, Superintendent of Lake Tahoe School District and Linda Uhrenholt, Regional Education Director, AT&T.  Tahoe’s plan is for all students, Grades 3-12, to have Netbooks with cellular connections by the end of 2012. Uhrenholt says that we are at a tipping point with mobile learning in our schools both for students and for faculties. Students envision learning at their fingertips, not waiting to use computers during a scheduled period. That vision can be achieved with mobile technologies like Netbooks. No longer will students at Tahoe carry heavy backpacks, for their books and their homework will be on their Netbooks. To make the mobile computing happen, the district is partnering with AT&T, Cisco, and Microsoft Live at Edu.  Tarwaters says when you look at the cost of Netbooks compared to the cost of textbooks and laptops, you’ll see great savings. Tahoe will not purchase textbooks in the future except for special needs students. In the Webinar, one of the district’s two IT specialists explains how the program works.