Our school community was fortunate enough to have Glenn Ellis speak to us last night on the topics of girls' education and STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math).
We recorded audio and synced up the audio with his slides over at Slideshare. The "Slidecast" is embedded below:
Thursday, May 28, 2009
Wednesday, May 27, 2009
Senior Leadership Seminar
Below is the recording and slide deck from a presentation that my colleague, Mary Jean Conlon, and I facilitated as part of our "Senior/Class of 2009 Leadership Seminar" series here at Castilleja. During the presentation we showed the students "A Vision of Students Today," we had them setup and populate an RSS reader, gave the students a tour of Google Books/News, and spent a small amount of time talking about digital identity. I really enjoyed working with Mary Jean in preparing for this seminar and in the delivery...she is a real pro and I'll miss her next year as she moves on to the field of healthcare IT.
Tuesday, May 26, 2009
I Love this Video!
Amazing piece here from the choral director and his students from PS22 in NYC. After 6 days of being on the web, it already has 150K + views! Go PS22 students!!!
Anytime, Anywhere, Summer 2009 Learning Opportunities
As we head into summer, I wanted to point out some wonderful multi-disciplinary learning opportunities that are entirely FREE and available anytime/anywhere.
1. Join the Classroom 2.0 online social/professional network and engage in some of the ongoing discussions. Classroom 2.0 is one of the largest global networks of educators and is a great place to meet other innovative teachers from around the world. You might also consider the Saturday morning (9:00 am pacific) "Classroom 2.0 Live" sessions, which are live, interactive webcasts that take place through a platform called Elluminate.
2. "Attend" the 2007 and/or 2008 K12 Online Conferences . Of course these conferences happened already, but they live on in the form of the archived audio/video presentations and web resources. The 2007 conference is archived here and the 2008 conference is archived here (if you'd like to go way back to 2006, that conference is archived as well).
3. Create a Twitter account and begin building up a global network of people with whom you can share resources and engage in conversation. The easiest way to start out is to create an account (be sure to use a picture and fill out the profile information) and follow folks that other Twitter users here at Castilleja are following (Flaurie, Nanci, Matt, Steve, Bear, and Heather are a few who use Twitter). It can take several months to really start to understand the value of professional networking via Twitter...stick with it and be patient!
4. Join the Independent School Educators Network. This is another social network, but it is primarily targeted toward independent school educators around the world. Be sure to join the Castilleja and the Mid-Peninsula groups and then check out the forums to join the discussions.
5. Join Facebook if you haven't already. There are some wonderful education related groups that you might consider joining, like the Global Educational Collaborative, Teaching and Learning with Facebook, Shift Happens: Bringing Education into the 21st Century, Parents as Partners, Edutopia, and the Stanford University Fan page. You could also become a fan of the Bucky Badger page to get your Wisconsin fix!
6. Start a blog. A blog is an excellent way to reflect and share out on your practice. Your professional blog would be a great space to share our your summer '09 professional development experiences. If you do start a blog, consider dropping the link in a comment so we can share it out with other members of our learning community. There are many places to blog...I would suggest Blogger and Edublogs for ease of use.
Of course there are many, many other wonderful open and free opportunities for professional development on the web. If you come across any others not on this list, drop the links in a comment on this post.
Good luck with your summer 2009 professional development pursuits!
1. Join the Classroom 2.0 online social/professional network and engage in some of the ongoing discussions. Classroom 2.0 is one of the largest global networks of educators and is a great place to meet other innovative teachers from around the world. You might also consider the Saturday morning (9:00 am pacific) "Classroom 2.0 Live" sessions, which are live, interactive webcasts that take place through a platform called Elluminate.
2. "Attend" the 2007 and/or 2008 K12 Online Conferences . Of course these conferences happened already, but they live on in the form of the archived audio/video presentations and web resources. The 2007 conference is archived here and the 2008 conference is archived here (if you'd like to go way back to 2006, that conference is archived as well).
3. Create a Twitter account and begin building up a global network of people with whom you can share resources and engage in conversation. The easiest way to start out is to create an account (be sure to use a picture and fill out the profile information) and follow folks that other Twitter users here at Castilleja are following (Flaurie, Nanci, Matt, Steve, Bear, and Heather are a few who use Twitter). It can take several months to really start to understand the value of professional networking via Twitter...stick with it and be patient!
4. Join the Independent School Educators Network. This is another social network, but it is primarily targeted toward independent school educators around the world. Be sure to join the Castilleja and the Mid-Peninsula groups and then check out the forums to join the discussions.
5. Join Facebook if you haven't already. There are some wonderful education related groups that you might consider joining, like the Global Educational Collaborative, Teaching and Learning with Facebook, Shift Happens: Bringing Education into the 21st Century, Parents as Partners, Edutopia, and the Stanford University Fan page. You could also become a fan of the Bucky Badger page to get your Wisconsin fix!
6. Start a blog. A blog is an excellent way to reflect and share out on your practice. Your professional blog would be a great space to share our your summer '09 professional development experiences. If you do start a blog, consider dropping the link in a comment so we can share it out with other members of our learning community. There are many places to blog...I would suggest Blogger and Edublogs for ease of use.
Of course there are many, many other wonderful open and free opportunities for professional development on the web. If you come across any others not on this list, drop the links in a comment on this post.
Good luck with your summer 2009 professional development pursuits!
Tuesday, May 19, 2009
Senior Seminar Series Reflections
Today I had the good fortune of teaming with our powerhouse librarian, Mary Jean Conlon, on a "College Research Survival Guide" type of presentation. We worked with three groups of 20 students for an hour each this morning. Our time together was spent participating in several different multi-dimensional activities (we were "quadrupal" tasking at certain points for sure). By the end of the period we wanted every student to know how to collect RSS feeds from a variety of locations (including the ProQuest database, Google News, and a few others). We also had the goal of testing cell phones as an interactive response platform through the use of Poll Everywhere. Finally, we wanted to take some time to challenge the students to begin (if they haven't already) thinking about their digital identity. To keep this post short, I simply want to say that I think we were fairly successful with most of our objectives in this experience.
Here is a layout of how we implemented this activity:
1. We started out with a few ice breaker polls...we had students straggling in late to the sessions and the poll provided a fun way to start things out. It set a light tone, which I think is quite important for seniors at this time in the year. It also served the purpose of introducing students to the concept of interactive audience polling via cell phones, which is a technique that many of these students may use for future presentations of their own. Poll Everywhere worked great as a tool to collect responses to these ice breaker activities/questions (see our presentation embedded below to see some of the questions that we asked students to weigh in on via their cell phones).
2. After a few polls, we showed the students Michael Wesch's "A Vision of Students Today." I have to say that this was the highlight of the session for me. Upon completion of the video, students were encouraged to send a text message with their first thoughts on the video. Students were encouraged to text a sentence, a phrase or even a word that indicated their feelings about the video. Some of the responses were light and silly, but many were very, very deep. Check out their responses online here.
3. The next portion of our time together was spent with Mary Jean, our head librarian, leading a conversation about RSS, Readers, and feeds. This was fantastic, with all of our learners getting their Google Reader up and running and populated with a few feeds. The students really enjoyed the Commoncraft RSS in Plain English Video as well.
4. We closed out with a far too brief discussion of "Your Digital Identity." We essentially encouraged students to think about what they want to appear on the results page of an open Google web search for their name. Over the next four years of their lives it will become increasingly important for the students to manage this identitiy, and while we just scratched the surface today, I'm glad we at least had a few minutes to consider this topic together.
Slides from our presentation today (I recorded audio and at some point in the future will post a slidecast over at Slideshare).
Here is a layout of how we implemented this activity:
1. We started out with a few ice breaker polls...we had students straggling in late to the sessions and the poll provided a fun way to start things out. It set a light tone, which I think is quite important for seniors at this time in the year. It also served the purpose of introducing students to the concept of interactive audience polling via cell phones, which is a technique that many of these students may use for future presentations of their own. Poll Everywhere worked great as a tool to collect responses to these ice breaker activities/questions (see our presentation embedded below to see some of the questions that we asked students to weigh in on via their cell phones).
2. After a few polls, we showed the students Michael Wesch's "A Vision of Students Today." I have to say that this was the highlight of the session for me. Upon completion of the video, students were encouraged to send a text message with their first thoughts on the video. Students were encouraged to text a sentence, a phrase or even a word that indicated their feelings about the video. Some of the responses were light and silly, but many were very, very deep. Check out their responses online here.
3. The next portion of our time together was spent with Mary Jean, our head librarian, leading a conversation about RSS, Readers, and feeds. This was fantastic, with all of our learners getting their Google Reader up and running and populated with a few feeds. The students really enjoyed the Commoncraft RSS in Plain English Video as well.
4. We closed out with a far too brief discussion of "Your Digital Identity." We essentially encouraged students to think about what they want to appear on the results page of an open Google web search for their name. Over the next four years of their lives it will become increasingly important for the students to manage this identitiy, and while we just scratched the surface today, I'm glad we at least had a few minutes to consider this topic together.
Slides from our presentation today (I recorded audio and at some point in the future will post a slidecast over at Slideshare).
Thursday, April 23, 2009
Anatomy of a 24 Hour Webcastathon
The glamorous setup of a 24 hour webcaster. This was my computer setup for Earthcast09 while I was working at my school.
Nothing like the Chris Pirillo setup, but it works. For more information on Internet Radio broadcasting (eg-"Webcasting") visit http://webcastacademy.net.
For more on Earthcast09, visit http://earthbridges.net.
See the photo below for the hardware and software "anatomy of a webcast." Roll over the photo with your mouse to see the notes on the various elements in the photo.
Nothing like the Chris Pirillo setup, but it works. For more information on Internet Radio broadcasting (eg-"Webcasting") visit http://webcastacademy.net.
For more on Earthcast09, visit http://earthbridges.net.
See the photo below for the hardware and software "anatomy of a webcast." Roll over the photo with your mouse to see the notes on the various elements in the photo.
Thursday, April 02, 2009
Moodle Google Integration... "MooGoogle"
We've made some really great progress on integrating a Moodle virtual learning network and a Google Apps for Education collaboration/communication network. Major, major props to my co-worker, Adam Contois, for engineering this on the software side of things. Adam is a model 21st century school IT professional who believes in the importance of providing free/open source collaboration tools that empower members of the learning community.
While we are just scratching the surface on what this might mean and look like for us here at Castilleja, we now know the following based upon the setup instructions over at Ben Wilkhoff's blog:
1. Accounts are created and managed in Moodle (or, you may use LDAP to manage your accounts). No need to re-create the accounts in the Google admin console.
2. When the user signs in to Moodle, they see a block with links to gmail, calendar, docs, etc. When they click a link, they're taken to a page where they have to enter a word verification code and accept the Google Terms of Service. After they accept, a Google Apps account is automatically created for them.
3. All authentication/sign-in happens via moodle. If a user attempts to go directly to Google Apps, they are re-directed to Moodle to authenticate. After signing in at Moodle, they are bumped over to Google Apps. While we like this, we also know that this could be a weakness. What happens if Moodle goes down? Or, in our case, Moodle sits on our network and we're concerned about network outages that would prevent users from getting to their Google mail, docs, etc. We're in the process of developing a redundancy so that if Moodle does bork out, the users would be able to sign in directly at the Google Apps page (chance are that the uptime with Google is going to be MUCH higher than anything a school organization can provide).
That is it for now...I just wanted to leave this reflection to share our progress to date. A screencast that shows this process will be posted later. Many thanks to Ben for sharing this on his blog.
Below is a wonderful "CommonCraft" inspired video that brings to life the power associated with an approach to instructional design that utilizes Google Apps for EDU, Moodle, blogs and wikis:
While we are just scratching the surface on what this might mean and look like for us here at Castilleja, we now know the following based upon the setup instructions over at Ben Wilkhoff's blog:
1. Accounts are created and managed in Moodle (or, you may use LDAP to manage your accounts). No need to re-create the accounts in the Google admin console.
2. When the user signs in to Moodle, they see a block with links to gmail, calendar, docs, etc. When they click a link, they're taken to a page where they have to enter a word verification code and accept the Google Terms of Service. After they accept, a Google Apps account is automatically created for them.
3. All authentication/sign-in happens via moodle. If a user attempts to go directly to Google Apps, they are re-directed to Moodle to authenticate. After signing in at Moodle, they are bumped over to Google Apps. While we like this, we also know that this could be a weakness. What happens if Moodle goes down? Or, in our case, Moodle sits on our network and we're concerned about network outages that would prevent users from getting to their Google mail, docs, etc. We're in the process of developing a redundancy so that if Moodle does bork out, the users would be able to sign in directly at the Google Apps page (chance are that the uptime with Google is going to be MUCH higher than anything a school organization can provide).
That is it for now...I just wanted to leave this reflection to share our progress to date. A screencast that shows this process will be posted later. Many thanks to Ben for sharing this on his blog.
Below is a wonderful "CommonCraft" inspired video that brings to life the power associated with an approach to instructional design that utilizes Google Apps for EDU, Moodle, blogs and wikis:
Tuesday, March 31, 2009
Google Mail Transition Proposal
I worked collaboratively with our technology department to prepare this presentation and proposal for our school community. In this Slidecast recording, Steve Taffee and I gave a presentation to our school community on the proposed idea of moving from our current collaboration system, FirstClass, to Google Apps/Mail for Education as our core collaborative environment.
This slidecast is posted in the spirit of openness and sharing. It is also posted for any of our faculty and staff who were unable to attend the meeting after school today. A link to our planning site that we created for this proposed transition is included below the slidecast. Your comments and feedback are welcome.
Google Mail Transition - visit this site to view the work that we've done to this point on this proposal.
Google Transition FAQ Doc
Google Transition Planning Doc (positives, negatives, and interesting points)
This slidecast is posted in the spirit of openness and sharing. It is also posted for any of our faculty and staff who were unable to attend the meeting after school today. A link to our planning site that we created for this proposed transition is included below the slidecast. Your comments and feedback are welcome.
Google Apps/Mail Transition
View more presentations from Matt Montagne.
Google Mail Transition - visit this site to view the work that we've done to this point on this proposal.
Google Transition FAQ Doc
Google Transition Planning Doc (positives, negatives, and interesting points)
Sunday, March 29, 2009
Earthcast09 - Have your voice heard!
Please leave an audio comment in the Voicethread below...chance are that we'll play it during the Earthcast09 24 hour webcastathon which is taking place on Earth Day, 2009 (Wednesday, April 22nd, 2009). We'd love to have voices of all ages from all over the globe in this Voicethread.
Please spread the word!
Please spread the word!
Sunday, March 22, 2009
Earthcast 2009 24 Hour Webcastathon!
Well, Earthcast/Earthbridges team member Jason Robertshaw has done it again. View the brief promo/teaser video that he created for this year's Earthcast09 24 Hour Webcastathon at the end of this post. The Earthcast09 24 Hour Webcast will take place on Wednesday, April 22nd (we're observing the day as it moves through Greenwich, England, so it actually begins on Tuesday, April 21st at 5:00 pm here in the Bay Area). While we have many hours of the day covered, we still have several openings for participation and could really appreciate your help. If you'd like to participate (even for just a few minutes, drop us an email at earthbridges (at) gmail dot com or leave a comment on this blog. We could really use some help from our friends in the Asiatic region of the globe as we have several uncovered hours from 5-9 GMT. See the schedule as it exists so far at our plannning wiki to see what hours are still available.
Earthcast09 is essentially a 24 hour long live Internet broadcast about all things relating to the environment. Topics will include green energy, green technology, college campus sustainability efforts, an update from environmental law professor Jason Czarnezki, students from schools around the world sharing what they're doing to improve the planet, and live call-in segments where listeners share their thoughts and ideas about environmental issues. We have several hours of the day where elementary, middle, high school, and university students will be leading the conversations.
We'll be streaming this broadcast live over at Earthbridges.net for 24 hours straight, so please support our efforts by tuning in as much as possible throughout the day. And please spread the word about this project.
Thanks again to Jason Robertshaw for this fantastic promo video!!
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