Ideas and Thoughts from an EdTech

As usually happens when I’m teaching others about a topic, this evening when I was sharing some tips about using the Macintosh operating system and Mac programs I learned a valuable tip: How to record audio and simultaneously take notes using Microsoft Word. I’d heard of this capability but never seen it demoed, and it wasn’t hard to do. We had to change the “view” in Word to “Notebook” to enable the functionality, and then select audio recording from the “tools” menu.

Interestingly, in doing some Google and del.icio.us searches for a screencast or tutorial about how to use this functionality of Word 2004, I couldn’t find any! I did find some references to this functionality in an old review of the program, but no tutorials. There are quite a few articles about using Microsoft OneNote on the Windows-side to record audio. I haven’t tried that either.

Has anyone had success recording teacher/instructor/professor lectures using either Word 2004 on a Mac or OneNote on a Windows PC? I’d be interested to hear what people think of the functional usability of these features. They sound great, but I’ve never talked with someone (in person or online) who has used them repeatedly in actual classes.

I had the delight this evening of participating with Dean Shareski, David Jakes, and students in a course Dean is teaching via an Elluminate Live session to discuss Digital Storytelling. Dean shared the following quotation from Joe Lambert, who is a co-founder of the Center for Digital Storytelling:

Digital storytelling begins with the notion that in the not [too] distant future, sharing one’s story through the multiple mediums of digital imagery, text, voice, sound, music, video and animation will be THE PRINCIPAL HOBBY OF THE WORLD’S PEOPLE.

The fact that the iPhone has a YouTube button which permits people to directly watch YouTube videos directly on their phone is really amazing, IMHO, but I think it reflects the continuing manifestation of the above prediction by Joe Lambert.

Just listening to Dean and David share during our virtual class this evening, I learned about a BUNCH of great digital storytelling examples and tools I hadn’t seen or heard about before. I saved most of these to my social bookmarks and YouTube playlists, but briefly, some of the highlights were:

Digital storytelling examples:

• True America: A super-powerful movie by an 18 year old student in David’s district about the meaning of freedom and the United States, created in response to a request from Barack Obama on his MySpace page for student-created videos
• Fun and powerful Apple advertisement from the late 1990s about 21st century “show and tell” via digital storytelling
• Chasing Metaphors: Great example of a digital storytelling theme or assignment for students
• A fun video Dean made of his family at Lake Michigan set to part of the song “Jump” by Van Halen

TouFee, another web-based video editing environment similar to JumpCut, and EyeSpot were mentioneed by David. Vimeo was mentioned but I think it is mainly a video sharing and commenting/social networking site, rather than an editing tool.

I have used these previously, but I did specifically save and tag David’s excellent PhotoStory3 tutorials and screencasts as well.

Thanks to Dean for both the opportunity to guest blog here, and also join in the conversation tonight via Elluminate about digital storytelling. I learned a lot and had fun!

Technorati Tags: digitalstorytelling

Friday’s headline article from Reuters, “Wii could top record-holding PS2″ reminds me of B. Joseph Pine and James H. Gilmore’s book “The Experience Economy: Work Is Theater & Every Business a Stage”. I have not purchased or read the book yet, but I’m intrigued by this idea that our economic landscape can increasingly be described as “an experience economy” where people are more likely to pay for an actual “experience” more than just a cheaper product or widget. The Wii and the iPhone both come to mind as products which seem crafted for the consumers of the experience economy.

How can schools be changed to join the experience economy? In his book “The Children’s Machine: Rethinking School in the Age of the Computer,” Seymour Papert observes that before they enter formal schooling children commonly display self-directed learning behaviors. Once kids begin formal schooling, however, adults essentially tell young people to stop experiencing their world and directing their own learning, and instead sit passively in their desk and read about it. Papert notes schools tend to emphasize the development of “lettracy” rather than “literacy,” which he (and I) conceive of as including a broader set of communication and learning modalities than text-based reading and writing.

I’m not sure what the answer to this question is, but I am certain most young people WANT their formal schooling experiences to become more interactive and experiential. We’re living in the postmodern world, and while we can debate at length both what that means and whether it’s good, the fact is students are increasingly accustomed to life in an “experience economy” outside school– and when they are inside formal classrooms they often find themselves feeling out-of-place in a traditional, largely passive, lecture-based environment.

One of the greatest challenges we face is helping teachers change their own paradigms of thinking about learning. It is much easier to lecture and provide information rather than facilitate project-based learning. Administrative expectations need to change broadly for a school or school district to move into a more “experiential” mode of learning.

What do you think can and should be done to help teachers as well as administrators embrace and EXPECT more experiential forms of learning in our classrooms?

When Dean guest blogged for me awhile back, he introduced a “humor” category and shared a few movies, so I figured I would do the same!

Remember the sound of a modem connecting over a phone line? Remember when the existence of “emoticons” was actually worthy of a news headline? Check out this blast from the past, I suspect from the early 1990s, from a television station in Toronto, Canada!

Wow have we ever seen a lot of changes on the Internet in a short amount of time! Via Linda Uhrenholt.

One of my favorite quotations to share during conference presentations and workshops, whose source I unfortunately do not know how to properly attribute, is the following:

Are you preparing students for their future, or for your past?

Missing from this quotation is the idea we also need to prepare students for the PRESENT that is taking place right now, and not just a faraway “la la fantasy land” vision of the future when the world will look just like that of the Jetsons.

As some authors have observed, our vision for what the future is going to “look like” has changed markedly over the years. Predictions from people like Benjamin Franklin that new technologies would yield vast amounts of leisure time have given way to conditions of information overload and overscheduled calendars, with often little time for people to enjoy unstructured time in natural environments. I’ve never visited Disney’s Tomorrowland in Florida, but I understand the vision it communicates of “what the future holds” has undergone interesting evolution over time.

The fact is, NO ONE can predict with certainly what the future holds. Yet, we still must live our lives today (in contexts which are often dynamic with respect to communication, information flows, and technology) and strive to prepare learners (both young and old) for flexible readiness in the months and years to come. How can we do it?

I read the following quotation by Herb Caen recently which brought many of these thoughts to mind:

I tend to live in the past because most of my life is there.

I think many of the most innovative uses of digital technologies for learning we see today in the United States are happening in charter schools where educators as well as students are freer to think and act differently than learners have in the past. It is natural and even unavoidable to look at our present context (as well as future prospects) through the lens of our own past experiences. We form our perceptions and decide on our actions based on those experiences and our thoughts about them.

For that reason, I think it is essential we strive to experience (ourselves) and help other teachers experience successes in using new digital technologies to access information, collaborate with others, publish ideas, and thereby create new knowledge. I find the quotation from Alan Kay, “The best way to predict the future is to invent it” extremely compelling. If we want to help teachers lead students in their classrooms in ways that will empower them to “invent the future,” I think we need to recognize the primacy of encouraging PERSONAL USES of technologies by teachers.

Those ideas will strongly inform the three day workshop I’m helping facilitate here in Oklahoma next week, and Karen Montgomery is facilitating for teachers in Missouri. We’ve titled our team-taught workshop “The Digital Learning Academy.” We have four main goals:

1. Have fun creating media and collaborating with other teachers.
2. Gain an experiential understanding of the read/write web. (web 2.0)
3. Help teachers make “A-Ha” connections for instruction and learning with digital tools.
4. Help educators “plug in” to the growing network of educational Yodas.

To support these goals (and hopefully accomplish them) Karen and I have constructed a three day workshop agenda focusing on the use of several web 2.0 tools for learning as well as videoconferencing. The key will be follow-up, I think. We’re planning to schedule dates in the fall when teachers will come BACK together, both face to face and via videoconferencing hook-ups, to share how they’ve used the tools and strategies they experienced in the digital learning academy with their own students to help improve learning opportunities.

My philosophy in helping putting together and facilitate this 3 day learning event is informed by the words of John Norton, who I met and visited with several weeks ago at NECC. He observed that accomplished teachers have GREAT capacity for supporting positive instructional change and ongoing professional growth of other educators, but that process often needs facilitation by others. The Alabama Teacher Leaders Network is focused on supporting the dynamic of accomplished teachers mentoring each other as well as novice teachers. I hope our digital learning academy and the online network we’re building (via Ning and other tools) will also model and support this philosophy.

I hope our workshop next week will be fun as well as “successful.” Rather than view myself as the source of content knowledge for this series of learning days, I view myself more as a “connector” and “facilitator” who will hopefully invite and encourage the teacher-participants to learn by doing– creating knowledge products which have personal meaning and relevance to their own lives with others, located in the same room but also geographically distant from their own classroom. We’ll see what happens! If we have fun “making stuff” together with digital tools, I think chances are high we are all going to learn a LOT.
One of the most beautiful things about leading and participating in a summer learning workshop like this is the AUTONOMY we are afforded when it comes to the curriculum. Accomplished teachers need to be afforded the same opportunity in their classrooms to seize “teachable moments” and not necessarily stay on the exact page of a curriculum pacing guide which was written in stone months before, and does not respect the learning opportunities which may present themselves in the dynamical and chaotic environment of a REAL classroom.

Ewan McIntosh (via his social bookmarks) alerted me to the PoducateMe website by Micah Ovadia. The website is touted as offering “practical solutions for podcasting in education.”

If this site is practical, then why is Audacity not included in the list of 22 recommended software options for podcast recording? Certainly that’s an extensive list of commercial products, but if the site really wants to be practical should a FREE, powerful, and cross-platform podcasting solution like Audacity be included on the list of recommended software recording programs?

I think so.

The website’s PoducateMe Guide is 186 pages long, and really does look fantastic. It is free to read online, and DOES include references to Audacity. On page 64 of the guide, the author writes:

Because it is free, multiplatform and easy to use, Audacity is often mentioned as an attractive option for recording and editing sound on both Macs and PCs. However, you will not be able to utilize dynamics processing plug-ins while recording with this software.

Certainly there are many limitations to Audacity, but the fact it is FOSS makes it more relevant and useable by educators around the planet than any other podcasting software alternative I’ve seen.

Thanks to Micah for creating a thorough and fantastic guide for podcasting. I’d recommend, however, including Audacity on the list of recommended software programs for recording. I’d also recommend including Garageband and Adobe Soundbooth.

I’ve added a link to Michah’s list of podcasting sequencer programs to my wiki curriculum, “Digital Music Creation: Engage, Inspire, Have Fun!” I’ll be sharing that again (with the help of my own kids) on August 3rd in Oklahoma City at the A+ School’s annual state conference focused on integrating the arts for learning in K-12 schools.

Technorati Tags: digitalstorytelling, podcast, podcasting

Hello, this is Wesley Fryer from “Moving at the Speed of Creativity.” At Dean’s invitation I’m going to be guest blogging here this week, sharing a few thoughts and probably exploring a few new tools. I’ll start by thanking both Dean and Alan Levine for their modeling lessons on using Voicethread. Voicethread is one of many tools I’ve previously heard about and briefly visited, but not actually used or even seen in action until reading Dean’s latest post and playing his demo. Wow! Isn’t it amazing how the envelope of communication possibilities keeps getting extended with web 2.0 tools like this? Looking back at my social bookmarks for “digital storytelling,” I see that I saw and saved the Voicethread site last month on May 16th, but I haven’t been back to the site to explore or think about it until this evening.

Another digital storytelling (and specifically “podcasting”) website I’ve learned about lately (from Bob Sprankle) but not yet tried personally is PodcastPeople. As I work with teachers interested in helping their students create and share their digital stories, generally creating an audio podcast with a tool like Audacity is the easy part. The more complicated discussion happens after the podcast is created, the “now what?” question. PodcastPeople (similar to Gcast, but according to Bob faster to use and setup in a workshop) takes care of many of the “now what” issues for podcasting, including creating the web feed.

I am sure I’m not alone in being frustrated at times with the quantity and power of these new tools which continue to come out almost every day, and the LACK of time I have to adequately explore and play with them. Another tool Bob has discussed recently in his Bit By Bit Podcast series is LibraryThing. In thinking about how I might be able to designate, or set aside, tools like these that I not only want to save for future reference, but also be sure I return to and explore in greater detail, I’ve created a new del.icio.us tag category for “tools I want to try.” I am fortunate to have a relatively large amount of flexibility in my current work schedule, especially compared to a K-12 classroom teacher (during the school year of course, not the summer.) I would guess teacher frustration at not having enough time to explore and use these tools can often be orders of magnitude greater than mine!

At our state leadership conference here in Oklahoma the past two days, several of the conversations I had with others focused on the issue of TIME and its scarcity for both teachers and students in our schools. The issue is NOT simply needing students to be in school sitting in class for longer periods of time, as our state superintendent made headlines promoting today, but rather finding creative and effective ways to provide more FLEXIBLE time for both teachers and students to explore, collaborate, and share.

One of the best suggestions I’ve heard to date about this was from Alan November several years ago at the TCEA conference in Austin, Texas. Alan mentioned visiting a school in east Asia where half the day students went to traditional classes, but the other half of their day they worked in their “offices” at school completing assignments and working on projects with others. We have a noticeably greater level of discussion these days about school reform, creativity, and flat-world competition. Our state superintendent actually showed the “Did You Know” presentation video by Karl Fisch. Rather than suggest thinking and acting in ways suggested by Daniel Pink, however, in response to all these flat-world changes… much of the conversations I hear seem stuck in discussions about doing “old school” with a new wrapper. I told someone today that I was most interested in promoting 2nd order change in education, rather than just 1st order evolutionary, minor change. Rather than trying to just put a new wrapper on an old sandwich, I’m searching for a new sandwich altogether.

The Oklahoma Creativity Project is one initiative that sounds promising, as does the focus on creativity and innovation embodied in the refresh to the ISTE NETS standards we heard about two weeks ago at NECC in Atlanta. Educational reforms need to go beyond “wrapper level” tweaks, however, and get to core issues. Most important among those issues is TIME. As I discussed in my NECC presentation about “school 2.0,” learning should no longer be formally constrained by traditional bell schedules. Schools should not be paid based simply on the amount of total time students have warmed seats in their building. We’ve got to not only question but actually CHANGE fundamental assumptions about public schooling, in the United States and elsewhere, and advocating for that type of “second order” change is inherently disruptive and often uncomfortable.

I absolutely love digital storytelling: I love listening to and watching digital stories, I love creating digital stories, and I love helping other people create them. The biggest challenge I face on all these fronts, however, is the same: TIME. Time is zero sum, we don’t get any more of it, and once it’s gone we can’t get it back. What are the most valuable ways for you to spend your limited heartbeats today and tomorrow? Choosing to engage in the consumption or creation of digital stories can often be a good answer to that question, but if you’re like me there is generally not enough TIME to make that choice.

We’re in the midst of an educational sea change. The tools keep proliferating, and the democratized power those tools offer us keeps increasing as well. Personally, I’m thrilled to be alive in 2007. There is more to learn than ever before, but also more tools at our fingertips to connect with each other and learn from one another. Twitter is significant not because of the technological aspect of the service, but because of the connective power it offers to connect us in personal ways to each other throughout the day. I’m thankful to Dean, Alan, Bob S, and many others for being innovators and early adopters of new digital, collaborative technologies and sharing their learning journey with our online educational community. If I wasn’t “plugged in” to the collective consciousness of digital edu-learning happening out here, I’m sure I’d feel much more overwhelmed by the diverse array of technology tools and options which surround us. As it is, I’m sometimes overwhelmed, but I always know there are supportive voices out there to help me process and learn as I can find the TIME.
It’s like we’re all part of the Borg, but a good, benevolent Borg!

I am often on the hunt for great new podcasts, and today in my 3 or so hours of driving to and from Wewoka, Oklahoma, I listened to my first System Trash podcast. Yes, these guys are real geeks, but they are also fun to listen to and I learned a fair bit– even though I listened to an episode about an operating system I think I know a good deal about (Macintosh OS X.)

The podcast series focuses primarily upon different variants (distributions) of Linux, and the slogan of the show is:

Ain’t no system we can’t trash.

Interestingly, I don’t think the podcast about Mac OS X ended up being very “trashy.” These guys obviously have a LOT more perspective than I do about operating system differences– and they definitely found more to like than trash with the Free-BSD based Macintosh OS X.

The much anticipated (and perhaps much dreaded) upcoming release of Windows Vista from Redmond is going to make the next 6 - 12 months quite interesting in the operating system world. As virtualization software continues to improve and more educators (including IT support staff personnel) begin to see the light of open source in schools, I think our educational technology environment is going to be more dynamic than ever!

If you’re looking to improve your knowledge and understanding of these events, you might check out the System Trash podcast. After all, it’s a free podcast– and if you don’t like it, you can trash it!