Digital Potluck Planning

This Wednesday at MHS turns out to be one of those school marathon days—off and running at 7:45 with nine normal periods, plus one activity period, an extra hour meeting beginning pronto at 3:20, then the annual open house for parents beginning at 6:30 p.m. Well when life (or school) hands you a lemon . . . make lemonade.

Principal Bryan suggested a covered-dish dinner to be squeezed into the 4:20 to 6:20 time slot. Great idea, especially for those who make an hour round-trip commute to school. But, let’s make this even better. The potluck dinner will be held off premises, just a hop, skip, and a jump away at the Spear’s. And even if you live close, plan on joining this “lemonade” gathering. It will definitely be the most fun and relaxing part of your day.

To RSVP just click on the comments link below, key in your response, choose Name/URL, enter your last name only (no need for URL), then click publish your comment. Then everyone is digitally in the loop for planning purposes. Hotdogs, hamburgers, and buns will be provided. We’ll need food of all types, paper products, plastic wear, condiments, ice, and beverages. The pool and spa will be open if you are so inclined. We do have two hours after all.

So what are you waiting for . . . click comments below, fill in and publish your comment, then check back often to see the list grow!

uShirts First Quarter Success!

January 2008 marked the revival of the Future Business Leaders of America organization at Milton High School. Twelve dynamic business students accepted the challenge to join, brainstorm, and innovate. The initial result . . . uShirts.

What’s uShirts, you ask? A uShirt is a t-shirt designed by you. Your idea, your design, your shirt. Simply submit either electronically or on paper your creative design, and FBLA members, i.e., uShirt employees, craft your shirt for you.

The uShirts business opened on March 16, 2008, with a blowout advertising campaign, and sales soared from Day 1. In the first three months of business, uShirts crafted 91 t-shirts! Here’s an order form if you want a uShirt.

Watch for the launch of FBLA’s next business venture . . . an online school store coming Fall of 2008.

Speed Type Challenge Take Two

With technology, sometimes things don't turn out as you expect. Even with the best, most careful planning, stuff happens. As it did when we first attempted to do the Speed Type activity last week in Keyboarding and Computer Concepts. So here we go again . . . attempt two . . . cross your fingers . . .

If you haven't tried this site yet, do it now! But be warned . . . this speed type game is not for the faint of heart. It will get your adrenaline pumping and your fingers flying. See what level you can reach. The words are not typical, so you really have to concentrate, focus, and use correct keyboarding technique to be successful.And here's your blogging assignment for this week:

• Play the speed type game (several times)
• Get to the highest level you can reach
• Take note of the word that trips you up and makes you lose
• Look up the definition of your "losing" word
• In a comment to this blog post, provide your "losing" word, a definition, and compose a sentence using your word. Be creative!
• Use your creature identity and period # at the end of your comment
• Also, include the level you reached in the game
• Your comment post is worth 10 points

Speed Type Challenge

If you haven't tried this site yet, do it now! But be warned . . . this speed type game is not for the faint of heart. It will get your adrenaline pumping and your fingers flying. See what level you can reach. The words are not typical, so you really have to concentrate, focus, and use correct keyboarding technique to be successful.

And here's your blogging assignment for this week:

• Play the speed type game (several times)


• Get to the highest level you can reach


• Take note of the word that trips you up and makes you lose


• Look up the definition of your "losing" word


• In a comment to this blog post, provide your "losing" word, a definition, and compose a sentence using your word. Be creative!


• Use your creature identity and period # at the end of your comment


• Also, include the level you reached in the game


• Your comment post is worth 10 points

Creatively Crafting Catchy Comments

As we work our way through class this week and increase our knowledge of computer concepts, document formats, and Word features, pay close attention. By the end of the week, your blogging task will be to provide an alliteration comment about something you learned, something that inspired you, something cool, something new.

What is alliteration? It's the repetition of the same consonant sound at the beginning of two or more words. Click on the comments below to see another example (you did notice the alliterative title, right). Then begin to craft your own alliteration to post at the end of this week. Your alliteration must contain four words with the same beginning consonant and is worth 10 points.

Remember, use the anonymous identity but provide your creature name and period # in your comment.

Blog, Write, Read, and Play Part 2

Now that we've all transformed ourselves into the likeness of some animal, bird, insect, or otherwise for this blogging project, let's pop over to Word 07 and explore the Shapes feature on the Insert ribbon.

Spend a little time playing with all the possibilities and create your creature using shapes, color, layers, rotation, and anything else you can dig into.

This is my "Bella the Queen Bee" creation.

And just to brighten up the place a bit, we will print our "shape" masterpieces and hang them around the classroom. Your creation is worth 10 points.

Birds Can Blog, Wrens Can Write, Rats Can Read

A Blog Project for Mrs. Spear’s
Keyboarding and Computer Concepts Students

Let's start with some FAQ's:

What is a blog?

• Short for web log, a blog is usually written by one person, updated pretty regularly, and can be about any subject. Readers of the blog can comment and it creates an opportunity to connect online with others.

Why are we blogging in this class?

• Blogging is a very popular use of the Internet. You can learn a lot from reading and particpating in blogs. And who knows, you might be inspired to author your own blog.

How do I safely blog?

• Never offer any personal information including your last name, contact information, home address, phone numbers, school's name, e-mail address, last names of friends or relatives, instant messaging names, age, or birth date.


• Never post provocative pictures of yourself or anyone else, and be sure any images you provide do not reveal any of the previously mentioned information. Always remember to look at the background of a picture too.


• Assume what you publish on the Web is permanent. Anyone on the Internet can easily print out a blog or save it to a computer.


• Keep blogs and comments positive and don't use them for slander or to attack others.

What's the first assignment?

• Assume the persona of a real or imagined classroom pet. Click on the comments link below and write a short description of your pet. Include the following: pet's name, male or female, description (color, size, personality, features). Use the anonymous option for your comment. But, at the end of your description include your first and last initials and period #. (example DS Period 4)

This first blog comment is worth 10 points. Please write complete, correct sentences to earn the full 10 points!

Keep following this blog each day to find out what's next in our blogging project!!

In the year twenty twenty

In the fall of 1986, I took a graduate education class entitled Major Philosophies of Education. It was a night class that met three hours once a week face-to-face, of course (no online opportunities yet). One of the requirements of the course was a group project (no wiki here) to create a school based on a philosophy of our own choosing. So our group set out to decide what our philosophy would be and how our entire school system would be structured (with pen and paper). Now as I remember correctly, my group of four was pretty forward thinking. And note that at the time, there were no personal computers, cell phones, and even video cameras were like dinosaurs. However, we came up with a philosophy called “elitism.” And the basis of our philosophy was that each student in our district would have a computer in which they were capable of connecting with their school district and teachers and subject area content and able to pretty much be virtually linked to their school 24/7. We even presented our project in video format (way before podcasting and YouTube). Pretty elite (and good foresight I must say) for 1986, huh? Fast forward to now . . . 2007. Elitism, as my 1986 educational philosophy project described, is reality. Wow, have we come a long way in 20 years.

So what will our world and education be like in 14 years from now in the year 2020? First, there will still be the elite--those that have the most up-to-the-minute technology devices and access to the coolest online tools. That reality will never change. As much as we might like to think, believe, or dream that the world and education will even itself out, that no child will be left behind, there will always be the underprivileged. When I first began teaching with computers in my classroom one of the first questions I would ask my students at the beginning of the school year was, “Who has a computer in their home?” Two or three hands would raise per class. As the years passed, those students became the minority. Now every student has at least one computer in their household.

The world will become flatter, smaller, and more connected as we reach the year 2020. Web 2.0 will continue to evolve and flourish. The masses of people, and by masses I mean people of all ages and all walks of life, will continue to add content to the World Wide Web and to learn and grow from and with each other. The Web will be alive, live, real time, no wait, 24/7 with internet connections faster, broader, and perpetually portable. There will be new terms and ways to connect, collaborate, and share, to add to wikis, blogs, vlogs, podcasts, feeds, steaming video, etc. And it will change, evolve, and grow at speeds we can’t even imagine. A good portion (if not all) of an individual’s life will be online.

But what does this mean for education? I truly don’t see education keeping pace with the speed of technological changes. At least not in the United States. The funding (and the priority) is just not there. And the federal government will provide less and less and the individual states (and local governments) will have to take up more of the burden. On the other hand, this financial impact may change the whole face of public education. We may see many more privatized schools or maybe we will see the merger of local school districts for the sake of financial security. Technology totally set aside, money is definitely a big issue for the future of education.

I’m always an optimist, and definitely am when I think of the future of education, but I do believe that problems we face now, today, in our schools will never be resolved. As new technologies emerge, new problems will always follow. The teachers coming out of college today will be in the education system for the next 30 years. And although these new teachers are entering their classrooms with more technology training than say ten years ago, we still deal with the problem of retraining and good solid professional development as new technology methodologies emerge. So again, technology grows and changes at a very fast pace, but our educational systems lag.

With technology, teaching (and really most occupations) will become a lifestyle rather than a job. People will always be connected, which makes it hard to separate career from personal life. I’ve always felt that teaching has never been a 7 to 3 job. From September to May, teachers immerse themselves in their classrooms and the job never stops. Some of my best lesson ideas have come to me in the middle of the night! With the “World Live Web” and connectivity, I see teaching in the year 2020 as a never-ending constant. In the future, students to students, teachers to students, and teachers to teachers will be ever-connected . . . sharing, collaborating, and doing so in real-time all the time.

Pack your back and take it with you!

Do you carry a backpack? Does it have lots of your life stuff in it? Would you like to convert all that important stuff to a digitally organized, always available, and less heavy format? Then check out backpackit.com. The New York Times, Business Week, PC World and more have really good things to say about it. With over 300,000 people using the site, you can keep your to-do lists, notes, ideas, and calendar online with backpackit. And you can keep it private or share. It’s up to you. The uses of the site are literally endless. But specifically for students this site would be great for

• notetaking
• homework, exam, and project reminders
• compiling resources
• posting club or organization information
• your school and work schedules
• posting your favorites pictures
• keeping track of all your favorites in one spot

You’ll start with a homepage and then add more pages as needed. You can set up lists, notes, and add a writeboard which has RSS capabilities. Save your favorites, keep a calendar, and be totally organized all in one spot. Here’s my backpack example.

Save a tree—practice a paperless classroom

Each school year, I choose a theme for my classroom. It’s usually a general or specific way in which I hope to make a positive change for my school year. One year I hung a large yellow smiley face in the back of my classroom and deemed the year “smile til it hurts.” Another year I decided to be “comfortably numb”—to not allow any bureaucratic educational red-tape paperwork bother me. This year, I began with a vow to eliminate paper usage in my classroom. Now for me, this is a pretty easy task. I teach in a classroom equipped with awesome computers and have a website that I post all lesson plans, assignments, announcements. My students also have access to a dropbox for handing in assignments electronically. And this is the year that I began to facilitate our high school’s first online class using Moodle which eliminates all need for paper. Every activity, assignment, quiz, and wiki is posted electronically and then graded complete with feedback through the site. So I’m good. But I’m also working on those around me. It really irritates me when a whole sheet of paper is used for something that could have been easily formatted on a half sheet thereby cutting down on paper usage by half, but also requiring that someone use a paper cutter. And I’m bugged by memos that come via email and then also on paper copy. Why? And teacher’s who copy mounds and mounds of handouts. Couldn’t at least some of these be distributed electronically? It just takes a little time and creativity. This paperless theme is one that will take me through the rest of my teaching days. It puts more responsibility on the students . . . good thing. It makes learning more fun and interactive for the students . . . good thing. It requires that students network both among themselves and with their teachers . . . good thing. It saves trees . . . awesome concept!

Shifting Classrooms

In Will Richardson’s Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms (2006), he outlines ten “Big Shifts” in education. Here’s a link to a slideshare that provides a brief look at each of these shifts.

One of these “Big Shifts” that I practice in my own classroom is Open Content. As Will puts it “Information that used to be found in textbooks is now a Google search away.” As a business technology teacher in a lab of totally up to date computers, I’ve been using “Open Content” for many years. But just recently, I’ve realized this big “shift” in using Moodle open-source course management system. With Moodle, I can pull together blogs, wikis, and podcasts, along with providing my students links to web content. I’ve pretty much eliminated textbooks in my classroom. It’s no longer “open your book to page 37.” I’m not the do all, provide all knowledge disseminator in my classroom anymore. The open world of knowledge is just a click away, and it’s equal responsibility among my students and myself to learn and share knowledge.

Teachers’ Salaries and Standardized Test Scores—Connection?

No Child Left Behind, soon to be entering its sixth year, has played havoc on school districts nation-wide and is wrought with controversial pieces. One piece that hits a nerve with teachers and parents of school aged-children is connecting educator’s salaries with how well their students score on standardized tests. As a teacher, I dread “the week” of standardized tests and know full well that they are not a perfectly true picture of a student’s abilities. As a parent, however, I take a different perspective when analyzing my own children’s “scores.” If my children don’t score at the proficient to advanced level, what was missed in the classroom instruction that may have caused this outcome? Did the teacher not “teach to the test?” Were there not enough homework assignments? Was the material not covered to enough depth? Who’s to blame? Should teachers be held accountable?

NCLB is currently up for reauthorization in Congress with many changes from the original law. Here’s an overview. One of the new stipulations is incentive pay, which dictates that teacher salaries will be contingent upon test scores. Wow, what kind of impact would that stipulation have???

All teachers would flee to the best schools perhaps?
Competition would heat up among colleagues?
Teamwork would diminish?
Focus would be short-term and narrow-minded?
Loyalty to money rather than children?
Teacher quality would improve?

Maybe you have a strong opinion about teacher incentive pay already, and maybe you need to read more. Here are some links to additional reading about teacher incentive pay.

From the Guildordian
From a Sacramento Teacher
From FreeRepublic
From Barack Obama

Looking forward to hearing from you.

What is Skype?

Skype lets you make free calls to any other Skype user from your PC. It’s free and has more than 29 million registered users worldwide, with an average of two million using the service at any given time. Here’s the really cool thing . . . my colleague and I downloaded, registered, and hooked up on a Skype call between our classrooms in less than 15 minutes, all while our students were observing, learning, and being wowed by the whole process. I will definitely use this cool tool with my business technology class. And here’s my vision for other uses: Hooking up with business professionals on location at their organizations for a chat about their job. This could be a virtual “job shadow.” Hooking up with another classroom, from another school, from another country to share ideas on a given topic is a great way for interactive exchange. You can do this with Skype. How about the co-teaching possibilities, with synchronous, real-time give and take of expertise. And Skype has safety in mind for those who fear the “bad” side of connectivity. Here’s a link and another for helpful suggestions for using Skype safely in your classroom.

isms, schisms

Behaviorism, Cognitivism, Constructivism, and now Connectivism. The first three isms are well-defined learning theories developed, studied, utilized, and followed by educators and scholars for centuries. Names such as Piaget, Vygotsky, Skinner, Pavlov, Bloom, Gagne, just to name a few, are associated with these learning theories. . . and now Seimens. George Seimens has proposed a new learning theory for the digital age . . . the next ism in the list . . . Connectivism. Notice the root word—connect. You are connecting to me right now as you read this blog. Blogs, wikis, podcasts, Web 2.0, folksonomy, the wisdom of the crowds--this is all part of the whole “connect” learning theory. We are now learning through interconnected, ever-connected, always connected means. Is it time to put a new learning theory in the books? I say, yes. But rather than in the books, better in e-books, blogs, wikis, podcasts, del.icio.us, digg, flickr, twitter, youTube, chat, blogger, skype, google reader . . . shall I go on?

Word Up

Whether you’re reading them, writing them, speaking them, or listening to them, words are wonderful. Everyone should work toward a masterful vocabulary from your A, B, C’s to your doctorate degree! When reading a book, keep a dictionary handy to look up words you don’t know. Stretch your writing skills by experimenting with thesaurus options and sentence structure of words. Learn a new word each day and use it in conversation. Keep an aware ear while listening to music, TV, radio, your teachers. Chances are you’ll hear a new word. Practice random acts of reading and writing often. Not just the stuff your teachers assign, but stuff you assign to yourself because you want to read better, write superior, speak expertly, and listen discerningly. Communication is a skill that everyone can always improve upon from birth to death, and the hub of good communication is words.

While looking around at podfeed.net, I found a podcast that will expand your vocabulary and understanding of words. Here’s a description:

Open your mind every Tuesday and Thursday with a fun 3 minute vocabulary lesson! Desmond teaches you “smart” words and how to use them to help you feel more intelligent and civilized or to just have fun!!! For more check out http://www.yakkyakk.com/ --the home of Desmond Ortega!

I love how Desmond is always in a location surrounded by books. His podcasts are short, interesting, and well-made. He makes you want to come back for more. Click here and then on episode archive. Choose an episode and click play episode and begin your journey toward a better understanding of words. And definitely add the RSS feed to your reader to have Desmond’s vocabulary lesson come to you twice a week. Don’t be insipid in your word usage. Go forth with intrepid vigor to a better vocabulary. (from Word Up’s Episode 12!)

Oh students of mine, please post some comments using new and exciting words you learned from Desmond.

A Lesson in Flickr

Flickr boasts itself as “almost certainly the best online photo management and sharing application in the world” and has two main goals:

• to help people make their photos available to the people who matter to them


• to enable new ways of organizing photos

The user-friendly, fun, and social website gives this overview:

You can use Flickr to:

Organize your photos in a meaningful way
Share your photos and stay in touch with your friends and family
Form a group for a wedding, reunion and event
Find beautiful, cool or intriguing photos
And much, much more!

The much, much more part is a way understatement! Wow, just check out the Explore page then take the tour. You’ll see the cool things that are going on and continually being developed at the Yahoo-owned site. And here’s an interesting article on how Flickr got its start.

So how can this site be used in the classroom? Here’s a few ideas:

*single image writing prompt
*collaborative story writing based on an image
*digital storytelling project
*creating slides shows within Flickr
*virtual field trips
*visual debates
*illustrating poetry
*geotagging images
*visual documentation of school events
*visual documentation of student artwork and school projects
*creation of digital visual portfolios
*teach about social software: how to tag, how to make comments
*teach about the intellectual property using Flickr Creative Commons licensing
*motivational posters, movie posters, mosaics

My inspiration came from this wonderfully comprehensive site. Thanks dj.

And lastly, I've included in this post one photo of the billions in Flickr. The search possibilities are infinite, so I chose “snow” for starters, then “snow landscapes,” and when I saw this photo, I was awestruck by its surreal beauty. Someday maybe I’ll see Mt. Rainer in real time, but for now Flickr will do.

Image citation: dherrera (2006, July 20) dherrera 96’s photostream. Retreived November 19, 2007 from http://www.flickr.com/photos/56181704@N00/472809315/

Wiki Whati?

A few years ago I stumbled upon a website called wikispaces. As I am always open to exploring new tools on the web, I played around in the site and used it “a little” with one of my classes. I still have my wikispaces account. However, since using Moodle for facilitating an online class as well as a resource for my F2F classes, I’ve been utilizing the wiki feature of this course management software quite a bit. It really is a great way to have students come together for a common purpose, to allow each to have a say or piece of the action, and to give the students a sense of ownership in the whole process.

However, this comes with some words of wisdom. Before jumping into the wiki world, you’ll need to educate yourself in using this tool. Although it’s relatively easy, you need to have a bit of knowledge of hyperlinking and a sense of how to structure the wiki. Definitely try out a wiki, spend some time playing with the features, and even set up a practice run before turning your students loose in it. And you should have a clear purpose and guidelines for the project so that students will be able to work in a direction toward a common goal and not feel frustrated.

I’ve also just completed a wiki project in wikispaces in an online class that I am taking. As a participant in this group project, I found it challenging only because “I” like to be in control. But the whole premise of using wikis is to collaborate and share. So if you plan to use wikis in your classroom, be open and aware of the different personalities and learning styles of your students. I learned quite a bit while completing this project for my class, not only about wikis and the content we included in our project, but also about myself.

Here’s two sites to try if you are considering using wiki technology in your classroom:

wikispaces

pbwiki

A Del.icio.us Lesson

Social bookmarking is a way for Internet users to store, organize, share and search bookmarked or "favorite" web pages. In a social bookmarking system, users save links to web pages that they want to remember and/or share. These bookmarks are usually public, but depending on the service's features, may be saved privately, shared only with specific people or groups, shared only inside certain networks, or another combination of public and private. The allowed people can usually view these bookmarks chronologically, by category or tags, via a search engine, or even randomly.

Most social bookmark services encourage users to organize their bookmarks with informal tags instead of the traditional browser-based system of folders. They also enable viewing bookmarks associated with a chosen tag, and include information about the number of users who have bookmarked them.

The social bookmarking site that we will explore in this lesson is del.icio.us

Begin by reading information about the site at: del.icio.us

Then set up your account by following these instructions:

Go to del.icio.us and register as a user. (upper right hand corner)
Fill in your user name, full name, password and email
Follow the instructions and begin your delicious experience!

Here's your first assignment:

Go to http://www.podcast.net/ and search for any podcasts that have to do with Web 2.0 and the Read/Write Web. Add at least five podcasts to your del.icio.us page. Finally, share your findings with the class.

Pageflakes . . . organize your interests

Pageflakes is yet another site on the internet where you can organize your interests so they are available from any computer and share your page with your friends, colleagues, or the world. Here's info from their about page:

Pageflakes is revolutionizing how we use the Internet. With Pageflakes, you can easily customize the Internet and make it yours using "flakes" - small, movable versions of all of your Web favorites that you can arrange on your personal homepage. Flakes are available for thousands of uses and interests, including news, sports, e-mail, local events, search, photos, music, videos - even interactive tools like a calendar and a to-do list - and just about anything else you do on the Web at school, work and at home. The Pageflakes community of users create and help each other discover more new flakes and share more new Pageflakes pages every day.

Here's my personalized pageflakes

Personally, I like igoogle better. :-)

About RSS

So you are flipping through websites, surfing around, and you notice this RSS button. Wonder what it is? Depending on how you obtain your definition, RSS is either Rich Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication. Either way, RSS is a format for sharing content among different websites. Sites can syndicate “feeds” (content) and Internet users can use an application called an RSS reader or aggregator to download and organize feeds such as google reader.

Why you ask? Well with soooooo much web content by sooooooo many people in soooooooo many topics, using RSS can help you organize the wealth of current information being posted to the web as I write and you read this post. There's RSS for blogs, news and current event web sites, and other web sites that update content frequently. So RSS is like getting your newspaper delivered to your door perpetually 24/7.

Here's the advantage for the classroom. Use RSS to subscribe to sites that deliver up-to-the-minute information that your students can use for assignments and discussion. Notice the RSS feed for CNN Money on this blog. I use this to make current news stories easily available for my Business Technology students. I also incorporate RSS feeds into my Moodle courses. And with Google Reader, sharing your feeds is easy.

RSS is just another example of how the web is becoming more read/write everyday.