Alverno College Pre-Service Teacher Meeting

I had the good fortune and privilege to speak with 16 pre-service teachers in Alverno College's teacher pre-service teacher program this morning. Pat Walsh, who is taking over as the facilitator of this class titled, "Technology in Education," called me 1 week ago asking if I'd be willing to host a class session on our campus. Pat's colleague who started out at the instructor was unable to continue due to health complications. I said I would be happy to host the class and I also thought up an activity to have the students participate in prior to our visit today. After hanging up with Pat, I called her back and suggested that her students watch Sir Ken Robinson's wonderful TED Talk titled, "Do Schools Kill Creativity?" Students watched the 20 minute clip and then reflected on the video and introduced themselves to me in the form of a text comment on a Voicethread that I emailed over to Pat. You can click here to meet these wonderful students!

I really enjoyed our time today. I most likely spoke way to much and threw too many ideas and concepts at them, but this was the first time that I've ever met with a group of pre-service teachers and I wanted to show them as many possibilities as our short amount of time would allow. We started out our meeting with a visit from my colleague and peer down at Plano Middle School, Scott Meech. It was nice of Scott to take time away from his busy day today to speak with us about some of the things we've been up to in our Protecht project. We talked about how we use some of these tools to collaborate and work with one another even though we're scattered all across the country. Scott brought up the concept of the "back channel" which was something unfamiliar to this group. Vicki Davis, the "Cool Cat Teacher" from Camilla, Georgia, wrote an interesting blog post on using a back channel with students. We did have one of the students talk about how she uses SMS messaging on her cell to back channel and talk with other students in class. This was interesting, as I've read quite bit about cell phones as instructional tools this year. Anyway, it was great to bring Scott into the mix as he always brings up interesting points that make you think and I'm glad the students were introduced to Skype as a way to invite remote guests into a classroom environment.

After our talk with Scott, we took a look at Karl Fisch's "Did You Know Video" and followed this up with a brief discussion. I've used this video this year with parents, teachers and now pre-service teachers. It is such a great piece to frame any discussion on what it means to teach and learn in the 21st century.

After our Skype conversation with Scott we fired up Ustream and broadcast our session. I twittered out the ustream URL and we had 3 or 4 other folks tune in (thanks to jepcke, jerthebear, and plennig for joining in the conversation via the chat box in ustream-I'm sorry I wasn't able to check the chat box...for those of you who would like to see the chat transcript, click here). I also sent out a Twitter post asking some of my twitter buddies to say hello. I think the impact of twitter, Ustream and Scott's visit via Skype really had an impact on this group. We received hello messages from my Twitterbuddies all over the world, which was pretty powerful for them to see. I took three screenshots of the Twitter replies to our group... these are posted online: Screenshot 1, screenshot 2, screenshot 3.

I was quite impressed with this group-I think they're going to take some of these ideas and concepts and run for miles and miles. Many of them are already using Facebook and tools with similar features and capabilities. I hope that they can tweak things a bit and customize the way they use these tools so they can be leveraged as instructional assets in their classrooms (or "studios" and "global communications centers" as we talked about!)

As promised, I told Pat that I would provide a link to the list of "Emerging Technologies" that Ryan Bretag twittered out last night (talk about just in time professional exchanges!) You may find this document online by clicking here. I'm fairly certain that this document was created collaboratively by folks in Ryan's professional learning network (PLNs-for more on PLNs, check out Vinnie Vrotny's K12 Online conference session on PLNs from last fall).

Today we also talked about productivity tools in comparison to creativity tools. To me, the tools that we talked about today are ones that promote and foster creativity. Here are the tools that I currently use most often to collaborate, communicate, learn, create, and engage in professional development:

• Skype
• Voicethread
• Google Docs-Watch the "Google Docs in Plain English" video on YouTube*
• Blogger.com
• Delicious Social Bookmarking
• Wikispaces
• Twitter
• Ustream.TV
• RSS (I really wanted to touch on RSS and Google Reader more today, but I just ran out of time. RSS and Google Reader are two tools that allow you to effectively manage and sift through all of the streams/information that you subscribe to)
  
• Google Reader
• Flickr Online Photo Sharing
• Classroom 2.0 - Professional networking community for teachers. Has a similar look and feel to other social networking platforms. This is a wonderful way to share, exchange, and meet other educators from all over the world.
  

*Actually, all of the "Plain English" CommonCraft videos are excellent. Lee Lefever has videos that explain blogging, Twitter, Wikis, social networking, and other concepts in "Plain English." Click here for the CommonCraft channel on YouTube.

The recorded conversation and slides from today's meeting with the Alverno students is embedded below. At some point I'll edit down the recorded audio and post that here as well.

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*Photo courtesy of a user on flickr who gave me explicit permission to use this photo for educational purposes (name is not mentioned because it isn't "K12 friendly")

Parent Education - Parent Web2.0 Study Group

I'm really looking forward to the first face-to-face meeting for our Middle School parent web2.0 study group this Tuesday, February 5th at 6:30 pm. I think this is going to be a wonderful opportunity for our parents to roll up their sleeves and explore the world of the "Read/Write" web. To quote Will Richardson in his excellent book, Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms, "There is no better way to understand the impact of the Read/Write Web than becoming part of it." From my pre-service days at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, I've always been a big believer in the concepts of "learn by doing" and constructivist teaching and learning. This learning experience for our parents is going to be highly constructivist with different parents engaging in different ways based upon their unique interests and background knowledge. Over the course of the next few months we'll meet face-to-face, virtually via tools like Wimba, and we'll have asynchronous homework assignments to reflect upon.

Another interesting component of this study group that I'm anticipating is that we are linking up with a similar study group being led by Vinnie Vrotny down at North Shore Country Day in Winnetka, IL. We hope to use Vinnie's Moodle system as the central launching point for our work with everyone carving out their own unique learning path from here.

We're looking for guests to join us to share their experiences in the world of web2.0 tools (either professionally, personally, or both) with our group. Joining us via skype, wimba, etc are all possibilities. Please let me know if you'd be interested in speaking with us and/or sitting in on our sessions.

Parent Ed Event-Growing Up Online

Last night I met three other parents online in a skype chat session to discuss the PBS Frontline special, "Growing Up Online." Two of the parents were from USM (the school I work at) and we were also joined by Lorna Costantini, a parent/parent coordinator from a school in St. Catherines, Ontario. Lorna is someone who I recently met online and we're participating in the Webcast Academy 2.4 class together. I must say that it was nice to be able to think aloud and process this event collaboratively with the other chat participants. I also really enjoyed the experience of watching this alongside three other parents as I'm not a parent myself-it was great to get their perspective and hear their voice on this issue.

I'm amazed at what we've managed to do at USM over the last few months. At the beginning of the year I never would've even thought of conducting a parent education session through a live chat. While this experience wasn't perfect (one of the parents commented that it was difficult to follow the program and chat at the same time-I agree) it certainly opens the doors for some different ways of thinking about parent education with the ultimate goal of including more parents in the conversation.

By the way, this wasn't broadcast in Lorna's area in Ontario so I ustreamed it to her. Included in this post is a screenshot that Lorna took while watching the ustream feed and participating in the chat. It was nice to be able to do this so she could follow along and engage in the conversation live with us.

By the way, if you didn't get to see Growing Up Online last night on TV, it is available for viewing online any time via the PBS website. The Washington Post held a chat on Thursday morning with the producers of the segment. The chat log may be pursed online here (some really interesting questions/answers in the chat).

Skype Conference Call w/Author Gene Yang-Summary

We had an amazing conversation with Gene Yang, author of American Born Chinese, at the end of the day with our 8th grade students and teaching team. Gene was an incredibly engaging personality and had some wonderful anecdotes to share regarding the process of constructing his book. It was so cool at the beginning of the conference watching him sketch one of his comic characters...that was just so neat to see live.

We used a variety of technologies to make the magic happen today. We used Skype for the voice portion, Gene broadcast a video feed via ustream.tv, and a peer of mine, Alex Ragone, from the Collegiate School in NYC streamed the audio feed out to the Internet via the edtechtalk website. The ustream feed was a great component of our talk-being able to see Gene as he spoke really personalized the experience for the students.

The students were super prepared thanks to the work of their 8th grade English Teacher, Laurie Barth. The questions that they asked Gene showed a great deal of care and they seemed to be engaged in listening to his wonderful responses. It was kind of cool how we physically arranged our meeting. We divided the students up into 5 smaller groups and they participated from 5 different classrooms (vs. having everybody in one large room). I think this made the experience a little more engaging and intimate for everyone involved. It also served the double purpose of hooking up our entire 8th grade teaching team with a Skype account.

What could we do to improve the experience for the next time we do something like this?? Here are a few thoughts:

1. Allow more student users to be engaged in the conversation by simultaneously chatting during the conversations. I believe this will activate the brains of more students in the audience and allow them to become more fully immersed in the conversation.

2. Be sure students are introduced to this forum prior to it happening. We were actually able to do a skype test call with most of the 8th graders in the classrooms the day before the conference. This gave us confidence that the technology would work and it also allowed the students to get their feet wet with this type of experience.




Direct Link to audio file



Recording of our conversation with Gene Luen Yang:

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