Drexel Online Symposium

This is a list of resources from the presentation Dr. Kristen Kozloski and I did entitled:
Contributing to the Education Field Knowledge Base through Communities of Practice

ISTE NETS

David Warlick's graphic

Response Blog Rubric

Through the use of blogs, students "...edit more, link more, seek more sources, be reflective, read each others' work, comment more, question more, and challenge each others' work" (David Truss)

Here is a clip (voicethread) of our students' reactions to blogging.

Google Reader

Wiki to organize/collaborate for online class

Wiki for sharing projects

Diigo

Go 2 Web2.0

Dr. Kristen Kozloski's blog

Creating A Social Network

The theme of our first week of class was, "Creating your own social network". To me, it's very exciting to see all of the ways a person can become connected. This week, we will continue creating our own social networks and also learn more about using Web 2.0 as a research and reflective tool. Here is a list of tentative ideas for class this week:

1. Explore tags, labels, and technorati
2. How to write an effective blog entry
3. How to comment effectively on blogs
4. Diigo - social bookmarking and the connections
5. Explore "professional" blogs

I've also added a new "help" page to our wikispace. If you find any other youtube videos that you think should be added to this player, please email me the hyperlink!

What else would you like to explore this week? In your "web 2.0" travels last week and over the weekend, what questions have you come up with? You may respond to this blog entry with any ideas/questions you have!

Time for Kindergarten Already??????

Madison's first days of school.



The most difficult thing Keith and I have ever had to do is put her on the bus. It all happened so quickly that neither of us had time to cry and thankfully, neither did Madison. She got on, sat with her new friend "Justin" and rode to school. The best part was seeing her glowing smile as she ran off of the bus that afternoon. We knew she would love school!


And then there's Owen - he was VERY excited for his first day of preschool today!

Organizing My Thoughts About Learning

Tonight in class, we will begin discussing Jonassen's updated "Mindtools" text. We will try to make sense of how he wants us to "travel" through the text. Tonight's goal is to begin apply his "framework" for creating meaningful learning experiences for our students. We'll use a concept map to document our thoughts and embed that concept map in our blog and reflect on it. This way, we'll be able to document how our thoughts evolve throughout the course.

Some key ideas from chapters 1-3; your reading due Tuesday night:

Meaningful learning:
1. Meaningful purpose
2. Conceptual engagement
3. Conceptual development
4. Methods and strategies that support these three components (Jonassen, 2006, p. xiii).

Jonassen asks: "How do we engage and support conceptual change in students?"
Jonassen answers: "...building models of phenomena being studied is among the most effective methods" (p. xv).

How we will begin to organize our ideas: (refer to the graphic organizer on p. xvi of the text).
1. Identify learning goals.
2. After skimming through chapters 4-8, how do you classify your learning goals? (domain knowledge, systems, problems, experiences, or thinking)
3. How do you want your students to model phenomena and which tools should they use? (chapters 9-17 discuss the tools)
4. How will you assess this learning? (chapter 3 and also throughout 9-17)

We are going to create models of the ideas we are learning. Here is my Graphic Organizer as a sample:


This is a different type of thinking for most. In addition, intense learning about technology has to occur throughout this process as we create "Mindtools". I'm calling for a shift in my students' thinking; a change in the way they do things. It's all about their "learning". I share a thought from Will Richardson's most recent blog entry: we need to try to re-envision our own learning; not just our students. I think this class will do that.

Your comments are welcome!

NECC 2008

This year at NECC 2008, I presented with Kristen Kozloski. The title of our presentation was, "University 2.0: Digital Innovations in the University Classroom". We shared the many technologies that we use in our university classrooms to facilitate our students' learning. We use many different Web 2.0 technologies to create a professional learning network with our students. The neatest thing about our presentation was that we created a Diigo group for all who attended. The purpose of this group is to continue the discussion "University 2.0". It's also a place for social bookmarking. You too can create your own (free) Diigo account (www.diigo.com) and ask to join our NECC 2008 group. Please join the discussion and collaborate with us! Diigo allowed us as presenters to create webslides of our bookmarks within this group. Here is a link to the webslides.

Finally, we experimented with UStream and streamed our presentation LIVE! The video isn't great quality but we you can definitely hear the information we share. We hope you enjoy the presentation...we challenge you to join our group AND our discussion. Collaboration is FUN!!!

Video clips hosted by Ustream

We made strawberry jam!

This week in EDTEC 448, we will be letting our creative juices flow! We'll begin with an introductory presentation by Sir Ken Robinson

and a discussion about how to get our students to be creative. After a discussion about thinking differently about our teaching and our students' learning (what we've been doing all term), we will begin to create our own podcasts. We will be using Audacity but we'll also discuss other tools that are available. We'll close tonight with the following sample digital story done in Voicethread (www.voicethread.com).



During the next class, we'll be continuing the Digital Storytelling conversation with flickr and several other publishing technologies.

My goal for teaching the Internet in the Classroom class at Penn State Great Valley is to motivate my students to "...think differently about their classrooms and the potentials of the technologies...in terms of pedagogy and curriculum" (p. viii, 2006, Richardson), we will be discussing their classroom web portals this week. As I thought about what their classroom portals might look like (and some already have one), Web 2.0 is going to have a huge influence on the appearance, purpose, etc.

I will ask them 3 questions just to see the "sign of the times" (Link to our Ning discussion.)
1. Where is your web page hosted (include the URL and discuss if it is a district mandated issue)?
2. What is the purpose of your web page (or web site)?
3. How do you use your web page for instruction?
4. After this class, what changes will you make to your web page?

Here is the slideshare presentation that I will share with my students:

| View | Upload your own

Social Bookmarking

This morning, I was thinking about my next grad class and how I would continue our “searching”, “researching”, “looking for professional resources”, etc. conversation. We are going to discuss organizing our Internet-based information and I’d like to use del.icio.us to do that with my students. I had been using delicious for a while as a bookmarking service. I love it (and the firefox menu bar that I downloaded to my browser is great!). HOWEVER, I know that diigo also does social bookmarking. I also have been using diigo for a while, but only in this way: I use diigo to highlight key points in an article on the web, add sticky notes, and then share w/ a colleague. She can see my highlights/notes and add hers, etc. It’s collaborative notetaking, research, thinking, etc. I decided to do a little research to see how I should present this to my students.

First, I did a search on google that looked like this: delicious vs. diigo. The first few hits were all I needed to dive into my research.
Here are some of the first few links that appeared:
1. http://www.diigo.com/help/why_diigo (biased of course!)
2. A post from Will Richardson: http://weblogg-ed.com/2007/diigo-and-delicious/
3. http://techfridge.blogspot.com/2008/01/diigo-cant-say-it-but-we-like-it.html
4. http://christytucker.wordpress.com/2008/03/29/diigo-or-delicious-for-beginners/ (This post echoed my “gut” instincts to go w/ delicious first!)
So, I’ve made my decision. We’ll learn del.icio.us as a whole group. (And of course, they can also watch the Common Craft video on del.icio.us for more help.) Those students who have used del.icio.us before can explore diigo and then share with us.

There’s something else very important that I want to note: As I was reading Will Richardson’s post, I was very excited. This is the type of blog post that I want my students to read, learn from, and write for this course. This is modern day Web 2.0 research! There is so much to learn just from this one blog post. Here are my questions for my students as they read Richardson’s post and the corresponding comments. They are entering the realm of Research 2.0 (that’s what I’d like to call it!). After reading Will Richardson’s post, from a professional development standpoint, Where will you go from here? What do you want to learn more about? How will you find the information? How will you use it professionally/in your classroom?

In The News

“In The News” – Building Learning Communities in the Graduate Classroom

After listening to a podcast by Alan November, it got me thinking about how I can form a learning community in my classroom. This class I am currently teaching is about how to effectively use the Internet as a tool to enhance the teaching and learning process. We will discuss learning theory, different types of learning online, developing a web page, etc. We need to understand these underlying concepts and be able to adjust our teaching accordingly. There are many ways to use the Internet; many of them I’m sure the teachers already use (Webquests are just one great example!). We also need to spend a lot of time on the concept of Web 2.0 and how to use these new tools to enhance the teaching and learning process.

In his podcast, Alan November discusses how currently many of us use the Internet to get data. We use the Internet like an encyclopedia. He makes a VERY important point that we need to consider at all levels: “Having data isn’t knowledge. Just because you have data, doesn’t mean you know what to do with it”(November podcast, 2008). Getting the data involves the lowest form of thinking on Bloom’s Taxonomy (having knowledge). We need to get students to use higher level thinking throughout the learning process. Andrew Churches put together an interesting analysis/comparison of Bloom’s Taxonomy – the Digital Format. He includes many of the Web 2.0 technologies and the higher level thinking skills our students should use.

Forming a learning community is important for my students because I believe that they need to personalize the information they are learning before they can use it to enhance the students’ learning. In order to form this learning community, I will stick with my constructivist style of teaching and encourage the students to experience, research, discover, etc. the world of blogging. Interestingly, a man named George Siemens has presented a “new” theory called Connectivism. He views learning as “network-creation”. He states, “…learning is the process that occurs when knowledge is transformed into something of meaning…” (par. 8). “During this process, learning is the act of encoding and organizing nodes to facilitate data, information, and knowledge flow” (par. 8). I want my students to form links and connections with content that they read, discover, hear, discuss, research, etc throughout this class. They will share the links and connections through their blog posts and comments on their peers’ blogs.

So, it all comes back to, how can I implement this in my classroom so that my students are doing this higher level thinking in a Web 2.0 world? I need to facilitate the formation of a learning community. We will do that through the use of blogs.

The Internet Miner: How will I find it? I have been researching and following several different professional bloggers through my aggregator and Twitter for about 1 year now. The bloggers that I follow publish new posts daily and notify their readers through Twitter. The problem that I find is that there is so much out there to read; I have to stay focused on the key ideas that I see each day and reflect on that. I have become part of an educational community with people I have never met but found on the Internet through the popularity of their blogs. I will show my students how to set up not only their own blog but also an aggregator (Google Reader). They will add their peers’ blog addresses and the addresses of other professional bloggers to their own Google Reader so that they can conveniently access these blogs.

Producer: To facilitate the use of a blog, we will go through several steps:
1. I will walk the students through the creation of their blog.
2. Each student will also set up Google Reader.
3. Students will set goals for their blog.
4. It’s not just about how they reflect and what they write in their blogs. It’s about reading others’ blogs and commenting that will facilitate the community of learners in this class. I am hoping that each student will become (if they aren’t already) a reflective practitioner.
5. Something else that is important to note is that we have a “blog comment rubric”. We will also discuss what makes a good comment which Vicki Davis summarizes so well in her post.

The Policy Advisor: I don’t think that it’s necessary to have a strict “policy” in my graduate level class but I can teach my students (teachers) how to implement this in their classroom (with their students). I will pose the question, “What do we need to think about in terms of blogging, posting in public, and commenting?”. There are several options to choose from as far as making your blog public. We will also discuss developing an AUP for blogging in our classroom. Here are two links that address the AUP issue:
1. Bud the Teacher Blog
2. AUP sample

Integrator: I expect that blogging will be beneficial for both my teaching and my students’ learning. Blogging is a daily part of the class and it will become a natural place for the teachers to reflect on their own learning. Through their blogs, they will make connections with other ideas; papers, podcasts, videos, articles, presentations, and/or blog posts. “…blogs are about communicating. You observe your experience, reflect on it, and they write about it. Other people read your reflections, respond from their perspectives by commenting or writing their own blog article. You read their perspectives, often learn something through their eyes, and write some more” (Klaus & Morris, p. 2). I am sure that my students will have deeper reflections and understanding of the course concepts because of the blogs; much more than they would from handing in a paper that never gets looked at again.

I hope that they will see that it’s an innovative way to connect with other professional bloggers and learn from them. I want to communicate to the teachers that we in addition to reading professional journals, books, web sites, newspapers, we should also be reading blog posts daily. Many educational researchers begin their thoughts in the form of a blog and then through many reflections, comments, revisions, etc. that blog post becomes a book or an article. I will immerse my students in the reflective process. Instead of handing in a paper, blogging is ongoing. They can continually revise their work and their projects may even emerge from their reflections. I will challenge them to “have a voice”.

References:
Klaus, D. and Morris, S. (N.D.). Retrieved 5-7-08 from https://consortium.wikispaces.com/BBResources#toc2

November, A. (Speaker). (2008). Using technology for building learning communities (Podcast No. 222). Retrieved 5-7-08 from http://www.speedofcreativity.org/2008/01/31/podcast222-using-technology-for-building-learning-communities-by-alan-november/

Siemens, G. (Nov. 2005). Connectivism: Learning as network creation. Retrieved 5-7-2008 from http://www.learningcircuits.org/2005/nov2005/seimens.htm

new

this is my new post and reflection after the first night of class

Student Teaching Seminar 2.0

My student teachers take part in an online seminar. I feel as though I need to make more of a connection with these student teachers. Each semester, I've been giving the same feedback to the students; engage all students, develop a system of classroom management, etc. I never actually visit the student teachers in their classroom and never actually meet them face to face. Therefore, I never get a real sense of what they are experiencing in the classroom (observing their CT, learning new strategies, etc.). I would like to make a connection with my student teachers in the beginning of the term to "show" them several very important strategies. Here are my initial ideas:
1. Video clips of effective teaching online (ustream?)
2. Online synchronous chat as we view the clips - discussion about strategies, critique the teaching...
3. Initial online chat to "discuss" ideas (questions from discussion board) so that the ST can intro themselves
4. Host another chat after the first video assignment - reflecting on new ideas for implementation.
5. Students post a clip of their video to the Net (course shell online???) and work with a partner to critique it??? (This is a stretch - what if they don't have the means to clip, produce, and upload their videos...)
6. The time change has got me....time for bed! Will think more and blog later.

dashboard widget!

posting from my dashboard...

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