Facilitating Collaboration - Session Five

Well, to be honest, I haven't been giving class my full attention these past few weeks (hence the tardiness of this post). No excuses though! I loved creating the Ning for my science department (thanks Terry for the idea...) In general, I'm all about being organized - my students swear I have OCD and having things up and running before using them on the job is my usual procedure. But, with the creation of the wiki for my students in forensic science and other (new) topics I'm covering in my classroom, it really feels liberating to say to my students that we'll be tackling some of the material together and that it's new for me too. That's not to say that I can jump into a classroom unprepared, but I no longer feel guilty (not sure if that's the best word) when something doesn't go as I planned or something unforseen pops up. I have been confronted by the students that are out there to push buttons and will ask questions until they trip up the teacher to "prove" how little we know, but I've always been able to handle them with some finesse. It's just that when I've planned a lesson, activity or lab and I haven't anticipated all of the angles, my usual internal response is frustration that I didn't have it perfect. With really focusing on collaboration these past weeks, I've learned to let a little bit of that go and have been able to bring in some activities without hours of preparation and pre-planning attempting to find all of the stumbling blocks ahead of time.
So this week, I've been just working through the immediate task at hand and I've set up my sci dept wiki, invited the other teachers to it, but have yet to see any collaboration. I've run into the same issue with setting up a blog for my staff development team here at school. I started small with both endeavors - for staff development I only invited 3 members and my sci department consists of just 4 others. Everyone is so busy that they really don't want to take the time to learn something new, even if it will benefit them immensely in the near future. (Although I just realized that we have a sci dept meeting today and I may have a captive audience...)

Facilitating Collaboration - Session Four

For the class this week, we're to start a wiki or Ning and I have half a mind to use one that I just created for my Forensic Science final exam. My class has no textbooks and so I often copy off various print sources for my students and provide additional online resources through the class Moodle. When starting this class, I decided to play around with the idea of having the students create the class text in a wiki (Ning is blocked at our school) as their final exam. I set up the wiki and created pages that would be like the chapters in a book. Next, I added members (I created user names and passwords for the students that contained no identifying information in case the wiki is ever made public) and checked to be sure that all students had access. Finally, I assigned students to groups and pages that they would be editing together. During our final exam periods the students created content following a rubric we had put together the previous day. I gave them three days to edit and in the process, students created a few new pages and re-organized the groups while working in etherpad to be sure that each student was contributing. Creating this wiki (I've opened it up to a protected status so that you can see what we're up to) was our trial and error session that I will use to plan out and create a new wiki for facilitating collaboration. I'm hoping to include the podcast I'm working on. I've scripted out an explanation of one of the anatomy labs we do to study the effects of muscle fatigue.

Facilitating Collaboration - Session Three

So this week we worked on RSS feeds, setting up a photo sharing site and thinking about Nings in education. How can they be applied to my school or job? Well, first of all I have to recruit some individuals willing to go out on a limb so to speak and get out of their comfort zones. For example? I started a blog for my teacher development group - we're looking to implement a portfolio component to the high school curriculum - and I invited the three other members of my team (start small, right?) and there has been no action (as you can see here). I'll I've heard back that it was too confusing and hard. It was too much to take in just to keep information accessible. UHHHGGGG!(I feel like Charlie Brown when Lucy pulls the ball away at the last second...)
Soooooo, I must first find a few individuals willing to be daring - OK, open-minded at least - that will succumb to my exploits of engaging their brains. The RSS feeds are easy - I already envision my students blogging (when the sites are unblogged - I mean unblocked)and subscribing to their feeds so that I don't have to search out their individual blogs to find updates (I was wondering how Louie has managed that all of this time.) I also see using feeds when I find cool blogs that I want to follow, like the science ones I found last week. I've also played with the RSS reader account provided by Google and have created a shared page with interesting blogs I follow.
Photo sharing is also an easy incorporation for me. I've been taking photos during my classes and labs - not of the students, but of the labs and activities themselves. I plan to post these as slide shows and use them in video clips (like those we made in Animoto). I want to post them in various places - my school web pages, our Moodle, the Wiki etc. This would make them viewable by those in the class and on the outside - I hope to help parents answer the question "So what did you do in school today?" Now, understand that there wouldn't be updates by day, but an overview of topics and activities.
Finally, I would love to use Ning in our school, but the site is blocked as social networking and I'm having a bit of a time getting our tech crew to adjust and tweak the filters so that the district is maintaining their policies while opening up restrictions in some areas. So I started a wiki in wikispaces (I'd link you to the home page, but it's private right now to "protect" the students) instead.

Facilitating Collaboration - Session Two

When researching about the uses and abuses of blogs I really found the link to Electronic Frontier Foundation interesting. When I first started reading, I was thinking about using this in classes to give students an understanding of the material that may be considered appropriate to blog about. Then as I read further, I found the material supportive of the first amendment rights but it seemed to condone making editorial comments about students, teachers and schools and although it did offer warning, it seemed more like a guide to how much could be written and still be protected. It seemed a little too much like a “how to” manual for students who want to know how much can be said and done while still being protected. So while I think the content is good information for teachers and administrators, I wouldn’t use it in the classroom (as a link for additional reading) just to introduce blogging to students.

I feel an even better way to approach my school district administrators to ease control over blogs and social networking (even Google Docs falls under social networking in our district) would be to introduce the 2007 tech.blorge blog post on school – boards’ reluctance to open up such access by David Cassel. (I would like to see some new numbers posted concerning these restrictions – I’ll bet they haven’t changed very much). I also found Cassel’s comments on the double standard interesting – stating that over 35% of districts report that 90% of their staff members are already participating in social networking outside of their school day.

Finally, I think that I need to subscribe my principle and district administer to the RSS feeds of David Warlick. His simple posts (May 2006 and December 2005) are direct and to the point concerning schools turning away from the technology due to the fear. His 2005 post is a perfect example – I wonder how far we’ve actually come as an educational community. I would tend to believe that there are many educators attempting to introduce more of these technologies into the classroom every week.

Facilitating Collaboration Session One

Wow, I've been reading about the wonderful world of blogs and to be honest I thought very little of them previously. I guess it took Richardson to spell it out for me - blogs are amazingly complex and intricate and the levels of blogging he mentioned really hit home. Now I think I've been doing a good job of "true" blogging, but I didn't really know the pedagogy behind why I was being asked to maintain a blog for this program, other than documentation (which I appreciate in and of itself.)
In the book by Richardson, I've found that the balance between teacher and student is again shifting as the students have much more expertise in many of the areas of collaboration with social tools and the teachers and districts are a step (or more) behind. I like to think that I'm looking to the future and working towards implementing the 21st century skill set in my classroom and that I do a pretty fair job of it already. I also like to think that I'm ahead of the administration at the school (which is a bit tough as the principal is also the technology director) but I never imagined that even though I may be ahead of the curve in some instances, when it comes to a majority of my students I'm still light years behind. I struggle most with getting all of the students on an equal playing field as well, considering the differences in access level to the internet, interest level etc. I mean, most of my students were pushed to the limits by my Pecha Kucha (Pet-cha what? they said through their snickering) and I think their ears were bleeding because I talked so fast in many of the slides...I showed them my Animoto video on blood spatter analysis and most of them had never seen that application. So my struggle is finding the time to pull it all together - the resources, the content (I am a science teacher after all) the examples, the tools, the applications, the access etc. so that THEY can be creating and sharing. My personality type has me wanting to do so much of it right away but I can't wrap my head around one idea before our class has launched me in a new direction. I know that I just have to step back and take it one day at a time and start small (didn't Richardson say that too?)

Digital Storytelling CEdO530 - Session Five

Well, I can tell you that I'm a little frightened to start the Pecha Kucha - I think that I'll have a difficult time finding just the right photographs to use in the presentation, making the building process lengthy. On the other hand, I do like the fact that the "thinking" part of the work is already done in my storyboard so I don't feel the pressure to be creative - I have a plan, now all I have to do is execute it. The other assignment was to create a rubric for a multimedia presentation. I already have in mind a plan and so with the background we have already had in rubrics from other classes and the resources in session five, I don't think that will take to much time.
The resources on buying guides have been minimally helpful. I am in the process of looking for a digital SLR camera right now and have found many resources and reviews online. Then I went to the two links from session five on how to buy digital cameras and found that my research and planning to play with some cameras in a store was right along the guidelines. In fact the guides really served only to reiterate what I already knew - but it was nice to know that I hadn't missed any major "steps".
I've taken a brief look at the two resources that my group is responsible for investigating (SlideSix and authorStream) and both programs seem fairly straightforward and easy to use and implement. At first glance both seem to have many similarities to VoiceThread without the commenting options from outside sources which may be an advantage to the question posed in class on Tuesday. I think Kara had asked what to do about the "openness" of these sites and how to go about controlling the commenting by third parties especially when using these tools with younger students. If I find any major advantages with SlideSix or authorStream, I'll be sure to address that in the evaluation.

Digital Storytelling CEdO530 - Session Four

After the long break between the session 3 and 4 I'm finding it hard to get back into the swing of things. (Not to mention last week it was my birthday, Friday was our anniversary and we were hosting 17 classmates/cousins for my daughter's pirate themed party yesterday - arrgh!) So this morning I finally got my computer out and spent some time looking over Prezi and the associated videos. I'm intrigued and feeling a bit challenged out of my comfort zone this week. The last assignment of revising an existing presentation within powerpoint and uploading into VoiceThread was less intimidating (although still time consuming)than learning a new presentation style & tool like Prezi. That feeling is compounded a little by also attempting to storyboard the Pencha Kucha. It feels like a lot but I am looking forward to the challenge and working on presentations that are so different from the norm. I feel like the Presentation Zen reworks what I already know and Prezi and Pencha Kucha are the new tools to attempt when presentations where the typical powerpoint (even one that's more zen-like) isn't the best choice.