Library Guides

 I got a pointer to Spartan Guides, a treasure-trove of organized links to web sites useful in education. The home page lists the most popular guides. Each of the guides has dozens of categories, which then often break down to sub-categories. Each final page has lots of information. For instance, the New Tools guide includes Digital Storytelling and Google Docs and Apps among it nearly 50 sub-categories.

On the Google Apps page I’d recommend two downloadable Google for Teachers PDFs. The first includes info on uses of Google Maps, including Math Maps (has placemarks with related math questions identified by elementary grade level – Kindergarten through 5th grades) and Climate Change Data (has placemarks tied to current and historical weather data). The second has a section on building custom search engines which I may use to organize links to shareable images. There’s lots more than the few items I’ve mentioned here.

The library producing the above has a wiki page with yet more information. Many of the links take you to pages done by Joyce Valenza using Only2Clicks. These pages have a thumbnail of the relevant web page for each link. There are too may good categories for me to pick just a few. Have a look.

Rural School & Community Trust

The Rural School and Community Trust ” is a national nonprofit organization addressing the crucial relationship between good schools and thriving communities.”

“The Rural Trust provides a variety of services—training, networking, technical assistance, coaching, mentoring, research—and materials to increase the capacity of rural schools, teachers, young people, and communities to develop and implement high quality place-based education.”

The site seems to get new material relatively infrequently. The information is accessible via targeted audience (administrators, teachers, students, etc.) and category (Funding/Grants/Scholarships, Networks/Groups, Place-Based Learning, etc.)

1:1 Resources for VT

The following is from an email from Heather Chirtea of the Digital Wish Foundation.

I want to invite everyone to look more closely within our own VT  borders for 1:1 guidance.

Collective Vision
Here’s the Roadmap for the Digital Wish 1:1 e-Vermont initiative, running in 27 schools across the state. We developed this 3 years ago based on 18 months of research on 1:1, plus input from Apple, Microsoft, VPA, VSA, VSBA, NEA, 6 ESAs, and VITA-Learn.
http://schoolmodernizationinitiative.wordpress.com/the_initiative/vision/

Replicating Success
Unfortunately nearly every school we enter is re-inventing the wheel with 1:1 computing. It’s an incredibly costly waste of time and resources. Digital Wish has reduced the planning time from 18 months, down to just 6 weeks. Every step in the process has been modeled as we go, for easy replication. Digital Wish is releasing 6 curriculum units based on the NETS standards, all of which are part of the 1:1 implementation kit. If you are thinking about 1:1, you should consider at least, getting the 1:1 kit:
http://www.digitalwish.com/dw/digitalwish/product?id=6554

Vermont Data
If you are trying to convince your board to fund 1:1, then here’s Digital Wish’s Vermont research study on improvements in 1:1 computing, based on surveys of 674 students and 45 teacher.
http://www.digitalwish.com/dw/digitalwish/news?id=143

Guidance
Implementing 1:1 computing demands you make an incredible number of decisions, plus you will have to entirely re-design your PD approach – or you won’t succeed. Digital Wish can look at your 1:1 plan today, and quickly tell you the downstream ramifications of most decisions you are now considering.  Then we can share stories of what happened in other Vermont schools that made the same wrong/right decisions, you are potentially now about to make. If you want one of our experts to guide you, or shoot holes in your plan, Digital Wish will provide a consultant for $125/ hour or work on a monthly stipend to answer questions as you go.

Argue for Technology
Here is a video Digital Wish produced, to help you argue for technology funding with your board and parents:
http://www.youtube.com/user/DigitalWishChannel#p/a/u/0/kGDsryLUn8Y

All the best,
Heather Chirtea

50 Best Blogs for Online Educators

On 50 Best Blogs for Online Educators it states,

“… Fortunately, many who work in educational technology fields are more than willing to share their expertise with others online through videos, podcasts, and more commonly, blogs. We’ve collected a few of these great blogs here, creating a great reading library for any online educator who wants to learn more, develop professionally, and connect with others in the field.”

The 50 blogs are in four groups – exploration strongly encouraged.

• News and Views (10 blogs): Give these blogs a read to make sure you stay in-the-know when it comes to all things edutech.
• Educational Technology Professionals (14 blogs): Here you’ll find blogs from professionals working in educational technology, a great resource for those new to online teaching and old pros alike.
• Education Professionals (14 blogs): These teachers, professors, librarians and other educational professionals share their advice on teaching online courses and incorporating technology into the classroom.
• Tricks, Tips and Resources (12 blogs): These sites are full of great advice and resources for online educators to use.

Teacher vulnerability engenders trust

Interesting post on “Vulnerability as a Connection Tool … in Distance Education” – there’s a 6-minute video clip and the following description:

Today’s hot topic deals with teacher’s  & trainer’s vulnerability in distance education. This is a very important subject as many of us at times feel vulnerable and cannot come up with the correct answer on the spot.

In this video I share 5 strategies that help me feel vulnerable and safe at the same time in a distance classroom.

• Strategy # 1:  Turn your competitive disadvantages into your best-selling points
• Strategy #2: Confidence is overrated. Keep doing what you are doing, and confidence will come
• Strategy #3: Be authentic and vulnerable
• Strategy #4: Change your role online
• Strategy #5: Don’t give away your power

I appreciate any comments or additional suggestions for Karen! Please provide your insights under the video.

She’s talking to recent graduates and grad students, but much applies more broadly. She talks of graduate students needing to learn how to teach themselves about topics of interest. I believe that we should encourage this in students from the earliest grades.

 

Exploratorium

The Exploratorium is “the museum of science, art and human perception,”physically located in San Francisco. Its site includes a long list of “Things to Make and Do” which are accessible by category – Astronomy & Space, Culture, Earth, Everyday Science, Human Body, Listening, Living Things, Material World, Mind, and Seeing. The site is also categorized by audience (“Who are you?”) – Educators, Parents, Teens, Artists, Scientists, Geeks, Museum Professionals, and the Curious.

Critiques of Khan Academy

Khan Academy is a site with screencasts (video clips) about a wide variety of topics (many math-related). Two of the teachers mentioned in my last post have critiques of the role of screencasting in the classroom. Mr. Ro’s “Do Screencasts Have a Place in the Math Classroom?” makes a case for student-created screencasts. Frank Nochese has a series of posts on Khan Academy. He talks about and references others’ comments about what’s good and bad about Khan Academy. His main objection is “Rather than instructing students with Khan’s videos, we should be inspiring them to figure things out on their own and learn how to create their own knowledge by working together.”

Bytesize Science

The American Chemical Society has a series of short videos (mostly 2-10 minutes) titled Bytesize Scienceon a variety of topics that might appeal to students – the most recent as I post this are The Chemistry of Cotton Candy and This Bites! What’s the Deal With Deet.

Using Skype

The site Teaching Degree has a page of links titled “50 Awesome Ways to Use Skype in the Classroom” organized by topics:

• Promoting Education
• Promoting Community
• Skype Ideas for Teachers and Parents
• Resources for Getting Started and Using Skype
• Finding Others Using Skype

Terrific Cheat Sheets

The site Teaching Degree has a lot of information not directly related to getting an online degree. A page I just ran across is 100 Terrific Cheat Sheets for K-12 Teachers. They are grouped into 9 areas:

• Language Arts
• Humanities
• History, Government, and Social Studies
• Math
• Science
• Technology
• Foreign Language
• ESL
• Miscellaneous

Google Apps for Teaching & Learning

Naomi Harm has a site she uses with a workshop on “Google Apps: 21st Century Toolbox For Teaching & Learning” that includes information on most of Google’s tools. Her “Resources From Others” page includes  a “Resources for Google Sites” page that includes dozens of links about creating Google sites, including multiple YouTube clips.

Professor Pena’s Links – Web 2.0 & English

I ran across a posting from Leonardo Ornellas Pena, a professor in Brazil on the LinkedIn group Technology Integration in Education. He is interested in teaching English and using Web 2.0 tools to that end. His post pointed to a sub-set of the information on his Google-based English 2.0 site (“… a collection of free, innovative multimedia and Web-based resources that can be used for practicing, learning, and teaching English Language.”), which includes links to English language resources, web 2.0 tools, and a blog. The subpages of the just-listed pages include links to categories of suggestions (for English: Dictionaries, Learning, Listening, News, Phonetics, Teaching and Writing; for Web 2.0: Bookmarking, MindMaps, Picture Search, Podcasts, Presentation, Publication and Word Clouds). The blog page is at this point a few more links, including to his Blogger page for English learning links, which is well worth a look. It contains links to some fascinating sites. One that really struck me was a Phonetics site that shows someone making the basic sounds of English, along with diagrams that show what happens in the mouth and throat to produce the sound.

6 Internet Safety Games

The site MakeUseOf often has interesting articles. A recent one is titled “6 Internet Safety Games To Help Kids Become Cyber Smart“. If you give these a try, I’d like to hear what you think of them.

School Day of the Future

I came across the page “21 Things That Will Be Obsolete by 2020” – an interesting take on where education and technology are likely to be headed. It’s part of a series of posts on the “School Day of the Future.” There’s lots of food for thought there.

Videos for Tech. & Media Literacy

Shannon Walters, Teacher Librarian at C.P. Smith School in Burlington, sent some great information to the SCHOOL-IT listserv (for tech-oriented folks in Vermont schools). She sent a link for a page that has 90+ Videos for Tech. & Media Literacy (compiled by Alec Couros).

For those concerned about the inappropriate stuff that can show up on YouTube and elsewhere, she sent along the following information:

Here are several links to tools for “safe” youtube viewing, from this week’s Clssroom 2.0 Elluminate session:

ViewPure is exactly what the name implies: pure video viewing. It gives educators the ability show students YouTube videos without advertising, free from links to suggested videos that might be inappropriate, and without user comments below the video. Users can copy the video’s “pure” URL for future reference. In addition, teachers can opt to install a “Purify” button on their browser’s toolbar. Instead of pasting a YouTube video’s URL into the ViewPure URL field, an educator can simply click on the “Purify” button while viewing the YouTube video to instantly clear it of questionable advertisements and materials.

(Editor’s note: M86 Security has created a free website [9] that also strips YouTube videos of their comments, links, and advertising. This website, called VuSafe, lets teachers create online video libraries of their favorite educational videos from YouTube and other sources, but unless the school uses M86′s web filter, YouTube must be unblocked on the teacher’s computer if he or she shows the videos in class.)

VuSafe: Easy, secure way to find, organize and share educational videos (show video in web tour-2:55)

TubeChop helps educators avoid the hassle of skipping through videos to find a certain clip within the video. Instead, users can select and “cut” just the portion of the video they would like to show or share with others.

I particularly like the option of easy cropping selections from a video (tubechop)!

Thanks, Shannon!

Self-Directed Learning Environments

A Google search on “using wordpress help students” I came across an article titled “WordPress as a Learning Management System – Move Over, Blackboard” – from which, the intro and excerpts follow.

I recently had the opportunity to interview Kyle Jones, a Knowledge and Learning Services Librarian who is one of the pioneers in bringing a new social aspect to online course management. His unique and innovative use of WPMU and BuddyPress in combination for learning services got us interested and we decided to see if he’d give us a peek into the world of WordPress as a Learning Management System (LMS).

…

During my graduate work and still to this day I develop WordPress MU course sites for Dr. Michael Stephens of the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at Dominican University. We began just hosting blogs but were blown away by the BuddyPress suite of plugins even when they were introduced in a very buggy beta stage. We monitored the development and then pulled the trigger in the fall of 2009 by creating a core installation of WordPress MU with BuddyPress at classes.tametheweb.com.

…

Due to the evolving nature of library and information science (LIS) and Michael’s philosophy of teaching, his classes place a high emphasis on exploring and understanding online environments … as a way to comprehend, use, and remix information.

Educause presentation: Creative Collaboration

The link associated above with “Michael’s philosophy of teaching” leads to a 45-minute presentation, much of which had me enthralled. Highly recommended.

I since ran across a post elsewhere titled “A WordPress as LMS Mockup” that’s about some prototyping steps towards using BuddyPress and WordPress to build a Learning Management System. Following the site’s tag “WordPress as LMS” takes you to more posts on similar topics.