Spotlight

For the second year in a row it has snowed on Wednesday of PETE&C! I am sitting in a 2:00 session about blogs and wikis. I feel really bad for the people scheduled for the sessions at 2 and 3:00. So whoever stays until the end......gets all the prizes! Yesterday I has a slow leak in one of my front tires. It was so cold and windy I thought my hand was going to freeze to the thingy that puts air into the tires!! Since I heard that it might snow on Tuesday, I bit the bullet and went to Goodyear and bought two tires for the front! Thank goodness! I can't believe it is snowing like crazy here in Hershey and our school got out 2 hours early!!! So I'll be leaving here in about 30 minutes and trek home to New London! I know there are grammatical errors and some spelling mistakes and I will fix them when I get home later.

This was a great conference again and I got to meet some people in person that I have been emailing or Tweeting or communicating with online. Some of the authors of the blogs I read are here too and I was happy to speak with them about their contributions to 21st century learning! Thanks to everyone who was filming, backchaneling, tweeting, and blogging.

Our learning doesn't stop here, or anywhere as long as you keep reading what people are posting! Pay it forward.

Image credit

This website was created by a team of 20 teachers who wanted to share ideas. Suddenly people wanted to join and contribute to the wiki from all over the world.

There is a book club session where they talk/online about books such as, Wikinomics, and Daniel Pink's book A Whole New Mind. Check the site for the next book.

Many teachers have ideas to share here. There are projects you can take part in with your classroom. The links are HERE to find a project. Take a chance, start slow and small. Just participate yourself first if you are nervous, then jump in with your class.

Interview section where you can hear about teachers from all over the world. The first one is from Tazmania.

Don't forget to keep the students directly involved in the process. They have great ideas and can organize the projects too! You can even send them out to find a project that will work with your curriculum. Believe me, they will find something if you give them the task.

reportingback.wikispaces.com -One team of teachers from a district are each adding their notes to a wiki for sharing. Now that she has announced this address, I am sure that others in the room will add to her site. I will put this blog link there too. GREAT idea. I want to try this with our teachers too for next year.

Look to the blog section to read some good education blogs to follow.
Edweb.com - check it out.

Great idea from Jen Dorman to have students learn a web2.0 tool and create a presentation to teach the teachers how to use it! Why not, these kids have the time and the desire to learn new things and love to have "one up" on their teachers!

Looking for a staff development project? Visit this differentiated instruction wiki.
Use parents in your district to help with projects. One teacher mentioned a parent travels the world often and brings back rocks from different locations. He takes a photo of the location and as much information as he can to contribute to the class study.

Learning to Speak Native -

What is a Digital Native (the kids) Who are the immigrants (mostly the adults).
Digital Natives are multi-taskers, prefer graphics before text, CDs, DVDs, cellphones, game systems, expressive, information overload, extremely social, less fear of failure, active involvement, share a common language, risk takers, web-based, have electronic friends, nonlinear,

Adults say: dial the phone number, tape that tv show

If digital immigrant educators really want to reach digital natives, they will have to change- Mark Prensky

Information Explosion - just look at Google, they have a clean front page, but at the top of the page you will see links to MORE search links. We have become information consumers.

Flattening of the earth - Open source everything!

Wikinomics - collaboration, what better way to learn the material than to create a page or edit another person's page with CORRECT information (with citation), innovation vs. invention, the point is to mesh two of the new technologies to create a new more interesting educational connection (read literature add photos and timeline to a GoogleEarth Tour.

The community becomes MY Network because of the amount of information you contribute. Sometimes you have personal relationships with the network like DiscoveryEducators who actually offer face to face programs.

Tools - YUGMA, Twitter, WiziQ, Ning, SecondLife, search for popular social networking activities, website-digitalnative.org

This is streaming live: http://www.ustream.tv/channel/the-connected-classroom

and will be archieved at: http://khokanson.blogspot.com/

Rich Hug from Unionville-Chadds Ford School District is the president-elect and started today's program with an Internet fiasco happening in his district. Students, cell phones and inappropriate content, need I say more! He handled it with ease. After all, many people here have read the story or have had similar circumstances in their own district.

Since he is my tech director of course I thought he did a great job telling this story. As I met people here in Hershey, and told them where I was from, their next comment was: "Oh yea, I know where that is NOW! Are you the district with the photo problem?". So we have some notoriety and are handling it the best as can be done. A parent program is scheduled for March to educate the community about what is new on the net! More information to follow.

SKYPE ME by Eric Wittmer. Eric ran this workshop at the Keystone Summit. Using with two classes, these teachers started with kids introducing each other, then asked the kids how they would like to use this technology to collaborate with their new friends. WHY?

• student collaboration
• teacher collabaoration
• integrating curriculum, math, language arts, technology, read a book together
• higher leve thinking skills
• learn about another person who does not live here(whereever you are)
• teaches kids modern day skills
• learn from other people
• professional development
• send files, photos

CONS - The Mac version does not have as many options as the PC version. This could involve a fee if you wish to use some of the plug ins. Using the teacher's computer limits access for all at same time. Student's can get on at home if they set up a user account without parents knowing. Sometimes there is a technical glitch and you have to reconnect. So the best way is to have one account in the classroom with a secret password, so they do not log in at home.

These two teachers started Skyping by sharing a common book "Rules". Every several chapters, they would connect and talk about the book, the characters and the symptoms of autism. They are talking about doing a reader's theatre or digital storytelling. The autistic suppport teacher did a short presentation to both classes about the characteristics of an autistic person and some of the strategies she uses with them.

You can conference with 6 connections at one time. This uses a lot of bandwith and is a bit troubesome here at Hershey because too many users on the Internet at the same time.
You can also use iChat if you are both Mac Users. If you are on the same network, you can do it very easy. When yo go outside, you need to use an AIM account.

If you want to arachieve the programs you can use, for Mac, ecam.com ($15) with a QuickTime file format. For the PC you can use ($25) and uses LARGE file space in a .wmv format.

More notes on the PBwiki

WiziQ.com - has materials already online to use with lessons
MeBeam.com - Free collaborative online space.

This is such a hop topic and it can affect many aspects of education. First of all student work, as it is created is automatically copyrighted. That means that if you wish to use a student's work on your bullein board as an anchor, you must have written permission and keep it on file.

Creative Commons is a place to use work without violation of copyright. Wikipedia does not allow copyrighted images in it's site, so you can use them. Stockphoto.com photos can be used without fear of infringement. CAPE has a lot of information for teachers who wish to learn more about copyright.

Be careful of duplication of class materials. Look in the book for the "allow unlimited copies" permission release statement. This is often in the front of a teacher's version, or at the bottom of the page of a black line master. Look on the Internet for resources you can use. Government documents are ALWAYS free to use. You must still cite them, but you may make copies of the maps, letters, documents available there. Another location is MIT OpenCourseware. They have put all 1800 models and content online FREE for anyone to use.

Scott Garrigan's presentation is available HERE.

KEYNOTE - David Pogue. David is most known for his 60 "Missing Manual" series of books, daily blog "Pogue's Posts" for NYTimes and his tech video appears Sunday morning on CNBC. His website is davidpogue.com. His predictions of tech for the future:

• VIOP - Your phone number is connected to the external box, not the phone. You can take the box with you anywhere and keep the phone number, quality etc.
• SKYPE - Free phone calls computer to computer going over the internet. No phone company involved. Perhaps it will come to cell phones. Ah yes, see T-Mobile. Unfortunately their announcement was made the same day as the iPhone, but watch them for future developments. You can take this phone overseas and make free calls.
  
• GOOGLE CELLULAR - (46645) call Instead of calling 411 at $2 per shot, you can Google what you need. Type in pharmacy and it will give you the closest one, address and phone number. Also get weather (weather Sacramento), movie (Shrek 19711), driving directions, unit conversions, currency conversions by sending them a text.
• SIMULSCRIBE - Will transcribe your text messages to voice messages.
• CALL WAVE - Transcribe the jist of your message but is free.
• A la CARTE TV - Any show at anytime.
  
• HD -High Definition standards are being fought by Blu-ray and HD DVD. Sony and Toshiba are fighting this format war like the Beta vs. VHS format wars of the 80's. Just sit back and watch the players fight it out before investing because half of Hollywood is on one format and the other half is on the other format.
• INTERNET VIDEO - Because many companies are getting in to this business for profit.
• WIRELESS EVERYWHERE - Right now you can get a card from Verizon to get online everywhere, but at $60 per month. Watch this video about the iPhone Shuffle(parody).
• HANDWRITING - LOL, MORF(male or female), AF, BRB, IMHO, RTFM(read the frekin' manual) TTFN, POS(parent over shoulder). The point is, kids are putting these into their school work!?! Engineers have adapted the Palm writing code and often write to each other in that form! Email is considered old fashined and old, kids want you to text them, not voice message or email.
• ONLINE VIDEO - YouTube, and many many others are the current form of entertainment.
  
• WEB2.0 - Information anywhere - Goloco.org(carpooling site), prosper.com(micro loans apply and lend)
• COPYRIGHT - Right now people are using a lot of materials to mashup
  
• borrow CD from library
• my cd is scratched borrow from lib to re-rip
• record a movie off HBO and burn to dvd
• my friend did this and I borrowed his and rip
  
• PUBLIC INFORMATION - Your email is NOT exactly private if the other person chooses to publish the content, or publish it in the local news. Beware of any videos that are created just for fun or school project, these too can be republished on a video site.

This way by far one of the most entertaining keynote speakers I have heard. Loved his tech insights. I guess I'll look at the NYT more often!