Last day (of course and February) reflections

Now I have even more applications and sites to learn about: Moodle, Ning, Teacher tube, voice threads, Twitter (“Tweets”), the Black Cloud project, Google Calendar, and Google Groups.
Suzie Boss and Jane Krauss suggest:

--Kids don’t know how to interact in a responsible manner and that lots of attention needs to be directed to help them with this. For this reason and to avoid being sued, many schools in the US and Australia are now blocking social networking sites like we have at ISB—even Google images. We are fortunate.

--If technologies are leading the way for the development of a project, it is time to reconsider the technology. This is a good idea. Inappropriate technologies make students and teachers shy of technological use, are time and energy consuming, and hinder, rather than assist student learning.

--It’s too late to interact with students when they have already developed a project (Like a PowerPoint or Document). The teachable moment is gone. The learning interactions (with the teacher of other students) that assist students need to be contained within the processing of their work. I am happy this was addressed in the IB Environmental Systems project I developed for this course.

The discussion about how much time technology takes from teacher’s days leaves me feeling I need to read The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, which I recall seems to address how to tackle time budgeting of one’s projects.

The collaboration among students is most useful. I liked the discussions in the class today. They reflect the good discussions on blogs. I particularly like the insight John Breedlove and Senor Denby gave. John gave me five minutes of his time to discuss how I could set up a Google.forms idea I have. Again he is an amazing resource in this course. I look forward to seeing his Google.Earth project.

The educational literature for the reading link to the Foothill de Anza Community College is an excellent synopsis of current beacons in education and I thank the course leaders for giving us that link as a resource and assignment. It helped put the project into relevant context for the new technologies (and review what we covered earlier in this course, but I forgot about.)

We teachers will always be taking time to learn the better way to help our students learn and understand using technologies. I predict the last course in this Master’s program will be about the effective use of a tech tool or technique that has not even been developed yet. And we will all see how it will effectively help our students. (Here at ISB, we will probably have access to it.) With the rate of new developments, we teachers will always be dealing with a conflict of how much time to dedicate to keeping up.

Study guide for Environmental Systems project

The students in my IB Environmental Systems course can benefit most from specific help in their laboratory work and their reviews for tests. Many wait until the last night (or later) to review the material. My course project is an attempt to get them to review earlier before the test, organize their understanding of the key concepts, reflect on their learning, and collaboratively prepare a document they can use individually to review for the test, and later, for the IB exam.


Using the concept of Understanding by Design or backwards design, with the above objective in mind, I made a list of expectations and specifications I would hope to see from students. I wanted the project to be collaborative, use technology out of need (rather than because it was there), address students’ needs, allow for evolution and improvement, and use the technology tools we learned in this course.


The development of a study guide is collaborative in that students each contribute to the production of the document. With ten topics to write about, each student is given ample opportunity to contribute a unique, creative product. I anticipate good students will be first and most thorough in their contributions, so I requested students who were not confident about their understanding to make their contributions first. I expect the better students will all benefit from each contributing to the product and having each other’s work to benefit from.


The use of wikispaces and its ability to have side discussions is an excellent tool for this project. Students are already contacting me on the discussions to clarify what is expected of them. Kim helped me realize the site would be cumbersome if the ten main topics were not divided up into individual pages, so students could be working on the site simultaneously—kind of like Google.docs.


I have already made a number of changes on the site to make it more clear, improve its relevance, and improve its usability by students.

Reflections from the balcony

I always enjoy discussions about where technologies will take us in the future. For the past ten years, the predictions seem to have both fallen short of where we actually went (Google Earth) and exceeded where we ended up (all teachers now being guides). The readings, class discussions and interactions have stimulated me to take more risks in my technological life. These fall in three areas:

Attention - As I look around the class during the discussions and presentations, I notice the "old" paper and pencil people like me are visually and attentively directed at the source of the presentation. A number of "younger" computer people have their faces onto a series of changing website images. At first, I found this rude--like reading a newspaper in front of your college professor during his lecture. Now I see this as efficient. While class was going on today, I was actively looking at the websites and ideas people were presenting--scanning images, reading short bits of articles, gathering information, and asking myself questions. Is this what students would do if we let them? When a student doesn't understand what I mean by Hadley cell, might she look it up, get a quick idea about it, maybe ask a question about what she is not understanding, and then move on to greater understanding of the class discussion? I think I will be more welcoming of students having their faces in computers during my class.

Phones in class and in my future - Today I took a phone away from a student who was text messaging during a large portion of the class presentation. I hadn't checked to see if she was actually gathering relavent information before I had her give it to me. (When she moved on to the task to doing the exercise we had discussed in class, she was lost, which suggests she was not attentive.) But, like in the previous paragraph, she might have been. In which case I would have been wrong to follow the school policy and have her give the phone up.

Furthermore, the discussion about phones made me wonder if an iPhone or similar device is more economical than my present methods of digital living. The cost of a computer and phone and access now must be more than the cost of an iPhone and its access for a couple years. I would also have much more flexibility and accessibility with a mobile phone device. Maybe I need to think this over.

Sites (in addition to those I checked out during class) to check out -
WorldMapper (http://www.worldmapper.org/)
Zotero (http://www.zotero.org)
Delicious (http://delicious.com)
Diigo (http://www.diigo.com)
What a widget is
How images on Flickr can be used effectively

Amazing memory of today's session - With the analytical power of technologies, once voice recognition (and its translation) is effectively achieved, semantic aware tools will give us un-realized capacity for accessing useful information.

Adopt and Adapt by Marc Prensky

So, wouldn’t it be nice if this Ed Tech course was offered alongside a course in Differentiaton? Wouldn’t they fit nicely hand-in-glove? I find I can always be a better teacher by changing the way I am grouping the students, changing the “assignments” I give them to make them more authentic, more diverse, and more in line with the students experiences and learning styles. By grouping them differently, assessing them by more than just my old exams and written assignments, I know I would reach more of them more effectively.

That has turned out to be a secondary goal for me taking this class (though I am not sure I am doing more than “Doing old things in new ways.” when I try them out).

I agree that much of my class time is spent with students getting and setting up computers to use them effectively in the classroom. With the new requirement of registering to produce a Word, Excel, or PowerPoint document, I have given up on using class time for students to produce such works in class. Maybe I need to follow up with Ed Tech more about this registration bit.***

Now that I have used Google.doc, I could more effectively use it to check students’ understanding during class. If I became better at quickly writing a form for students to respond to (especially a template that could be used over and over again), I could get a quick handle on students understanding quickly and effectively by a short digital quiz on Google.doc with the results showing up on my screen instantaneously. Maybe that will be a future project.***

Is there a web-site where teachers “try something new each lesson and report back on the Internet what works and what doesn’t”? I guess the entire Internet has a lot of it, but I am not astute enough to find it effectively.Prensky correctly suggests teachers would ask, "When will we have time for the curriculum," they will ask, "and for all the standardized testing being mandated?" But his response, “If we really offered our children some great future-oriented and they could develop their skills in … technology, I bet they would complete the "standard" curriculum in half the time it now takes.” We have heard similar arguments repeatedly in technology-supporting literature. With as long as these innovations have been around, we should by now have the data to support this claim. This data would be some of the most significant information one could learn from a course like we are taking. It would make headlines in many educational journals. The absence of such data in articles suggests the data does not exist and that, in fact, students do not prepare better the core material once they have effectively learned to use the technologies available. This study should be THE major focus of many tech courses. In the previous paragraphs (here and in the article) it was suggested that the teachers “report what works and what doesn’t”. I WANT to hear that technology HAS helped students learn core material effectively better than the “old things the old ways”.

The path toward tech instructional enlightenment...thorns of elitism?

I might have considered we students would be overwhelmed with new internet tools, applications, and tempting niceties, but the “Connectivism” animation kind of outlined the path I believe we are going to take. This path takes us lay students from fear and ignorance to having our students share their learning digitally with the technological world:

1. Build learning network
2. Practice finding online sites
3. Determine the credibility of the information
4. Use Google to find peer-reviewed articles
5. Social bookmark the sites I select
6. Finds others who bookmarked same sites
7. Next look at blogs which are opinions about the topic from like minded others
8. Based on what I have learned blog (and make recommendations) to others
9. Use a Reader to subscribe to blogs to know when information is updated
10. Use an MP3 player to record audio and video pod casts which are accessing courses
11. Access professors via podcasts
12. Video conference by Skyping with experts like we did in our face-to-face session
13. Teachers like to share expertise with students, so they might be asked to give a face-to-face
14. Have students summarize with video or audio their learning to the rest of the world

Seeing the mountain before us as a series of treks with smaller steps make the challenges attainable. But I wonder if:
* the technologically savvy instructors will be considered elitist by those who are either older (and did not learn ICT from their youth) or un-motivated,
* an even greater gap will develop between private and US public school education, or
* the standards of use of technology in instruction do not grow so fast that it leaves many good instructors struggling to keep up with the innovations and even newer developments.

Educational Technology Standards and ISB—where will we go from here?

I took the assignment on reading about NETS a step further and tied it with ISB’s Enduring Understandings and Essentail Questions and Andrew Torris’ blog post “When is it too much? AND When do we say “DO IT or GO!”?

Four inputs for effective technological growth in a school are the administration, the teachers, the students, and the community. We course students were told ISB supports the NETS standards for educational technology, we are constantly improving the hardware to make this possible, and we are having this coursework to support these standards. Andrew Torris’ blog post “When is it too much? AND When do we say “DO IT or GO!”? suggests a “PD that is voluntary [like this course is] results in just a few [in our case a significant minority] “interested” teachers showing up, and the technology use being enhanced in classrooms where there is already integration already going on.”

Where will ISB go from here? The Enduring Understandings and Essential Questions ISB adopted state “students will begin to understand” the various aspects of educational technology. Does our strategic plan envision a move toward making this understanding more enduring? Will teachers be required to take educational technology PD in the next couple years? Will teacher evaluations include requirements for demonstrating more current educational technology use in the classroom? Will our future hiring practices reflect such a commitment? To what extent are we already screening teachers for digital dexterity?

At first glance, the Performance Indicators look formidable. I look forward to the discussion of these issues in the course as I look forward to moving forward in effectively using these technologies.

Reflections on “Bloom’s Taxonomy Blooms Digitally”

The article is timely, relevant, and informative:
* Review of Bloom’s taxonomy. Every time we look through this list it stimulates us to re-consider how we could do more or better.
* Defining computer tech terms we have only heard of
* Discusses computer tech terms we have used and shows us how those skills are taking our students to higher orders of thinking. (This gives a kind of pat on the back for some of the projects we are already having our students do, but also giving some insight on why some students have more trouble with these higher order projects.) This helps us evaluate the other tech assessments we are now using and modify those lessons to bring them, also, to a higher level. I could have had students evaluate the scientific value of a recent Google.doc project I had students do, rather than just get information for analysis. In the evaluations I’ve had students doing to date, I have not had them evaluate the kinds of technology used in the lesson.
* Introducing how new tech terms are applied, therefore, giving us ideas of future project

I’m not sure what a “popout” (term I got from Kim’s blog posts) is, but I think it might apply to these paragraphs. This article helped me see that the blogs I have been studying this week have largely been un-organized. I, too, am not good about helping the reader know from the title what is going on in the blog, so they know whether they want to read further or not. I will attempt to be more clear in my future blog titles to inform the audience. I also noted that my bookmarks (and Reader) organization is inefficient. I will attempt to make folders and organize the wikis in my Reader and the favorites in my Bookmarks into folders to save me time in the future.

I also want to learn more about mashing, which I assume will come with this course. I look forward to learning how to integrate links and animations into my projects. Finally, it would be a wonderful way to celebrate someone’s life by giving them a digital tribute using these technologies.

Going against the grain of modern technologies, this paper is one I would like to have under the glass at my station desk.

Any thoughts?

PD development by the ISB tech team and my goals for this course.

I applaud the tech team and the administration and curriculum support for taking us in the direction ISB was and is heading. Attracting and hiring the team we have at ISB, funding the technological developments of the past few years, and throwing support behind increasing the tech staff so we can expand and improve are commendable. I am most pleased that they all agreed to support advanced PD in technology and followed up with a current, relevant, attractive, and comprehensive avenue for us to move to a more technologically aware, skilled, committed, and motivated institution. The picture of the many of us in the course speaks 1000 words to this.
What I expect to get out of this course is . . . . opportunity. I have learned to trust the members of the team over the years and repeatedly am smiling when I walk out of one of their after school sessions. (I’ve actually been upset because the sessions are so often in direct conflict with my teaching schedule.) I approach “the learning I hope for” with an expectation that they know what I “should” learn and will provide me the opportunity to learn, practice, and improve these skills. I believe what one learns in a class is dependent on the learner. This course is opening doors I didn’t and will not know even exist. I already have the knowledge that students learn differently now, the knowledge that technology can improve the way I guide students toward learning, and the awareness that there are so many learning avenues that I am not aware of. I hope this course will show me the avenues so I can go and try them out to see which might work for me, my courses, and my students.

Five years from now things we are discussing now in this class will seed the development of where each of us will go to make our students, classes, and learning more challenging, interesting, successful, and current. Having so many in the class means we will have a community to discover with, share with, rejoice with, and get support from. The course is giving me what I hoped for.

Reflection on Siemen’s “Connectivism”

I liked the flow of the paper once he got into the background. Introducing definitions of learning, knowledge, and learning theory was essential to the rest of the paper.

My favorite two questions to explore were (emphasis mine):
* What adjustments need to [be] made with learning theories when technology performs many of the cognitive operations previously performed by learners (information storage and retrieval). and
* With increased recognition of interconnections in differing fields of knowledge, how are systems and ecology theories perceived in light of learning tasks?

‘I store my knowledge in my friends’ reminds me of the society set up in Fahrenheit 451 in which (I believe) all books were memorized and kept in the minds of people to access from each other. Now the store has gone a step further than books, to digital and global storage.

“Chaos” – Our brains form connections from a chaos of neurons. The ‘wiring’ gets selected and reinforced with repeated use. I’m curious if, using technologies, what “wiring” will be reinforced and if it will alter people’s capacity for passion, commitment, and depth of thought. Flexibility, adaptability, and diversity will be characteristics that will be selected for success.

I love the social ant behavior as a model for human community digital interactions. Ants actions have implications for digital community success.

The concept of ‘organizational ecology’ is attractive. I support, “Creating, preserving, and utilizing information flow should be a key organizational activity.” In this course we are now doing the ‘creating’ step.

“The internet leverages the small efforts of many with the large efforts of few” reminds me of the Obama campaign and the action emails since that are mobilizing people to do the ‘small efforts’. “Diverse teams of varying viewpoints are a critical structure for completely exploring ideas.” is also consistent with Obama’s choice of cabinet members and how to work through conflict and resolution.

My compliments to the individual who selected this article for us to review. It took over an hour for me to read, synthesize, reflect, and ponder on it; the time was like a good movie. Thank you.

It's war

“To combat the shrinking half-life of knowledge, organizations have been forced to develop new methods of deploying instruction.” I smile at the use of combat and force to describe changes that must be made in instruction because of there being more knowledge.

The 18 month half-life of knowledge has existed in the biological sciences for decades. The focus has needed to change, and instruction of the sciences has taken advantage of the new technological innovations, and we probably are much better at giving our students hands-on and electronic learning experiences now than we did a score and years ago. This transition is continual, gradual, adaptive, and appropriate.

In our class we are each taking making our transitional steps toward including technology in our repertoire. It becomes part of us when we “choose to use” it. We resist it when the combative ultimatum of force is upon us. We choose to take this course and we will all get a lot out of it. We will modify our instruction as we see best within the constrains of our energy, environment, and abilities. It will not come about because of the pace at which new information is being generated.

Solution to problem of copying Word text to post as a blog

With the problems I've been having with my computer (which lead to my having to restart or get back into Internet Explorer) I've learned it might be faster to use FireFox, but I've also learned to do all my composing in Word and save it as I'm doing now. Unfortunately I didn't do this earlier and I lost valuable time and ideas.

The problem with copying and pasting this information to post as a blog was it was pasted as an html document which could not be published as a "compose". I got around this problem by saving the document as "Plain text" on my desktop and copying this plain text a new posting. As you can see here, this works fine.

Now to solve the computer's not working.....

PS. I love the "

Your blog post published successfully!

" sign