"Facebook Top 20 Learning Applications"

Short video here on the many educational applications that can be installed and utilized within the Facebook platform. A shout out to Derek Baird for posting this in his Twitterstream.

Making Friends Online

I'm often times asked by folks when I tell them about our student Internet Radio show, The Gator Radio Experience, "How did you find those people from [insert location here] to talk live with your students." Many people who ask this question of me probably know how to find a doctor in their community, a mechanic to repair their car, or a good babysitter to look after their children. They all have networks in their local communities that they can reference when they are in need of such resources. Finding people to collaborate with online is really no different than finding people to work with in our respective communities. However, just like it takes time to build up a support network in our local communities, the same can be said for working in the virtual world. It takes time to build up a network of trustworthy individuals who are willing and able to collaborate with us on various projects.

When my wife and I relocated to the San Francisco Bay Area a year ago, we only knew a few people. However, these few people showed us around the area and introduced us to many people that they knew. A year after our move we're still not fully established and we don't know the area that well, but we definitely have a little larger network than when we first moved here. We've gone hiking, to baseball games, dinners, etc with both new and old friends. This network has been incredibly kind and supportive to us throughout our transition. I'm sure this network will continue to expand as we get to know more people in the different aspects of our lives here in the Bay Area.

The same exact scenario plays out in online relationships and communities. It might even take more time, quite honestly, to build up rapport and trusting relationships that can be leveraged for a variety of different activities from professional development experiences to classroom projects. Just like moving to a new community, you have to be patient when you first enter an online community. Look for a few helpful people to get you started and they'll introduce you to many of their trusted connections. Be sure to share useful information as this helps you establish credibility and rapport in the online community. Build up a profile that includes your photo, your interests, your professional background, and links to any online spaces like a blog or wiki that you work in. Chances are that if you are an honest, thoughtful and caring contributor to the online community, that community will return the favor by supporting you in all sorts of powerful ways. And if you remain patient during the process of becoming acquainted with your online community, I think you'll find this to be an invaluable form of professional development and continuous learning.

*Photo-my wife, Erin, and I pictured in front of the Golden Gate Bridge early on in our transition to the Bay Area.

The Tinkering School

This is one of my new favorite TED Talks from Gever Tulley about his Tinkering School. What if we made more learning objects available within our school communities and simply permitted members of the learning community to tinker?? This is only 4 minutes long...well worth your time, I promise.

You gotta see this...

This video has been passed around the Twitters in a viral manner this morning...if you haven't seen this video, take the 3+ minutes to do so now. This might be the most creative YouTube I've ever seen. What a beautiful piece of art!

What does your email signature look like??

With the movement to a new email system, I took the opportunity to create a fresh email signature. I took a screenshot of my signature and included it in this post. In the spirit of openness and transparency, I decided to include the major online workspaces that I use on a regular basis in my email signature. I hope that in some small way this models some possibilities for the many parents, teachers, students and administrators that I work with in my position as the instructional technology coordinator at my school.

How about you, what does your email signature look like??

My Summer Reading List

Below are a few books that I've either recently finished or plan to read at some point this summer. I should say that I've read all of these books so far using my iPhone and the kindle application. While I have many complaints about the proprietary nature of the kindle format, I must say that I find the iPhone to be an incredibly efficient e-reader. I believe I'm able to read at a much, much faster rate on my iPhone in comparison to a traditional book. I attribute this to being able to personalize the font size to the one that best suits my needs I do wish that Copy>Paste from the kindle worked...it would make it so much easier to reference excerpts from the text in blog posts.


Outliers - Malcolm Gladwell
I finished this book a few days ago and if I can get things together, I will post a review soon.






Doing School - How We Are Creating a Generation of Stressed Out, Materialistic, and Miseducated Students - Denise Pope
Probably the book that I've enjoyed the most thus far. Again, more thoughts as time allows.





The Google Story - Mark Maiseed
I started this book a few months ago and set it aside for a bit. I finally had the opportunity to finish it up last week. A good read, but I haven't enjoyed it nearly as much as the other Google-related book that I just started reading, What Would Google Do?




What Would Google Do? - Jeff Jarvis
This book is absolutely fascinating. I'm currently about at the half-way point in this book and feel as though it is a must read for school leadership. I've bookmarked many passages along the way and hope to reflect further on Jarvis' excellent book in a future post.




Mindset: The New Psychology of Success -Carol Dweck
This is our school's faculty summer reading book and I'm eager to begin reading this as it has been on my list for quite some time now.

Google Teacher Academy Application Video

Below you'll find the video that I created as a requirement of the application process for the Summer '09 Google Teacher Academy which is taking place in Boulder, CO in early August. Applicants for the GTA are required to submit a 60 second video either on the topic of "Motivation and Learning" or "Classroom Innovation." My video is on "Motivation and Learning." I really enjoyed the process of building up this piece and found it extraordinarily challenging to convey my message in this mixed media format in only 60 seconds of time. This has consumed my last couple of days...now it is time to step away from the computer and go into full summer teacher-bum-mode ;-) Project notes on how this video was created are included at the end of this post.



-All images used in this project are licensed in the Creative Commons and posted at flickr (a great big thank you to everyone who posts their content in the Creative Commons)

-The audio track is from an artist that goes by "Tryad" over at jamendo. This is the same audio track that was used in Michael Wesch's viral "A Vision of Students Today" video. Thank you for posting this song with a Creative Commons license, Tryad. Teacher geeks like me truly appreciate this.

-The slides were all assembed in the Google Docs Presentation tool. This is a web based slide authoring tool that I've really come to appreciate. I love how this platform faciliates collaboration and sharing. The Google Docs slides are posted online over here if you'd like to see them.

-After the slides were assembled, I started doing a few screen recordings with Jing Pro and then posting to YouTube. I probably posted 3-4 rough cuts in this manner. I struggled, though, with editing and timing of the video so ultimately I switched over to Screenflow. After recording in screenflow I adjusted the duration for the various slides and dropped in the audio track. This video was extremely helpful in optimizing the settings out of screenflow for posting in YouTube's HD format.

-The word cloud at the beginning of the video was created with wordle.

-There were many, many pieces and ideas that I had to leave out of this video. For example, I wanted to do a series of slides on, "What if...students could connect and collaborate with other students around the world...to solve complex probles, improve cultural sensitivity/awareness, etc." I'll have to save this for "What If 2.0" I guess!

Summercore Professional Development Experience Reflections

We just wrapped up an intense week of professional development on all things relating to educational technology. See my previous post to view a Michael Wesch inspired video that we created at the end of the week. All-in-all, I thought it really was an excellent experience with a total of 26 faculty members going through Summercore together. Below are a few questions and reflections I have

1. How can we share out our work from this week? We can do this virtually by making our Moodle site public and I think we could possibly do some sharing at a faculty meeting in August/September when we get back to school. What else can we do??

2. How can we make learning experiences like this a more regular part of our culture? While this was a fantastic week, it was only a single week. Can we make this type of learning a regular part of what we do without it becoming another add-on?

3. The cross pollination between teachers of different departments and divisions was immensely valuable. How can we extend the non-traditional groupings of faculty throughout the school year? Perhaps faculty could self form groups based upon professional learning interests.

4. Everyone was a teacher and a learner over the course of the week. Many thanks to Heather, Bear, Sarah and Doris for serving as faculty assistant instructors. The model of teachers teaching teachers is a good one and quite worthy of expanding.

5. The morning discussions where each person shared their thoughts on the previous evening's readings were fantastic. I only wish that some of these discussions took place virtually in moodle forums so that our faculty members would've had this experience as well.

6. I think the 8:30-5:30 days were about an hour or two too long. I think the days could've been shortened up to allow for more asynchronous reflection work in forums/blogs.

7. Did we focus too much on the tools in not enough on the concepts? For example, should it be, "iMovie and Voicethread," or rather, "Conveying a message through a mixed media narrative?"

A special thanks to Steve Bergen and Lynne Schalman of Summercore. This was our second year of working with them and they really have helped us progress in our thinking about the role of digital technology in learning. The "Olive Tree and the Lexus" metaphor is one that we'll all be grappling with as we move forward.

Castilleja Faculty - "A Vision of Learning Today"

Upon completion of an intense, week-long professional development experience on all things relating to "Learning 2.0" and digital learning, we created this short video response to Michael Wesch's "A Vision of Students Today." Be sure to watch Wesch's "A Vision of Students Today" if you haven't seen it yet.

Enjoy!

I gotta go to garage sales more often...

I picked up this sweet little office ornament today from a neighbor's garage sale. He is a Google employee and is relocating to NYC. This is one of my best garage sale purchases...ever! Kind of fitting as my school just fully transitioned to Google Apps/Mail services this weekend!