School 1.0

• Rituals, rules, and routines
• Focus on the right answers
• This is okay.

School 2.0

• Engaged
• Self-directed
• Project-driven
•  Independent problem solvers
• Teachers and students are empowered
• Learning community

Meaningfulness + Significance + Connectedness =  Contribution

EXAMPLE:

Conrad calls the school during summer vacation, wants to come to school to work on his video project.  He won’t take no for an answer.  The school secretary forwards the call to Principal Tim Tyson.  The principal explains that it is too late to make your class grade better, the report cards have already been printed.  “But Dr. Tyson, I got an A”, Conrad explained.   “You said if the project was perfect, you would put it on the school website and into the iTunes Store for the whole world to see”, he continued.  The next day, Conrad showed up at 9am with two of his partners to get back to work on his project.

For the first time, schools can have access to true global distribution.

MabryOnline & iTunes

• School website serves up 1.5 million files per month on average.
• In June 2007, it served up 4 million files.
• People can subscribe to school content via iTunes.

The deal that Dr. Tyson put forth to his students:

• Your work has to be the best of the best
• Ask yourself: “What is it about your work that is so great that it needs to be out there for the entire world to see?”
• Students from New Dehli, Tasmania, Beijing, Shanghai, Peru, Georgia, Australia, UK are viewing their work.
• Students feel a great deal of satisfaction when their work is globally relevant.
• This is authentic assessment: when an A is not good enough for a student.

When does meaningfulness start?

• First job?
• Graduate college?
• Right now!
• We need to have a meaningful activities for students right now.

Project on Human Embryonic Stem Cell Research

• The students approached Dr. Tyson with their topic.
• Two weeks later, the students (on their own) had already scheduled a field trip to Emory University to spend two hours with Dr. Chetta in her research lab.  She presented one of the same intro presentations that she does for her doctoral students and physicians.
• Produced a movie that Patrice Weaver said was the best thing she’d ever seen.  Won the film festival.

Students wanted to make a difference, not just report:

• Commercialization of Drinking Water
• Human Embryonic Stem Cell Research
  • Shot everything but the video of the sonogram.
• Child Slave Labor on the Ivory Coast
  • “Social studies, but more grown up.”
• Saving African lives from Malaria
• Captivity of Elephants
• Poverty in China
• Organ Donation
  • Done like the series 24.
  • Students created every scene except for two that were recorded in the operating room by Emory University.
• Immigration in United States
• Genetically Modified Food
  • Students changed the way their principal buys his food.

Not all about technology and connectivity

• “I wish we could get away from this argument in our profession.”
• The effective educator is the one who bridges the gap between technology and meaningfulness.
• Students want to go beyond preparing for the next year, they want to make a contribution today.
• School 1.0 = Taking it in
• School 2.0 = Giving it out
• We need to stop simplifying our students’ education into tiny little segments.

Dr. Tyson’s closing keynote video/slides can be found here.

Link to session information page here.

Tuesday 3:30-4:30

Some resources:

• thefischbowl.blogspot.com
• learningandlaptops.blogspot.com
• www.lps.k12.co.us/schools/arapahoe/21c/necc2007.html

Staff Development is critical!

• Teachers meet once every three weeks for three hours - talk about:
  • educational theory, latest research, etc
  • pedagogy, how it looks in the classroom, collaborating & coming up with ideas (would try things out and then come back in person & blogs to report)
  • technology piece, show tool (blogger, del.icio.us, wikis, etc) and talk about how they can be used in the classroom.
• Key point that helped them: teachers teaching teachers, not from administration or coming from above.

How did they want to change the way they taught? They realized they wanted to teach via Constructivism - humans construct knowledge. Learning is an active process.

Created professional learning environment. Treated students as professionals.

• Tables, rolling chairs, so they can change the dynamic of the classroom all the time
  • allows for increased collaboration
• changed posters in the room to things students were interested in, and added some motivational type posters
• posted expectations the students created (what do you expect of your teachers, of the class, of each other?) Had students sign it, laminated it, and posted

Successes

• engagement. Engagement with teachers (lunchtime isn’t teachers complaining, they talk about how they’re teaching & share ideas). Engagement with students (they’re blogging! Voluntarily!)
• Students blogging around the perimeter live while others discuss in a fishbowl
• Skype is better than blogger

Collaboration

• within and without the classroom
• what’s important for our students to have to be successful in the 21st century? Teamwork! Know when to be a leader and when to be a follower
• Collaboration on wiki with another class from another country
• Collaboration != cooperative learning
  • collaboration: students together are teaching each other and learning. Helping each other understand. Goes beyond walls
  • cooperative learning: same idea, but not as engaged. Restricted to classroom.

Get students connected

• Be a reflective thinker - ask the students to be reflective on their learning. They can tie it together to things they did before in the course, in other courses, etc. Promoting the reflection promotes connections.
• Take an active role in their learning. Want to learn want to make connections.
• Blogging gives voice of their own
• whose standards are you using? Yours or your students’?
• Podcasting! You’d be surprised who is interested in what students have to say. Anything students write can be podcasting. Grandparents can listen!
• Wrote their own textbooks. Student editor worked with instructor. Teams of students got photos, format, text, etc. Used wikis to help collaboration.
• Googledocs, review toolbar in Word
• Digital Storytelling. Ask one big question, talk about it all semester (What does it take to challenge the system? What matters? etc). Everything relates to question, at the end they build a digital story relating everything to that question.

Higher education institutions are putting their research videos on ResearchChannel.com. Also check out TeacherTube for video.

Recommend the use of SurveyMonkey, ZOHO Polls, SurveyScholar, Zoomerang, and Response-o-Matic for original research.

We need to make sure that were teaching ethical usage of the polling services when we let students administer their own research.

Allow students to choose RSS feeds that they will be responsible for reporting back to the class. This could be used in tandem with writing this news to a blog.

Wikibooks

Respect of intellectual material. Emphasis needs to be placed on attributing ownership to original authors.

We want students to share, but once content is uploaded to the web, they have to ask permission from all of the content owners. Focus on using Creative Commons material.

Advice for professional social networks: use professional user names.

We need to speak up for issues that prevent students accessing the information and tools to which they need access.

Students need access to good (free if possible) to get their work done.

The presenters plugged all sorts of wikis for various levels (class wiki, class/play wiki, team wiki, etc.)

PrimaryAccess.org to put audio and still images together (similar to Snapkast?)

Train thyself: Hitchhkr.com, edtechtalk.com.

Link to session page here.

Tuesday 2:00 - 3:00
Dr Sue Stoddart

Key Words: Effective and Lively!

• instructor presence - must be more present than normally would be in a face-to-face class
• lively - engage students
• know all the tools available to online discussions (see discussions not read, etc)

How do we really get to know students in online learning? - Through online discussions!

Great discussions do not “just happen”. You need to put work in before, during, and after.

Before - prepare in advance

• clarify goals & objectives - use to evaluate student participation, revisit and reevaluate
• plan guiding questions for discussion
• design activities that will prepare students to discuss - research material/interview for discussion topics
• clarify goals for each discussion
• talk about discussion (what is a discussion? How do you participate effectively in a discussion?)
• set ground rules - provide a rubric! (no “im speak”, etc)
  • Quality of Information
  • Resources
  • Interaction
  • Participation
  • Delivery

During - great discussions are purposefully led

• ask questions that establish what students understand before asking them to do more complex or original thinking - don’t want students to get to the end too quickly. Let students ask each other questions, and evolve discussions. Students not participating this way? Step in, ask questions, and promote students asking questions as well
• ask follow-up questions that allow students to develop or clarify a response. Model this so your students will start doing this as well
• give feedback as they go, tell them how many points they are getting, where they are lacking, what they can do to improve

After - great discussions are assessed

• debriefing or journals - provide record or summary of key points as they emerge. Key things they learned from each discussion, and from course in general. Add entries every week.
• draw connections between day’s discussion and other topics - even a final project. All discussions build on each other up to the final project. Each is relevant to the greater course and can be connected to earlier and later discussions
• evaluate student responses based on ground rules. Not just quantity but quality of responses
• Use your rubric! Follow what it says, don’t grade on things not on the rubric.

Building to more discussions

• how will next discussion build on learning created in the current discussion?
• Always go in with discussions already set up. But allow the flexibility to change if the discussions shift, or if there are problems with a key topic, or if students understand something earlier than expected
• use students’ comments or written responses to address new discussions
• emphasize connections between new topic and earlier discussions

Extend the Traditional Classroom - benefits and uses of online discussions

• student interaction outside of class
• seek clarification for issue encountered in coursework - students can come more prepared if they have questions in between classes
• build on one another’s perspectives and gain deeper understanding - don’t be afraid to learn from students, don’t be afraid if they “know more about technology” than you do
• class preparation - use to discuss ideas to use later in class
• monitor discussions to identify where students are struggling
• frequently asked & straightforward questions
• shy students, students lacking confidence - they can flourish in online discussion! They find that they do have things to contribute, and gain confidence as they go
• chat rooms - one-on-one conversations with students, group work, special topics. (Sue doesn’t use chat rooms frequently, but when she does she doesn’t require them for the grade.) Fastest typers tend to contribute the most. Good for interviews with authors or other people of interest.

Failing Online Discussions

• no community - usually because the instructor isn’t present enough
• no motivation - no requirements, not clear goals and rubrics, don’t know if anyone is actually reading what they’re doing
• unfamiliarity - don’t know how to use the discussions. Use Snapkast, Camtasia, etc to help students learn
• no credit - doesn’t motivate students
• unrealistic goals

Benefits of Online Discussions

• students can think through responses thoroughly and take time to compose and edit before submitting
• can respond, save, and “sleep on it”
• can hear from each individual student as opposed to only the more outgoing people who are more apt to respond traditionally
• interactive learning and accountability - putting your thoughts in text. It’s there, and will be there in the future

Online Discussions are what make online courses courses and not just shoveling a face-to-face course online and expecting students to interact with it.

Free cartoons for instructors from Randy Glasbergen!

Link to session page here.

OR: iTunes/YouTube and the Academic MySpace

This topic in one word: VOICE (individual identity, reflection, meaning making, and new literacy).

Why digital stories in ePortfolios?

• Reflection is the heart and soul of a portfolio
• Digital stories can humanize any model of ePortfolio

Plugs The World is Flat by Thomas Friedman.

“How we educate our children may prove to be more important than how much.”

Plugs A Whole New Mind by Daniel Pink.

Balancing right brain skills for conceptual age with the left brain skills for the information age.

6 Essential High-Concept, High Touch Aptitudes

1. Design - create objects
2. Story - ability to fashion a compelling narrative
3. Symphony - synthesis
4. Empathy - forge relationships
5. Play - laughter clubs
6. Meaning - pulling it all together

Experiential Learning Model - Practice and Metacognition as a continuous cycle.

Storytelling as a theory of learning.

Learner ownership and Control of Electronic Portfolio Development.

Digital storytelling process:

Learners create a 1-4 minute story (digital video clip, first person narrative, illustrated by still images, music track to add tone).

Purposes of Storytelling

1. Voice & Personality - Enhanced Audio of Granddaughter Victoria (so much energy!)
2. Legacy - My Sister Sarah (tell story about her newborn sisters’ fight with cancer)
3. Biography - Victoria reads her autobiography.
4. Memoir - focuses on the memories of the storyteller, often much longer than a typical story.
5. Reflection-Transition - Young man explains why he became a teacher to one of his elementary school teacher.
6. Reflection-Decision - Use a digital story to weigh the options in a decision to be made, document the process used to make decisions.
7. Benchmarking Development - A digital story as a snapshot throughout the development of a learner (example had a series of digital stories, twice a year from kindergarten to senior year in high school).
8. Change Over Time - Maintain a collection of work over time to help recognize when growth has occurred. Victoria talks about how much she has grown since kindergarten now that she is in 1st grade.
9. Evidence of Collaboration - provide explanation of the process of a group’s collaborative process on a project.
10. Documentary - Take the place of a PowerPoint or research paper. Story takes on the characteristics of a documentary, often fact-based without emotional content.
11. Record of Experience - Experience doesn’t always yield a discrete artifact. A digital story can reflect and document and experience and be presented as final evidence of an experience. Documenting a rural Alaska experience.
12. Oral Language - Learning to speak in a second language. Learners record their voice, speaking or reading aloud at different stages in their development.
13. Rich Digital Artifacts - Showcase student work with an explanatory narrative. Replacement for written narrative because some students have trouble reflecting textually.

Voice = Authenticity, digital storytelling brings out that voice.

Process to develop digital stories:

1. Script development, sometimes in groups called story circles.
2. Record the author reading the story (audio recording/editing)
3. Capture and process the images
4. Recods/edit the video.
5. Present/share the digital story.

Online tools for video editing:

• BubbleShare
• PrimaryAccess
• JumpCut
• EyeSpot
• PhotoBucket

Online tools for audio editing:

• Odeo
• Podomatic

Link to session page here.

Driving forces behind Wikitext:

• Students were not using textbooks, often sold back to bookstore with shrink wrap still on them.
• Dissatisfaction with timeliness of textbooks.

Theory behind Wikitext:

• Enhance student learning by increasing involvement in course content and encouraging higher level thinking.
• Introduce collaborative environments.
• Use technology as an instructional tool.

Designing the Wikitext:

• Developed an online text book by adapting content from existing textbook as a guide.
• Started with grad students, chose topics and wrote sample articles.
• Support sessions created, written support developed (formatting guidelines, resources, sidebars, composing quality questions, navigation, etc.)

Implementation of the Wikitext:

• Done in introduction to education course.
• 227 students, online and face to face.
• All students had to choose a topic to write a 1,000 word article. Needed to include 5 multiple choice questions, 1 essay questions, and a sidebar discussion.
• Students were put into groups. Each group reviewed and rated all articles.
• Rated on a three point scale (outstanding, satisfactory, unsatisfactory). Changed to five point scale in the next semester.
• Best version of each topic’s article was published in the wiki. This was the article that students were responsible for knowing on their exams.
• Ratings of articles were averaged into final course grade.
• Ratings tracked by student ID number. Edits tracked by TA’s.
• Students were then responsible for one major edit to an article (> 150 words).

Methods of the Wikitext:

• A lot of research was done on this process. Eight different studies done (attitudinal, student response to process, holistic approach to the process, comparison of student-assigned to teacher-assigned grades, pre-course, during course, and post-course etc.)
• Most data self-reported

Results of the studies:

• Student concerns: 28.3% research for article, 20.1% writing composition, 19.5% concerns on technology, 15.7% worry about quality of content
• Final grades were slightly higher than when using normal textbook.
• 22% reported high involvement in traditional course, 61% reported high involvement with Wikitext.
• 100% no spent ~2 hours, 50% spent no time out of class with traditional, 89% reported 1-4 hours a week with Wikitext.
• 69% agreed that they experienced active learning after the course was over
• 53% got a lot of worth out of the class.
• 79% said content currency was higher or much higher, 47% said quality was better.
• One student said it was the most inspiring undertaking of education revamping he had ever experienced.
• Some said they didn’t want to read articles by their “idiot peers” and that they didn’t want to do “the instructor’s work for them”. These students expected a more top-down pedagogy model.
• 62% wanted to use Wikitext again.
• 70% reported increase in technology skills.
• Conclusion: student centered learning increased, active-learning increased, technology skill level increased.

Link to the final versions of the book created here.

Link to session page here.

What makes a global citizen?

Going beyond learning about the world to learn with the world.

One who can connect with any person from any heritage or background, one who does not think one culture is the epitome of all cultures, one who is not afraid to borrow from another culture.

In order to acquire the skills needed for the 21st century, we need to step back and accept that everyone has strengths. Many countries have been isolated culturally and linguistically. Many of our students do not understand the value of other cultures; that there is wisdom out there in cultures other than ours.

There is nobody out there that knows too much that they cannot learn from another culture…there is nobody out there that is not smart enough that they cannot teach someone from another culture.

Students need to expand their appreciation of other cultures, or at least come to an understanding that there is value in other cultures. Many companies today are looking for this kind of appreciation.

This session was multicast to several places in Georgia. Barry Joseph came in at one point via Second Life to talk about Global Kids.

iEARN sponsors communities of practice both online and face to face. Engages about 2 million students every day in interactive curriculum based collaborative projects with peers in 118 countries.

EF Tours has a mission to make sure that every student has an international experience by the time they leave high school.

TakingITGlobal is an online community started by young people to take action worldwide.

Link to session page here.

Monday early afternoon

Again, only had a bit of time. I spent a good deal wandering and just looking at what all was there. Stopped to chat with a few people, dropped off my card, etc etc. Two booths I visited and spent a bit of time at:

Smart Technologies

Smart Technologies is the maker of SmartBoard - the interactive white board. I’ve actually had the chance to use a SmartBoard before, and it’s really neat. Lafayette has one in their language labs, and I got to play with it while I was there a year and a half ago.

I saw a good deal of new features I hadn’t known about. The software comes with a program you can use to make slides for a presentation right there. You can also open up a powerpoint or keynote presentation. They now have a recording feature to record the presentation for later playback. I asked about podcasting capabilities, and right now it just saves the presentations as a .avi file. No quick “click here to upload” button yet, but when I asked the representative said she wanted to take it back to their development team because it would be a useful function. Whether anything will happen with that is a different story however…

Another thing I hadn’t known about is the ability to use the Smart software without a SmartBoard. It can be used with a tablet PC and a projector to use in, say, a large lecture hall. You have the same annotation and recording capabilities. This looks an awful lot like Lecture123, another product we’ve been evaluating.

Task Stream

Task Stream is the commercial ePortfolio product that Helen Barrett recommended to us in the workshop on Saturday. From what I could gather, this might be a product we could conceivably use. We are working hard to get a usable ePortfolio system implemented at Rutgers. Though we love our open-source Sakai, and the open-source ePortfolio software we’re trying to use now (can’t remember the name off the top of my head…) fits in easily with it, Task Stream has some really great features. I’ll have to drag Jesse back there and get his opinion on it, since he’s been the one more involved in ePortfolios.

Monday 12:30 - 1:30
Paul Sparks

prsparks@pepperdine.edu

“The best way to predict the future is to invent it yourself.” - Alan Kay

Create a new identity - Avatar

• fully customizable
• hair/clothes/gestures/etc
• reflection of yourself OR new identity
• can have more than one avatar (”alts”)
• creating identities helps learn!

Participate in Community

• spaces built for interaction
• bars, dances, etc
• people share experiences through their avatars
• real sense of presence

Over 1 million active users in the last year, up to 8,000 private islands. But! Only 60 schools involved in Second Life

McLuhan Problem - create a virtual classroom in Second Life. Get this wonderful new technology….and make avatars sit in desks in rows???

Some ideas:

• create environment based on conceptual ideas of a book
  SLiki (collaborating to create virtual spaces)
• go to an island speaking a foreign language

Collaboration in Second Life

(student thoughts)

• collaborate in ways unique to SL
• think about learning in a different way
• take a concept, build something to represent it
• requires constant communication

Learning in Second Life

(student thoughts)

• take a concept, build something to represent it
• learning curve
• come to deeper understanding of topic and learning

Link to session page here.

Monday Morning

We didn’t have much time to spend in the vendor fair so far this morning, but we did get a chance to visit some of the booths.

Best Buy

We mainly went to Best Buy to get some really big bags.

They had Dance Dance Revolution displayed, and were talking about how some schools have been using them in physical education programs, etc. Not great for our purposes in higher education, but the game has demonstrated some results in helping get kids more active.

Google

I am a fan of Google. I love the applications they have developed. There was not a lot there today that I wasn’t already familiar with, but I did learn a few cool things.

They have Google Docs and Spreadsheets on demo, of course, which allows online collaborative editing. You can work on a document online with others you have invited.

Google Earth was on display as well. I never thought this had much use in higher education, but it was always fun to play around with. Apparently though there are some who are using it for landscape and architecture. It can be used in conjunction with another product, SketchUp, for use with 3D images. This could be particularly useful in architecture.

I tried out Google Blogger for the first time. Now, I don’t generally blog much, and I only used it to make one post, but it doesn’t seem too drastically different from other blogging tools you have out there (such as WordPress which we are using for this blog). Jesse would have loved it had Google Blogger been able to be hosted on your own server, as opposed to having everything up on the company server. I think one of the main advantages of this tool over others is probably that it’s easy to use with the vast array of other Google products.

I joined the Google for Educators group on Google Groups. More or less a listserv, with some nice additional features in your typical Google style.

And last but not least, I checked out the station on Custom Search Engines. This was pretty neat - you can set up a group of websites to use when performing searches. So say you frequently do searches on a particular subject, and you have a handful of sites you know are reliable and thorough. You can put those sites in a group, and do searches on just that group. It cuts out on all the irrelevant and unreliable information you can get doing normal searches.

I completed a scavenger hunt in doing tasks at each of these stations, and got a Google tote bag! The scavenger hunt to get a goodie was great marketing, not to mention fun and creative, in my opinion. Did I mention I really like Google?

Parallels

We went to Parallels mainly to see a demonstration of its capabilities with 3D graphics and gaming. Right now, I have to run my games in Bootcamp — which is alright, but can be a nuisance when I have to restart my computer every time I want to go in and out of a game. (Yeah, I have a MacBook Pro and am actually running it in OS X and not Windows…surprised myself there.)

Well, they didn’t have anything to show us, but the new version will have those capabilities! Though it was suggested we test it out on the demo version first.

Apple

We hit Apple quickly on our way out. It’s the largest booth there, so the ten minutes we spent at it wasn’t nearly enough. We saw a very neat new device by Bretford that will be released shortly. It lets you sync files from up to 40 (I believe) iPods at once. You can also download onto multiple iPods as well. This has some wonderful possibilities (have all of your students podcast on a topic!). Not to mention it looks so cool to see that many iPods all neatly tucked away in a drawer. Here is a shot of it: