We've been sharing with teachers the value of podcasting as a prewriting, revision, and publication tool for quite a while now, and many of our staff and students use tools like Audacity to capture their ideas in the writing process.  However, it can be complicated to attach the resulting .mp3 to a document or presentation and keep the resulting hyperlink intact. In other words, students might podcast a brainstorming session, link the file to a Word document, email the Word document home, and be surprised to have a dead link from the Word .doc back to the podcast file.

Hi all—please see the following opportunity for you or a staff member(s) at your school to become a “Google Certified Teacher.”  Educators who have gone through this one day session say it is amazing.  To apply, you need to submit a one minute video, described by Google as “on EITHER of the following topics: "Motivation and Learning" OR "Classroom Innovation." Be as creative as you like.”

I know that we have plenty of experts in our buildings in both motivation and innovation, so please share this opportunity with staff.  Full details and application here:  http://www.google.com/educators/gta.html

 

Please know that ITS will offer to help with the video capture side of the application as we can. 

 

Best of luck—

 

Mike

 

Littleton Public Schools are subscribers to the Discovery Network of Educational Videos, and our teachers and students make great use of the high quality, student-friendly resources.  Teachers tell us that they find the video and audio library robust, and the content is easy to integrate into their lesson plans.  Increasingly, teachers are asking the students themselves to browse the Discovery Library to find multi-media resources for research units.  Recently, I had the pleasure of visiting a couple of fourth grade teachers at Lenski Elementary.

Hello Morgridge Family Foundation Winners!  Congratulations on receiving this grant!  This is more than just an infusion of technology into your classroom; it is an investment in your ability to meet the diverse needs of today's "digital natives."  So, to get the ball rolling, please respond to the following question:  What are the unique challenges and opportunities that the 21st century learner brings to your classroom?  

Final reflection, for now, on NECC 2008.  In many ways, NECC is the perfect complement to the TIE conference.  NECC brings in speakers and practitioners from all over the country, and even the world.  It’s intriguing, and in many ways validating, to see and hear what’s going on in other places.  I’m happy to report that as I sat listening to many speakers, I could honestly say, “Oh, we do that.” I don’t pretend to think that we do it all, or that we do it all perfectly, but I would put our teachers and their practices on par with their counterparts from across the globe.  In fact, I believe that we have teachers who should be presenters at NECC; they’re simply that good.

Likewise, the TIE conference is an opportunity to witness effective strategies by educators in using technology in the classroom.  Two things are distinctly different about TIE—there are more classroom teachers presenting, and there are computers at all the sessions, which encourages active learning.  As we have in the past, Littleton...

So a quick day two update.  As I mentioned last post, I was excited to attend a session by Ian Jukes.  Ian is always on the bleeding edge of the educational technology world.  As a former professional football player, Ian attacks every speech as if he is playing in the Super Bowl.  His mantra: Kids today are digital, and unless we’re fluent in digital mediums, our kids will simply unplug us.  To be clear though, Ian doesn’t want to throw traditional literacies out the window.  He correctly notes that schools are important social agencies for the transmission of culture.  What’s different today though, is that students aren’t simply receiving culture—they’re producing it. After that, I stuck around for a session by Will Richardson of the role of social networking in teacher learning communities.  As Chris Marchetti quickly picked up, Web 2.0 tools could have a tremendously powerful affect on the PLC work in LPS and other places.  The key though, according to Will, is that purpose precedes protocol.  In other words, until teachers understand why they are participating in an online community (to refine practice to aid their students) they will not buy into the concept of connecting asynchronously. 

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Oops.  Started the morning off by going to the wrong session, but sometimes detours lead to interesting destinations.  I had hoped to go to a Web 2.0 and Marzano’s instructional strategies class, but it was booked up 25 minutes before the session even began.  I was interested in the Marzano class, as that is the premise that Brent Wilson and I are using for our IT 6515 class at the University of Colorado, Denver.  Feel free to see our class work (and think about making a contribution via the discussion tab if you feel so inclined) at http://it6515sharedresources.wikispaces.com/ .

So instead, I wound up at a digital editing for elementary students session.  It’s a bit heavy on the tool process, and perhaps glosses over the curriculum connections, but reminds me of something I heard at the TIE conference.  There, the keynote speaker, Dr. Jason Ohler, defined literacy in a profound manner: Literacy is the ability to “write” in the medium in which one “reads.”  In other words, we know how much video students take in—can they produce and publish in that medium? 

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Day two blog post: Well, first the good news. The heat index has dropped down to 90 degrees or so, and is notably cooler. Now the bad news—NECC 2008 is experiencing some Internet wireless connectivity and density issues, and it has been a bit of a challenge to access resources. However, the sessions have been fantastic. I started the morning off at an information literacy and management session that was geared for elementary students and their teachers. My key takeaway: guided research on the Web. Younger students (maybe all students) need to be able to simultaneously gather information from electronic resources and analyze the source itself. This is best accomplished by leading students to preselected web resources and holding discussions on just why the teacher selected these particular sites. If it sounds like a modified web-quest, it is. My next session centered on the new teacher standards on technology. The new standards parallel last year’s student standards, and I find it interesting that...

NECC 2008 in San Antonio.Today, teams from Littleton, Heritage, Arapahoe High Schools, and members of the Instructional Technology team met up in the heat and humidity (heat index 108) of San Antonio, Texas, to take in the 2008 National Education Computing Conference. Their mission: to transform first their classrooms, then their schools, into models of 21st Century learning. We’ll keep a running blog to exchange ideas and thoughts, and give the folks back home a sense of what’s going on at the world’s largest educational technology conference. One of the key issues at this conference will be the unveiling of the ISTE (International Society of Technology in Education) standards for teachers. As soon as I can get my hands on them, (it seems like they’re under pretty tight wraps) I’ll post them. These standards are supposed to compliment last years’ NETS (National Education Technology Standards) 2.0, which, in a nutshell, shifted ISTE’s focus from learning about the tool to learning with the tool. Anticipation...