NoteMesh – For Class Note Taking

This is a neat tool for high school students but marketed to higher ed.

NoteMesh is a free service that allows students in the same classes to share notes with each other.
It works by creating a wysiwyg wiki
for individual classes that users can edit. Users are free to post their
own lecture notes or contribute to existing lecture notes. The idea is that users in the same class
can collaboratively create a definitive source for lecture notes.

You can check out the school cloud to see which schools are using it. 

September 28, 2006 | | 3 Comments »

Effective Professional Development for Technology Integration

I'm part of the team that is rolling out a new web based report card to all 5,000 elementary teachers at my school board. There are 8 of us who will be working in our school board's training labs and at schools in-servicing teaching staff. With the in-servicing and support calls, I know that it is going to be a very busy October and November.  If you have any tips for large rollouts I would love to hear them.

I have just finished reading "Innovative Approaches to Literacy Education." It is a book that includes chapters from a number of different authors. While I didn't find very much new information I did enjoy reading Tim Lauer's chapter journey from web pages to blogs and RSS, and Dale Hubert's Flat Stanley project.

Julie Coiro's final chapter really stood out. She reflects on effective professional development for technology integration and outlines four things that she has learned through her own experiences.

    1. Most effective when professional development is determined by teachers around their own needs of professional study.

    2. Listen to teachers needs and provide resources that address those needs from a realistic classroom perspective.

    3. Teachers are seeking research-based effective practices that support integrating technology into instruction.

    4. Teachers learn best when provided with models for linking technology with purposeful reading and writing  activities.

She points to the Apple Classrooms of Tomorrow study which suggests that teachers move through a developmental continuum in their integration practices:
    1) adoption – use technology to support traditional instruction
    2) adaption - integrate technology into existing classroom activities
    3) appropriation - developing new approaches to teaching by taking advantage of technology
    4) innovation - discover new uses of technology tools

Julie also advocates for the study group model of professional development which she draws from Lyon and Pinnel's book "Systems of Change in Literacy Education: A guide for Professional Development", where facilitators guide teachers through a professional development program framed in ten components.

    1. Assessing the context for teaching and learning
    2. provide basics of a new approach with concrete examples of organization and routine
    3. demonstrate with explicit examples
    4. establish clear rationales for the approach
    5. engage teachers in active learning and exploration of new techniques
    6. invite teachers to try new techniques and share their analysis of process and results
    7. establish procedures for pursing a plan of action
    8. coach for shifts in teacher and student behavior
    9. coach to support teacher reflection, and continual refinement
    10. extend learning through small group conversations that connect theory with practice and build networks among educators.

September 26, 2006 | | 8 Comments »

12 Ideas Around Social Bookmarking in Education

I have been working on these ideas through the wiki around social bookmarking. 

 http://www.teachinghacks.com/wiki/index.php?title=Social_bookmarking_tools

Here is what I have so far:

1. Create a set of resources that can be accessed on any computer connected to the Internet

2. Conduct research and share that research with your peers

3. Track author and book updates

4. Groups of students doing a classroom project sharing their
bookmarks, a teacher subscribed to their rss feed to see the direction
of their research. (FURL – teacher can review and comment on resources
that are bookmarked)

5. Resource teacher does a PD event with a group of teachers
creates a shared del.icio.us account where teachers can post research
and information bookmarks that they gather throughout the year. All
members continuously benefit from this shared resource.

6. Rate and review bookmarks to help other students to decide on usefulness of resources

7. Setup a group tag in order to share educational resources (IE. Dekita Exchange and on this wiki in Geocaching for Educators)

8. Unintended learning through the discovery of resources and information shared by others through their bookmarks

9. Share links to current news items that relate to classroom discussions.

10. Examine the popularity of a web site that a student had
listed and examine those who have tagged that resource in order to find
new resources. (and perhaps unintended learning opportunities)

11. Share one del.icio.us account between a number of different
subject specific educators or a school in order to share resources with
each other. (see Willowdale Elementary School and District6 )

12. Share one del.icio.us account between a large number of
educators across a school district that teach in diverse settings in
order to create a broad and deep set of resources. (see Traverse City Area Public Schools for district wide social bookmarking)

 Any other ideas to add to the list?

September 21, 2006 | | 11 Comments »

Gardening – The Blog

Just a Quick Note:

I have added a reading list feature to the sidebar of the TeachingHacks blog.  These are books that I have read recently or in the process of reading. Three books appear randomly from my reading list. The books are rated from 1 to 5, 1 being the lowest and 5 being the highest.  If a book has a rating of zero, then I am in the process of reading it.

September 17, 2006 | | 2 Comments »

Using Online Videos to Drive My Own Professional Development

I really am amazed when I look at all the resources that are freely available that help educators to drive their own professional development.  I don’t really care what you want to call it “personal learning environment”, “professional learning environment” or "ple."  Arguing over syntax seems like a waste of time to me and doesn’t seem to go anywhere. (i.e. “learning objects”)

Aside from online communities, blogs and podcasts, I personally enjoy watching keynote, conference presentations and a variety of video content that has been archived online.  I find that these are often the greatest motivators that help immerse me in new innovations or just inspire me.

Here my current favourites:

NECC2006 and here  (I hope to make it to this conference)

Building Learning Communities 2006  (I hope to make it to this conference)

Teachers.tv

TedTalks  

Curriculum Services Canada  

Cue Conference  

Leading Learning 2006  

Leading Learning 2005  

Annenberg Media Center  

Google Video engEDU and Educational Genre  

Frontline  

When I feel the need to start looking at Higher Ed. materials:

Stanford on iTunes  

Berkeley
on iTunes  

MIT World 

Archive.org  

Please feel free to add your favourites.

(Ah!  – Alan – I created another list again – shall we start another shared tag in del.icio.us?)

Update:

I have added the shared tag "pdvideo" in del.icio.us for adding any resources to the list.  If you need a batch renaming tool for del.icio.us try Scripted Remark, it worked well for me.

| | 3 Comments »

The Internet is Neither Helpful or Harmful to Student Learning


I’m feeling quite a bit of frustration here, so this photo I took of a street in Haliburton, Ontario is quite appropriate.

We have a provincial body that governs the profession – the Ontario College of Teachers which publishes a quarterly magazine called “Professionally Speaking.” This quarter the magazine has an article titled “State of the Teaching Profession Survey Results .”

The survey was conducted by COMPAS Inc. and commissioned by Professionally Speaking. The methodology for the survey is outlined in the article, basically they completed a phone interview of more than 1,000 teachers during July. The results are deemed accurate to within 3.1 percentage points 19 times out of 20.

One particular result has me banging my head against the wall. Educators in the province, at least the ones who took the survey, still don’t get it. When referring to Student Success Factors – educators were to score what they considered helpful or harmful to student learning and education.  You guessed it the Internet was neither helpful or harmful (computer games faired far worse).
 

 

 

Very helpful

Very harmful

 

 

MEAN

5

4

3

2

1

DNK

the Internet

3.1

11

25

39

17

8

1

computer games

2.4

4

9

30

36

21

*

* greater than zero and less than 0.5

Reading about Bull54it and the Art of Crap Detection made me feel a little better, thanks Gary Stager .

September 16, 2006 | | 3 Comments »

Polar Science 2006

I am passing this opportunity along to participate in Polar Science This project was last year’s winner of the Edublog Awards “Best example/case study of use of weblogs within teaching and learning.” Please pass this opportunity to interested educators.

Educators: Use internet communication and collaboration tools that help engage students in learning through this unique experience.

Administrators: Teachers are supported through experienced project leaders, who are able to help educators through any challenges they may face.

IT Geeks: Encourage your staff to participate in the read/write web, and watch communication and collaboration grow in your schools.

YES I Can! Science has now opened registration for what is promising to be a fantastic learning experience for students – *Polar Science 2006*.

Building on the tremendous success of last year’s project with York University scientist Dr. Thomas Hawke, we are following Dr. Shane Kanatous from Colorado State University on a scientific expedition to Antarctica. From October to December, 2006, Dr. Kanatous and his team will be investigating the adaptations that allow young Weddell seals to develop into elite divers. Studying these adaptations may have tremendous implications for human medicine. By understanding how another mammal has successfully overcome the debilitating effects of working under low oxygen conditions, scientists may be able to learn new therapeutic approaches to assist humans with heart or lung disease.

Students from grades 4-12 will have the opportunity to read the expedition team’s weekly updates, conduct their own experiments and research, and communicate with the scientists through the Polar Science web site.

We are very excited about the upcoming expedition. This year we have added something new to the project; an /Ice Team/ and a /Lab Team/. The /Ice Team/ led by Dr. Kanatous will be performing the field research, analysis and collecting samples from the Weddell seals in Antarctica.

The /Lab Team/, led by Dr. Thomas Hawke will be performing experiments and analyzing samples in his lab at York University in Toronto. The Teams will be in constant communication via email and web logs (that you will get to look in on!). This is a great opportunity to see how research is conducted and students will get the chance to see discoveries made in real-time!

For complete information about the project and to register your class visit:

http://www.polar06.yesican-projects.ca .

(As with all YES I Can! Science project, there is no cost to take part.)

September 13, 2006 | | 2 Comments »

Giving Away 100,000 Wikis – Wikispaces

Wikispaces wants to reach their goal of giving away 100,000 wikis to educators. I will let them explain:

Back in January, we decided to offer our Plus Plan to K-12 teachers for free. We didn’t set out with a grand strategy, just an interest in helping teachers with our easy to use wiki technology.

Over 10,000 educational wikis later, we’ve heard countless stories of excited students and empowered teachers. They’ve told us about their collaborative essays, group study guides, online lesson plans, and classroom notice boards coming alive on Wikispaces.

Now we’re taking the next step – we want to give away 100,000 free K-12 Plus wikis. That includes all the features and benefits that normally cost $50/year – for free. No fine print, no usage limits, no advertising, no catches.

We hope that you’ll read on, try a wiki at your school, and help us spread the word.

Check it out at: http://www.wikispaces.com/site/for/teachers100K

September 12, 2006 | | 1 Comment »
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