Ideas and Thoughts from an EdTech

About six weeks ago I pointed a number of key people in our division to Will Richardson’s article The New Face of Learning. It sparked some discussion and interest, and in an effort to bring forward these ideas, we invited any interested teachers to gather informally to discuss what this article might mean for schools.

So we gathered together using a hodge-podge of technology. We had 16 in Moose Jaw, 4 in Assiniboia via Polycom, 1 in Bengough via Skype and 2 in Eston via Skype as well (Kelly Christopherson and a colleague using a mic-less computer but he did participate via chat). Then Will joined us from New Jersey. Here’s a large version of the image.

What you hear is the last 20 minutes of Will’s portion and another 20 minutes of conversation that took place after he signed off. Sorry, I only remembered to start recording after 40 minutes into our talk. What impressed me was the diversity of the group both in both teaching positions (grade 1-12) and in experience using technology. Yet the common understanding seemed to be that things must change. While many have already embraced the change, everyone recognizes it must happen. We may not agree on exactly how that must happen but the beginnings of these conversations are important. Those of us using these tools have been having these conversations for some time so to see others joining in is encouraging.

Here’s a short clip taken with Jeff’s Treo.

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We hope to offer a few of these types of sessions to promote some discussion and interest around web 2.0. We ended by agreeing to bring in students to try and better understand how they use technology…Stay tuned. Thank you Will for taking time…buy your son something nice and send us the bill!

Show notes:

• Will Richardson
• post on cell phones
• post on teacher blogging
• George Siemens
• Alan November
• David Warlick
• Kathy Cassidy (Primary Blog)
• Clarence Fisher (Middle Years teacher blog)
• Post about student choice
• Clarence Fisher (Middle Years classroom blog)
• Post asking students about their learning
• Calculus Blog (High School Math classroom)

 

 Conversations on Change: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (908)

Kathy Cassidy is on a whirlwind tour. It began with a trip to Saskatoon this fall as the winner of the provincial award for computers in education. Then she was off to Philadelphia as one of 5 teachers honored as a Microsoft Innovative Teacher Award. Next she’s off to Cambodia.

This is a short interview on her trip to Philadelphia. Unfortunately, there is little online information about this program and conference as it relates to Canadians, so thus, no show notes. Have a listen.

As well, her latest class project is an attempt to help her students understand what “1,000″ means. Please add your name to her wiki.

8MB

16:16

 

 Kathy goes to Philly: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (573)

It had been a while since I had the pleasure of chatting with the posse. As always, we learn from each other. Nice to have Heather join the squad. Alec, where were you? Missed your voice. Rob has put together some nice show notes for our talk last week. You can head over to the posse page if you have a comment on the podcast.

It was make up your own topic night when Dean, Rick, Heather and I got together via Skype on Oct. 25, so the conversation covers a lot of ground.

• Stephen’s critique of K12Online and responses (I chose Wes’ response because I thought it was a measured, reasonable response that showed an interest in maintaining a dialog. Sadly, other comments seemed more like they would be heard in a junior high class.)
• Group dynamics of blogrolls, networks and groups
• Women of Web 2.0
• Characteristics of communities, Dunbar’s number and grooming
• SCoPe and November session on Open Source in Education
• Roadblocks to the ability of teachers to use free/libre open source software in schools
• Problems moving courses out of proprietary course management software to Moodle or other open source software

A small production note - I used the Levelator to get the vocal levels consistent for all of us. Big thanks to Alan Levine for his blog post about Levelator, and to GigaVox media for making this tool available for free!

Enjoy.

 

 Communities, Open Source in Education: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (411)

My wife has always wanted a VW beetle. I pretty well do what she wants so we got a 2007 red Beetle. I would have been happy with a 1995 Ford Focus but we got the beetle.

Anyway, besides the fact that it was way more than I wanted to spend, I discovered one little feature that might make the whole thing worthwhile.  A tiny auxilary jack located next to the stereo allows me to plug in my mp3 player. So my drives around my school division are now the perfect opportunity to get caught up with podcasts. Yesterday the 100km trip back and forth from Assiniboia allowed me to listen to:

• David Warlick talking to teachers in Northern Ontario. I was actually amazed at the resistance and skeptism by the teachers.
• TED TALKS with Jimmy Wales
• TED TALKS with Nicholas Negroponte.  My favourite line was in regards to school districts who asked about piloting his laptops for smaller sizes, “Screw you! Get to the back of the line!”
• Wes Fryer’s free digital curriculum talk. I always get good stuff from Wes.

I guess we’ll keep the bug.

I spoke to about 80 school based and senior administrators last week about blogging. I only recorded the first 12 minutes but the link to the slides has all the slides.

The focus of my talk was on creating connections. Evidence that my talk resonated was the fact that after I invited them to begin reading conversations using Bloglines, over 30 of them requested invites. Now like anything, I’m not sure all will make this part of their routine but even if 10 begin reading the conversations that are taking place, it’s going to make a difference.

The audio ends at slide 22 of 44.

 

 Blogging with Administrators: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (411)

I’ve had the opportunity to share the “news” about social software/web 2.0/Read Write Web (choose your favourite term)  to some groups other than classroom teachers. In the past month I’ve done two workshops for our provincial teachers’ association. One to the local teacher association groups and the other to the special subject councils.

The message is virtually the same but it’s nice to discuss the use of these tools outside the classroom application.
This week I also begin a series of 3 workshops on digital photography as part of our community courses.

The fact that these topics and tools have great use for adults in everyday life, once again brings validation to the importance of them to be explored and used with our students.

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!

Bob Sprankle’s “Bit by Bit” podcast is one of my favorites to listen to, and I always enjoy the “Seedlings” episodes that Bob creates collaboratively with Cheryl Oakes and Alice Barr. Today in my 4 hours of driving to and from a small school in southern Oklahoma, the last three “Bit by Bit” episodes were some of the first podcasts I listened to. Bob, Cheryl and Alice generally share “geek of the week” sites, and I was particularly interested to learn in the first part of their latest series about Delibar (a del.icio.us desktop client for Mac OS X) and Roy: Tale of a Singing Zebra. I’m sharing a workshop with teachers on interactive whiteboards this Thursday, and I’m going to use Roy as an example of great, free digital curriculum now available online that is perfect for classrooms equipped with interactive whiteboards!

Thanks Bob, Cheryl and Alice for continuing to share your discoveries and educational journey with us all!