Here is another great Moodle design that two teachers are trying for the first time.



The teachers wanted a course site to replicate as much of their current course design as possible. Of all the different Moodle tools, Forum ended up being the most versatile, because it respects groups and allows students to easily upload files to share with the entire class (unlike Directory or Assignment).

The two faculty members teach six sections between them, which we created as groups. This will keep the class discussions sorted, just to make it easier to find the work of your classmates. If you give each group and the course unique enrollment keys, then the students will automatically sort into the correct section when they log in for the first time. You only tell the students the enrollment key for their section. No one ends up using the course enrollment key.



Throughout the course, students write each paper using the same writing and peer editing process. Moodle discussion forums allow each student to both make their work available to the entire class and specifically to the individual who will be reviewing it. The reviewer then writes a formal response paper and uploads it to the same forum. This keeps the original and review paired together (using Reply in the Moodle forum).



When the time comes to submit the final draft, the student uploads the file to the Assignment object rather than the forum. Why? This is the "instructor reviewed" draft, intended for the teacher instead of their peers in class. This is set up as an "advanced file upload" assignment object, though I renamed this type "Upload multiple files" in the English language file, because that more specifically indicates what our users will be using it for. Students upload their instructor reviewed draft and metacritical essay, and then the teacher responds using the Moodle grading interface, not to mark grades, but rather to upload a Word file that includes teacher comments as floating notes. This exchange between the teacher and student remains private.

Students complete WEDGE (Writing Every Day Generates Excellence/Ease) activities to start each class. These are posted to a separate forum. We take advantage of a nice feature of Moodle that allows any participant in the class to start a forum topic. This way, the students take charge of the operation of the class, creating the new container for the day.



Of course, the teachers also use the site for routine class management, posting syllabi, links, and calendar events to help the course run smoothly. They chose to use the Topics course format and organize the page by assignment type.



Most announcements will simply be posted as text to the front page or sent via email -- no need to take the extra steps to post to a News forum when the teachers are seeing the students most days of the week.

We considered using the Glossary activity for Word of the Day and then decided that a simple Forum would be just as easy to use and more familiar to the students. The teachers did not need the auto-linking feature that the glossary provides.



We only ran into two issues using these features. If the teacher creates a single forum prompt for all sections, then the students cannot reply to it! This Moodle "feature" is documented on Moodle.org but there do not seem to be any plans to change it. So, either the teacher posts the same prompt to three sections, the students post the prompt, or the teacher starts a thread to which you cannot reply and the students start a new thread to reply to it. A minor inconvenience that we will hopefully solve one day.

The other issue was the sharp dividing line between forums and assignments in terms of privacy of replies. Wouldn't it be ideal if one could post a "private" forum reply that only the author of the original post could see? Or if a student could submit an assignment but allow the rest of the class to view it?

Do you have experience setting up a high school English course in Moodle? What other features have you leveraged to make your course hum?

tags: moodle, english, highschool, secondary

School started today, and I can see light at the end of the tunnel. We have made our most significant changes to the network for the year, have almost finished annual maintenance on everyone's computer, and can soon settle in to the daily support of a school in operation. And I can find the time to start blogging again!

Today, I spent an hour with our U.S. History teacher, who is offering an elective titled "Election 2008" this fall. He wanted to build a course web site that would put the students' ideas front and center and provide many connections to outside resources related to the national and state elections coming in November. We stretched our practice of what Moodle could do to support such a course.

Here is the Moodle site as it currently stands.



Why the big blank space? We are using the "social" course format for this course, rarely used at Catlin Gabel. The social format is the most child-centered of the course formats in Moodle. It puts a discussion forum front and center, so that students' posts about election news, photos or cartoons, and statistics from the race can dominate the page. As the course begins, this part of the page will become an ever-changing river of student thoughts and reactions.

On the right-hand side of the page, we are pulling two RSS feeds into the site, one from the progressive Talking Points Memo and the other the conservative Washington Times. In this case, Moodle's practice of showing the feeds separately works well.

In the left-hand column goes more conventional Moodle content, especially links to course resources and activities. We did have some fun using embed code from YouTube and election-related widgets to embed interesting content into the sub-pages.

The teacher is planning to Skype in representatives from the campaigns and students from other schools. I have seen Moodle's Skype plugin but haven't quite figured out what exactly it does. Isn't the magic of Skype all in the application? Does it list your online friends or something? Please enlighten me, if you have worked with this before.

I will enjoy watching the students develop this page and engage in rich conversations as the course begins.

tags: election2008, moodle, constructivism

Should schools become more entrepreneurial? One person with whom I had a conversation the other day thinks so. Do you have special programs or events at your school? Spin them off so that they must be financially self-sufficient, forcing them to adapt to survive. Do you have untapped resources that you could leverage to raise revenue? Do you offer summer school or a summer teacher institute? How often do your buildings lay idle? What is your merchandise store like?

On the one hand, these ideas appeal to me for how they embrace the initiative of individuals. However, several distinguishing features of schools make me wonder how effective a business-style entrepreneurial approach would be in a school. For one, schools are culturally sensitive -- they place greater value on relationships and humanity than your typical corporation. Second, schools serve students, so if an experiment within the school's "core business" goes awry, students experience the drop in quality. Third, schools do not tend to hire for entrepreneurial wisdom. Whereas a business might cultivate an entrepreneurial spirit from top to bottom, how many individuals in a school are prepared to take strategic risks?

Maybe the answer is to start from the periphery of the school and proceed one step at a time. Perhaps the call is to ask schools to broaden their idea of how a school could operate. Let experiment -- with sharing content, outsourcing our school merchandise, or starting a rich summer program -- and then keep what works and discard what does not, but with an attitude that allows for failure rather than allowing it to retard innovation. If that goes well, then perhaps a day will come to shake up some of the assumptions that define the core program.

tags: innovation, entrepreneurship

Here are notes on my successful import of 200 classes into Moodle. This is part of a project to create a major assignments calendar for our upper school that calculates the number of major assignments by student rather than by grade, providing a more accurate view of potential conflicts before they happen.

First, I wrote a Perl script to export classes from Education Edge into a text file. I used the following SQL query and then formatted the results pretty.

SELECT DISTINCT
ea7classes.ea7classesid,
ea7courses.coursename,
deptentries.description as coursedept,
ea7courses.ea7coursesid,
ea7courses.courseid,
ea7classes.classsection,
periodstable.entryid as period,
ea7faculty.userdefinedid as facultyid,
ea7records.nickname,
ea7records.lastname,
ea7records.passportnumber as facultyusername,
ea7rooms.roomid

FROM
ea7courses
inner join schools on (schools.schoolsid = ea7courses.schoolsid)
inner join ea7classes on (ea7classes.ea7coursesid = ea7courses.ea7coursesid)
inner join ea7sessions on (ea7sessions.ea7sessionsid = ea7classes.ea7sessionsid)
inner join ea7academicyears on (ea7academicyears.ea7academicyearsid = ea7sessions.ea7academicyearsid)
inner join ea7classterms on (ea7classterms.ea7classesid = ea7classes.ea7classesid)
inner join ea7terms on (ea7terms.ea7termsid = ea7classterms.ea7termsid)
inner join tableentries as termstable on (termstable.tableentriesid = ea7terms.termid)
left outer join ea7coursefilters on (ea7coursefilters.parentid = ea7courses.ea7coursesid and ea7coursefilters.filtertype=163)
left outer join filtervalues7 on (filtervalues7.parentid = ea7coursefilters.filtersid and filtervalues7.recordtype = 1098)
left outer join tableentries as deptentries on (deptentries.tableentriesid= filtervalues7.filteridvalue1)
left outer join ea7classtermmeetings on (ea7classtermmeetings.ea7classtermsid = ea7classterms.ea7classtermsid)
left outer join ea7timetableentries on (ea7timetableentries.ea7timetableentriesid = ea7classtermmeetings.ea7timetableentriesid)
left outer join tableentries as periodstable on (periodstable.tableentriesid = ea7timetableentries.period)
left outer join ea7facultyclasstermmeetings on (ea7facultyclasstermmeetings.ea7classtermmeetingsid = ea7classtermmeetings.ea7classtermmeetingsid)
left outer join ea7rooms on (ea7rooms.ea7roomsid = ea7classtermmeetings.ea7roomsid)
left outer join ea7faculty on (ea7faculty.ea7facultyid = ea7facultyclasstermmeetings.ea7facultyid)
left outer join ea7records on (ea7records.ea7recordsid = ea7faculty.ea7recordsid)

WHERE
schools.schoolid = 'US'
and ea7academicyears.description = '2008-2009'
and ea7courses.ea7coursesid <> 404

ORDER BY
ea7classes.ea7classesid,
ea7classes.classsection

Then I installed and ran Moodle's Upload Courses contributed module. What a nice job the author did with this. Once I cleared all of the ambiguous teacher names, the courses imported in a flash.



I decided to create one Moodle class for each course/teacher combination. In other words, if one teacher teaches one section of ninth grade English, and a second teacher teaches two sections, I would create two Moodle courses. Teachers are pretty autonomous at our school, and this structure parallels what most teachers did with Moodle when I created courses only upon request. In cases where the teachers actually co-teach the course, I will need to remove one course and double up the teachers in the other remaining.

I embedded teacher initials in course IDs to distinguish them and provide a key for subsequent Education Edge searches based on this information, but will have to go back and embed them in the course fullnames as well -- the students can't currently tell the courses apart, because they only see the full names!

Rather than importing enrollments as well, I will allow students to enroll themselves on the first day of classes.

I edited config.php to show a limited set of default blocks for all the new courses. Unfortunately, the major assignments block I am working on did not show up, so I will have to add that subsequently with a script.

I am still working on a major assignments block for our Moodle that borrows concepts and SQL queries from Gary Anderson and pulls course enrollments from Education Edge. More on that later.


tags: moodle, blackbaud, educationedge

Catlin Gabel hosts one exchange student from Maru-a-Pula School in Botswana each year. Yesterday, our new student arrived in the States for the first time, but he had been in touch with his host family for weeks ... through Facebook. He also asked where to pick up a SIM card for his phone. This is the first time I have welcomed such a well-connected student from Botswana to the States! Now, if only we could find him a Euro-to-U.S. power adapter ...

tags: botswana, africa, cellphone, facebook

Our summer helpers have developed a killer room for the process of completing annual maintenance on our faculty and staff laptop computers. Note the ingenious use of the built-in projection system to get everyone through the long days!

I dug up this command today for a project, with the help of Doug's Applescripts for iTunes.


tell application "iTunes"
set current encoder to encoder "MP3 Encoder"
end tell

We like to set the default encoder for importing, especially on shared computers, in order to facilitate the conversion of audio files captured using Olympus audio recorders and Windows computers.

I also learned how to show all of the supported Applescript commands for an application: Script Editor -> File menu -> Open Dictionary. Now why didn't I know that two months ago?

Unfortunately, iTunes does not include support to show the Kind column in the items view, which I was hoping to script.



tags: itunes, applescript

Catlin Gabel teachers hone their iPhoto skills.

I just finished teaching a successful two-day workshop in iPhoto. Like many of our classes, I was so pleased that eight teachers and staff members chose to spend some of their summer time developing new skills that they may use this year. Photo management software inspires a lot of energy from our colleagues, so visual and personal yet also connected to their work here at school. Notable, a few attended simply because they were longtime PC users at work who were about to purchase a Mac at home. In this project-based workshop, I also learned much about the print publishing options of iPhoto, such as the ability to drop photos into individual day cells in the calendar tool. One teacher placed 160 photos into one twelve-month family calendar! I also noted how quickly I found myself teaching the students Flickr, in order to fetch Creative Commons photos to import and manipulate, when many had forgotten their digital cameras. One staff member created an entire musical slideshow about trout. Amazing.

tags: iphoto, photography, professionaldevelopment

Here's a shot of the Mahlum Architects offices, where I am waiting for our 9:00 meeting for the Catlin Gabel Creative Arts
Center. Note the central tables for discussion and sharing documents. The staff rearrange themselves periodically so that architects sit with their project teams.

Today, we take planning for data and audiovisual support to the next level. We are seeking to plan for future capacity without exceeding the budget, include flexible audiovisual solutions for classroom and gallery space, and ensure sufficient power everywhere for the laptop program.

To start the project, we will need to meet specific fundraising goals this year.

Today, I led day one of our MacOS class. I was pleased that five teachers and staff members chose to spend time learning more about an operating system. I wish more would seek such professional develoment, since good practice with one's OS can make a huge difference. Four of the participants were switchng to a Mac at school or at home, and only one just wanted to better get to know their computer.I used an emergent curriculum approach, which worked well for day one. A brief introduction, prompt about challenges faced or problems solved, and then we spent the rest of the time rolling with the questions encountered as the participants toyed with their machines.We also discovered that any Mac loaner laptop user could control the screen of any other's, because we used shared login credentials for our shared machines! We will have to change the remote management preferences, finding a way to allow screen sharing when useful and prevent it when not.

Dates and times look great in Excel until you try to concatenate them within a formula. Then you see Excel's messy raw date and time values. I have found it necessary to use the YEAR, MONTH, DAY, HOUR, and TIME functions to extract these values and then format them for a SQL query.

For example:



First attempt (didn't work)
="INSERT INTO `tour_dates` SET `datetime`='"&D2&" "&E2&"';"

The result:

INSERT INTO `tour_dates` SET `datetime`='38260 0.375';

Boo!

Second attempt (worked!)

="INSERT INTO tour_dates SET `datetime`='"&YEAR(D2)&"-"&MONTH(D2)&"-"&DAY($D2)&" "&HOUR(E2)&":"&MINUTE(E2)&":00"&"';"

The result:

INSERT INTO tour_dates SET `datetime`='2008-10-1 9:0:00';

Yay!



tags: excel, mysql, date, time, datetime

We have started our summer tech training workshops, classes that the IT staff and our media arts instructor teach on topics that our employees select. These require a lot of time and preparation from our staff, but our employees highly value the opportunity to learn. Our offerings this year include workshops on desktop publishing, Excel, iPhoto, Picasa, Mac OSX and Windows XP Pro. I am pleased that operating systems were a popular choice this year, given how overall proficiency with basic features is pretty low. I blame the software companies for annually rolling out new eye candy that help them market the products while underemphasizing fundamentals that help people work better. I wish that more people wanted to work on web technologies in the classroom, but we will have more opportunities to work on that once the school year begins.



One challenge is the wide range of skill levels present in each class. Each teacher handles this challenge in her own way. I make the workshop highly project based and let the curriculum emerge from student interests and questions. This does leave me scampering around the room a lot answering questions and solving problems, but it keeps everyone working all the time at their level. This disappoints some students who come to the class expecting a lot of direct instruction, but most participants leave happy. I will teach the MacOS and iPhoto workshops. Do send any killer activity ideas that you have organized or encountered.



tags: training, professionaldevelopment

The Flip Mino has the potential to be useful in our school, especially for students creating work for immediate review or sharing. The Flip seems highly compatible with efforts to encourage student construction of knowledge, visual literacy, and multiple forms of representation. I can see teachers and students using these devices to practice foreign language recitation, interview subjects for a variety of purposes, and gather material for oral history projects. I can imagine huge impact during our international trips. With a portable digital video recorder, students could turn their view outward, collecting sounds, scenes, and interviewing people to include in a presentation or learning portfolio upon their return. Multimedia art students should have a blast with the devices.

The device is small enough to take along anywhere and starts up quickly. User controls are simple, especially the big red record button in the middle. The price ($145 at Amazon) is twice that of a small digital audio recorder, about right in my opinion to gain video in such a small device.

The Flip has the potential to remove barriers to using video in classes, as the Olympus WSM-300 did for us with audio this past year. The relatively low cost makes it possible to put devices in the hands of students more often. The small size makes it easy to carry a device off-site or package a class set. You can keep the camera on you more often, since it slips into a pocket.

One huge key is the USB mass storage feature. Like the Olympus audio recorders, USB connectivity is built into the device. This eliminates the most time-consuming step in conventional video capture -- transferring footage from camera to computer. Now, one can transfer footage as a simple file copy or using The Flip's proprietary software. Each Flip comes with its own software installer on the device. If you want more control and flexibility, open the INSTALL folder and run the 3ivx installer. You will gain the ability for QuickTime Player (Mac) to open these compressed AVI files. An open-source decoder also exists.

In my one-day test, 2GB storage was more than adequate. I shot here and there during a three hour visit to the amusement park -- 25 short clips in total -- and only used 500MB.

For some reason, converting the files from compressed AVI to MOV. I am not sure whether the problem lies in the AVI conversion, the special compressed format that the Flip uses, or my slow G4 Mac!

The Flip software offers buttons to quickly post video to YouTube and other video web sites. I haven't yet tried them, but this could be a way to quickly get a movie into FLV format for the web.

For a $170 video recorder, the quality is excellent. A couple of weak points are the audio levels and zoom. In my single day of use, I found the audio pickup a tad weak, though it should be fine for interviews and other classroom applications. I also found the image too fuzzy at 4x zoom -- it may be digitally enhanced.

I wish that the Flip had multiple folders for organizing stored clips, in the manner that the Olympus digital audio recorders do. Then, two students could share one device but keep their work separate.

Flip makes less expensive video recording devices, but only the Mino has a rechargeable battery. I would like to avoid the impact of disposable batteries, even though a dead rechargeable device will then be useless for the remainder of that period. Now I need to seek a device to charge a dozen USB devices at once.

How long before this level of video recording is a standard feature on cell phones, in the way that still cameras have recently become?

Here is a sample I shot today at full size and converted from 3IVX to QuickTime H.264 at 1000kb/s in order to retain as much as possible the quality of the original shot. Or, you can download the 3ivx version directly.



tags: video, flip

Our faculty wants a "major assignments" master calendar, in order to identify days on which too many teachers have scheduled major assignments before they impact students. In Moodle, students automatically see all the assignments in their courses. I want a way for each teacher to see a summary of major assignments schoolwide as they schedule their own. To complicate matters further, it would be most helpful for a teacher to automatically see what major assignments their students (not all students) have on a given day.

I am thinking about how to implement such a feature in Moodle. (I am an average programmer). Since we want to track only major assignments, we need to find a way to distinguish major from regular assignments. We also need to write a function to count major assignments for the given day only for students enrolled in the class.

Ideally, this counting function would fire as the teacher selects the assignment date. That way, the teacher could easily move the assignment from one day to another and see the impact on students' workloads.

In our school, it would be less work to create a new assignment type called "major assignment" than it would be to add a "major" checkbox to each assignment type. In our school, major assignments are not likely to be submitted electronically, and keeping the function in a separate module would avoid making changes to Moodle core code.

I could use your advice and feedback on this idea. Is anyone else working on a similar idea? Is there a better way to approach this task? Am I missing an existing feature in Moodle that could help me achieve this end?

Many thanks.

Update

I also posted this to the Moodle forums. Here's an encouraging reply I received only seven minutes after submitting the question. Isn't that amazing?

Re: Idea for a "major assignments calendar"
by Gary Anderson - Sunday, 27 July 2008, 07:42 PM

Hi Richard:

We have implemented this at our school. We have teachers label assignments by putting them in bold (we have a patch that adds the tag to the title. We also have a simple block that looks for assignments that have this tag and counts the number of affected users. We have taken the extra step of having a user profile field that shows if they are in the class of 2007, etc.

It works nicely and has avoided many scheduling conflicts. While we are not prepared to put this in Contrib, hopefully the above ideas will get you started, and I can send you are code on an "as is" basis if you contact me.

--Gary

I also just figured out that Gary is from Seattle Academy of Arts and Science, which I hope to visit in October.

tags: moodle, homework

Reading edutech blogs, one might think that the iPhone is the only mobile platform out there. As a happy BlackBerry user, I have resisted the urge to try out what is apparently the greatest device ever. Nonetheless, running a school tech department, I felt an obligation to at least try one out. Fortunately, we came into a free iPod Touch as a result of our annual, huge order from Apple.



Before you get too excited, let me state for the record that the iPhone is a more capable device than the Blackberry. It can do more (and do it better). Its graphics are superior, the screen is larger, and the glass keyboard isn't as bad as I thought it would be. The camera shoots better pictures, and you can watch TV shows on it. RSS and Twitter text is more readable and easier to navigate.

Now that we have got that out of the way (phew!), let us consider a different question. What functions do I need in my mobile device?

On my Blackberry, I run:

1. Phone
   
2. Mail
   
3. Calendar
   
4. Address book
   
5. Notes
   
6. Tasks
   
7. GMail for a hosted domain
   
8. Google Maps
   
9. TwitterBerry
   
10. Facebook
    
11. Google News
    
12. NewsGator Reader (RSS)
    
13. Opera web browser
    
14. Camera

In other words, I can interact with practically all of my information sources from this device. I can blog, twit, photo, and so on. I can pay attention to either work or personal mail, depending on the day of the week. I suppose I could play music, but ever since I shortened my commute to 5 min, I don't need to. When consuming information, I prefer text to audio and video, or at most a page of text supplemented with other media.

I paid $0 for the Pearl with a new AT&T service contract.

Adding the handheld to our school BlackBerry Enterprise Server took about 5 minutes.

I recharge the battery every other day.

To download new BlackBerry applications, I typically just Google what I want and download it from the manufacturer's web site (i.e., like any other download). Click Install, and I've got the application.

iPod Touch

I spent about 20 minutes trying to determine whether I could avoid registering the product with Apple and still download the 2.0 software update. I could not.

$9.95 for the software update for a device we just purchased? I couldn't just pay the fee and download the software. I also had to create an iTunes Store account in order to pay the fee.

Applications are only available through Apple. That seems scary. Every installation requires my iTunes password, even for free products. Why?

Apple says that they now fully support mail for Exchange servers. Except that it doesn't work for me. Microsoft Entourage can access our Exchange server great through HTTP. Why can't this iPod?

If I want push email, we have to install an Exchange ActiveSync server. I doubt this is as simple as Apple's diagram might suggest.



Let's focus on teaching and learning

It's easy to get seduced by all the gadgetry out there, but this takes time away from our main purpose of building capacity to support teaching and learning. I'll stick with the BlackBerry (for now).


tags: iphone, ipodtouch, ipod, blackberry, pearl

I picked up this coffee mug to remind me to always create new ideas and content. In the darkest months of winter, warm beverages will remind me that the sea of content is best navigated when we participate in the creation of that information. May you create something today.

25 students and their parents attend the first of three ninth grade laptop orientations. We take advantage of this opportunity to provide training and advice to our students. We balance a broad overview of laptop use in courses with specific technical tips and advice on appropriate use. It's an exciting time for the kids, many of whom are receiving their own, individual laptop computer for the first time.

Presentation Slides

Training Notes

Facebook is apparently still learning how to handle married couples. Does that mean that I am too old/not in the right stage of life for it?



In related news, my friends from outside work are increasingly getting on Facebook. It's interesting to watch and participate.

tags: facebook, sns

I am so pleased with the "new" Quick Selection tool in Adobe Photoshop CS3. At least it's new to me. Since the rise of Web 2.0, I have been content to adopt only every other version of Photoshop, having found the annual changes minor. I don't mind if Adobe, Apple, and Microsoft release new versions annually in order to generate revenue for themselves -- I just choose not to participate.

The Magic Want tool was pretty brilliant when it came out, but Quick Selection takes the tool a step further. In classic fashion, Adobe improved on the most notable weak spot of the tool -- it's performance when the subject and background are very similar.

I wanted to move my boys upward in this photo, so that you would no longer see the bottom edge of the painting. I wanted to cut them out and move them up the canvas.



In the past, some portions of this image would have required manual cutting. Note the low contrast between the edge of the shirt and the wall in the background.



I was amazed at the performance of Magic Select. It seemed to interpolate from the rest of the selection, and I no longer had to adjust the sensitivity of the wand in order to get the right area. In the rare times that it selected too much area, I just deselected and tried again, and it got the selection right the second time around. Feathering is also extremely effective, as the result shows no seams.



And the final result



Look how great the shirt area looks!



The head blends in perfectly against the green background, but note that Quick Selection actually retained some green edge around the head. If I were moving this shot to a solid color background, then it would have required more work. Then again, I would not have shot it again this painting!



The painting is from the Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art in Amherst, MA, USA.


tags: photoshop

I made a full week of the Building Learning Communities conference this year. I started with EduBloggerCon East, an informal gathering of local educators and technologists to discuss tech issues on our mind. I spent Tuesday at The Met, the "unschool," in which students learn through internships and independent study. The formal conference ran from Wednesday through Friday and included one keynote and several breakout sessions per day.

EduBloggerCon was a success. I am a big fan of participant-led events, which bring a level of authenticity and spontaneity often lacking from more carefully planned professional development. I took the group through a workshop to explicitly connect technology-rich activities with underpinning learning theories. I participated in a discussion of extending special education technologies to the entire school and a review of people's favorite new tools (mine was NanoGong). I was disappointed by what I saw as overemphasis on tools and relatively weak discussion of pedagogy. Does this mean that educational technologists need to develop stronger dialogue around pedagogy? Yes. Can I better structure my workshops on this topic? Definitely. It may be time for me to narrow the discussion to constructivist teaching with technology rather than trying to cast a wide net over a number of pedagogical constructs.

I had a tremendous time at The Met. I had heard and read about their model for internship-based education -- a school without classes or courses! However, this was my first direct experience speaking with teachers and students about the model and reviewing their planning and explanatory materials. Running for over a decade now, The Met staff has continued to deepen its understanding of what works and enrich the details of their program. I kept a series of notes on the a-ha moments of the day and hope to refer to them often in the future.

I am pleased that the Big Picture Company now boasts a network of 50 schools nationwide (and a few abroad) that have adopted their principles and model and participate in their network for professional development and planning materials. Given all of the talk about authentic learning environments, student interest in learning, and 21st century skills, this seems like one obvious direction to explore when considering new models for effective education. One of their schools is located in my backyard. I hope to pay a visit to expand my local professional network in Portland and see how the Big Picture model translates to one of their newer schools.

To tell you the truth, the first two BLC keynote addresses were disappointing. Ewan McIntosh and John Davitt focused too much on currently existing technology applications and their effects on social dynamics and power. The dominant educational technology discourse has been enamored with these possibilities for a few years now. We are ready for a more detailed exploration of the intersection of new technologies with specific pedagogical strategies. Give us lots of specific examples from schools -- by now, they should exist, right? Explore both successes and failures. Teachers and school technologists have already bought into the vision. Now give us the tools and wisdom to implement well.

The third keynote exemplified a great address to 1,000 people. Ironically, Pedro Noguera did not talk at all about technology! His classic talk on the case and problem of school reform resonated well with much of the audience both at the conceptual and practical levels. Full of detailed examples and specific cases, Noguera interwove the conceptual and moral imperative for school change with many different views of each concept, data from research studies, and individual schools implementing specific strategies, to great success.

Interestingly, McIntosh scored a hit with me during his breakout session titled "We're Adopting: One Year On." I had read about his introduction of a large professional learning environment in East Lothian last year and was excited to get an update on the progress of the network one year along. Not only did McIntosh deliver the promised update, but he also revisited some of the concepts from the keynote in much more detail and to far greater effect. I found the second presentation much more compelling and useful than the first. Most effective was his step-by-step analysis of a FlashMob performance at New York's Central Station. The idea was creative and original, but it was also planned to a very fine level of detail, and many individuals departed from the script in ways that made the experience even more high-quality.

Ewan also delivered several nuggets to remember as we facilitate school change. Emerging technologies have impact because many people share awareness of the tool at the same time. Small, passionate groups make things happen. And I remember one of Ewan's nuggets from last year: forget the pilot. Come up with a great idea and launch it well. This year, that idea surfaced with the selection of a unique, memorable name for the initiative. In East Lothian's case, it was "EduBuzz." Let evangelists evangelize, but then turn them into trainers. People need training, not evangelism (I could stand to remember this sometimes.) Support bottom-up and emergent behaviors through informal structures -- meetups, gatherings at bars. Don't think. Try.

'Students teaching students' was a recurrent theme. Over and over again, speakers highlighted the value of exposing students to content, providing time for analysis and reflection, and then having students present content back to the group. Darren Kuropatwa described his everyday practice of students creating Smart Board presentations and then posting them to the class blog, demonstrating their mastery of topics in mathematics and building the 'textbook' for the course. Darren also makes great use of imagery and metaphor to get students excited and build real-world relevance. Note that this is a far cry from the applied education of The Met, but it has a far better chance of reaching all learners than direct instruction. Watch video of Darren's presentation.

Bob Sprankle enlighted us with his use of blogging and podcasting over the years. Again, the dominant message was the high educational value of students producing content, demonstrating their understanding, sharing their knowledge with family members, and even receiving comments from people around the world. I have not yet had the opportunity to gain public visibility and interaction around student work, but we come closer every year. I would probably get a lot more Sprankle in my life if I listened to his podcasts, but I prefer to read.

Clarence Fisher delivered a presentation on international collaboration as the norm, essentially the story of his classroom. Given Clarence's recent reminder to U.S. edubloggers to refocus on teaching and learning, I knew I would enjoy this session. Clarence opened the door to teachers everywhere to navigate blogs around the world and get their students more globally connected. He also made direct links to the pedagogical usefulness of such an approach -- authentic audience, writing the "textbook", and seeking experts outside of one's organization. Clarence's nuggets: design a logo for your classroom, subscribe to Global Voices Online to find the latest international content (he found AfriGadget this way. The most important job as a teacher is to hook up individual students with information tailored to their interests and learning goals. Clarence built his global network by Googling for "grade 8 teacher," finding teachers with blogs around the world, and then sending dozens of emails seeking collaboration. Clarence does not allow his students to link from their school blog to their personal Facebook pages and such. Clarence's sites: Thin Walls (collaboration with Los Angeles school) and Studying Societies (class wiki).

The New Technology Foundation promotes many of the same ideas through its national network of "new tech" schools. Starting with New Tech High at Sir Francis Drake in Napa, Bob Pearlman described their emphases on group work, collaboration, and generative work. Again, many of the same ideas, facilitated with technology, starting to form a blueprint for a vision of school reform. They also have a school in Portland.

I learned of several online professional development/school management environments. Check out EduBuzz from Scotland, where 1500 school administrators and teachers reflect online about their practice; PeBL, the online portfolio and learning application from the New Technology Foundation; and Big Picture Online, the online sharing/working/school leadership portal for the Met schools.

For a change, I attended a session that was more about content than pedagogy. The National Archives promotes learning through the critical examination of source documents. The presenter brought several examples, including a military register showing John Glenn and Ted Williams serving in the same unit and a letter that 12 year-old Fidel Castro wrote to President Roosevelt introducing himself and asking for a $10 bill! If you search their Archival Research Catalog (ARC), be sure to click the full Search button and then click the Digital Copies tab in order to most directly access the source documents themselves instead of just the descriptions! My only complaint about this session was that the presenter focused exclusively on analysis of the source documents. Any real lesson would combine this with other pedagogical techniques. My curiosity was piqued by the military document, I Googled for Ted Williams' military service and found a wonderful summary that enlightened me about several other fascinating aspects of his military experience that one could not infer from the primary source material. Heck, a colleague at Catlin Gabel informs me that every time he wants to view a speech from any possible historical figure, he finds it on YouTube.

I even presented my own session at this conference, titled "A Window Into Gaza." I was delighted to present to a full room and elicit three individuals particularly interested in either starting a club at their school or helping put the program in touch with more possible funding sources. See my presentation handout and blog posts right after the event for more information or to get involved.

I can highly recommend this conference for educational technologists focused on teaching and learning. As I hope I have demonstrated above, all of the presenters I saw had a strong grasp of the connections between pedagogy and technology and could provide both wisdom and examples with their presentations. The conference design was superb. Following on the heels of NECC, the contrast is clear. Building Learning Communities keeps the scope of corporate sponsors, vendors, and salespeople to an appropriate place. The vendor "floor" was tiny, and company representatives were genuinely helpful and interested in teachers' questions and issues. For me, it was easy to steer clear of the vendors and not feel accosted. EduBloggerCon retained the grassroots feel and spontaneous organization that so dramatically failed at NECC. I was able to attend (even sit) at every session I entered, and they even served a sit-down lunch two of the three days! Kudos to the November Learning team for superb organization. I only suggest that they get the proposal submission process and logistics submissions online next year. I was surprised at the number of times I was asked to respond to a question by email instead of an online form. That could not have been easy to collect and organize! I also appreciated ubiquitous wireless access but found it variable in quality. I know it's very difficult to accomodate the hundreds of laptops that participants brought to the session, but it was a bit hard to lose connectivity periodically, once while presenting! Next year, the conference will be at the Park Plaza hotel in downtown Boston instead of suburban Newton, so pencil in July 27-31 right now!



tags: blc08, learning, professionaldevelopment, techintegration

Here is the handout from today's presentation. Thank you to all who attended!

A Window Into Gaza

tags: blc08, globaled

I spent the day at The Met, an internship-based school in Providence that has become a national model for a network of 50 "Big Picture" schools. I was so pleased to witness the program, teachers, and students first-hand after having heard about the school for years. Every time I heard something notable, I Twittered it. Here are my notes:





Waiting to board a bus to The MET in Providence. Excited to see the program first-hand!
I haven't been on a charter bus in ages. Reminds me of college.
4 Met Schools are fully booked today with PD and community activities.

The Met: connecting internships with learning goals and assessment.

The Met: 98% students accepted into college, all required to apply
62% attend college, 40% complete two or four years

Three R's: relationships, relevance, rigor

No Met schools in MA - because of high stakes testing? Yet their New York school is making it work.

The Met doctor can be a student's primary care physician. Part of teaching the whole child.

15-20 social work interns practice at the Met, providing that service to the students.

50 Big Picture schools nationwide. I had no idea.
Rhode Island funds schools at $12,000 per ADA per year. That's twice the rate in CA!

Assessment: employee evaluations, school work products, exhibitions
Pedagogy: knowing student learning styles; active, authentic, hands-on learning; reflection

The Met: online database of resources. Any member can contribute. An example of structure making an online environment more effective?
Al student work maintained online. Mentioned in passing, but so revolutionary.

Open Office concept. Using school resources independently to get things done. about 11 hours ago from web

Students are in internships 10-12 hours per week.

Internships last 3 months to a year.

Most Met schools are contained within larger schools or other organizations. A surprise for me.

Campus design: retained walkways, kept neighborhood roof lines, open facilities to community, red brick not cinderblock.

I bet these graduates are extremely independent and directed in college.

About to start student walk through the school.

Big Picture Soda: a science project turned commercial success!
Incredible media studio: recording, editing, film studios, control room.

Math needs are poorly met through internships. Why is there so little algebra naturally happening in the workplace?

South Carolina district superintendent at this preconference at The Met. Cool.

Students required to complete 75 page autobiography for graduation!

Curricular areas defined by skills, not content. "The Met Learning Goals"

Quantitative reasoning, social reasoning, communication, empirical reasoning, personal qualities

New digital portfolio system will track content competencies in addition to aforementioned skills (The Met)

The Met unapologetic about preparing kids for a successful career (and why not?)

Big Picture Online: I would like to learn more about the portal that these 50 schools use.



tags: blc08, themet, schoolreform, schooldesign

The online learning environment and community for the 50 Big Picture schools. I would like to learn more about the design of this portal.

Exemplifies care for the school.

I just finished facilitating a session that aimed to make explicit connections between technology activities and specific pedagogical theories of learning. It went okay -- we struggled a bit with the challenge of speaking about pedagogy in sufficiently specific terms, in the context of technology activities. Two or three people invoked multiple pedagogical constructs for a single technology example. While this might authentically reflect the real complexity of actual classroom work, I also feel that we would benefit from at least narrowing the conversation to one pedagogical construct at a time in order to truly understand the reason for its effectiveness.


Participants expressed interest by posting stickies under the session description.

Here are our notes from today's session:

Pedagogical Constructs
- Behaviorism: rewards, grades, stars, stickers, reinforcements
- Cognitivism: intellectual complexity, Socratic method, programming, debating
- Constructivism: building meaning based on experience, building knowledge base, socially, based, Montessori, project-based learning, not one authority
- Connectivism: working in a highly connected environment, using your network, blogging, lurking on backchannel (sidebar convos, perhaps) chat
- Engagement, joyful participation
- Differentiated Instruction
- Inquiry model, studio
- Understanding by Design
- Universal Design for Learning: multiple representations

Examples

Internet Safety -- 5th and 6th graders
- Lecture, poster or comic about one safety rule
- Build a web page and publish it, demonstrating that they can follow the rule
- Connectivism, Understanding By Design: project is available for any student to be successful with, every student completes the task; more than constructivist, because of group work, connected to all teachers, working with and supporting each other

Art/music collaboration: history of silent films, background in nonverbal communication, drama, what it takes to create a movie
- students created storyboard, ideas for how they would create a silent movie
- how can we make this more open to different kinds of students? break students into groups? not so product driven?

Podcast project with ninth grade
- vignettes, write about an experience in their lives, added music and sound effects
- extraordinary podcasts in terms of writing and expression, correcting themselves as they were speaking it aloud
- one kid in particular related his experience with parents getting divorced
- very personal, not shared outside of the class
- differentiated -- being able to express themselves in a different way
- kids who had decided they were not good writers
- read vignettes written by other people

Digital Storytelling -- fifth grade
- kids had a personal narrative, Macs, iMovie, Garageband
- music, sounds effects, parents made up the audience
- blogged and podcasted so that relatives far away and teachers could also enjoy it
- behaviorism: rewarded for their work
- constructivism, engagement, personal narrative
- can add to story by including random elements, discussing how that impacts the story
- using photos may not be easier, especially if gathering other peoples' images
- visual literacy: how are images interpreted? How do you tell a story well with images?

Google Tools: teachers investigating tools themselves and thinking about how they could use them in their classrooms, present the tool to the rest of the class
- larger group response and feedback to the tool
- greater opportunity for creativity -- more ideas about how tools could be used

VoiceThread: bridging podcasts and vodcasts
- focus on the up-front preparation before you get to the technical tool
- could also have value to throw kids directly into the tool to explore it (e.g., Scratch)
- teachers didn't think that one would be allowed to submit a research paper as a VoiceThread
- when is the purpose of the lesson exploration? (especially when it is something new). No matter how teacher-directed an activity is, learners find the opportunity to explore.
- exploration is highly constructivist -- building your own representation of the tool based on your toying around with it
- power of exploration when there is a direction to it: e.g., "build a house" "build a bicycle". Need to have some kind of goal, allow the time to explore, fewer projects, more time per project.
- Able to accept as research once you set the bar high for product expectations

Simple repetition: elementary school students record own stories and then, on their own, decide to re-record over and over in order to improve them.



tags: ebce08, blc08, techintegration, pedagogy

Thankfully, edubloggers are writing about the lack of classroom representation in the most widely read online conversations about educational technologies. Brian Cosby and Clarence Fisher bemoan the lack of teachers at NECC and classroom examples in NECC presentations. He draws attention to the Educational Technology Professional Development Manifesto, which urges presenters at ed-tech conferences to get specific and provide enough detail that others may implement one's ideas in their schools.

Nancy Bosch suggests that including classroom examples in ed-tech presentations may not be sufficient. Bosch writes:

I spent ten years presenting (as a full time teacher) around my state and district. I also presented for 5 years at NECC and IMHO I was very good at it, bringing hundreds of examples and projects from the classroom to share with the participants. I then suffered from tech overload and frustration because, no matter how much they “oh-ed” and “ah-ed” at workshops, I saw little technology integration in the classrooms throughout my large district.

At the same time, Chris Lehmann feels that edubloggers need to start an organization in order to effect educational change, Will Richardson wonders how to broaden the impact of powerful learning with technology that he and others have witnessed.

On the positive side, Gardner Campbell acknowledges that critical mass grows slowly but offers one institution's history as a light at the end of the tunnel. Campbell writes:

I was struck by the commonalities with my own experience, as well as with the stories I’ve heard from similar groups: early adopters, early resistance, the slow growth of a critical mass, the difficulties with communication and cooperation and resource allocation that come with all large organizations, the successes, the professional networks, the immense satisfactions.

This leaves me to wonder: what will it take for teachers to more widely teach effectively with technology? I don't have a single answer, but I think I can see one important missing piece. Edubloggers and teachers are not involved in enough discussions together that address teaching and learning with technology in ways that serve both populations. I have participated in so many discussions with teachers in which we spend a lot of time just to move beyond the idea that teaching with technology means trying a new tool in the classroom. It takes a substantial effort to move the discussion back to the teaching and learning objectives for a unit of study and to bring pedagogy to the forefront. If we really believe that technology is a tool, then the discussion must center about pedagogy. Changing the tool is most the most effective way to improve curriculum, but it does directly change how students interact with curriculum. Pedagogy addresses the creation of learning environments in which students interact with curriculum. Technology tools make it possible to differently implement time-honored pedagogical strategies (group discussion, for instance) and sometimes make possible new pedagogical frameworks (e.g., connectivist environments).

As I enter a new academic year, I hope to collect and present more examples of effective technology integration in the curriculum at my school. Some of it lives within the curriculum integration category of this blog, but if you want to go further back in time, you have to select an archive first and then select the category again -- not the best way to navigate this content repository. I would like to draw particular attention to technology uses that are particularly effective at supporting progressive, constructivist pedagogies at our school. For example, our lower (elementary) school Spanish teacher has students creating and revising their own presentations by sitting alone in front of an iMac with video camera. In the middle school, English students write a song about post-Civil War Reconstruction, share it with their classmates to hear, transcribe the lyrics, and then have a discussion about it, all online. In the upper (high) school, a history teacher plans a new Election class for the fall, hoping that students will create their own theories about the roles of new media in this election, using new media tools to investigate the question. The best example from my past is the ChemSense project, in which students create simple, 2D representations of chemical processes and structures and discuss them in an online space. In each case, students construct their own knowledge, and the technology tool makes the process easier and more powerful.

I am convinced that theorists and teachers having more conversations about effective technology support for specific pedagogies can only lead to greater adoption in the classroom.

Our lack of a common vocabulary for new, technology-infused pedagogies works against us. Other new educational ideas, such as small schools and learning differences, have developed this common vocabulary and more quickly make sense to more teachers. In educational technologies, the only common understanding is a false one: that educational technologists simply want teachers to use more technology in their classes, and that this alone will lead to better teaching and learning. Unintentional, unplanned technology integration that uses loads of resources is counterproductive.

The lack of common vocabulary hurts us in another way -- Google searches. A teacher using Google to search for technology in the classroom will easily find 'blog,' 'podcast,' or 'Web 2.0.' She won't just stumble across a discussion about 'constructivist uses of technology,' for example. Our good writing about effective technology integration gets lost in the vast pool of ed-tech buzzwords that exist out there. Teachers find plenty of support for the misconception that technology integration is just about the gadgets.

We need more cross-pollination between educational technology and teacher conferences, but we also need new, more clever strategies to make this happen. This year, I succeeded in encouraging our middle school world cultures teacher to submit a proposal to the K12 Online Conference. Now, I hope that the selection committee will accept his proposal, and both ed-tech theorists and classroom practitioners can benefit from viewing his ideas applied to the classroom.

I plan to start a small, professional learning community at my school this year to more frequently engage in regular discussion of the pedagogical applications of computer technologies in the classroom. I hope we will meet both in person and online, and that enough teachers will be sufficiently interested in the concept to give it momentum. In this way, I hope to reclaim the dominant conversation about educational technologies.

I also need to build my own personal collection of web sites that present examples from the classroom in a way that clearly explains the pedagogy underlying the technology. Nancy Bosch has done so. The Apple Learning Interchange, notwithstanding the corporate organization, seems to churn out podcasts and videos on this topic every day. Subscribe to their RSS feed. (I wish they provided more of this content as text.)

Some of us eagerly anticipate the start of Building Learning Communities this week. Others have already begun their work at the Lausanne Laptop Institute. I hope that the recent surge of interest in teachers and classrooms in widely read educational technology discussions continues and becomes permanent. We have completely addressed the broad justifications for this movement. Now, it's time to get specific and applied.


tags: edtech, techintegration, blc08, ebce08, laptopinstitute08

Use Fluid to create a standalone application from a web page. Their site declares, "Your web browser is for browsing." We alt-tab to quickly switch between desktop applications, but we option-alt-arrow (or some other combination) to switch between browser tabs. As applications increasingly move to the web, I often find myself instinctively reaching for alt-tab when my application is actually running within a browser tab. Also, it is easy to quit the browser completely, closing a web application I actually need.

For example, when I develop a web application, I typically run Cyberduck and Smultron from the desktop and phpMyAdmin and the web application I am developing in Camino, my preferred web browser. Now, I can run phpMyAdmin in its own, separate desktop application, allowing me to alt-tab to it whenever I please. Yes, I know that I could run a desktop mySQL manager, but I prefer phpMyAdmin.



You could also use Fluid to keep a Facebook, Twitter, or Yahoo! Sports window open separately from your browser.

Fluid's about page explains that other, similar projects exist, one even open-source and cross-platform.

Fluid seems awfully similar to Mozilla Prism. What gives?

Fluid was very much inspired by the excellent Mozilla Prism project, Adobe Air, and other, earlier Site Specific Browsers like Bubbles. Many people think Prism was the first product in this category, but actually, Prism itself was preceded by other SSB products. Fluid's goal is to be the best, most native-feeling SSB for Mac OS X Leopard. Prism is cross-platform, which is a huge benefit for lots of users. However, many Mac users prefer a more tightly-integrated, Mac-like SSB application. That is Fluid's niche. Fluid is a thoroughly native, Cocoa Mac OS X application. No compromises or least-common-denominator tradeoffs.

source

One day, we may exclusively use web applications. In the meantime, Fluid seems helpful.

tags: fluid, ssb, sitespecificbrowser, webdevelopment

I have adjusted this blog template so that posts appear before sidebar content, especially for mobile devices. If this does not display properly in your browser, please let me know. It should look something like this.




tags: css