Trailfire

Trailfire presentation by April Chamberlain

Trailfire is a guide to help locate the path taken as we search the internet. This is the first that I have heard of this tool and see many applications for its use. Without having experimented with it very much it still seems somewhat cumbersome. In my opinion many colleagues of mine will welcome this to use in their own professional development, with a webquest with their students or to enhance the curriculum taught.

Being that this resource can be either public or private will allow for staff development or personal development to experiment with the internet and its wonderful resources world wide and choose whether to share what has been found. It also allow for teacher created curriculum to be “controlled” for that classroom.

Trailfire enables the trail creator to add virtual marks to any website using the same trail name. The beauty of Trailfire is that there are two ways to locate a trail. The first is to search for that topic of choice from the Trailfire website or a person can receive a link by the trail creator. Again this system is conducive to those that prefer their privacy and others that are out there to gather as much information as possible.

I’m hoping to use Trailfire as a resouce for literature appreciation and book elements such as background, character development, elements of the story and illustration styles. Within this presentation there are multiple resources to delve into that discuss storytelling.

Once a person locates a trail they would like to visit, select and add this to ones favorites using the box in the upper right hand corner. There are several “trails” listed that I will be spending more time exploring. These appear to have many more articles, blogs, lesson plan and ideas to develop a network of Trailfire uses.

Great job and nice trails to explore. I will be taking a much closer look at this tool. Thanks for the presentation.

Putting the Pedagogy into the Tools

Putting the Pedagogy into the Tools by Anne Davis

I enjoyed this presentation and how Ms. Davis incorporated these tools into her lessons with students. Her ideas and summaries of each of the tools lend themselves as a jump start when discovering and using this free online software.

I especially liked the beginning of the presentation when she states that the teachers are the facilitators of learning. In order to do this, educators are charged to: grab their attention, encourage curiosity, build anticipation, foster creativity, prompt students to wonder, explore their world, get involved and feed inquisitiveness and to captivate the moment. Wow, I think I’ll somehow post these expressions in the media center. These are encouraging in themselves

These are some of the things that I will take away from this presentation. Blogging seems to be a great way to tell a story. Students love to talk about themselves and this online tool gives the teacher the opportunity to facilitate that type of learning. As stated, this type of writing (blobbing) for the student can be profound. No longer are they writing for the teacher and a grade but to connect with others, a wider audience in a place where they can be heard. Blogging can encourage and show respect for writers and their ideas, it promotes ownership and creates an archive of their writings. This is a great tool to incorporate into any curriculum or discipline.

There are a few of the highlighted programs that I would like to try using with the students in media classes. I would like to use Audacity with students and record them reading stories to share with others in their class or other grade levels. Using Flickr I would like to use Ms. Davis’ idea to show visual images with a descriptive writing project. Skype is a tool I would like to use with a partner school in our district in conjunction with the SmartBoard & webcam to discuss and share book talks similar to what they do at the end of the Reading Rainbow videos. Google maps could be used with all grade levels to make visual connections with places that are being discussed in stories or classrooms. Mindmeister will be a great way to create images and share mindmaps. This could be model initially as a group project and eventually used to organize thoughts. Others tools that I don’t have specific plans for but will like to experiment and share with others include: PBwiki, SlideShare and Talking Cats Generator (kids will love this!). A grandiose plan would be to create blogs with the upper elementary students and throughout the year include many of these tools into their pages.

Design Matters

This presentation by Dean Shareski talked about design elements and how they make a presentation meaningful and beautiful. Mr. Shareski states that creativity, design and learning should be inseparable.

The design elements discussed were planning, imagery, use of whitespace & transitions, constraints and innovation. I agree with the author when he states that planning does matter and is extremely important to a presentation. Storyboarding was the first element discussed and is a great tool to use with younger students to give them a clear picture or purpose to their projects. Written scripts is another tool that we use to help students focus and frame ideas for effective communication with presentations such as podcasts. He talked about imagery and how our world is becoming more visual. Students love to use pictures in their projects but need to be taught how to use images to support their ideas in the text. Images are to supplement the writing and students many times get carried away with this part. Visual literacy is a topic to be taught to all for their projects. Flickr was suggested as a good resource for photos rather than clip art and to help avoid copyright issues.

The project that I will take away from this presentation is the student projects using four slides or pictures to create a biography about themselves. I would like to do this project several time throughout the school year and note the differences. What a great way to get students to edit their work and focus on the main ideas to be presented.

Contrary to what was suggested here, I do like to use template with students when starting new projects. I know this limited creativity or personal touch but with elementary ages students it helps to bring focus and save time

Design does matter and we cannot forget to talk about the various elements that will make student and professional project better.

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Travel Through Space and Time

Travel Through Space and Time by Silvia Tolisano

Ms. Tolisano shared her story of her student activity to stretch traditional boundaries, school, students and take them on a personal learning journey. She has taken the ”Flat Stanley” and Letters to Felix” stories to a new dimension. She traveled to China and virtually has taken her students and teaching coworkers with her via online technology. She combined a blog, podcasts, photos and videos to educate students about cultural universals such as education, transportation, food and culture.

The internet has truly opened up our world and its traditional boundaries for student learning. The ideas used were simple enough with a bear mascot for the younger students and an Amazing Race game for the older students. However, I found it fascinating how she used the various online tools for this learning experience. I’m starting to become familiar with some of the software mentioned but in this podcast she has explained how each of these were incorporated into the journey. She mentioned WordPress, Windows movie Maker, Audacity, Delicious, Flickr, Skyp to name a few. Each of these programs had specific and important functions for the overall project.

Even though as she stated, the equipment was too much for one person to carry throughout the day, I was amazed at the simplicity of the hardware and equipment used. The equipment was such that most people would be familiar with their operation. A laptop, webcam, digital & video cameras, mp3 recorders, and their chargers were among those listed.

This is a fantastic project. I applaud her for incorporating the Web 2.0 tools and sharing this project with others. Her organizational skills and preparational tasks were phenomenal and led to the success and wonderful global studies for students, staff and now sharing with others to continue the amazing learning experience.

More Than Cool Tools

Keynote #2 Alan Levine, Brian Lamb & D’Arcy Norman

This is a great presentation by Alan, Brian & D’arcy. “More than Cool Tools” highlights numerous applications available from the internet. Most of this software is free of charge. They talked about the evolution of trends in how educators are socializing, collaborating, sharing information along with filtering and disruptions. Using Web 2.0 tools can be liberating and also disruptive. A person’s work is never finished because with Web 2.0 tools there will always be opportunities change.

I’d like to speak on the collaboration portion of the presentation. To begin with, even with the collaboration tools available on the internet, the first challenge in collaboration involves shared activities and responsibilities between partners working toward their shared goal. Next with any type of collaboration, it requires assembling the appropriate set of resources and maintaining a shared flexible process.

Collaboration is becoming a networked organizational form that provides an electronic workspace. It is becoming a laboratory without walls that allow for a virtual organization. With this virtual network the possibilities expand and move outside of the building or district boundaries. Technology has relaxed the constraints of distance and time allowing for colorations to take place in new and exciting ways. The use of blogs, wikis, RSS feed and other free web based applications have become collaborative spaces to share experiences along with practical application ideas. Some other applications mentioned for collaboration were Google.docs, Zoho, Del.icio.us, Twitter to name a few.

Using Web 2.0 tools for collaboration offers current, exciting, online continuing-education programs for all involved. Opportunities for collaboration will continue to change with new technologies to our learning environments.