Digital
Storytelling
Discovery
Educ. Network
Global
Collaboration
Google
Google
Earth
Learning.com
Lemke,
Cheryl
Podcasting
Think.com
ThinkQuest
Thornburg,
David
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"When I
go to school, I have to power-down."
"Let's put the edge back in education."
"The hammer Michaelangelo used to create the Pieta is not very
different from the one used to vandalize it."
Digital Storytelling:
This presentation was delivered by David Thornburg.
- "There's no such thing as too many pixels."
- Camera Tips
- Turn off digital zoom; use optical zoom instead.
- Set the pixel amount to the largest possible size.
- Rule of Thirds: Visual design principle stating
that visually interesting simuli should occur around one-third division
gridlines.
- To create audio that is exactly your desired length
and royalty-free, a PC software option is SmartSound Movie Maestro. The
application allows you to drag the music to your desired length.
- Audacity is an open source product recommended for
recording audio with a PC.
- When recording, smile and annunciate. Save files as
an uncompressed .wav file. Do not save it as an MP3 file until all
editing is complete because it does slightly distort the quality.
- GIMP is an open source alternative for photo editing.
- ProShow Gold (PhotoDex, $60), not available on Macs
and with Linux, is a wonderful tool for digital storytelling. It easily
allows inserting of photos, addition/manipulation of text, and
specifying
pans/zooms.
Discovery
Educator Network: After a wonderful dinner and many freebies from Discovery Education, they
sponsored several presentations.
- The Highland Elementary School in Corona Norco
created a Dad's Club. Activities of
the Club include:
- Karaoke Night
- Father-Daughter Dance
- Laser Tag Night Out (a father donated his laser tag
facility)
- Can Collection/Recycling
- Fathers Complete Construction Tasks (e.g., cut down
white boards)
- Assisted with Clean-Up after a Rodeo
Global Online
Collaboration: This session was presented by Sue Armstrong.
- My Hero Project: Students share the stories
of their individual heroes (from their parents to Elie Weisel).
- Global
SchoolNet: This includes the CyberFair Contest
(students in grades 3-12 develop webpages on given topics), Doors to Diplomacy
(for middle and high school students to develop web pages teaching
about international affairs and diplomacy), and the Projects
Registry (a clearninghouse of K-12 projects students may join).
- ThinkQuest
- iEarn: Note that
this does involve a subscription fee.
Learning.com:
There is concern that digital natives are not necessarily effective
technology integrators. Students who are talented in technology
integration have technology strategies and discipline and the abilty to
merge these two skills. They do this by offering student-based online
training tools and a NETS-S aligned assessment "system."
Lemke, Cheryl -- Bridging the
Achievement Gap: Technology Solutions That Work
- There is a range of technology use in classrooms on a
three-dimension scale. A good teacher will move across these dimensions
on a regular basis.
- Complexity (basic to higher-order thinking)
- Authenticity (artificial to real-world)
- Instruction (didactic to construction)
- enGauge 21st
Century Skills
- Digital-Age Literacy (basic content, visual
literacy)
- Inventive Thinking (slef-directed learning)
- Effective Communication
- High Productivity
- Visual Design
- Be sure you do not have viewers/users listen, view
a graphic,
and read at the same time. Limit viewers to two input modes
simultaneously.
- Teach visual design concepts including proximity
(group like
concepts), alignment(right/;eft justifying are more visually appealing
than center), text font/size (create large contrasts between font size
so it does not look like a mistake), contrast, and color.
- Concept mapping is particularly useful for reviews.
Seek
similarities/differences and cause/effect. The creation of the visual
picture creates brain-based cues for future memory retrieval.
- Promoting Self-Direction: Be careful not to
over-praise students, or it can inhibit their desire to work toward
greater success. Tell students that through perserverance and hard work
they can increase their intelligence quotient. Current studies are
testing whether 1:1 full-time access to laptops increases student
perserverance.
- Based on a student reported in the JTLA of a
meta-analysis of students writing from 1992-2002, students write more
when using computers, they revise more, get more feedback, and receive
teacher feedback earlier, and the quality of their writing is improved
significantly. However, when tested without the computer, they score
lower. They must be tested using the computer.
- When students are assigned intellectually stimulating
work, test scores increase. According to Newman, there are three keys
to determine if an assignment is intellectually stimulating: relevance
beyond schooling, discipplined inquiry, and knowledge construction. A
way to do this is to make it relevant to today by identifying a topic,
identify who would care about the topic, think of potential projects
related to those who would care about the topic, identify which
standards and 21st century skills would be assessed in the project.
- Sites to check out
- Child Soldier
Project: A collection of images created by children who are in
war-torn communities.
- New
York Times Graphics: Allows students to see, using a graphic,
the relationship between class, profession, and income.
- Cognitive Overload: Working memory can hold only
5-9 pieces of
information. This suggsts there is a need for drill-and-practice
because it builds in automaticity so students do not reach cognitive
overload.
- Immex: A free software package that allows students
to apply mathematical problems.
- The Soundry:
Students created this website to teach about sound. It includes java
applets on the Doppler effect, harmonics, waves, etc.
Google:
Presented by Google representative Chris
Fitzgerald Walsh.
- Keywords: Type in the following text to procure basic
information:
- Population of [NameofCountry]
- Define: [Word]
- [Person'sName] Age
- Weather [ZipCodeForPlace or NameOfPlace]
- [ProductOrService:PizzaHospital] [DesiredZipCode]
- [NameOfCity, State] to [NameOfCity, State] —
provides directions
- Movies [ZipCode]
- Cell Phone Abilities: Dial 46645 in SMS and send
basic keywords (see above)
- Alerts: Creates an alert that informs the user when
there is newly
posted news feed content. Users specify the keywords and the frequency
of the feeds
- Personal Pages: Uses the Ajax scripting code that
allows the equivalent of adding widgets (e.g., RSS feeds, weather,
traffic, news, alerts)
- Video: Includes
"teasers" of the videos and the ability to download full-length videos.
There are free (e.g., "hoop dreams") and fee-based offerings (e.g.,
recent television shows). "Google Current" are short video clips on
current popular search topics on Google.
- Earth: Now
available for Mac and PC. Allows zooming in and out and moving around
from large- and small-scale options. Users can specify "My Places." It
is possible to search by political or absolute location.
Google
Earth: This session was presented by Hall Davidson.
- Instead of having students names attached to a world
map, add student pictures to Google Earth. Students can also include a
description of the location where they were born.
- Have students track the Donner Party across their
westward route as they read Patty
Reed's Doll or track the route of Lewis and Clark. It is also
possible to identify collections of pre-identified sites so students
can follow the trails rather than creating the links themselves.
- GoogleEarthHacks includes collections of shared .kmz
files (files that include push pins with attached text, audio, and
video).
- Google Earth allows the user to add audio, video,
stills, and text.
- Audio is available at freesounds.com.
- Video is available at archive.org and archive.gov.
November, Alan: Presented by
Learning.com, Dr. November addressed the need to educatoe American
children to compete in a global economy. Notes from this
presentation appear below.
- Children in the U.S. are not experiencing the
academic demands of other countries. In fact, children in our highest
achieving schools in the U.S. would be required to take one year of
remediation before entering a same-grade school in India.
- Due to work ethic and academic demands in other
countries, it is not only cheaper to outsource jobs, but it businesses
can also purchase better quality. We are about to experience
unprecedented global employment competition.
- Other countries are focusing on pushing their higher
achieving students even higher, while we focus on closing the
achievement gap.
- High Tech High in San Diego has the highest achieving
minority students in the State of California.
- Do not offer a one-to-one laptop initiative until
your schools is ready with its content. Schools with laptops should be
offering online education 24 hours a day to take advantage of the
technology.
- Students must have the opportunity to be
collaborative and self-directed. They are this way in kindergarten and
we teach this ability "out of them."
- It is helpful, and perhaps imperative, to give entire
schools of students opportunities to solve real problems that require
integration of all subject areas (e.g., create a submarine).
- The tipping point in education occurs when students
feel they own their learning. To create this envirnoment, requires
great teacher creativity.
- It is the role of the principal to create change in
his/her schools.
- Home schooling is increasing in student population
and quality. See the information
that shows the objectives addressed by home school students. These
objectives are significantly more demanding than he public school
expectations.
- Use the "Wayne Gretski Model" for education -- see
where the field is going, and move in that direction.
- What skills can we teach today that will outlive the
changes in the Internet and other technologies? November recommendds
the creation of the following district-based committees:
- Critical Thinking
- Equity
- Leadership and Managing Change
- Ethics
- Knowledge Common (How can children add value to the
world?)
- Online Design
- Easy Who Is:
An electronic method of identifying who developed a website. This is
the equivalent of a title page of a book.
- A "Google bomb" is a means of creating links to a
specific website. To move to the top of the Google return list,
increase the number of links to the site. This can occur by creating
blank webpages except for links to the desired webpage.
- There are three things students should ask about
websites regarding site credibility:
- What search method did you use? (Was there a Google
bomb?)
- What do the forward links reveal as the potential
for bias?
- What do the links to the site inform? (Do
this by using Alta Vista and link: [InsertURL] to find the links
to this site. You can also include a space and then specify host: [edu or k12.nv.us] to see
what educators are saying about a specific site.)
- Consider showing students sites introducing different
perspectives of history. This is possible by using the following search
terms: ["American Revolution" host:ac.uk]. Or: ["World War II"
host:ac.jp Hiroshima].
- Note: In all other countries, .ac is the equivalent
of .edu.
- Teachers also need to collaborate within regions of a
singular community (e.g., Ruby Thomas ES and Garehime ES).
- WebPlay: A
company that teaches children how to write theatrical scripts. Children
then write plays about another location and the class has a
partner-class that writes a play about their locale. Then, the
partner-classes critique the plays using think.com.
For instance, a New York City class could write a play about London and
a London class would write a play about New York.
- Knowledge Common: Students create products that will
be reviewed outside of their individual classrooms and knowledge that
will outlast a simple work. Blogging is an excellent way to encourage
and allow the creation of common knowledge.
- Creative Commons:
A website that teaches the importance of assigning copyright and issues
of safe abd legal publishing. Perhaps it is more important to have
students create an Internet code of ethics instead of just blocking
their access. We shouldn't be "the Internet police," we should teach
students to be self-responsible.
- Students need to feel ownership over their own
learning, and they need to be personally responsible. One way to teach
children to do this is to give them a topic (e.g., Las Vegas) and tell
them to add information (or correct information) on Wikipedia. A school could even
create a wiki for a specific topic (e.g., the Donner Party) and have
them contribute to the wiki over many year.
Podcasting:
This session was presented by David Warlick.
- EPN Web: This is a
network, created by David Warlick, that breaks down educational
podcasts into categories (beyond K-12 and higher education, the two
educational options in iTunes).
- Recommended Podcast: Summa Historica (Professor Bob
tells fascinating stories of history's people, laces, and cultures
in ten minute daily podcasts.)
- Read The Flight of
the Creative Class.
- Use Audacity to alter recorded wavefiles.
- Open the file in Audacity, and begin by deleting
unwanted sections (e.g., umms). You do this by highlighting the problem
areas and press "Delete."
- Change the megahertz to 44,100. This is possible by
highlighting the "Project rate" (bottom-left of the project window).
- Add audio backgroungs. Under "Project," add
"Ambient Sounds." You can "Generate Silence" if you want the sounds to
not overlap. It is also possible to use the "Envelope Tool" to decrease
the sound of the background sounds.
- Use Feedburner
to create an RSS 2.0 file.
Think.com:
Great, free resource for school-based blogging created and managed by
Oracle. Allows teachers to create accounts for their students that
exist within a safe, closed, teacher-moderated environment.
Students/teachers can find other students/classrooms with whom to
communicate. There is also the ability to easily create webpages that
parents can access. Presented by Oracle representatives.
ThinkQuest:
This is a competition between students in various age-groups
(elementary, middle, and high school levels) who engage in web design.
Managed by Oracle. Presented by Oracle representatives.
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