Second Life in Education

ISTE on Second Life hosts many valuable sessions to keep us up with the latest in technologies for our classrooms. In February, 2011, the group hosted a four-week series about teaching with iPods and iPads.  To learn more about ISTE Second Life, watch the video, Computing in the Clouds and check out the information about Second Life in education.

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.

Photojojo! It’s Fun. It’s Free

Photojojo is a free online resource where you and your students can learn to “turn a photo into a mural in 5 minutes flat”, shape your photos into a dog or a cat, create an origami photo, put students’ faces on cupcakes, make a tripod from a water bottle or a photo holder from a tennis ball, and so much more. A February volume, for example, shows how it’s possible to move landmarks, in your photos, of course. You can subscribe to Photojojo’s twice a week email newsletter or get its creative ideas through RSS.

Common Sense Media Toolkits for Educators

Common Sense Media is a valuable resource site for parents and educators. It’s a place where you can get the help you need to evaluate media and its impact on children. If you appreciate the resources and guidelines offered by Common Sense Media, you may want to order hard copies of the Common Sense Tool Kit for Schools and the Early Childhood Toolkits.  The school toolkit ($50) features grade-by-grade guides, tip sheets, a presentation with talking points, parent communication materials, a DVD with 22 videos, a CD with electronic versions of all parent education materials and more. The Early Childhood Toolkit ($50) provides ideas and templates for helping educators work with parents of children five-years-old and younger. It includes suggestions for a parent workshop, PowerPoint slides, an educational DVD, and handouts. The school DVD can be purchased separately for $20.

Flip Video Madness

It never fails. When I pull out my Flip Video camera, everyone not familiar with this tech tool asks where to get one. For example, after showing one to a physical education teacher, the teacher ordered her own little camera that night and now has an extensive collection of PE class videos online that she and her students created. Why has this camera become so popular? It’s compact, extremely easy to use, and is very affordable. It’s the perfect way to get students motivated to do social studies, literature, and science reports and to have fun with foreign language practice. Kids like to see themselves on video and learn while they are filming and being filmed. Think of the five-year-old doing a book report on her favorite book, Fancy Nancy; the athlete creating a video for his college portfolio; and a group of Middle Schoolers doing travelogues. The camera works with two AA batteries, a power adapter, or a battery pack. Just insert the USB connection into your computer and your video is ready for you. You never need to go searching for a cable to get your video into the computer. If you and your students want to film underwater, there’s a case for that, and with FlipShare TV, students and parents can watch the video on a TV without wires.

Shows Students How to Avoid Plagiarism

Our job is to teach students how to avoid plagiarism, not especially to catch them after they submit a less than acceptable papers. PaperToolsPro is a writing and research management program designed to help both students and professional writers with their work. With it, users can collect notes, organize content, move information to a word processor, and create bibliographies and citations such as MLA and APA. The program includes resources designed to help teachers help students avoid plagiarism, understand research paper style and citation formats, and evaluate sources. If you are interested in learning more about PaperToolsPro, you’ll want to the watch videos that introduce the program, show how to use the program, and how to make notes into a draft. There’s also a detailed tour , as well as demo accounts. Individual subscriptions are $20 a year and school subscriptions are $200 plus $1 for each enrolled student. Other pricing options are available. Until 12/31/09, there’s a special—two teacher subscriptions for one price of one.

PaperToolsPro™

Schools of Education & 21st Century Learning

If you think back to the education courses you took in college or graduate school, how many of them prepared you for the use of technologies in education? That's an extremely difficult thing to do with technologies changing so fast that by the time students take an ed tech course, much of the content may be outdated. So what are Schools of Education to do? Maybe it's like programming where the programming language you learn is not as important as learning to think like a programmer. It sure doesn't hurt to learn the latest and greatest technologies, but it's also important to learn be a 21^st Century thinker and learner in a world where so much information about what teachers need to know may be found online.

Be A NECC Blogger

ISTE (International Society for Technology in Education) invites you to join in with blogging about NECC 2009 in Washington, D.C. To become a NECC blogger, all you have to do is to submit your name, some brief info, and your blog URL. Once your information is submitted, you'll be added to NECC's Google spreadsheet of bloggers. If you don't have a blog, you can use NECC's Blogger Outreach to find out more about this national ed tech convention, and if you are heading to the conference, you can use the blogs to stay connected while there. So far some of the blogs on the list include ISTE Connects, Edublogs from Perth Australia, UNC Greensboro, and Kenilworth School District from Illinois.

Rate Your Vision for Technology in Your School

Just where does your school stand in elearning? The Software and Information Industry Association (SIIA) has a vision for technology and elearning, Vision K-20, which features student engagement and achievement, equity and access, documentation and tracking, collaborative learning communities, teaching and administrative effectiveness, and 21^st Century skills. Information is included on the SIIA site to help you achieve goals such as meeting the needs of all students, effective management, learning anyplace and anytime, nurturing creativity and self-expression, and making sure students are motivated and involved in their learning. You can find out how your school is doing by logging on to the SIIA site and taking the Vision Survey.