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.

If All of my Classes Did This

“If All of my Classes Did This” by Wendy Wolfe

In this podcast presentation were ideas and examples of how various internet tools could be applied to the classroom and learning. Some of the programs Ms. Wolfe discussed were ToonZoon, ReadWriteThink cartoon creator, Gliffy, Zoho, Gcast, Scrapebook and VoiceThread.

A few of these programs would be exciting to use with some of the upper elementary students. I’m looking forward to experimenting with some of these. Our school has begun using Professional Learning Teams, I’m on the Technology team. Some of the suggested online programs discussed here would be great to bring to these meetings. Because I’m not clear on what to use these with, bringing them into this small group who is excited about learning and using new technology. Then collaborating with them on project might be a good avenue for me to travel.

As always, student privacy and safety is a concern. Some of the sites mentioned would need to accessed through a classroom account. Some sites were more flexible than others having numerous ways to publish. Multiple student collaboration on Gliffy or Google docs site could be monitored.

The programs that I am most interested in experimenting with are ToonZoo and ReadWriteThink Cartoon Creator. Everyone has a story to tell and I think using the cartoon creators would be a fun and creative way of doing this. With the thought bubble feature this could also be incorporated into an illustrator study and his use with thought bubbles.

Using these online resources opens the world to our students and teachers. Web 2.0 gives us learning a lot of new tools to use in the classroom.

Learn to Blog, Blog to Learn

Wow! There is a massive amount of information in the webcast “Learn to Blog, Blog to Learn by Anne Davis. Even when using the “beginners” pages Anne provided, I was overwhelmed with information. Anne has definitely put a lot of time and effort into this endeavor and it shows! The introductory webquest had great insight and information to be used with students. This can be used with beginners and experienced students in the world of blogging. The examples of student work will be helpful when setting up and introducing our own school blog.

I’m thinking of using a class blog to have the students discuss books that have been highlighted for our student elected state book award called Maud Hart Lovelace. Initially I am planning to start with 4^th & 5^th grade students for this book discussion. Then collaborating with one or more media specialists in the district, open this up so the students from other schools will have the opportunity to talk about the books from this preselected list using the blog.

Being that I have little experience with blogs and students, I will be curious to see how eager or comfortable the students will be in putting their work out on the page for others to see. I’m also interested in the student’s reaction to others’ responses. Some of the features within Blogmeister that I especially appreciate are that it gives the teacher control over every word that is written, the teacher can make the post public or private and the teacher also approves all comments and posts. Another feature that teachers will be pleased with is that student email addresses do not have to be used.

The intent of using a blog in the classroom for me is to have the students use this as a springboard to reflect up what they are learning. I would also hope this is another way to for them to grow to be good citizens and accepting of others and their opinions.

Me Blog - No Way

“Me Blog – No Way” by John Pearce

The format of this presentation I liked a lot. Each of his points was presented first with using a voki (imitating a person we all recognized from our schools) and then an explanation and hints for each of the points of interest and concerns expressed. The presenter discussed many concerns about blogs that are constantly expressed by educators.

I agree with John that our means of communication is changing and we owe it to our students to become involved and participants. Two things that motive students are the use of technology and the chance to communicate with one another. Blogging combines both of these activities for our students and can be channeled into an educational activity.

I would like to begin blogging with students. The presenter hit the nail on the head when he stated that some people’s reluctance to blogging with students (mine) is because of the safety factor. The suggestion to bring the principal, leadership team, coworkers and parents on board are going to be key factors in the success of the student blogging. And he also suggested some elementary leaders might think that this activity is more for the secondary level. This also was something that was in the back of my mind. But then again, in elementary school we already teach internet safety and bullying. Rules and prodical for blogging would be an extension of this. I intend on having students blog about books they have read. This will be an extension of a reading and writing projects.

Students are already using forms of blogs such as ClubPenguin in the elementary school. If we as elementary teacher wait to include blogging in our teaching we are missing a chance to reach and motivate many of our students using tools that are right at our fingertips.

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The Why’s and Wherefores

“The Why’s and Wherefores” by Brian Crosby

With this webcast, Mr. Crosby has shown his audience that free internet based tools such as Flickr, Skyp, video conferencing, wiki pages, blogging can be incorporated into elementary classroom work to change the look of 21st century learning. Through example, Mr. Crosby shared ideas of projects he had used with his classes.I especially appreciated the classroom examples shown with each of the internet tools explained. Incorporating these motivational tools into writing, social studies, science and especially community service lessons are great lessons for both teacher and students.

The Aha moment for me in the video podcast was the realization that with Flickr the class and I can share digital photos taken for class projects without me distributing these into individual folders for student access. This will be a great time saving resource for me to use with many lessons.

Also using blogs for writing projects and students comments is also another great way to teach internet ethics and safety. Student book reviews blogged onto a classroom page can be used as a learning and promotional device in the media center. Being that many of these tools are free make them even more amenable.

Oodles of Googles

Sharon Betts discusses how students can use a google account to organize their online materials for a report. This podcast gets me excited to delve deeper into my own Google account. There are so many items to try using a Google account. In the presentation, Sharon navigated in Google using the Notebook, History and Docs options. She demonstrated how to add pictures, cut and paste from the history and clip and collect information as she surfed the web. She organized her picture, text and sources from the notebook page.

The feature that I am most impressed with in Google docs is the sharing opportunity. With this option students can collaborate using this online file. There are different levels that allow the option to share work through adding, editing and/or viewing levels. Both students and teachers will find this feature beneficial when collaborating on projects.

Options that were new to me in this podcast were the presentation mode available. Google docs has a slide show option available to directly publish work online. There is also an feature for feedback and reflection on work completed. Files may also be archived in Google docs ad discussion groups take place here.

The biggest benefit I see in using Google docs, notebook, history and other features in the ability to easily extend collaboration with others at your network. It is convenient to use, participants can be from near or far, the format is similar to other familiar word processing and slide show programs, it’s free and accessible to anyone with internet access.