BP15_11152009_One minute with Google Docs Forms

BP14_11112009_Jam Legend from Xavier

Note: This was originally posted on Xavier's BlogJam Legend-Web 2.0 Tool in the Classroom

Jam Legend

Watch out Rock Band, here comes Jam Legend!!! Jam Legend is great way to get the video games into the classroom. If you are like me, then you realize that gaming can be very educational. Not all school districts allow the use of video games, but now you can have the video game feel in your classroom. Jam Legend is very similar to Rock Band and can be very beneficial in learning music.

For those that have played Rock Band or Jam Legend, you know that it takes much rhythmical thinking in order to play. What a great way to teach down beats! The beginner levels of Jam Legend would be a wonderful way to teach students how to feel the downbeat in the songs. It would also be a great reinforcement tools when teaching rhythms to your students. As the levels continue, the teacher can begin to introduce upbeats and what that feels like for the students.

The great thing about Jam Legend is that it has multiple levels.Students are always in different spots, and these levels would be a great way for students to challenge themselves. As students begin to master the levels they can move to the more difficult levels, allowing them to slowly learn the new concept.

This would also make for good friendly competition in the classroom!If the instructor would break the class into groups, this could be a great way to build relationships as well as build self-confidence.

This is a great tool and will really challenge and capture the attention of the students! The more we incorporate games into our teaching the better the students will learn.

Rock on!

1 comments:

Mr. HD said...

I must agree that challenging our students with interesting games and activities is a great way to keep them engaged and exploring. I find teachers that use this type of teaching method reach their students on a deeper level. This is a great idea.

BP13_11112009_Kuler from Cathy Palmer

Note: This post originally appeared on Cathy Palmer's Blog

Review Web 2.0 Tools: kuler

http://fontstruct.fontshop.com/

Kuler is a dynamic color-theme generator. It uses structured methods of color relationships and/or intuitive methods of visually choosing colors from an image or spectrum color wheel. The visual color information is easy for anyone to access, and very intuitive to use without knowing any code or specifications. The technical color information is useful cross-media data for print designers and web developers, and works well as a conversion tool between formats.

Main sections of the kuler website include Themes, Create: From a Color and Create: From an Image.

The community features let you browse the color themes posted by others for creative inspiration or share your own color themes with a team. Tags posted by the color theme creators make them keyword searchable. Comments and star ratings are enabled, and the number of downloads is tracked so that the themes can be ranked by popularity. There is even a Community Pulse area that visually shows the popularity of all colors by how many times they have been included in a theme.

There are many benefits of this free color-palette-generating service in that it is cross-platform (Mac or PC), cross-media (print or web), and it offers both visual and technical information for design and production. Kuler functions are also built into the InDesign CS4 and Illustrator CS4 applications of the Adobe Creative Suite software. A drawback of kuler is the need for a separate Adobe I.D. registration to use online, as well as a Flikr account to upload images because the Color Extraction feature can only access images uploaded to Flikr. Color Extraction has difficulty with CMYK-mode images, and this feature does not support color management, so associated color profiles of uploaded images will be ignored.


kuler could be used in a classroom lesson for design inspiration, print or web color gamut specification, or understanding relational color theory.


Help and more information about Kuler is available at http://kuler.adobe.com/links/kuler_help.html

BP12_11112009_Yaca Paca from Shelly Pinkowski

Note: This review was originally posted on Shelly Pinkowski's Blog

BP9_2009112_Yaca_Paca_Web2.0_Review

http://yacapaca.com/
Wow! How excited I am to have come across this Web 2.0 tool. By the Chalkface Project, Yaca Paca is a free online assessment platform for both teachers and students. Their mission statement reads: "To make the best teaching ideas available to every teacher in the most practical way" (yacapaca.com). I could not believe how comprehensive and thorough the site and its materials were as I clicked around on it. I am an English teacher, so I naturally looked over the information under English. There are printable and reproducible worksheets and teaching packets on punctuation, parts of speech, Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet, and many other topics that most English teachers use. I went to the technology link and found lessons and worksheets on "Using the Internet as a Tool for Learning." There is a blog section with lots of interesting articles and blogs dealing with all kinds of subjects. I checked out a YouTube video entitled "Do you teach or do you educate?" Under the archives section, there appeared to be articles, materials, and the like going back to 2004. I am very impressed with my newly-discovered Web 2.0 tool.

I clicked on the "I'm a Student" button to see what would happen. It appears that the teacher must have an account and log-in password which she/he gives to the students. I will most definitely be bookmarking this site's URL and re-visiting it in the coming days. If it is as good as I think it is, I hope to be giving my own students a password so that they can begin exploring the site, also. I need to learn more about the student aspect of the site. I will have to let everyone know what I discover as I experiment more with yacapaca.com

BP11_11112009_Broadcasting with UStream.tv

What if you could broadcast your class to the world, or at least to that sick kid at home, and include the discussion and questions raised during your presentation? What if you could host a podcast with the opportunity for your live audience to make comments, ask questions, and participate in real time? Wouldn't that be awesome? The answer you are looking for is "Yes."


Ustream offers educators that opportunity--free of cost and with minimal hardware requirements. All you need is a computer with high-speed internet access and a webcam/microphone combination.


The first time I saw this tool demonstrated was in a room with over 300 fellow educators. Leslie Fisher, AKA My Tech Goddess, delivered a presentation on educational Web 2.0 tools at the 2008 MACUL Conference in Detroit, Michigan. By simply providing the link to her presentation, audience members who had internet access through either laptops or other mobile devices were able to join the text conversation that appeared to the right of her broadcast.


Fisher's image appeared on the large projection screen as she faced her webcam, and audience members posted responses to her poll questions, offered ideas, and asked questions about the material. The entire broadcast was recorded, allowing for the opportunity for those not in attendance to view not only her presentation, but the audience's participation as well.

The great benefit for educators who take advantage of this tool is that an entire lecture, demonstration, discussion, or other presentation can be recorded for those students who miss our classes for all the myriad reasons we hear about every day: home sick, gone for a sports event, attending a music festival, or staying home for the newest release of their favorite video game franchise. I had that last one today.


Ustream is collaborative, shareable, and free.  What more could you ask for?

References

[Untitled Screenshot] Captured Nov. 11, 2009 from http://www.ustream.tv/channel/WEB-2-0-Literacy-Tools-Transforming-K-12-Education

BP10_1182009_One Minute with Edmodo

BP9_1182009_From Scrapbooking to Scrapblogging

Remember when English teachers used to ask students to cut pictures out of magazines to create a collage to represent either the student or some character from literature? The students would flip through magazines that appealed to their interests looking for something they thought represented their interests, or more likely, looked for images they thought were cool and then came up with a reason for including the image. Such examples often came through as "I like snowboarding so I put a picture of Shaun White (The Flying Tomato) on my collage."

When I used to use this activity, students struggled to move past the literal level of meaning, which is why the collages often ended up being a collection of "likes" rather than a picture of the student's personality. I stopped using this activity due to the frustration of hearing "I like..." statements all day long.

However, using both Flickr and Scrapblog, this activity is ready to be revived. Instead of flipping pages in a magazine, students can search conceptually. What images are returned when one searches for "stubborn" in Flickr? These are only two of the images that are returned using this search. Students can be as literal or as symbolic as they wish, depending on their needs and intentions.

Within Scrapblog students can create scrapbooking-style pages that can be used for autobiography of the student, for the student to create a biography of a particular author through images and text, or to create a character analysis or summary.

Other activities could include explorations of historical figures, an artist's scrapbooked portfolio, or a student creating a scrapbook based on a virtual or real-life field trip.

The tool presents students with a variety of templates, which are customizable, and the students can share the resource and results with fellow students and with teachers. Creating the Scrapblog is relatively simple, and users will find that importing pictures is as simple as dragging and dropping into a part of the template. The result of the Scrapblog is a shareable, fun artifact that students will engage in. One example of a student-created scrapblog page is this one from a French-language student.

References

[Untitled screenshot]. Captured Nov. 9, 2009 from http://www.flickr.com/photos/44306447@N03/galleries/72157622768626244/

[Untitled screenshot]. Captured Nov. 9, 2009 from http://www.scrapblog.com/viewer/viewer.aspx?sbid=16579

BP8_1182009_Do You Edmodo?

Students are brand aware. They know that a pair of jeans from one store may be no better than another, but will pay the extra money for the little seagull on the pocket, or for the big W stitched into another. As much as students say they want to be independent, and claim to follow no one but their own sense of fashion and style, we know that everyone has a uniform.

One piece of Web 2.0 technology all students agree on, regardless of who made their jeans, is Facebook. The ubiquity of facebook is unchallenged, and since it's been made an app for iPhone, it is ultimately portable. Students love it. They love the look of it and are so loyal, that when changes either happen or are rumored to be happening, groups of users "against changing whatever" pop up like dandelions.

Opening up facebook on school campuses might be more than the average secondary principal could bear. But a tool is available that looks an awful lot like facebook, works like updating one's facebook status, and remains private, with access only possible through a code assigned by the teacher.

Edmodo.com acts as a collaborative space for a class outside of school hours. Students might post questions about homework, continue a conversation started in class, suggest an idea for later class periods, or ask another student for the day's homework. The teacher can create polls, upload files for students to download, and monitor the discussion to make sure it doesn't cross from collaboration to copying.

Students in my class are not required to use the tool, but it is available for whenever they need it. It is secondary to our course management software, but welcomes them as a comfortable space when we can't meet in person. When several students missed class due to a fast-spreading illness, we used edmodo as a method to communicate with our missing classmates.

The final benefit is personalization. Because students feel comfortable in the space--in part because it reminds them of facebook--I have seen students raise questions and issues they would not in the classroom due to fear or a lack of confidence speaking out loud. For some students, this is the greatest benefit of all.

References

[Untitled Screenshot]. Captured from http://www.edmodo.com/home/

BP7_1182009_Google Docs Forms

While the entire suite of Google Apps tools is useful across the curriculum, Google Docs Forms can be especially motivating for students who may otherwise be hesitant to participate in the classroom process.

Students can create quizzes, surveys, polls, and so on, and do so collaboratively (with a partner or group up to 10 members). Surveys and polls can be intimidating to students in classrooms, where teachers get to know the handwriting of the students, or where students are required to raise their hand and speak in class in order to express their opinions. Google Docs Forms allows students the safety of anonymity, while also encouraging 100% participation in the activity.

As a teacher, I have used the Google Docs Form as a formative assessment at different times during the class period: as a warm-up, as a check for understanding, and as a survey of opinion both before and after a lesson. Never has a student refused to answer a question. Sometimes, I suspect a student may not have answered truthfully, but the vast majority do, and the process allows those who don't normally contribute a chance to influence the "opinion outlook" of the group. Their votes count just as much as the most verbose student in class. Best of all, I can access their responses instantly.

Because I teach the same subject as others within my school, I have shared this document with those teachers, who can then create a new file for themselves, edit it for their own purposes, or use it as I created it. By opening the sharing with colleagues, using Google Docs (and especially, Forms), a new kind of collegiality has opened.

See also:

• Palm Breeze Cafe: Google Docs Forms Video
• Google's Instructional Video
• A Student's Perspective Video

References

[Untitled Screenshot]. Captured November 8, 2009 at http://spreadsheets.google.com/gform?key=0AjFX-xfLm_AxdENJUTd4aFJIVG1qeGM1eGJhVzdhcXc&hl=en&gridId=0#chart

BP6_1182009_Has Social Bookmarking Killed the Research Paper?

The model of the research paper--five paragraphs, lots of notecards and sourcecards, generally irrelevant subjects--was created more than one hundred years ago. Back when this was originally considered a good idea, the first two numbers in the year were 1 and 8. It is safe to say that the research paper has truly run its course and needs to be replaced--but by what? That is not what this post is about.


What this post is about is how social bookmarking, or social scholarship more generally, can create educational opportunities for both students and teachers.
Christine Greenhow (2009) suggested that teachers can use the collaborative power of sites like Delicious to share resources on best practices and share research sources discovered during professional development opportunities. Such a process would encourage and develop a "scholarly approach to teaching" where the collected knowledge and wisdom could be not only saved for each teacher's future use, but shared with her colleagues across the world (p. 11).


So what about that research paper? Don't students need to analyze, organize, and synthesize? Sure they do. But perhaps there are other avenues to the competency than through the same old product. I don't know any teacher who thinks knowing how to do a research paper is the primary skill or competency that comes from completing a research paper. Teachers talk about ordering information from most relevant to least, about analyzing information for its reliability, organizing information into meaningful chunks and in a meaningful order.


Guess when else students are doing those things? While they are tagging. When students tag an item in a social bookmarking (or other technologically mediated) setting, they are getting to the essence of the resource. Cosimo Cannata (2009) suggested that students are affectively engaged in internet tools, and especially with tools, like social bookmarking sites, that encourage tagging (p.29).


The claim is not that tagging will or should replace the entire research paper process, but teachers might find students more willing to engage with the resources from a perspective of social tagging, rather than through the perspective of the "official library subject headings." The Ann Arbor District Library (Michigan) incorporated user tagging into its collection listings in order to provide descriptors that make more sense to the local consumers (Rethlefsen, 2007). The following example demonstrates the tags feature in the bottom left corner of the image.

The implication of all of the above is that students are more likely to engage in tagged resources, and enjoy participating using tools that are dynamic, interactive, and provide some sense of personal engagement. Tagging allows students some element of input, and thereby, some sense of ownership. Tagging allows students to arrange information into categories that make sense within their own world.

Students think critically during this process; they analyze; they compare and contrast; they reduce ideas to their essence. Aren't these the competencies we hope they get from the process of writing a research paper? Maybe it is time, after all, to bury the old boy.

References

Cannata, C. (2009). Folksonomy, tagging, and taxonomy for effective learning: Perspectives of learning 2.0 in the XXIst century. International Journal of Emerging Technologies in Learning, 4(2), 26-32. doi:10.3991/ijet.v4i2.657

Greenhow, C. (2009) Tapping the wealth of social networks for professional development. Learning and Leading with Technology, 36(8), 10-11. Retrieved from http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=eric&AN=EJ842796&site=ehost-live

Rethlefsen, M. (2007). Tags help make libraries Del.icio.us. Library Journal, 132(15), 26-28. Retreived from http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=aph&AN=26692224&site=ehost-live

BP5_1182009_Flickr Shines in ELL

In classrooms across the disciplines, students explore ideas, discover meaning, and draw conclusions from experiments and other experiences.  English students break into groups to apply lessons from centuries' old literature to today's cultural, economic, and social realities.  Chemistry students observe reactions and draw conclusions about what's happening at the chemical level.  Math students attempt to discover the principles that underlie formulas.  The concept of encouraging students to discover for themselves, to create meaning for themselves, and to apply their learning to their own world is familiar enough.

What would this kind of learning look like in an English Language Learners (ELL) classroom, and how could this be supported with technology resources?  Is there a way to encourage students to use technology in a kind of discovery method?


In a lesson uploaded to Scribd, Ekaterina Tolstova describes a process for teaching new verbs for English language learners.  The lesson plan presupposes that the students can recognize the English alphabet on a keyboard.  Students are instructed to enter verbs like "run" or "swim" into a Flickr search, and then to try to determine the meaning of the verb from the images that are collected.  The screenshot below shows a selection of the images that are returned searching "run."

The images returned for this term include both animals and people engaged in some form of running.  Other images are included that do not feature running per se, but one image (not shown here) showed all the gear needed to run a marathon, including shoes, watch, iPod, heart-rate monitor, t-shirt, and more.

The strength of the lesson plan is in both the visual nature of vocabulary acquisition, and the mediation of meaning.  "To run" can mean everything from "jog" to "sprint," and the variety of images returned from a Flickr search offers enough ways of meaning to allow the learner enough context to interact with meaning, and to arrive at a conclusion contextually, instead of merely textually.

References

[Untitled Screenshot].  Captured Nov. 8, 2009 from http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=run&w=all

BP4_2009112_Web 2.0 Tools: Introducing "Middlespot"

Give a kid a tool with the ability to do "mashups," and they'll likely know what you mean, even if you don't. While students may have experience using multiple music files to create mashups, they can serve an educational purpose as well, such as those that can be created using Middlespot.

Mashups, semi-loosely defined, combine information or functions from multiple sources in order to create a new product. In the case of Middlespot, students employ a virtual canvas onto which they can save, organize, label and mash their research sources, including web pages, images, music, video, files and more, into one central location.

Figure 1. Middlespot: Leadership Lessons from Shakespeare's Hamlet

The Middlespot mashup above would be created by students in eleventh grade language arts classrooms in Michigan, where the State Curriculum suggests connecting the lessons on leadership, both positive and negative, to Hamlet's course of action throughout the play.

A document within a "stack" will pop open when the cursor hovers over it. The user can then expand their view while remaining on the mashup canvas, or click the source to go back to the web page from which it was retrieved. The three webpage stacks in Figure 1 are collected, from left to right, into encyclopedic information, reviews from performances (including a linked video), and connections being made in the world of leadership and politics to leadership lessons from Hamlet.

As an educational tool, the mashup acts as a one-stop resource for students who sometimes struggle to keep all their references in one easy place. Certainly, students can bookmark their reference sites using Delicious, or create folders within Evernote, but Middlespot allows all those references to be collected on one workspace, allowing the student to quickly access any and all of the information they have researched literally at the touch of a button.

One of its great advantages lies in the fact that students at my school more and more report being visual learners. This kind of aggregation and organization plays directly to their learning styles. Instead of struggling with stacks of notecards and source cards, or creating outlines which, for today's students, are a great mystery compared to idea webs and the like, this kind of information aggregation is right up their digital sleeves.

References

Middlespot: Leadership lessons from Shakespeare's Hamlet [Screenshot]. Captured Nov. 2, 2009 from http://middlespot.com/search.php?wpKey=8cHP5KD4QP7dYkP2WQJyP5&wpName=Hamlet:%A0Leadership#

BP3_2009111_5 Blogs Worth Subscribing To

Do yourself a favor and check out these great blogs...

1.  A Geeky Momma's Blog is hosted by Lee Kolbert, a tech geek I've followed on Twitter (TeachaKidd) for a long time.  She hosts Palm Breeze Cafe, a vodcast in which she discusses, debates, and explains issues associated with educational technology in the schools.
2. Steve Dembo, a popular presenter at national technology in education conferences, hosts Teach42 where he blogs about current issues in educational technology, and relates much of his own research to contemporary news features.  When I accessed his site on Nov. 1, 2009, Dembo had commented on an article from The Telegraph (UK) regarding the use of mobile phones in schools for educational purposes.  The site also includes links to related blog posts as well as blogs recommended by Dembo.
3. Scott McLeod is Dangerously Irrelevant.  McLeod focused the educational technology lens on leadership and administration and their role in improving technology integration in schools (or sometimes standing in the way of it).  Why Dangerously Irrelevant?  Because we are trying to implement new realities in institutions that cannot accommodate the new reality. The terms of the new reality may seem irrelevant within the present institution, but are actually dangerous to the survival of the institution itself.  
4. If you have a short attention span, or just want a tidbit of useful information every day, discover Jane's E-Learning Pick of the Day.  Jane Knight presents visitors with useful tools, with tools for teachers and students, covering the spectrum from collaboration to design.  A recent favorite of hers (and mine): 100 Ways to Use Facebook in the Classroom.
5. Peer collaboration is the greatest part of Teachers Teaching Teachers.  TTT is a weekly webcast channel where teachers talk about how they have integrated Web 2.0 (and other technology-related) tools into their classrooms and provide advice on how to do it on one's own.  Associated with the National Writing Project, a recent webcast featured the author of The Digital Writing Workshop, Troy Hicks, discussing elements of his book.

BP2_2009111_iGoogle_ScreenShots

Screenshots from iGoogle:

BP1_2009111_The Purpose of Educational Blogs? Yes.

Ten years ago, if I wanted my students and I to collaborate with other student journalists and advisors, I had to do a fundraiser to pay for all the travel expenses necessary to fly or drive to the national conference site, to stay in a hotel, and to keep the students fed.  Most of the time, students and their families ended up picking up a significant portion of the cost.


Today, from conferences to conference calls, and from class-specific discussion boards to public blogs, teachers and students can participate in learning communities that span the globe.  As in the image to the right, taken in my classroom, students can increase their participation in learning, and share their knowledge and insights with any who choose to monitor their blog spaces.

Just after breakfast this morning, on a cool, sunny, fall morning in Northern Michigan, I “attended” a conference in Xi Hu, China by way of Wesley Fryer’s blog Moving at the Speed of Creativity. Here, Fryer has posted his notes and reflections on Carl Owens’s presentation “Collaborations between the Teacher Education Technology Programs and Rural K-12 Schools” as well as on the other sessions he has attended to day.  The conference continues another two days.  Owens is an Apple Distinguished Educator and Director of Technology at Tennessee Technological University.

Another blog I visited during lunch today took me all across the country, linking to and commenting on stories posted on other blogs from California to Pennsylvania.  On Joanne Jacob’s blog, the author collects and comments on several topics, but seems to focus on charter schools, Teach for America schools, and related content.  Two of the first components one finds on the page are ads for the book she has written.   Even so, the information available both within her own comments and through the posts from other sites provide a wider insight into the state of education in the nation.

Steve Dembo, one of the premier presenters at technology in education conferences around the country, offers his own content, links to news items related to technology in education (including connections to his own previous posts related to these news items), and methods of connecting to him and to those other bloggers whose opinions and expertise he values most.  His blog, which I perused over a few pieces of my daughter’s Halloween candy, Teach42, can be graphically overwhelming to those who have Attention Surplus/Sedentary Disorder, who need to be able to focus on only a limited number of elements.  “Normal” learners will appreciate the graphical variety and the multiple entry points into the blog.

In fairness, not all educators appreciate the opportunities available within the blogosphere.  William W. Savage, Jr. (2006) wrote that “blogging is akin to vanity publishing” and that bloggers “may write about whatever one pleases, without fear of vetting, editing, or anything else destructive of one's ego.”  I wonder if Savage ever actually visited a blog.  He might be surprised to find that for many blogs, the comment section for an article can run longer than the original article itself; that within the comment section, other interested parties offer not only their own perspectives, but offer additional references to news, other blogs, or even research; that those who post comments often ask for clarification of ideas, terms, or data in order to better understand what is presented. 

Savage ends his diatribe against blogging with the following observations: “the medium seems to exist to encourage nitwits and crackpots to believe that somebody out there truly cares about their opinion” and “I support blogging for the professoriate, simply because so many of its members produce caca de toro under the rubric of scholarship, and that material should be consigned to the oblivion that I deem cyberspace to be.”  I guess he’s got us all pegged.

So, what is the purpose of blogs in education?  Yes.  The purpose of blogging in education is to blog about education.  The blogger may be student, researcher, teacher, administrator, parent, or outside observer.  The audience may be no one, or the audience may be anyone--and that, to paraphrase Robert Frost, can make all the difference. 

References

Noller, D. (Photographer). (2009). Student bloggers [photograph]. Original work.

Savage Jr., W. (2006). You can't spill mustard on a blog. Journal of Scholarly Publishing, 38(1), 47-51. http://search.ebscohost.com