Copy / Paste by Peter Pappas

Your Mission is Life-long Learning: A Video How-To

Most school mission statements include a reference to "fostering life-long learners." Nonetheless if you walk through most schools you'll find an information landscape that seems designed to suppress that goal. Far too many adults telling students what to know - as if that will inspire them to take responsibility for their learning. 

To explore the meaning of life-long learning at your school, I suggest you show this video (and a few of the comments it received) at your next faculty meeting. I've included a few questions for your follow-up discussion. 

Background: "help with a bowdrill set" is a YouTube video posted by a young man looking for help in using his bowdrill to start a fire. After detailing his materials and techniques, he states "I know I'm doing it wrong. Please comment down below so you can teach me how to do it." If you view his YouTube post you'll see that his video has over 8500 views and fifty people took the time to offer concrete advice. I trust he's now successfully starting fires.

Guided questions:
1. How would you define teacher and student in this video? What roles / responsibilities do they have?
2. What information / skills / strategies did the young man lack? What did he have?
3. In what ways is the teaching / learning environment of this video similar to / different from your classroom?
4. What does all this suggest about the paths to life-long learning?

Tip of the hat to Angela Maiers and Ben Grey. I first saw this video at their 2010 ASCD conference workshop   Link to my Prezi coverage of the conference 

Social Media Engagement for Schools

Educators who are already using Twitter (and other social media) know the power of interaction with your own personal learning network. It's like a never ending seminar that you can freely visit to learn, share, and reflect. By far, the best professional development going! Likewise, more of our students are using social media to learn and to share their thinking / creativity with an authentic audience of peers.

While many teachers and students have embraced social media, most schools still lag behind, struggling with the question of whether they should formalize social media networks for their students, teachers, and community. 

First step - help school leadership better understand what social media is and how it can be effectively utilized. (Hint: it's more than Twittering about what you had for lunch.)

My hats off to Hans Mundahl, Director of Experiental Learning and Technology Coordinator at the New Hampton School, who has provided a great video that introduces the potential for social media engagement for schools. He even simplifies it to this tidy equation ...

(Engagement + trust) x targeted audience = impact

Which translates into...

(social media + shared authentic conversation) x personal learning network = quick useful resource

 

 

When your done with the video be sure to take a look at the great wiki page resource that his PLN created.

Will iPad Replace the Textbook?

In these dark times of slashed school budgets, program cuts, and teacher layoffs it seems extravagant to even consider finding funds for student iPads. Nonetheless, Brad Colbow's video tour of new magazine apps shows the iPad's potential for merging purposeful art direction with meaningful academic content. 

Since I first posted this today, I added a sample of what it might look like using material from my homefront series of document-based questions. Add the ability for teacher- and student-created content with in-class social networking and you have education's killer app. Plus I bet students wouldn't forget to bring their "book" to class!  Download IPad-educational-app-demo (7MB pdf)

 

 

87 Free Web 2.0 Projects For the K-12 Classroom

Web 2.0 sites become more useful as the number of users grow. Fortunately for teachers, there's loads of free educational 2.0 applications that can be utilized in the classroom to help students research, collaborate and share what they've learned.

Hats off to British educator, Terry Freedman, who has solicited lessons from 94 teachers from around the world and edited them into a free downloadable book Download Amazing Web 2 Projects 2 online version  (2 MB pdf) Hint: If you're not following Terry on Twitter (as I do) here's his Twitter link. The book also includes Twitter links to all the creative contributors to the project.

The book is organized by grade level and has curated links to all the web resources utilized. Each project includes a teacher-friendly "how to" with benefits, challenges, management tips, sample screen shots / links and learning outcomes. Terry's project is a great example of how the internet can be harnessed to share and collaborate. Who knows, the projects might even inspire your students to collaborate with their peers on their own book!

BTW - If you are a big fan of Wordle, you might like to see another international teacher collaboration "Build Literacy Skills with Wordle".

ASCD Conference 2010 - The Prezi Updates - Final Installment

This is my final Prezi report on the San Antonio ASCD 2010 conference. Producing six reports in three days involved a bit of a learning curve. When I get a chance I intend to write a "how-to" post with Prezi tips. Thanks to ASCD for inviting me to be a guest blogger at the conference. They are great people and gracious hosts.  I met so many wonderful educators at the conference. Thanks for all you do!  Direct link to this Prezi

 

For all my ASCD conference coverage click here.

Download CompassLearning ACSD Pulse Poll Results

ASCD Conference 2010 - Prezi Report 5

Here's my latest Prezi documenting Sunday afternoon at the 2010 ASCD conference in San Antonio. Click the arrow, give it moment to load, then click to advance and navigate.      Direct link to this Prezi

 

 

ASCD 2010 on Prezi

For all my ASCD conference coverage click here

BTW - You can find the cub scout YouTube yideo here

ASCD Conference 2010 - Prezi Report 4

Here's my latest Prezi  documenting the 2010 ASCD conference in San Antonio.

Click the arrow, give it moment to load, then click to advance and navigate. 

Direct link to this Prezi

ASCD 2010 - Sunday AM on Prezi

For all my ASCD conference coverage click here

ASCD Conference 2010 - Prezi Report 3

Here's my latest Prezi  documenting the 2010 ASCD conference in San Antonio.

Click the arrow, give it moment to load, then click to advance and navigate. 

Direct link to this Prezi 

ASCD 2010 Saturday PM on Prezi

For all my ASCD 2010 conference coverage click here

Using Prezi to Cover the ACSD Conference: Part 2

It's Saturday morning at the ASCD conference in San Antonio. I'm on my mid morning break and thought I post my next installment of my Prezi coverage. Click the arrow, give it moment to load, then click to advance and navigate. ... Enjoy. 

 Direct link to this Prezi    

ASCD 2010 on Prezi

For all my ASCD conference coverage click here

 

How to Use Web 2.0 to Create On-line Professional Development

As a former assistant superintendent for instruction one of my responsibilities was organizing the district workshop days. It was valuable time - the entire faculty and staff was available - but also a challenge to develop programs that delivered meaningful PD that were also easy to manage and cost effective. Recently I received an email that introduced me to how one district is leveraging free technology to move their PD day to an online environment.

The email said ... "I'm @steelepierce on Twitter, following you, and also following your Copy/Paste blog.  Would you be available and willing to have a telephone conversation, preferably Skype, with our Teaching & Learning Department?  Topics: 1) our using your ideas on summarizing and notetaking for a professional learning online "workshop" we're creating for our staff (550 teachers!) and 2) your coming to work with our teachers in August 2010. Thanks for your consideration. Looking forward to hearing from you"

It sounded interesting, so I Skyped with the TLC at West Clermont Local Schools - M.E. Steele-Pierce, Cheryl Turner and Tanny McGregor. They developed a PD module based, in part, on my blog post, "How to Teach Summarizing Skills." I shared my input via Skype and also by recording comments into the training module. They built the lesson using Voicethread and delivered it online to faculty across the district during their recent Professional Learning Day. In addition they used Wallwisher (at end of this post) to gather teacher reflections.

 Click to view the training module. Advance or return using arrows. Click thumbnails to see all slides. Use mouse to zoom in / out of slides.

These are challenging times for school districts - and relentless budget cuts add to the challenges. The team at West Clermont shows us how the innovative use of free tech tools can provide PD that is cost effective, builds local capacity, and models the instructional practice we want to see in the classroom. 

For more ideas on how to develop quality PD, see my post "15 Essential Questions for the Successful Staff Developer." For information on learning strategies for the classroom, see my post "18 Literacy Strategies for Struggling Readers - Defining, Summarizing and Comparing"

Use Wiffiti to Follow the Twitter Backchannel at ASCD Conference 2010

I was excited to receive a media invite from ASCD to be a "guest blogger" at their upcoming conference in San Antonio TX (March 6-8, 2010). To get started,  I've posted this Wiffiti screen which is coded to gather Tweets marked with the hashtag #ascd10. It's a great way to keep up with the latest comments via Twitter. Click in lower right for full screen view.

Check out my other ASCD Twitter visualizer - a "Twitter StreamGraph" to track key word use associated with #ascd10. Check back at this blog for my ASCD posts and follow me at Twitter / edteck. And see you at #ASCD10.

Flickr photo credit:  "Midnight Dining" by Elmas156

Twitter Visualization: What are the Key Words being Tweeted at ASCD Conference 2010

I was excited to receive a media invite from ASCD to be a "guest blogger" at their upcoming conference in San Antonio TX (March 6-8, 2010).  To get started, I've posted this Twitter StreamGraphs visualization that displays a flowing graph of the words most frequently used in the latest 1000 tweets marked with the hashtag #ascd10. 

Note: Since the conference closed I've updated the graph to show tweets using #ascd.  Click here for full screen graph.  Twitter StreamGraphs is designed @JeffClark

Check out my other Twitter visualizer - a Wiffiti screen which gathers Tweets marked with the hashtag #ascd10. It's a great way to read the latest comments about the conference. Check back at my blog for my ASCD posts and follow me at Twitter / edteck. And see you at #ASCD10.

 

 

Navigation tips:

 

 Scroll to right for the latest keywords. Scroll down to see the full Tweet.

If you see a large spike in one time period that hides the detail in all the other periods, click in the area to the left of the y-axis to change the vertical scale.

 

 

 

Capture Group Feedback with iPhone Dragon Dictation

This week I've been leading small group sessions with high school teachers focused on "Looking at Student Work." (I'll report back in a blog post later this week). Along the way I've been gathering teacher feedback in written form with the goal of adding some of their comments to the blog post.

Today, during a break between sessions,  I decided to use my iPhone Dragon Dictation program to save me typing out the feedback. I read some teachers' written comments into the program. Within 10 seconds the program turned them into text. I then copied and pasted the text into an iPhone memo. I emailed the memo home to review and edit later. 

Not bad for a free program! 

Already I'm thinking of many other ways to integrate this into instruction and staff development.

Note: The sentence I read to produce the text in screen shot above was "I just used my iPhone "Dragon" dictation program to capture teacher feedback in small group session and convert to text and it worked." Very accurate transcription!

PS. Tomorrow  I plan to let them dictate directly into the iPhone. Saves a step, but I have the feeling it might feel a bit intimidating. I'll let you know.

Treading Water in a Swelling Sea of Information

You are awash in information. Its marginal cost of production is approaching zero. As costs of goods drop, you naturally consume more.  It's easy to deal with the other cheap stuff you bought and no longer want. (Just look at all those T-shirts in the back of your closet). Consuming information is different. It competes for your limited attention, and your ability to critically filter out unwanted "informational noise" is emerging as an important new literacy.  

PBS: FRONTLINE's Digital_Nation explores the implications of living in a world consumed by digital media and the impact that this constant connectivity may have on future generations. Broadcast on Feb 2, 2010

I hope you find the time to watch the show. If you don't have 90 minutes to spare, you can spend 4 and enjoy this trailer. 

Picturing the Story - An Interdisciplinary Approach to Culture, Environment, Language, and Learning

I'm pleased to served as an advisor to a new interactive resource for teachers and students. "Picturing the Story: Narrative Arts and the Stories They Tell" uses world art from the permanent collection of the Memorial Art Gallery dating from 1500 BCE to the 20th Century. Each work has a story to tell, either visually through imagery and symbol, or indirectly through custom and ritual. The stories reflect sacred beliefs, folk traditions, common human experiences, or unique cultural practices. 

Each work of art includes downloadable resources - the story that inspired it, the culture where it originated, the techniques used to produce it, as well as extensive lesson plans, activity suggestions, and recommendations for further reading. The lessons and stories are designed to be used at a variety of grade levels. 

Downloads resources include: 

• Classroom Copy - Printable, condensed version of online materials, copy-ready for classroom use. 
• Curriculum Connections - Organized by subject area:  Social Studies, ELA, Science, Art/Art History. Lesson extensions, children’s book recommendations, and activity suggestions, most with accompanying activity sheets.  
• Learning Skill-based Activity Sheets:  Printable, copy-ready sheets that address specific learning skills, for classroom use with online materials or printed classroom copy. Includes skills such as constructing comparison, identifying context, recognizing sequence and many more.

Every work of art has a story to tell. These stories can explain the unexplainable, teach a life lesson, or celebrate our common human experiences. Each work in this collection is approached from three different perspectives: 

1. Picturing the Story: Viewing a work of art while reading/hearing/seeing its associated story. The story is available as on-screen text, as an audio file voiced by a professional storyteller, in ASL video interpretation, or printable pdf version. In addition, an audio “guided-looking tour” of the work of art by a museum educator helps focus attention on important details and promote visual and verbal looking skills. 

2. Reading the Art:  Understanding the symbolism and references used in this work of narrative art. High-quality images of works of art, with zoom-able details, comparison or supporting images, and interpretive information connect elements of the work of art to its associated story.   

3. Connecting the Culture:  Exploring the cultural and functional context of this work of art. Historical and cultural context information, including maps, supporting photos, and other images, connect the work of art and the story to the cultural background, promoting document-based and inquiry-based learning.  Information addressing purpose or function of work, biographical information on artist (as available), geographical and environmental issues, and process and tools of creation allows the objects’ significance to extend into a variety of curriculum areas.

Details from: 
 "The Fox and the Heron"  Flemish, Frans Snyders ca. 1630-1640 
 "Rama, Sita and Lakshmana Return to Ayodhya"  Indian, Rajasthan, Rajput School ca. 1850-1900