Category: EdTech

Making Thinking Visible with Technology #pzmewinter15

I’m looking forward to speaking at today’s Project Zero Memphis Winter Workshop. Here are some of the resources that I’ll be sharing.

Visible Thinking includes methods for making students’ thinking visible through learning routines that are thinking rich. These routines encourage the development of a culture of thinking and can be used across all grade levels and content areas. With freely available technologies students can engage in Thinking Routines to provide evidence of their thinking and demonstrate their understanding of course content in multiple ways (images, audio, video, presentations, artwork, and more). The Making Thinking Visible with Technology (MTVT) project seeks to provide professional development, a database of lesson plans, and resources to help teachers to develop opportunities for students to make their thinking visible with technology.

Making Thinking Visible with Technology

Additional Resources

If you would like to investigate this further you can visit the full set of additional resources on my professional development wiki.

 

Google Announces New Learning Management System (LMS)

Google Classroom“Classroom is a new, free tool coming to Google Apps for Education that helps teachers easily and quickly create and organize assignments, provide feedback, and communicate with their classes” (Source). “Classroom weaves together Google Docs, Drive and Gmail to help teachers create and organize assignments quickly, provide feedback efficiently, and communicate with their classes with ease…it lets students organize their work, complete and turn it in, and communicate directly with their teachers and peers” (Source).

The following video highlights the experiences of some of the teachers and students who provided feedback as Google developed Classroom.

Benefits for Classes

Easy to Set up
Teachers can add students directly or share a code with their class to join. It takes just minutes to set up.

Saves Time
The simple, paperless assignment workflow allows teachers to create, review, and grade assignments quickly, all in one place.

Improves Organization
Students can see all of their assignments on an assignments page, and all class materials are automatically filed into folders in Google Drive.

Enhances Communication
Classroom allows teachers to send announcements and questions instantly. Since students can post to the stream, they can help out their classmates.

Affordable and Secure
Like the rest of our Google Apps for Education services, Classroom contains no ads, never uses your content or student data for advertising purposes, and is free for schools.

Learn more: http://google.com/edu/classroom

Developing Young Authors with Storybird #aaim14

StorybirdI’m enjoying being in Ft. Smith, Arkansas for the 2014 Arkansas Association of Instructional Media Conference. Below are my slides from the workshop that I facilitated yesterday. All the workshop materials and resources (including a video tutorial, additional examples, notes, etc.) are available on my wiki, Learning Telecollaboratively. The slides also include a link to a special download containing information for using Storybird in preparation for Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) assessment.

Storybirds are short, art-inspired stories, presentations, reports, or tutorials you and your students make to share, read, and print. Storybird is a fun, collaborative website that can be integrated in all content areas and at all grade levels. It can be an effective resource for teaching parts of a story, the writing process, promoting creativity, and more. STEM and social studies teachers can use Storybird for engaging alternatives to traditional lessons, reports and presentations. Storybird also seamlessly keeps a portfolio of each student’s work.

Participants will be guided in setting up accounts and helped as they begin using Storybird.com’s tools and services. Participants will learn how to use the teacher-specific tools.

Win Prizes in IDT Memphis’ Picture Scavenger Hunt at #AAIM14

Klikaklu“Treasure hunts are a fun way for students to use problem solving skills, to work in teams, to practice comprehensions skills, and to use technology resources all while practicing subject matter” (Source).

Klikaklu has reinvented the scavenger hunt. The iOS app allows you to create a treasure hunt based on images. It is a photo hunt game that uses your phone’s GPS, camera, and advanced image matching technology. It’s a great way to quickly create and play treasure hunts! Share hunts privately with friends and family, or leave them in public places for students and others to find. Lead people to new and interesting spots. Reveal secrets and rewards when they crack your clues. No geocaching boxes or QR codes are necessary, so you can create hunts around school, in national parks, museums, at the public library, or on field trips – any place you want to add an element of challenge or mystery, or share information with others.

AAIM Conference

Educators at the 2014 AAIM Conference can download the app and begin competing for prizes in IDT Memphis‘ virtual scavenger hunt. Our scavenger hunt is a very simple demonstration of how the app works and the game is played. Browse through the resources below for ideas for using Klikalu at your school.

Tutorial

Resources

Pirate Day Treasure Hunts

iPad Orienteering with Klikaklu

Reinventing the Scavenger Hunt

The Teacher’s Quick Guide to Scavenger Hunts

Make Your Own Treasure Hunt

Talking Ed.: FIRST Robotics

Talking Ed.: FIRST Robotics

Talking Ed. with Tod Traughber

Episode 005 (View entire series)

The mission of FIRST is “to inspire young people to be science and technology leaders, by engaging them in exciting mentor-based programs that build science, engineering and technology skills, that inspire innovation, and that foster well-rounded life capabilities including self-confidence, communication, and leadership” (Source). The organization seeks to show students of every age that science, technology, and problem-solving are not only fun and rewarding, but are proven paths to successful careers and a bright future for us all.

Tod Traughber is one of my doctoral students and he coordinates the judges for one of the regional FIRST Robotics Competitions. In brief conversations here and there, Tod had been trying to convey to me just how amazing the organization is and how exciting the competitions are. I was blown away once we were able to dedicate some time to discuss nothing but FIRST. Their mission and activities are something that I believe many students, teachers, and schools would love to be a part of. Thus, I invited Tod to participate in the following interview in hopes that we could get this great information out to everyone.

Talking Ed.: Overcoming Challenges through Social Media

Talking Ed.: Social Media

Talking Ed. with Lisa Durff

Episode 004 (View entire series)

Earlier this week I had the opportunity spend time talking with Lisa Durff (@durff, +Lisa Durff). She discussed her special needs and the importance of social media and her personal learning network (PLN). In particular, Lisa makes heavy use of Second Life and Twitter as they enable her to interact with others in meaningful ways.

You can visit Lisa’s blog to become acquainted her work, interests, and thinking. Especially note this post for a bit of background on her physical challenges and insight into ways that technology helps her overcome them.

I think that you’ll find that Lisa’s ideas and experiences will open your eyes to new possibilities about technology’s ability to empower us. I know her story inspires me.

Learning with Web 2.0 and Social Media #idt7078

IDT 7078I’m very excited to be starting another learning adventure with graduate students here at The University of Memphis. For the next seven weeks I’ll be teaching IDT 7078: Seminar in Instructional Design and Technology. This semester’s topic is Learning with Web 2.0 and Social Media. Many of you may recall (because you were active participants) that I previously taught this course with a similar topic (Teaching and Learning with Web 2.0) in the Summers of 2008 and 2009. In both of these instances the students collaborated to publish the first two editions of the ebook Teaching and Learning with Web 2.0. Their exemplary work earned nominations for the international Edublog Awards (2008, 2009).

I also offered this course during Spring 2013 and the seminar topic was Learning with Web 2.0. It was the first time that I’d incorporated my work from Harvard, the idea of making thinking visible with technology, into a course. It pushed everyone’s ideas about thinking, learning, understanding, and technology. This experience as well as the work and research I’ve continued to do in the past year have resulted in the development of the class that starts today.

This semester’s class promises to be another outstanding experience for all of us. It has been designed utilizing some of the best practices and student feedback from the earlier offerings, and now incorporates many of the innovations in technology that have been developed in recent years. As we consider all the “cool” technologies and social media we will always keep the focus on their contributions to learning. These technologies can help us go a long ways in making thinking visible.

It’s going to be a different sort of experience and a wildly fun journey into learning. We invite you to join us!

hgsepzfol #hgsepzfol

Yelling at Your Computer Isn’t the Same as Yelling at Your Car [Video]

I’m developing some resources for a course that I’ll begin teaching after Spring Break and ran across this video. I think it can be used as a provocative way of framing a conversation with students about digital citizenship and netiquette.

How do you approach these topics with your students? Can you recommend related resources that I (and others) might use?

Netiquette

Developing Young Authors #MECA14

StorybirdStorybirds are short, art-inspired stories, presentations, reports, or tutorials you and your students make to share, read, and print. Storybird is a fun, collaborative website that can be integrated in all content areas and at all grade levels. It can be an effective resource for teaching parts of a story, the writing process, promoting creativity, and more. STEM and social studies teachers can use Storybird for engaging alternatives to traditional lessons, reports and presentations. Storybird also seamlessly keeps a portfolio of each student’s work.

Participants will be guided in setting up accounts and helped as they begin using Storybird.com’s tools and services. Participants will learn how to use the teacher-specific tools.

Below are my slides from the workshop that I’ve taught a couple of times this week at the Mississippi Educational Communications Conference (MECA) in Jackson, MS. All the workshop materials and resources (including a video tutorial, additional examples, notes, etc.) are available on my wiki, Learning Telecollaboratively.

Related Articles

Managing Online Identities

Keeping up with the state of technology is not easy. New social media services such as Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Pinterest, Diigo, YouTube , Tumblr, Instagram, and AudioBoo continue to emerge and users sign-up and setup profiles without considering the full ramifications of sharing personal information. Practical tips for helping you and your students thoughtfully setup and maintain your online identities will be shared.

Below are my slides for this session. All the workshop materials and resources are available on my wiki, Learning Telecollaboratively.