Several months ago, I received a Facebook message asking me to to join a group. Surprisingly, it was a group organized to pay tribute to a Junior High teacher from Glencoe, IL named Marvin Martin.

I joined the group and then leaned back in my chair. People were posting stories and memories that they had of his class and I wanted to do the same… but I couldn’t. The reason I was unable to, was that it wouldn’t do him justice for me to just whip off a paragraph in ten minutes and toss it into cyberspace. More than likely he has no idea just how much of an influence he had on me, but he just may have been the most valuable teacher I ever had.

Mr. Martin taught me to read.

I don’t mean that he taught me phonics, that happened many grades earlier. I don’t mean that he taught me to draw meaning from the written word, that too happened a a much younger age.

He taught me to read with passion. With hunger. With love. With hate. He taught me to read a song and the songwriter as well. He taught me that reading was both a gift and a curse. A new friend that becomes an old friend just a few chapters later. He planted the sapling that has grown within me all these years, and now provides shade as I read with my son.

Before I journey too far along the highway of metaphors, let me explain a few things. If I remember correctly, I had Mr. Martin as a literature teacher in sixth grade at Central School, in Glencoe, Illinois. Prior to that class, I can say definitively that I did not read. Of course, I read for class, and I could read a menu and such, but I rarely if ever, picked up a book for pleasure.

Mr. Martin established a very simple system for dealing with students like me. He created a structure where you could get extra credit in his class by choosing a book off of his list, reading it, and passing a comprehension test. Every test you passed earned you a few percentage points. My first time out, I skimmed through a book and took the test. I failed miserably. You see, he ensured that he asked questions that you couldn’t answer by reading the cliff notes. He made you think about what you had read and prove that not only did you read it, that you understood it. I don’t take failure well, so I went back, re-read it for the first time, and this time I passed the test. Sensing a way to get an easy “A”, I grabbed another book. And then another.

I believe I completed that class with 192%.

The books on his list were a mix of classics as well as contemporary literature. They weren’t just geared to middle school students either. You see, he made a promise to his students. If there was a book that wasn’t on his that they wanted to read, they just had to submit the title of it to him and he would read it and add it. At any given time, he had a queue of about 15-20 books. Which might seem daunting, if he didn’t read a few books every day. It seemed to me that he simply devoured books, and every day new choices were available. And I took advantage.

I began to read every night. I would get so into the books that I kept reading late into the night. When my parents finally put their foot down, I began keeping a small flashlight next to my bed that I could use to continue reading with as soon as they’d gone to sleep. I began carrying a book with me, so whenever I had a minute of down time, I could break it out and burn through a few more pages. It got to the point that I was unable to go to sleep if I didn’t read at least for ten or fifteen minutes.

That habit is still with me today. I am never without a book to read, and I read every single night before turning in. If I don’t have a new book, I grab an old favorite. Another habit I can attribute to Mr. Martin. No matter how many times you’ve read a book before, there are still new things to be discovered within those well worn pages. I can honestly say that I have read some of my favorite books more than a dozen times.

The funny thing is that everything I have discussed so far… was simply the icing to his classroom. This was a layer on top of the actual teaching and learning, an optional component that most students participated in. The class time itself was a different type of journey.

I won’t pretend to say that I remember every class period, or that I looked forward to going every day. But here’s a few things that have stuck with me.

I remember that he was never satisfied with half an effort. When you read aloud, you read with expression. He made sure that you thought about what you were reading, considered the point of view of the characters as well as the author, and read it so that everyone else in the room could feel it.

I remember studying the words of Simon and Garfunkel. In particular, the 59th Street Bridge Song and the Sounds of Silence. I remember him leading us to discover what they meant by phrases like “the words of the prophets are written on subway walls and tenement halls.” And I also remember him challenging us to bring in lyrics to our own favorite music at the time and to see what we could learn from them. If my memory serves me, we wound up studying a song off of U2′s Joshua Tree album and a couple John Lennon songs, all by request.

I remember that while he was always a passionate teacher, there was only one time that he was genuinely angry. Somebody requested that he read Flowers in the Attic and add it to the list of books that could be read for extra credit. He was furious over the incestuous themes throughout the story, and refused to add it to the list. I had never seen someone get so upset and emotional over a book before. Looking back on it now, I think one of the reasons he was so upset was that in some sense, the book defeated him. He couldn’t in good conscience ‘encourage’ students to read that book by adding it to his list. And yet students were interested in it, all the more so because he was so upset by it. I think more students eventually read that book because of his refusal than would ever have read it had he accepted it. And while seeing him discuss the lyrics of Simon and Garfunkel showed us how high he could get discussing the written word, his reaction to Flowers in the Attic showed us just how deep those passions ran.

I would be remiss if I didn’t share one other aspect of Marvin Martin. Teaching was his life. And while I feel that I have met thousands of educators who are passionate teachers, few of them kept a sleeper sofa and refrigerator in a small office next to their classroom. Rumors run wild amongst six graders, so take this paragraph with a grain of salt, but so far as we knew he spent most of his evenings reading and sleeping in his office. There was a house in Glencoe that I’d been told belonged to him. It seemed like it could have fit in the garage of most of the houses neighboring it. While most other teachers shared stories of what they did over the weekend or while on vacation, Mr. Martin shared what books he had read. Teaching was his sunrise and his sunset. He dedicated every moment of his time to his students.

According to the Facebook group, after teaching in Glencoe for forty years, he retired in 1996. I’d always thought about going back and visiting him to let him know how profound an influence he had on me, but I never did. I’m hoping that through the magic of Facebook I’ll be able to reconnect with him and pass along a link to this blog post. Even better, perhaps have the chance to tell him in person.

So let this stand as a tribute to a wonderful teacher… from a student who didn’t know enough to thank him at time and doesn’t have enough words to do a proper job of it now.

Thank you, Marvin Martin.

Since today happens to be Thanksgiving, I thought that it might be nice to include one of the things I’m thankful for in this post. In particular, I’m thankful to be a part of a community that places such a huge emphasis on sharing, collaborating and assisting each other whenever possible. That’s one of the great things about the EduVerse. If you need some help, access to an expert or are hunting for a specific resource, there’s thousands of people who are willing to help, provided that you ask. As I mentioned on Day 7, I’ve never been very good at asking people to be guest bloggers. However, I’ve never been shy at asking for other people’s opinions, and often base blog posts on them.

The most obvious example of asking friends or colleagues to blog in conjunction or in response to you, is the various memes you’ll find circulating around. Lee Kolbert was curious to see what other people’s RSS feeds would look like as Wordle’s. She wasn’t shy about it, she not only tagged people in her blog post, but she also sent me a direct message on Twitter. The people who ask are the people who get responses, and people have rallied to the cause. As of this reading, ten people have responded by posting up Wordle’s of their RSS feed.

A few days ago, I did something similar. I wanted to get some of the bloggers who inspire me to share their tips for being a better blogger. I sent them an email and nearly every single one of them responded. Of course, being prolific writers with years of experience, many of them couldn’t stop at just one tip! I’d like to share their responses with you today.

Before I do, let me just outline today’s challenge: Collaborate with somebody or several people on a blog post or meme. Invite other people to share their thoughts on a topic of your choosing, create a meme for other people to participate in, or send a request for people to address a specific question on their blog. Details are up to you, the important part is that it’s collaborative in nature! And of course, be sure to share what you do in comments here.

Without further ado, here are how some of my own favorite bloggers responded to the question: What tip would you give to people striving to be a better blogger?
Order based on when they responded

Jeff Utecht:

• Always include a picture that frames your idea (visual literacy)
• Always link…..a blog post should never be without links (link names, blogs, ideas, companies)
• Find your voice….it takes time, sometimes 50+ posts, but keep at it and you’ll find your voice. You were never taught about having a voice on a blog, because blogs weren’t around when you were taught to right. Every blogger has a voice, find your, find your style, and be original with it!

Dean Share(ski):

Find your voice. As I have my pre-service teachers delve into this medium, it’s easy to see whose blogs get the most action. It’s the ones who let go the reigns everyone in a while and write from their gut. I can read about almost any topic when passion is evident. For new bloggers this is usually a big risk but well worth it. Write about what fires you up.

Link. Link. Link. Hypertext is the glue of the internet. It is the web. Most new bloggers don’t see this. I advice my students to think about a global audience and don’t assume they know what institution you attend or what town you’re from. I can’t think of any blogger who I consider overlinks. Linking is a generous gift you can give your readers.

Sylvia Martinez:

Think Nike – just do it. They don’t all have to be gems. If you don’t like it, leave it as a draft. Reread your drafts every once in a while and you’ll have new ideas and the inspiration to polish them off.

Miguel Guhlin:

First tip – Listen to yourself as you experience other’s writing, media, as well as your interactions. Juxtapose your thoughts and reactions with those ideas…explore the differences, challenge why you agree, or don’t, with them. Then, write from that perspective…what you feel and think matters, don’t belittle…treasure it.

Another tip – share what you are learning as you learn it. We learn every minute of our day, but can only share a small fraction of that, and half-remember ourselves from one day to the next what we learn…share what lies at the edge of consciousness, what you have to remember and wish to externalize for easy reference.Then, you can google yourself…and you will find yourself online.

last one – play with your ideas and your writing, like a cat with a ball of yarn that forgets to hold back. When you can do that with what you’ve learned from others as well as yourself of endless abandonment–play–well, then you’re in the Zone.

Scott McLeod:

Invite people to respond. Write a couple of (hopefully) interesting paragraphs and then ask a question at the end that invites readers to chime in, contribute a resource, etc.!

Thanks for thinking of me. What do YOU think is a great blogging tip to share with others?

Darren Kuropatwa:

Write what you know and talk about what you care about. People who write with passion are forgiven small errors and are engaging to read.

Alan Levine:

Set up your flickr account to publish directly to your blog. You can use your own (or other’s ) photos by using “Blog this” button, which automatically embeds the photo and whatever text you write. I either do this to blog about, say an event in my own photos, or just using the photo as a metaphor for a thought.

Alec Couros:

1) Take a break when you need it, rather than forcing your posts. While this depends highly one what type of blogger you are (e.g., professional fulltime vs. part time), sometimes a short hiatus may be what you need to renew your perspective and get you writing again. If the break is
relatively short, there is not a great chance that you should not have to worry about losing subscribers. If you’ve followed the other tips here, there’s a good chance you will already have a stable base.

2) Let change come naturally. If you started out as a certain type of blogger but after some time you’ve realized that you are passionate about something else, go with it. Change is often good. Change your
theme, your tagline, your focus if necessary; whatever it takes to be passionate about writing. Chances are these changes will not be incredibly dramatic so you will not have to sacrifice your readership.
The most important piece is that you are writing about something that is important to you. Your posts will likely be more coherent, powerful, and personal. Share your enthusiasm with you readers.

3) Avoid the echo chamber. There is an inherent danger in an information environment without a critique. Write and comment carefully, and most importantly, critically. Bad ideas quickly become good ones when the mob mentality arrives.

Jennifer Dorman:

Write about what interests you. That will keep you motivated and will infuse passion and direction into your writing.

Kathy Schrock:

Always post the feed URL of your blog someplace permanent on your blog page. This makes it easier for those using a less-popular news reader to aggregate your content.

Don’t be afraid to say something controversial, and, if you want to offer a post that may cause you to be criticized or ridiculed, just shut off commenting on that post. You may be criticized or ridiculed in other places, but at least not on your own blog!

Don’t let content get lost. With many of us microblogging with Twitter and Plurk, I sometimes feel that entire threads of content are being lost in 140 character hunks. If you do have a meaningful, continuing conversation using one of these tools, summarize it afterwards in a blog post so it is more “permanent”.

Steve Hargadon:

If you want to make contact with a prominent blogger, mention and link to them in your own blog in some inviting way, since they (we) all have Google Alerts on their (our) own names.

Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach:

Blog because you are passionate about what you are sharing, not because you feel you have to get a post up for your readers. I would rather read an occasional post that is written with true voice than a slew that were obviously written just to get something up.

Doug Johnson:

Make your blog as personal as possible. I read writing that has a “voice.” If I want dry scholarship, I’ll read a peer-reviewed journal, but I’ll read your blog if you share your personal experiences, ideas, opinions and passions. PLEASE have a good “About Me” page so I can put your writing in context – your job, your location, your years in the profession. Give me a way to contact you off line, please. I could be an e-stalker, but the odds are against it. For many of us, it’s not really educational unless the heart and soul are touched as well as the mind.

Vicki Davis:

I find my best posts come from the heart – I work hard to experience what I am writing and to pretend that someone is sitting right there and that I am talking to them conversationally. Although sometimes, it leaves me exhausted, I think that this conversational/ experiential type of blogging gives me a voice and keeps me focused on my passion: advocating the effective use of technology to reach ALL learning styles in ways that promote academic excellence.

David Warlick:

Often, in my blog entries, I find it necessary to include information that is related to the article, but not logically part of the article. A sidebar serves well for quoted explanations, lists of links, and other ancillary info.

There are lots of ways to achieve this, but just a little straight-forward HTML seems to work most consistently for me. Below is some HTML code that I just past into my blog article, at the beginning of the paragraph that should wrap around the sidebar.
<table border="0" width="300"
align="right" bgcolor="#ffdf89"><tbody><tr><td>
YOUR SIDEBAR TEXT GOES HERE
</td></tr></tbody></table>

This code will produce a 300 pixel wide sidebar aligned to the right (with text wrapping around to the left) with a tan background color. Good luck!

Will Richardson:

End with the beginning. This is not necessarily a blogging tip, per se, but a writing technique, a way to bring ideas full circle. Example

Bud the Teacher:

I find that most people choose not to blog or to share because they feel like someone else has or will do whatever it is that they’re trying to do better. They’re not good enough, or whatever.

The harsh reality is that’s probably true. But what is also true is that no one else will ever do it the way that you do, and you will learn more in the doing than you will in reading someone else’s account of the same thing, even if it’s a very, very good account or blog post or whatever.

So be brave, and write anyway, knowing that there’s value in sharing your experiences in large part because they’re yours.

Jen Wagner:

1. Use your blog to BUILD others up and not TEAR them down. As Thumper was told in Bambi (slight edit here…) If you can’t write somethin’ nice, don’t write anything at all.

2. Count your “I’s” before you hit submit. Count your “me’s”. Could your “should’s”. And count the times you draw attention to yourself. Your blog might be written BY you………..but it doesn’t need to be written ABOUT you.

3. Sometimes you don’t have to hit SUBMIT!!!

Huge thanks go out to everybody who responded. I truly feel honored to have such inspiring and responsive people in my network!

Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

Via Joyce Valenza

Podcasts of many of the sessions at the Building Learning Communities conference have been released! If you couldn’t attend, you should definitely check them out. Heck, even if you did attend, this is your chance to get a second helping.

My personal favorites are Marco Torres’ opening keynote, Andy Hargreaves’ day 2 keynote, but every one of them is worth the download.

Mmm… Learning is tasty.

I got here a little late, but I’m thrilled that Prensky is doing a presentation. If you haven’t heard of him, stop reading and go visit his site.

i’m not sure how he started, but right now he’s giving an overview of the Native/Immigrant theory. Those of us that didn’t grow up with the internet (myself included) have an ‘accent’. People who distinguish between online and offline. “Real life” is just as real online as it is off.

Teaching is not the same as learning. Learning takes effort. We’re not exactly sure how it hapens, but it can either feel like work or it can feel like play. It feels like play when you have engagement. Kids know what engagement feels like. Engaged learning is active and passionate.

Just using technology does not mean that the kids are going to be engaged. Students say “Whenever I go to school I have to power down.” “I’m bored in class 99 percent of the time.”

From Mark, “For today’s kids ot learn, engagement is more important than content.” There’s a charged statement. I can really get behind it, I’m just not sure I would have had the balls to state it like that.

“Content won’t help students to learn throughout their lives, but engagement will.” Mark seems to be the master of the sound byte, and that’s what his Powerpoint is.

It’s effective. The difference between analogue and digtal technology, is that digital is programmable. You can tweak it to do what you want it to do. So the question is, how do we empower students to do that sort of thing?

“Programming is the literacy of the future.” I don’t agree with that one. It’s not programming. It’s critical thinking and logical process. I’m not a programmer, but people think I am because I can think things through critically, experiment, analyze the results and adjust accordingly. If he’s talking about programming abstractly, then that might work for me.

Today’s students are not ADD, they’re just not engaged. Does an engaged child look like an ADD child? That’s an interesting idea. ADD students are the ones that aren’t engaged by the traditional methods of teaching. They aren’t engaged, and they’re ticked. Which leads to disruption.

When we say, “Stop playing and get started on your school work. You’re wasting your time, money and braincells”, it enrages the students. It doesn’t take the work they’re doing that appears to be play seriously. And often the work they’re doing on their own is incredibly deep and meaningful. After school, they get their real education in 21st century learning. During the day they get yesterdays education, after school they get future learning.

If technology is the new literacy, then many teachers are illiterate.

Disrespect is at the root of many of our problems. Students don’t think they’re respected by their teachers, and consequently they don’t respect them in turn. So what can we do about that?

1. Foster the message, we are all teachers and we are all learners. 2. Teachers should teach using tools that they can’t ever master. Technology comes and goes, don’t try to stay ahead. Just use it, even if you haven’t mastered it. Use unfamiliar tools. Don’t waste your time learning the stuff because the kids can do it!

Wow, this is fantastic. How do teachers use tools that they don’t understand and haven’t mastered. Wikipedia: Assign them to create an entry. Evaluate it for contenet, journalism, use of multimedia, and creativity, and then teach them about search vs. research, fair use vs. plagarism. That’s the lesson. The lesson for IM is about formal language versus informal language. Do you need to be a master of IM? Of course not, the students will figure that part out.

3. Learn from games.

Kids want the games, not just because their games, but because they’re intellectual stimulation that they don’t get from us.

Why is there so much negativity about games? Nobody seems to want to stand behind them. Why? When digital immigrants were growing up, games were trivial. They were casual, simple. Card games, dice games, etc. Minigames. And most educational games that are available today are Minigames. They don’t do much. They last a few minutes to a couple hours. AMEN. That’s not what the kids play. Kids play complex games. Games that take 8-100 hours.

Are sports important to school? Of course. Well, games are intellectual sports.

People say, what about the graphics? How can we create something that compares? We don’t have to. We aren’t fighting a war of graphics, we’re fighting a war of ideas.

Kids are learning to collaborate, they’re learning teamwork, to take risks, ethical and moral decisions, lateral thinking, persistence, scientific deduction, management, to master and apply new skills quickly, etc…

People who played video games as kids who are now in busines often cite it as a reason for their success. Doctors who played video games (a specific type of surgeon) commit 37% fewer mistakes.

There are four ways we can use games in instruciton: Use commercial games, use custom games made for education, talk about games in class (bring the conversation to class), use complex game design principles to create engaged instruction.

He’s going through a ton of games that are available on the market right now that fit for education perfectly. Everything from the Sims, to Civilization, to the Tycoon series to Typing of the Dead.

SocialImpactGames.com Lists them all on the site.

Here are the issues though. there are no curricular games yet. Yet is the operative word, they’re coming. The second issue is that classrooms are not designed for electronic games. Not just physically, but organizationally. How do you teach when your students are all at different levels and doing different things? Gotta be creative and inventive. You could have students play outside class and synthesize it inside class. Also, use complex game principles. Game designers have figured out how to engage kids. So learn from them.

Key things to take from game design: Engagement, goals, decision making, gameplay, leveling up, adaptivity, iteration

I’m a little distracted right now, just had another one of those “Might be brilliant, might be stupid” thoughts and had to get it down. Sorry I don’t have many details from that previous list.

Teachers are used to content first, students want engagement first.

Focus on the goals, focus on the decisions, focus on the levels kids go through so they can make themselves better, and focus on the iteration.

“What can you learn from a cell phone, almost anything!” Article of his, I need to look up.

No more battery life!

Had to quit there but there wasn’t too much left. Fantastic speaker though. You can find his site at MarcPrensky.com, and it’s definitely worth a visit. He definitely gave me plenty to think about. Great way to close off the conference.

technorati tags:blc, blc06, games, education, prensky

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I’ve never seen Joyce Valenza present, but many people have pointed her out to me this trip and said that she was worth seeing.

She lays down some ground rules at the beginning and one of them is that if you’re going to blog about her session, please ‘blog kindly’. So I’ll try to be gentle here.

Heh, I’ve never seen a group of people in a workshop all sing together. She’s saying that Bob Dylan’s “The Times They Are A-Changing” should be our new anthem. She played a clip and astonishingly enough, people actually sang along. Then again, these ARE educators. We’re a bold bunch.

Users are changing, technology is changing, so we need to change accordingly. “Our kids lives are seemless”. She wants to be a window on their desktop and open all the time. She wants to blend the virtual with the face to face.

Gen X’ers spend 6.5 hours per day using technology. She quotes some research from Griffiths and Brophy, and PEW. I’ve never heard of the former, gotta look that up and see what they have to say.

We need to make our systems smarter. Instead of labeling things the way we think they should be, we need to start using ‘tags’ that make sense to the people using them. We know our users, we need to tailor our learning landscapes to meet their needs.

What can we do that can’t be outsourced to Bangalore? What can we do that Google can’t? Personalized service, with knowledge of the learner, tailored to their needs.

Put tools no more than two clicks away from a learner. Independance and intervention are critical.

She’s sharing mciu.org/~spjvweb, the ‘front door’ of her library on the web. It looks like her daughter drew the front page, which is very cool. Warm and friendly, which is a much better motif for a library then technological and sterile.

Ok, I know I said I’d be gentle, but I do have to throw out one small critique. There’s alot of unnecessary animation in the Powerpoint that’s cute, but detracts from her presentation. Flowers growing, and specific phrases slowly zooming in, they should probably be eliminated. After she’s made a point of verbally focusing our attention on a phrase, and then afterwards when she tries to go to the next slide, she first has to wait for the slow zoom to finish. It’s kind of distracting. And she’s doing a fantastic job of emphasizing the things that need to be brought out already. She’s a dynamic presenter, so her Powerpoint doesn’t need to be. Ok, back to the session.

She’s just gone through some examples of how some of the organizational processes of the library could go virtual and be more effective than doing them personally. It’s cheap to put information out there, and an easy way to get feedback and suggestions in a safe anonymous way.

Her site has got a ton of resources for students and for teachers, for content, curriculum and professional development. She also has an Online Research guide. And all the tools are available to pull off her site for teachers to use.

She collaborates with the media class at her school and ‘hires’ them to create content for the media center. When somebody asked how she orients students to the virtual library, she said that she has her students create the virtual library tour. Best way to learn is to teach it, right?

Students create pathfinders as they do research to keep track of it all and to show the path they used to find their resources. I dig that. The example that she’s showing emphasizes that they aren’t just using the internet, but also offline resources and a wide variety at that. Blog as bibliography. Very dynamic and much more robust. Dig that.

Have you ever heard of book-trailers? I haven’t but I love the idea. People have created online trailors for books they’ve read and made them available for other students. How cool is that? I would love it if every book that I looked up on my library’s website or even Amazon.com had a trailer. I’m a big fan of that idea. Very practical, and it could easily be done for every book your students read.

How are you going to interact with your students? FAQ’s? IM? Email? Blog? Podcasts? Most of the time students need their answers when the library isn’t open. Being available really takes advantage of teachable moments and makes powerful impression upon the students. And she points out that most of the questions students ask take less than 30 seconds to respond to.

This is a great point. She doesn’t want to see every library site converted to blog format. While she’s thrilled to be posting library news and sharing new content regularly, most of the people who are visiting the website have a purpose and want to get to specific tools. She wants those to be the highlight, the center, the focus of the site. The most valuable pages on the site were documentation guides, search tools, and the online catalog / OPAC. So build the site around getting people to those quickly. Then weave the other stuff in around it.

From feedback she’s gotten, just having links to the offline sites and databases isn’t enough. The icons don’t give any information about what their purpose is. “I don’t care what the name of the database is, I want to know what it DOES.” That’s a really good point that often gets overlooked.

SHe’s showing some some sites that are reprinting books, high quality educational content, and sites to search and find them. Her point is that these sites are much more educational rich for students to be using than what they might happen to find on the front page of Google. GALE.

Ok, here’s an interesting idea for a browser feature that might have some potential. A student does a Google search. They find a site that doesn’t quite suit their needs, but they find a link that takes them to a site that takes them to a site that takes them to a page that actually has the information that they want. All they’re going to bookmark is that last page, and that’s what’s going to be sited. While that may cover them for their bibliography, it could be very userful for teachers to see the PATH that students took to get there. So imagine a button in a search engine that grabs a breadcrumb trail that a user took to get to the current page. NOT the history, because students often go in 20 directions at once, so a straight history won’t work. But some sort of a bookmarklet that will copy out the trail a user took to arrive at the current page. Something that shows the search words used, and then the path that they followed. I think that could be incredibly valuable information for teachers, for other students, and might be a strong addition to a bibliography. Not just what you used, but how you got there. Anybody think that could be userful?

Hehe, she just mentioned unitedstreaming and that every library must have a subscription to it. It feels damn good to work for a company that educators are passionate about and evanglize for voluntarily.

This is truly a whirlwind overview of everything a virtual library can be. There’s way too much information to summarize. However, thankfully everything that she’s showing is online. Heck, nearly every slide in the Powerpoint is basically link after link after link. So if this is resonating with you at all, you’ll have to visit her site and spend a few weeks exploring. The one thing you’ll miss out on is just how animated and passionate she is about what she’s sharing. There’s no question, she’s a true believer. I’m guessing it’s not too unusual to find her working late into the night helping other librarians get their start with this stuff just out of the goodness of her heart, because she loves doing it. Not only doing it, but sharing it. I can see why people reccomended that I see her present, her excitement is contagious.

Her del.icio.us account is del.icio.us/joycevalenza. I’m guessing that it’s going to be something worth subscribing to if she uses it.

She’s sharing a ton of open source stuff now, and mentioned one that I hadn’t heard of. In fact a few, PrimoPDF, and FreeMind (I hope the URL’s are correct, I’m offline right now) are going to have to be added to my Office 2.0 presentation. Free PDF creator and free version online Inspiration.

Her blog is joycevalenza.edublogs.org, website is mciu.org/~spjvweb and direct link to the Powerpoint mciu.org/~spjweb/landscape.ppt

technorati tags:blc, blc06, library

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When he creates projects with his students, they use a system comprised of four P’s: Planning, producing, producing and Pheedback. Each P has a series of steps, and he has podcasts that outline every step of the way, designed by and for TEACHERS.

He introduced the presentation by sharing a video that students made focusing on what they didn’t like about the school environment they’re learning in, and what they’d like to see done differently. The basic message in a nutshell was, students feel empowered and want to take more control of their learning using every tool at their disposal, and instead they’re immersed in a traditional lecture/lab environment. They feel stifled. These are former students of his who are now in universities. They created the movie across campuses, never even working face to face at all. They transfered files back and forth and made it happen.

The credits from the movie were incredibly creative. It was essentially an iChat between one of the students and Marco, with Marco asking questions like “Who edited the film?” and the student responding “Oh, we each took turns. Jim, John, Juan, Chung and Chaim each did a piece.” A great example of making something mundane, innovative.

The target audience for the video wasn’t teachers actually, it was other students to get them thinking along these lines and to encourage them to start having these conversations on their own campuses.

Interesting, he says that all of the movies he showed during the keynote, had production times of a single day. Longer was spent planning them and storyboarding, but the actual production took a very small amount of time.

Typically teachers gather a tremendous amount of footage. At his school, they actually log and archive all of their raw footage so that they can use it again without having to go get it again. He encourages people to train your eye, to change the way you see symbols in the world.

Heh, he just showed a two minute trailor for a movie and asked us to count the ‘cuts’. Two minutes. 211 cuts. Wow. He reccomends that you think about what type of movie this is going to be and write down what sort of tone will be appropriate for it. For example, this was an action movie, so a frantic pace is appropriate. 211 cuts. A dramatic movie that that is more heartfelt might have a more leisurely pace.

He just showed a commercial for Powerbar. 30 seconds, 29 cuts. One cut per second. Typically people when they go to shoot their video they shoot incredibly lengthy clips. 10-20 minutes nonstop. It’s more effective to use large numbers of brief clips and get cut together to convey a message.

He keeps saying that he’s got a podcast about this that takes you step by step. I wonder if they’re actually podcasts or if they’re video podcasts. Hmmm….

He’s pointing out that it helps to draw out the scene, where each person is, and then having your students draw out where the cameras are going to be to get the shots they want.

There are three main shots. Long, medium and close ups. Wide shots communicate the stage, setting and background. They establish the scene. They provide context and show where it’s happening. If your students use wide shot to depict something emotional, the student is making a ‘grammatical mistake’. For the most part, they should be using a close up. That’s not to say that a long shot can’t be used to convey emotion, but if it is it should be done very deliberately and they better be able to justify why they used it.

Mid shots convey what is happening. It’s the verb. The action shot. Dialogue, but not emotional dialogue.

The close up shot is called the headless shot. You usually cut off the top of people’s heads because you’re most concerned about the eyes. You’re trying to capture what they’re thinking, how they’re feeling.

Moving on, if you’re going to shoot a movie, you have to have good light. If you don’t have light, you don’t have your images. Composition is also critical. You have to know what you’re trying to communicate. Sound makes a huge difference. It must be very clear.

Light: The color white can be friend or foe. You have three colors in digital imagery. White is in the middle and sets the tone. Most cameras will take an average from the room and will base colors based on what it assumes the white to be. White balancing can change the image dramatically. Often students try to get fantastic backgrounds and don’t pay attention to the light. The actual subjects wind up completely blacked out because of it.

If you hold up your hand and try to spin around until you see the place where your hand is brightest, that’s where you want your subject to be.

The best time to shoot is during the morning and late in the afternoon. The light is at an angle, so it’s possible to get nice soft light. If you’re shooting in the middle of the day, shoot in the shadows because your light is even. The best time to shoot is actually when it’s cloudy, because it’s ‘even’ light. The camera amplifies all the little stuff. So if it looks a little dark, it’s going to be super dark on camera and even worse when projected.

Another tip: Buy a tripod. Keep the camera movement to a minimum. Pan, tilt or zoom only for a purpose.

Sound. Sound or music makes or breaks your movie. The microphone is usually on the camera. You need a quiet place to record your voice overs, like a closet, car, something small and enclosed if possible. The mic needs to be close to the sound source. Make use of handhelds, booms and lavalieres. Get headphones so you can always hear eactly what you’re recording so you know if you’re getting it or not.

Other tips: Get permission forms, let the authorities know that you’ll be filming in that area. Or call the local film commission. At first they’ll be confused, but then they’ll be impressed and thankful that you did. Shoot multiple takes and note them on the storyboard. Seperate the shots using a slate/clapboard.

“No amount of technology can make a bad movie good.” — plaque at Pixar.

Websites with resources are at sfett.com, torres21.com and flickschool.com

technorati tags:blc, blc06, Digital Storytelling

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Dr. Andy Hargraves is presenting the second keynote, titled Sustainable Learning Communities. Wow, he doesn’t pull any punches. His introduction was essentially a comparrison of the current American educational system versus the direction that the rest of the world is moving in. Every other major country in the world is moving away from nationwide standardization in favor of other more diverse models. He calls the US the captain and lone attendee of a sinking ship.

He asks the audience, what is sustainability? My definition was “A system that can maintain itself despite sociological and economical changes. His definition, “Sustainability does not simply mean whether something can last. It addresses how particular intiatives can be developed without compromising the development of others in the surrounding environment, now and in the future.” It is about endurance, renewal, and such, but it is also about social justice. Your improvements do not prosper at the expense of other schools or other systems around you.

That’s a really great point. If you are a principal and move to a different school and bring all your best teachers with you, it is an unsustainable system.

Unsustainability: Imposed short-term targets (or adequate yearly progress) transfress every principle of sustainable leadership and learning. Sound familiar? He says that it is completely unsustainable. England has had it for years. Government arbitrarily sets targets that schools need to reach so within X number of years, the majority of students would be exceptionally above level. It has been a universal failure. Where there has appeared to be improvement, it has really been deliberately ‘rigged’ so that students are guaranteed to achieve highly (teaching to the test, having low performing students be absent on testing days, etc).

“If you’re a governement, you can’t change things if they’re succeeding. You can only change things if they’re failing.” So in Australia, they had to prove that Literacy programs were failing so they could make changes, inspite of the fact that research was proving otherwise. Fascinating. Never heard about that. Gotta read more about that research.

What makes you an “Enron” of educational change? If you spend the majority of time focusing on the bubble kids to make it seem that you are generating more achievement than you really are. If your reading scores are going up, but less people outside of school are actually spending time reading. If you are a principal and see immigrant students coming into your school and you immediately think about finding a new job before failures through testing show up forcing you to lose your job. Scary thought.

So what can we do that is more sustainable in an age of post-standardization?
Depth, learning comes before achievement and before testing. Endurance, it lasts beyond the short term, the immediate target, improvement doesn’t disappear when the charasmatic leader leaves. Breadth, it is a shared responsbility across a community, teachers, principals, students and parents. Justice, we cannot bring about improvement in any one area without thought to the other areas around us, one district is also impacted by the surrounding districts. Diversity, standardization does not suit diverse system. Resourcefulness, how do we renew our sources of energy, conserving expenditure. Conservation, honors the past in creating the future, innovating into the future by bulding selectively on the best of the past, rather than bastardizing the past to take credit for future success.

Depth: Learning comes before achievement, which comes before testing. Not the other way around. Data driven instruciton is a misnomer. The data should not be the drivers, the practitioners, the instructors and teachers should be. Data is like Mapquest, it helps you find your way, but it is just an aid. If you make one wrong turn, you’re hopelessly lost forever. You need to combine that with your own eyes, experiences and thinking to get you correctly from point A to point B. Evidence guides you, but so does your own experience and intuition. This is radical stuff. Putting learning first, rather than testing and data.

Endurance: Sustainable leadership lasts. It goes beyond a single principal or superintendent. All leaders eventually go away, so systems have to exist beyond the specific person at the forefront of the change. We will all eventually die. A sustainable learning environment won’t go away with the leader. The positive leader will have taken actions to ensure that the principles, practices and people will endure after they have left. The best leaders ensure that their legacy continues long after they have moved on. Saying goodbye and then lamenting that, “They hired the wrong person to continue my work” is more of a reflection on yourself than anybody else. If the principal is hit by a bus tomorrow, will the things the principal stands for endure?

Breadth: It’s about distributed leadership and shared leadership. On average, 30% of teachers entering teaching leave within the first 3 years. Some schools try to focus on veteren teachers and give them all the leadreship positions. Younger teachers get frustrated quickly. They don’t have opportunities to take leadership responsibilities early on, and instead they wound up moving on to other professions where they have those opportunities. Other schools try to focus on novice teachers and rely on their enthusiasm and energy to sustain the culture of the school. Unfortunately, the constant turnover means they are constantly making the same mistakes. Which is not sustainable either. The key is to have a blended culture, with leadership opportunities across all age and experience levels. Create an environment of mentoring and reciprocal learning.

In some countries, there’s a major emphasis on “Lateral Leadership”. If your school is doing well, they provide tremendous incentives for sharing your strategies and leadership with other schools around you, spreading your success as far as possible. Focusing on the successful schools, instead of focusing on the failing schools. Novel concept.

In the UK, Australia and Canada there is an emphasis on networking schools for peer support and peer pressure to improve all schools.

It is time to put learning before achievement, before testing. Testing will wind up improving because of it. It’s a matter of focus an emphasis. Not of charismatic leaders, but of creating sustainable change regardless of the leader in front of the podium.

I don’t often go to Keynote followups, but this presentation is sort of tickling my brain and I feel like there are some ideas bouncing around that I want to try to explore a bit before moving on to another topic. So this blog post now continues in another room with a smaller setting.

Somebody just raised a great question. How do we try to make change, widespread radical change, while still acknowledging and accomadating the current system. His solution is to find schools that are succeeding and network them with schools that aren’t, and have them share their strategies for change. Building on the successes some schools are experiencing. Since the results are trasnapearant (all the results are available publicly), if a school is failing it needs to implement practical changes that are currently being implemented by successful schools. Practice learning from practice.

If it is clear who is succeeding and who is failing, but many of the succeeding schools appear to be successful because they have figured out how to ‘work the system’ and success is defined based on faulty criteria, what is the criteria that schools SHOULD use to identify success and who they should look to for leadership. How do you quantify or qualify it?

Successful schools promote stimulating conversations that are also committed conversations, that translate into some kind of action over time. It’s not enough to discuss the ideas, they need to influence actionable decisions that transform the school community.

Professional learning communities, what passes for professional learning communities is often teachers thrown together to look at test score data in math and literacy. It’s rhetoric. And it’s definitely not a learning community. Professional learning communities are about more than just throwing groups of teachers together after school to look at achievement data and figure out quick ways to raise their scores. It’s about challenging each other to move ahead.

technorati tags:blc, blc06, leadership, education

Blogged with Flock

Before I had to duck out, I caught the first 20 minutes of Jim Wenzloff and Chris Burnett’s presentation, Tales from the Clem. I’ve seen Jim present before and I know Chris well enough, but there’s always something new to learn.

Chris heard Will Richardson speak at BLC04 and after listening to him share how he had students publishing to the web without any pre-approval process, she promptly walked out. While that may work for an average middle class group of students, it certainly wouldn’t fly with her ‘at risk’ students in Michigan. Waste of time in her mind.

However, after some time passed, people at her school wanted her to start dabbling in blogging and to see what it was all about. She said that she would be willing to give it a try if it was 100% secure and everything flowed through her before it went live. Posts, comments, trackbacks, everything. They set it up and she gave it a try. Her students did some posting and then she mentioned on an international listserv that if anybody had a free minute to stop by and give her students some feedback. By Monday, a slew of comments from around the world had rolled in. To say it added an entirely new dimmension to her students’ ideas about writing would be an understatement.

Over time, she has restructured her thinking about blogs, always keeping in mind the key question, “How can I make this work for MY students” and then taking appropriate action.

She shared some really interesting projects, but the last thing I saw before I go really stood out. Jim and Chris have started a listerv where teachers can volunteer to provide feedback to student bloggers. A teacher who wants to give their students a little boost can send out an email and any volunteers who have time can chime in and help a student see the value in publishing for the world.

What a brilliant idea! So good, I think I’m going to have to give it it’s own blog post just in case some people aren’t reading these posts all the way through! Thank goodness you are though, thanks for sticking with me.

Anyway, if you want to get involved, you can email Carol (net2001@yahoo.com) or Jim (jim@misd.net).

technorati tags:blc, blc06, blogs

Blogged with Flock

As I mentioned in the last post, I ran into my usual problem and ran out of battery during the second session of the day. So, I had to resort to paper and pen. Thankfully I don’t work in the ‘school of tomorrow’ and still had access to those ancient technologies! So here’s the recap as translated through my illegible handwriting.

The second notable session that I attended was presented by Dr. Sarah Kajder. She’s an 11th grade English teacher who’s students would typically be classified as ‘at risk’. Students that aren’t expected to succeed. I found it extremely interesting that she mentioned that she sort of flies under the radar, tries not to rock the boat and just use these new technologies without necessarily going through the proper channels. While I do understand why teachers might go that route, I do think it’s worth the journey. Administrators for the most part are trying to do what’s best for the children, it’s just that often they don’t know what that is. Anyway,. her presentation definitely lent a new perspective to the whole aspect of 21st century literacy skills.

Sara did make a point of mentioning that even though teachers do have to teach the scripted curriculum and accomplish the tasks needed to pass state tests, that’s not to say that they can’t do more beyond that. She doesn’t reccomend throwing the curriculum out, but to layer new methodology on top of it. Essentially teaching kids new skills in spite of the curriculum. Important changes are happening in the way that we read and write and we have to react accordingly.

She had her students list the tools that writers use. In the first 12 minutes, all they could come up with was pen, pencil, paper and computer/typewriter. That’s it. Eventually one girl volunteered weblog, but was immediately shot down by a peer. “That’s not a tool we use in school.” So she had them expand the list to ALL sorts of writing tools and with some encouragement added post its, blogs, wikipedia, cell phones, iMovie, digital cameras, videogames, stencils and highlighters. Quite a diverse list, but now they were thinking about writing in a very different way. It’s an interesting way to think about it. Writing is about more than just text now, it includes sounds, voices, images, video and so on.

Whenever she reviews a new technology and considers bringing it into the classroom, she asks herself two questions: What ar ethe unique capacities of it and how does this tool allow us to do something better? If it can’t fulfill those two, she doesn’t bring it in yet. Technology amplifies instruction, for better or for worse. It can make good teaching better, but it can also make bad teaching worse.

One thing I found interesting was that during one part of the presentation she asked how many people had a weblog and about half the room raised their hands. Then she asked how many people blogged with students. About a quarter of the room did. That’s amazing to me. Two years ago, she would have had to ask how many people had even heard of blogging and I bet only a couple people would have raised their hands. That definitely says something, I’m just not sure what.

In her opinion, a ‘good’ weblog has a clear purpose, is reflective, has a recognizable point of view, emulates expertise and exhibitis multiple modalities. “Classroom blogs need to reproduce the same conditions in which genuine affinity spaces can emerge and be supported.” I’m not sure that that means in hindsight, but it seemed profound at the time. I’ll have to ask her about that one later.

One other great example from her presentation. She mentioned that in her curriculum, they learn about Chinese society through a single book. That book basically represents everything her students might learn about China in class. So she found a cooperating classroom on a website in China to work with who were studying “What it is to be an American?” They were doing almost the exact same thing and using the Great Gatsby as their model! Her students couldn’t believe that the book was going to be the Chinese classes only idea of how Americans lived. They wound up using a weblog to write back and forth to fill in the gaps. She also mentioned that the Chinese class was correcting her classes grammar, causing her students to step it up a bit!

Pretty good presentation and I hung back to chat with her a little bit after the workshop was over to pick her brain a little bit. She really had some great ideas, not just about using blogs in the classroom, but why we should be doing so in the first place. It’s not enough for it to just be cool, it really has to serve a purpose. I definitely want to read more of her stuff.

If you want to learn more, her website is BringingTheOutsideIn.com

technorati tags:BLC06, BLC, literacy, blogs

Blogged with Flock

Aaahhh…. This feels good. Sitting in an auditorium, waiting for Marco Torres (the keynote speaker) to begin. Haven’t had the chance to do this for what seems like forever, despite having attended more conferences this year than the rest of my life combined. Ironically, just like always, i’m already stressing about battery life. Different year, different laptop, same ol’ problem! This time, i left my power supply at the hotel, so I’m anticipating about 90-120 minutes of typing before I have to resort to pen and paper. Good times, good times…

Marco is showing a video full of inspirational quotes like, “When I become a teacher, I want to maintain the bell curve. I want to sit in the lunge and complain. I want to teach one year, twenty five times. I want to cover, rather than uncover material, and use chalk.” Looked like it might have been part of an Apple campaign, leading into a Think Different ad.

Marco is from San Fernando, inner city LA. The culture is predominately latino and proudly so. He’s sharing a map where students in his government class mapped out where hispanic communities live in the LA area. Then they mapped where low income families lived in the same area. Then they mapped people who never graduated from high school. Can you figure out the trend? Pretty powerful lesson there.

Teachers have three options, you can quit, complain or innovate.

During the lockouts, he sent student camera crews out to cover it because CNN could possibly use their footage. Authentic learning with practical, real results.

With the advent of technology, we have new ways of communicating information. We’re no longer restricted to just text. Or text and audio. We can also add video. His example is a passage from an MLK speach. Just looking at it, do you know who the speaker is? Much more powerful to hear it being read. And even more powerful to see him presenting it himself.

Video tends to be so much more memorable than text alone. He just had us close our eyes and listen to some music by a band named Peru Negro. Very rhythmic, definitely latin, a great beat. Now we’re watching it a second time with our eyes open and seeing them perform the music. It adds an entire other dimmension to the music. There’s traditional dancing going on, and for lack of a better term the music is very physical in nature. The people on stage almost look like they’re possessed by the music. They’re also wearing traditional dress, or dress that I assume is traditional for Peru. It gives it an entirely different flavor. Oh yeah, Marco’s students created the video as well.

He hosts a film festival every year called iCan. He’s sharing a commercial that students made for the festival emphasizing that it’s an opportunity to share films with the rest of the community. Wow. He showed the commercial on local cable, and they went from 200 people to 1000 people. All through a commercial created by students. Impressive.

Marco is a secondary social studies teacher. He just uses multimedia to make classroom experiences relevant and meaningful.

He just shared a digital story called The Power of 1, which conveys how important it is to vote, how powerful a single vote can be and how many historical events were decided by just one vote. I’m going to have to see if I can get links to his videos, because just describing them doesn’t do them justice. I guess that’s the point of the presentation. Some things are just more effective visually.

Another interesting project. He had students try to find the worst fairy tale they coud, (Little Suck a Thumb), and then make a digital story from it. Very cool. I’d love to do that in kindergarten with Kid Pix.

It’s about changing perspective. Taking something traditional and making it new. Make it relevant. Make it meaningful. Make it applicable. Make it enthralling.

Here’s a great slide. “High Tech = High Touch; Connect with self, our feamily and with the community.”

He says that self esteem is an issue with his students. We wants them to be succssful and confident. So he connects his students with younger students. They were going to work with younger students about adverbs. At first they wanted to get all fancy and use Flash and make animations. Instead, they went the simple route and used paper cut outs to make a quick video to act out a story that featured a specific word. In this case, it was ‘fortunately’. Every sentance alternated between beginning with Fortunately and Unfortunately. It wasn’t fancy, lasted about 30 seconds or so, but very effective. His students made about 35 of these videos. The library made a DVD of it and shared with the entire community. Students becoming publishers. The new story for the 21st Century. Why publish for your teacher when you can publish for the world?

Marco shared a video about an elderly man who only knew a few words in English. Everyday he would go into a coffee shop and order donuts and coffee, because that was all he knew to say. He ate that for nearly a month. Then one day he overheard somebody ordering ham and eggs. He wrote that down, practiced saying it and the next day ordered ham and eggs and finally had a decent breakfast. A simple, but powerful story. That man passed away recently, but now his story will live on. Marco points out that his Pueblo’s stories are just as valuable as learning what the original 13 colonies were. You could make a pretty strong argument that they’re more important.

Oh good, he’s got a website with links to the movies that he’s going to share. Many of these videos are shared on local cable access, which appearantly they’re thrilled to broadcast.

Many of his students came to this country alone. Their family would send them to the US so that they could have a better life. They life with extended family, or friends of friends. Some students made a video about what it was like to seperate from their family and living apart from them. Think about that. Seperating from your family and never even knowing your mother and father. Marco mentions that he didn’t want his students to be just another statistic, he wants them to share their stories and to put a face on these issues.

It’s not about the technology, it’s about being different and being distinct. He suggests that everything you do as a teacher should have a life outside the classroom. Find ways to put yourself in an uncomfortable situation. Make it meaningful. Give it a business plan.

He encouraged one of his more difficult students to find a band, any band, and then to record and promote them. This student hooked up with the band, built them a web site, a MySpace account, created some videos, and helped get their name out there. He said the student didn’t even like their music, but the project itself was real and real applications. Unbelievably, one of the songs by this band wound up being used for the trailer in Batman. He is now doing the same for Sony. This is a student who was failing class. A failure in class, successful in life. What does that teach us?

I just realized that they’re video taping this presentation. I seriously hope that it’s going to be available somewhere.

In conclusion: Embrace your obstacles, make it relevant, make it meaningful, amke it applicable. Innovate and infect others with curiosity. Why are you doing the things you’re doing?

The two websites he lists are sfett.com and torres21.com

technorati tags:blc, blc06, digitalstorytelling

Blogged with Flock

I’m kicking off the BLC06 conference over at the MIT Media Lab. After an early start spent fighting traffic caused by collapsing tunnels, we finally made our way over to MIT. The moment you walk through the doors, you know where you are. This place simply reeks of creativity. I won’t bother to describe any more about the room itself, you’ll just have to browse through the photos to understand what I mean.

The lab focuses on “creative uses of new technologies”. It all revolves around innovation, particularly learning in education. Mitch is saying that they call their program Lifelong Kindergarten because for the most part, Kindergarten works pretty well. Kids spend a lot of their time building, creating, experimenting and collaborating. They believe that’s what should drive the bulk of educational experiences throughout school. In the process of designing things, kids learn about the rules of the world. Often the spirit of kindergarten dissipates as students move into the older grade levels.

Froebel, the person often credited for inventing kindergarten, created specific tools to be used in kindergarten to promote development. “If Froebel were alive today, what tools would he be using with kids?” By using technology, they hope to apply the principals of kindergarten to learners of all ages. ‘Frobel’s Gift’s for the 21st Century’.

One thing I find very interesting is that everything in this room looks like it was just recently hacked together. There are no fancy shelves (they use the same wire ones that I used to have in my kitchen growing up), half the computers don’t have outer cases on them, and very few of the computers or monitors seem to match. The lab is a marked difference from most computer labs were everything looks 100% the same and great care is taken to maintain identical standards.

The Media Lab helped to design Lego MindStorms. For years, people have been using it to create robots in a variety of settings and in competitions world wide. Mitch is showing off something called Cricket, which is similar but very different. For example, there’s a birthday cake with candles that have blinking lights on them. When somebody blows on the candles, it plays Happy Birthday. Not exactly a robot. Same sort of idea, but different in execution. I’m pretty sure that he showed this off last year at the conference, but it seems to be on the market right now, being sold by the Playful Invention Company. Typically, they’re for children eight years and older, but he showed us an example done by a six year old.

The software looks like a simplified programing visual programing language. Very module, almost like assembling something with Legos. Just build your program block by block.

The other program we’ll be playing with is Scratch. Looks a little bit like Logo. It’s similar, but this one isn’t quite as ‘cute’. For example, it throws a cat onto the screen. You can drag over a command, such as “Take 10 steps forward”. Then you can add other commands, like “Turn 90 degrees” and so on. However, this can get pretty darn sophisticated. It can apply simple Photoshop type filters based on things like the location of the mouse. Mitch used the ‘swirl’ as an example. The closer the mouse gets to the center, the more the picture swirls. Most of the time I’ve found that computer and art teachers want to move right on past the filters in Photoshop so they can get to important things like using layers to make students appear in a rain forest or on the moon. This turns a flat 2D piece of art into a multimedia masterpiece. Essentially, you can create an engine that end users can use to create their own artwork of sorts.

Scratch is still in beta. Later this year, it should be available to the public. Cross platform as well, which is always a good thing. I wonder if it’ll work in Linux.

After a short presentation, we split up into two groups, one half playing with Scratch and the other half playing with Crickets. I do say play because that’s exactly what we were doing. However, we were also learning plenty.

I hunt out with the Crickets group. I have to admit, the software made it easy to get rolling. There were about six groups of people doing Crickets, and everybody went off in very different directions. I wound making a digital Menorah. When you touched two clamps together, a light started flickering. Touch it again and another light started flickering. Touch it a third time and it started playing “Dreidel Dreidel“. At the very end, the lights would gradually flicker off into darkness. The program to create that sequence was actually much more complicated than it sounds, but the software made it really easy to experiment. I kept taking out pieces and putting in others to see what would happen. There was one other project that really stood out to me. Two women made a ‘friend finder’. Basically it just beeped and blinked until two units got within a few feet of each other, and then they both started playing “Oh My Darling, Clementine”. It used IR to determine when another unit was close, so it had to be pretty exact. But they got it working really well and I have to admit it was pretty impressive.

After everybody had demonstrated their projects, we formed a circle and had a round table discussion exploring the applications for these programs in education. People are pointing out that since there’s so many points of entry, and the projects are so open ended, students of all levels can be successful. I think one thing that everybody took away from this was how important the process was versus the product that they created. Regardless of what the final result looked like, everybody learned something about programming, logical process, cause and effect, and sequencing. One person said, “I’m not a math person, but I was astounded by the math implications that were in this project. I was kinda of growing with it. I kept adding to my toolbox of knowledge of how this worked.” Everything was very simple, yet it could become extremely sophisticated based on your needs and efforts.

In New York, they have some groups of students using Crickets to try to explore ways that they could improve the subway system there. While they may not have created inventions that could directly be implemented, the ideas that they came up with had potential that could actually be developed. For example, one group came up with the idea of having air swirl around the tunnel when the train was approaching, in order to give some warning to people with disabilities. Someone who may not be able to see or hear the approaching train could still feel the increased air activity.

While the software itself (Scratch) is going to be free, I was a little disappointed to hear that it wouldn’t be open source. They said that they wanted to make sure it was free so that students in third world countries could still get equal access to it. However, I look at the software and I immediately think that it could very easily be ported to a totally on line version using something along the lines of AJAX. Of course, I say it could easily be done because I’m not a programmer and wouldn’t do it myself, but the front end looks like it could be web based. So why not give somebody who DOES know what they’re doing the opportunity to continue to develop it? Also, I would love to see more programming commands created for Crickets. For example, there is no way to have it loop back to a specific part of the program if a specific trigger is tripped. So why not allow somebody outside MIT to code that them self so it could be worked into a future release? It wouldn’t affect the business model, because people still need to buy the Crickets hardware, so that’s a non-issue. It’s a lesson that Lego learned as well with Mindstorms. By allowing the community to develop their own plugins or add ons, Mindstorms really took on a life of its own.

Interesting note: Mitch obviously loves his work and greatly enjoys sharing it. The only time I saw him lose his smile the entire morning was when somebody suggested that they align some of the demo projects to state standards. I know that doing so sort of takes some of the ‘open-endedness‘ out of it and sort of feels like it’s diminishing the creative aspects of it, but at some point you do have to face the reality that schools live and die by their standards right now. It may not be pretty, but that’s just the way things are. So how do you address specific standards within the curriculum while still maintaining the freedom to be innovative? It’s a tough one that isn’t too much fun to address.

On the whole, it was a perfect way to kick things off at the conference. A little bit of instruction, a little more play time, and a whole lot of learning. More than anything, it really got everybody thinking about a subject that often gets left out of the curriculum: innovation. And let’s be honest, where would this country be without innovators? It’s easy to teach someone how to scan objects in the checkout line, but teaching people to be innovative is an entirely different challenge.

technorati tags:blc, blc06, mit, medialab

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Yikes, this is starting to become a habit again! This podcast recaps a few conversations that were scattered around NECC and the DEN National Leadership Conference. I’ve heard from many people that the most valuable part of the last few conferences they’ve attended have been the conversations that have occured with other attendee’s and presenters outside of the actual workshops. If that’s the case, then why aren’t we creating more opportunities for such conversations? Perhaps it’s time for a new EduBlogger’s unConference, utilizing the Open Space format. Anybody want to take a trip to Chicago if I put it together?

Enjoy the show!

Direct link to the podcast Had some trouble getting it uploaded, should be working now

Technorati Tags: blc06 blc2006

One thing that I really enjoyed about the cruise was having the chance to sit down and chit chat with so many people from around the world in a very casual way. Of course, I wasn’t going to let an opportunity like that pass me by, so after my unwitting victims had a few drinks (and I had a few as well!) I did a few impromptu interviews. I asked everybody to identify one thing that they learned from the conference, or that got them excited. Something new they saw that they couldn’t wait to take back to their school or business. I think you’ll be able to hear just how much everyone enjoyed the conference.

Amongst the many people interviewed were Alan November, Will Richardson, Jim Wenzloff, TS Charelston and Mohd Paruk from Singapore, and Jon from my old school. I also got Paul, Mike and Terry from the UK and several other people I know I’m forgetting. No show notes for this one, just listen and enjoy!

Direct link to the podcast

Just a quick reminder, Teach42 is up for a people’s choice award! Stop by PodcastAwards.com and throw the show a vote in the education category.

On the bus right now heading back to the hotel. I’m typing on my PPC so forgive the grammar and terse writing style.

This has been quite a learning adventure, and an international one at that. We just heard about the new bombings in London, and I’m trying to remember who I met this week from London. I feel a much greater connection with the UK after spending so mnuch time with people from there. I hope their friends and families are ok and my thoughts and prayers are with them. This conference really emphasizes how we’re all part of a much larger world community.

I don’t know what the name of the software is yet, but it definitely sounds interesting. It’s an online tool, Free and Open Source, that provides you with your own URL, 100mb of storage, public and private aspects, blogging, polling, links, chat, discussion, WYSIWYG web page creation, and more. Oh yeah, and it’s ad free.

So, what exactly is it? I still don’t know! I have to tell you, if he’s really trying to hook us in, he’s doing a great job of it. Definitely piqued my interest.

Ok, the list of what it does isn’t done yet. It can do a formative assessment against all state standards throughout the year. I’d make some sort of snide remark along the lines of “all that and the kitchen sink” but the title of the session is Better Than Baking Soda, which seems to describe it pretty well. I would imagine that we’ll get to the actual tool sometime soon

Bah, I had to step out to use the restroom and missed him getting started on it. So I just stepped back into the room and everyone in the room is ooo’ing, aaaahhh’ing and whispering amongst each other. Definitely sounds like people are digging this so far. Looks like the site is MyEdesk Reference Desk.

Ok, a few quick links to samples. Bakerstrail.rwlo.org, pstudent.rwlo.org, polarissda.rwlo.org, mbaker.rwlo.org, germanexperience.rwlo.org What does RWLO stand for? Real World Learning Organizer? I still don’t have a great feel for what exactly it is, but like I said I missed out on a small but important chunk.

Here’s the blurb from the main page:

The PT3 Pathways Project is funded by the US Department of Education through its Preparing Tomorrow’s Teachers with Technology program. This project adapts a proven set of P-12 training materials and Internet-based curricula for use in math, science, language arts, and educational technology in community college courses taken by pre-service teachers. This site will house an online library of technology-based learning objects to promote constructivist learning in the community colleges. Faculty from thirty community colleges are to participate in a face-to-face/online training and development program and will be supported by mentors in an online learning community to promote institutionalization.

Ok, now he’s saying that this e-desk is basically like iDisk on steroids. iDisk??? What the heck IS this thing??

This is pretty amusing. Right now he has Skyped in somebody in Utah who is also sharing the screen via Breeze. So he can see what we’re looking at and talk to the crowd. He’s taken over the presentation at this point and is doing the presenting. Every once in a while, he asks the actual human being in here and says, “Can you flip me to the next slide?” It’s cracking me up.

We just took an IQ test that was created using this tool. Sounds like Utips.org is a new version of e-desk. Or something like that. This seems interesting, but everything is really confusing which kind of undermines the effectiveness of the presentation.

We’re looking at the results of the IQ test. You really can pull up the data in every way possible. You can see how everyone did in general, in raw data or as a chart. You can drill down to individual questions and see how each individual student did on any given question. It’s a pretty decent interface, very intuitive. You can even align the questions to standards, so you can see how students did against certain standards throughout the test. I’m assuming that with multiple testing opportunities, you can track them over time as well.

You can create your own tests as individuals, or the school/district/state can do it as a group.

Let me reiterate, the software is Free and Open Source. The backend is SQL, so you if you already have your questions and standards, you can import your stuff in. I like the way they put it, “If you have a big enough geek, you can certainly do it”.

They did a nice job with Javascript, making the pages pretty quick and dynamic. He’s demo’ing how one goes about creating a test and it has some nice options, like the ability to make it “open book” meaning you can try an answer and if you get it wrong you can guess again until you get it right. He just built a test in about 3 minutes. They already had questions created that were aligned to standards. Basically, he said I want 5 questions addressing this standard, 5 questions for that standard, put in a few options and voila! You have a test.

I do want to point out that this is a very high tech way to do very traditional testing. In that sense, I feel a small sense of disappointment. I bet it will also make a killer worksheet. I’m not saying the tool isn’t cool, because it is. But I don’t think that it really pushes us forward. However, we do have tests, we do have quizzes, and this is the type of thing that teachers do on a regular basis. So this tool would definitely be valuable to teachers and schools. Considering how many sessions I saw this week that emphasized moving forward and changing the way we educate our children, this session stands out markedly as not following suit. This is an innovative tool to do something very traditional. Ideally, we want to make drastic changes to education. This is something you can use in your classroom tomorrow, and every day until we get there.

If you want your own copy, you can email cody@myedesk.org. It’s Free and Open Source, did I mention that? So you can host your own copy if you want. If you want to do it on their server, head to rwlo.org and sign up for a free account. They have tutorials there as well.

Beginning on September first, e-desk and utips are merging. That explains some of the confusion.

Unfortunately, I have to catch a plane now so I won’t be able to see the demo.

This is a very cool, practical tool that you teachers can take right back to the classroom and start using from day one. The presentation was a little confusing and I’m still a bit confused by it, but I definitely see a lot of potential here.