Getting ready for the MERLOT-Sloan-Moodle Conference

Many of the Teacher Ed Editorial Board will be heading to San Jose for the Emerging Technologies conference, sponsored by MERLOT, Sloan-C, and Moodle beginning July 20th...I'll be missing the conference because my newest grandson will be born on the 20th.

However, I wanted to share some of the sites that we will be highlighting at the conference. Our award winner, VoiceThread (voicethread.com) has recently been a boon to my program. The first graduates of our Math Education program will complete their work this summer. Tomorrow we are having a gathering to celebrate and showcase their work. I used VoiceThread to make a collage of the main areas of learning in the program and asked our students to highlight ways in which the program worked for them. You can view our VoiceThread at voicethread.com/share/1238895/. I think this is a great way to share good news.

We'll also be talking about the Newberry Maps site (http://www.newberry.org/k12maps/), which I highlighted in the May 23 blog, and Read, Write, Think from NCTE (http://www.readwritethink.org/classroom-resources/lesson-plans/) which I talked about in the June 5th blog.

I'll highlight other sites we present in the next blog, but I wanted to share a terrific site I learned about on our call---Dropbox! Dropbox is an online site where you can upload files. We needed something like this because we were preparing our PowerPoint for the conference and it was too large to send via email (lots of pictures :). So, I set up my Dropbox account and shared the file easily with the members of the board. If you're interested in setting up an account, just follow this link: https://www.dropbox.com/referrals/NTg5OTY4NjE5

Be sure to check out the site for the Emerging Technologies conference: http://sloanconsortium.org/et4online -- there's the opportunity to participate remotely if you haven't bought your ticket to San Jose!

Take care,

Jane

June 5, 2010

We didn't have a Teacher Ed Board call this week due to the Memorial Day holiday, but several of us communicated via email. One site that we just completed a review on is Read, Write, Think, one of the Thinkfinity sites, this one sponsored by NCTE and IRA. This is a wonderful collection of lesson plans, K-12, with connections to the standards (both national and state) and a variety of topics, lengths of lessons, even units.

One of the most popular items currently is a unit on creating a class newspaper for grades 3-5. There are ten 50-minute lessons and links to a wonderful interactive http://interactives.mped.org/view_interactive.aspx?id=110&title=: which allows users to create a newspaper, flyer, brochure or booklet. It's quite a fabulous tool!

Included is also a graphic organizer to help students create a newspaper story format for their articles. As well, there is an article which details how a second grade teacher created a classroom newspaper. There are printouts, websites, and multiple resources that teachers (or preservice teachers) can use to build effective learning in the classroom.

In addition to all the wonderful professional resources (including professional development opportunities, books, etc.) there is a terrific section for parents and afterschool programs that includes engaging activities and resources designed for literacy and critical thinking.

I hope you'll check out this site. Our MERLOT review was a solid 5 by both reviewers and should be posted in two weeks. However, the link to the post is http://www.merlot.org/merlot/workflow/viewCompositeReview.htm?id=468514 for anyone who can't wait :)

Jane

Wonderful Map Site

At our last Teacher Education call, we looked at a website that received all 5's from both reviewers in the MERLOT process. It's Historic Maps in the K-12 Classroom: http://www.newberry.org/k12maps/ from Chicago's Newberry Library.

What's so valuable about this site is that it includes primary resources which have been digitized. As well, the curator of the Newberry maps section has included notes for each map. The lesson plans attached to the maps provide teachers with wonderful lessons, tied to Standards and enriched by the curator's notes.

For instance, I looked at one of the maps of New Orleans, circa 1723. It is written in French, but the translation is available. There are lessons available for:
K-2 - Waterways and Communities
3-5 - Setting up a New Community
6-8 - Cities and Settlement
9-12 - Mapping Migration and Settlement
all based on this map.

For a social studies class K-12 or a social studies methods class, this site is a treasure!

See our review at http://www.merlot.org/merlot/workflow/viewCompositeReview.htm?id=450873

Jane

May 3, 2010

Today's teacher ed call involved three big topics---blended learning, some new applications, and the topic of time management.

In terms of blended learning, it appears that many schools of education employ blended learning in their teacher training programs. I just got the go-ahead to transform my face to face math methods class into a blended course, which is innovative in my program. I plan to take notes on how and what it takes to make the transition. My first step is to determine which are the best sessions to put online.

Some new applications that we discussed on our Teacher Ed call today included ietherpad.com and typewith.me. Both are examples of sites that can be used in both a face to face, blended or online format. They are effective both synchronously and asynchronously. At the Sloan Blended Conference, one of the speakers had an etherpad set up and as he was talking about innovations, had audience members log in and type in their ideas, which were projected on the screens in the room....it was sort of like using Twitter in the background, but easier for those who are unfamiliar with Twitter but comfortable with a word processor. Since support of the original etherpad has been withdrawn, both ietherpad and typewith.me have sprung up and give you all the benefits of the first iteration. They allow for multiple writers to participate in crafting a document, have a timeline, where participants can see the changes in the document over time, and identify writers in different colors. Our MERLOT Teacher Ed Board used etherpad to write our conference proposal for the MERLOT/Sloan/Moodle conference on Emerging Technologies in San Jose July 21-23. It was a really positive experience. I highly recommend you trying it.

As well, Cris Guenter, our art educator suggested three sites which provide online interactive whiteboards:

CoSketch.com
http://cosketch.com/
Whiteboard that you can collaborate to visualize your ideas and share them as images. The good thing is that, you don't have to register or install anything. It works in all browsers, it's real time and you can get an embed code for your drawing after you finish.

Dabbleboard
http://www.dabbleboard.com/
Whiteboard that enables you to visualize, explore and collaborate. It also lets you conduct presentation and chat though you can not share files.

Creately
http://creately.com/
Lets you create professional looking online diagrams with your colleagues.

I recently attended the TLT group's Friday Live session and it brought to mind the issues we all face when we are teaching online, web-supported or blended courses--time...or lack thereof. Some of the suggestions included setting up specific times to be online and letting your students know about it...i.e. I'll be online from 9 a.m. to 10 a.m. M-F. You can contact me via email or instant messaging, or perhaps in an Elluminate, Wimba, Adobe Connect, Centra, or whatever type of meeting tool you have available. Dorothy Fuller and Nancy Pelaez noted that they had specified times when students could find them online and that they found that students were not looking for the 24/7 presence that most of us have established in our online work. If you have any suggestions for maintaining a life outside of teaching online/blended/web-supported classes, please post them as a reply!!!

If you're available on Fridays and want to think about a variety of interesting teaching/technology related topics, I highly recommend the TLT Group's Friday Live series. The sessions are free and quite informative. http://www.tltgroup.org/

Jane

Wednesday, April 21

Wow! A Wordle that classroom teachers don't have to worry about. http://www.tagxedo.com/ will have a moderated gallery so that it's kid friendly. Very easy to use and certainly a plus for K-12 teachers who don't want to be surprised by an adult word cloud.

Jane

Good news!

Though Etherpad has been discontinued, you can now have all the same features by going to ietherpad.com!

Another substitute is http://typewith.me It appears to be another clone of Etherpad. The Teacher Ed Board looked at it while I was at the Sloan Conference. We had used Etherpad previously to work on our conference presentation together. Worth a look!

Jane

Sloan-C Blended Conference

I'm currently attending the Sloan-C Blended Conference in Oak Brook, IL....the conference has nearly doubled in size since last year and attendees represent 32 states and 6 countries. Many thought-provoking presentations yesterday, including one by Brenda Smith-Chant from Trent in Peterborough, Ontario, Canada. She teaches an intro psychology course to 800 students!

Her presentation was a fascinating study about the use of webcasts of her lectures. She found a consistent pattern---webcasting did not affect attendance to any degree. As well, students tended to watch the lecture immediately after it was released (about two hours after the class, due to closed captioning) and then again in the days prior to the exam. In fact, there was a group of students who "saved" reviewing the lectures until prior to the exam and then watched all 24 hours (or attempted to).

The results of the study showed that highly resourceful students' watching had no significant impact on their grade, but for students who had lower resourcefulness scores (determined by the Zimmerman questionnaire), those who were able to watch the second half of the course's lectures had significantly higher grades.

Another highlight was a workshop given by folks from the University of North Texas on their NextGen course redesign project. Their two year process really involves faculty in rethinking courses, developing a course that mixes lecture, experiential learning and online work. It's clear from the two examples that they have a wealth of support in instructional designers---very sharp online reviews and web page designs. They have a Ning which you can join by writing Philip Turner (pturner@unt.edu). One of the highlights of the workshop was playing Monopoly with a twist, one of the experiential aspects of the "Sociology of Disasters" class. In it, depending on your position at the table, you were given a racial and gender identity as well as a bankroll in line with your social status. Some examples: a female character who rolls a 9 is pregnant and must stay at her location on the board for 3 turns, paying rent (if applicable). Men and non-minorities get $200 for passing Go. Women and minorities get $150....and so on. Students play this game (very thoughtfully created) and then later in the course have to analyze how their character would fend in a major disaster.

More later,

Jane

March 22, 2010

Today, our teacher ed call centered around some of the sites that we triaged recently. As we were discussing sites, I noted a few that seemed very promising. When we triage for MERLOT, it means that we're selecting sites that we will review in the future. Cris Guenter mentioned a site that was particularly useful in graduate education classes, an assignment that taught students how to use Zotero to create an annotated bibliography. One of the neat aspects is that it could easily be adapted to any other course (it's constructed for an early childhood literature class). After checking it out, I discovered some other fine work by the author, Sarah Leigarde Swart, and thought you might find it interesting as well.

Ms. Swart's main site is located at http://www.easytechnoskills.com/index.html. One of the most impressive aspects is a compilation of resources for online teaching and learning. You can view that at http://www.easytechnoskills.com/DE_resources.htm.

I'd encourage anyone interested in incorporating more technology in their teaching and learning to check out these websites.

Jane

Teacher Education Call 3/8/10

As is usual, we learned about a lot on our biweekly teacher education call. I thought I might share some of the ideas here.

Cris Guenter shared information about a Virtual World Conference on March 12-13: (http://www.vwbpe.org/) Registration for Virtual Worlds Best Practices in Education's quick link is: http://vwbpe10.eventbrite.com/ Once you register, you’ll have SLURLS so that you can teleport to the session of your choice. You need to have a Second Life avatar to participate and you should know how to teleport and how to sit down in Second Life, but other than that, newbies are welcome.

We talked about a new feature in You Tube which allows you to use machine captioning on your video. David Wicks tried it out but found that the captioning (similar to programs like Dragon Speak) was not very accurate. It might be something you want to look into. You do have the option to go back in and edit the captioning file once completed.


One site that we are planning to explore is Tiny Chat
Tiny Chat allows users to embed chat in a website, blog or forum. You can also share You Tube videos through Tiny Chat....something to investigate!

Jane

Quizlet

Just the other day I was working with my math methods students on the topic of geometry and it became clear that many of them had forgotten some important vocabulary terms, like similar, congruent, the difference between diameter and radius and so on. I recommended a site to them that the Teacher Ed board had recently reviewed -- Quizlet. Quizlet was created by a then-high school student in order to practice for his tests. The program allows you to either use electronic flashcards created by another teacher or student, or develop your own to help you practice and learn vocabulary.

Just recently, the Quizlet site posted that an Apple app for Quizlet will be available this month. How cool is that?

Quizlet, though valuable for math vocabulary, would be equally useful for foreign language acquisition, science terms, literature terms and the like.

Check out our review of Quizlet!

Jane

MERLOT Leadership Meeting

I've just returned from the MERLOT Leadership meeting in Long Beach, California. It's an opportunity for editors of the various boards and project directors to meet together with the MERLOT leaders. At the meeting (February 4-5), we discussed the upcoming Emerging Technologies for Online Learning conference in July (20-23) in San Jose, a joint venture of MERLOT, Sloan, and Moodle. Information on the conference can be found at http://sloanconsortium.org/et4online.

One of the highlights of the meeting was sharing the MERLOT Classics Winners for 2010. They are quite fabulous! Unfortunately, you'll have to wait until the conference to find out which ones the editorial boards selected.

In the meantime, though, I wanted to highlight our 2009 Classics Winner, Jing. The Jing Project, a free site, allows users to capture screen shots, create video, and upload video to screencast.com. Then, instructors can insert the URL and students can access the video their professors have created.

Members of the editorial board have used Jing extensively. One example is to use it to illustrate to students (either face-to-face or online) how to use a particular website or a piece of software. Jing will capture examples up to five minutes in length. For example, I used Jing to show my students how to access the discussion board in our course management system and how to post a discussion response. Another board member has students use Jing to capture problems they are having with software or websites. They send the link to him and he can then help them sort through the difficulties.

Members can upgrade from free accounts to Jing Pro for only $14.95 a year. The free version, however, has been quite adequate for my needs over the past two years.

I hope you'll try Jing (if you haven't already) and comment on the ways you've used it here.

Jane

Cool Tools for Schools

So many of us in higher education are overwhelmed by budget cuts, time constraints and more and more "to do" items. We still want to keep up with integration of technology, but there's so much out there and limited time to explore.

One of our favorite Teacher Education sites this year is Cool Tools for Schools . The site, created by a New Zealand educator, Lenva Shearing, includes many, many tools that are useful for educators. Lenva keeps up with the blog, so links work, and materials are organized in a easy to follow manner.

So, if you're looking for a Presentation tool, for instance, Lenva has linked 41 annotated sites. You can look through them and choose the tool that's right for your situation.

Be sure to read the MERLOT review to get insights into ways in which you might use "Cool Tools for Schools.

Join MERLOT and have access to Personal Collections (Cool Tools is in mine!), and the ability to post comments and use MERLOT to the fullest.

Jane