Copy / Paste by Peter Pappas

Harness Twitter and Your Audience Backchannel with Wiffiti

Recently I posted about trying out Wiffiti in my professional development sessions. "Use Wiffiti to Engage Your Audience." Since then I've used it a few more times with great success. I thought I'd share a live Wiffiti screen with my readers. This is from my most recent training session at Pomperaug High School in Southbury CT.

Wiffiti accounts are free and it's very easy to use. I created a new Wiffti screen using the school logo and set it to gather the tag #R88. The evening before the presentation (and again that morning), I posted a Tweet asking for greetings - “Say hi to Monday's teacher workshop at Pomperaug HS. (Southbury CT) Go Panthers! Tell us where you're from & why you Tweet. Add tag #R88”  As participants arrived in the workshop, they were greeted on the big screen with encouraging words from all over the world. 

During breakouts I switched back to projecting the Wiffiti screen and invited workshop participant to text message into the screen. They had fun with shoutouts to their friends and comments about the workshop.  Pretty impressive when you're talking about the impact of technology on teaching and learning!

Many thanks to my Twitter PLN who took the time to send us a greeting. You made this possible!

Use Wiffiti to Engage Your Audience - Big Screen Live Presentation of Feeds from Twitter, Flickr and Text Messages

I'm always looking for ways to make my presentations more engaging and interactive. (A must if you're advocating more student-centered instruction.) I've been using a TurningPoint ARS for years with great results and have tried live blogs at my larger workshops. As a convert to Twitter, I thought it was the logical next step. 

I've experimented with Twitter visualizers on my blog- StreamGraph,  TwitterCloudExplorer, and most recently, Wiffiti. When I saw how good Wiffiti looked on my blog, and I realized it would be a great way to capture the backchannel at workshops. Users can interact with Wiffiti from their mobile phones or the web. It looks great on the big screen - plus it can feed from Twitter, Flickr and text messages.  

I opened a free account and gave it a trial run at my recent workshop in Moriarty-Edgewood SD, New Mexico. It was easy to create a new Wiffiti screen with custom background. (I selected a local landmark neon sign from old Rt 66 in Moriarty.)  I set up the Wiffiti screen to capture Tweets tagged with my Twitter user name @edteck.

The evening before the presentation, I posted a Tweet asking for greetings - “Say good morning to my teachers' workshop on old Rt 66 in NM. Where are you from? Why do you Twitter?”  As participants arrived in the workshop,  they were greeted on the big screen with encouraging words from all over the world. Pretty impressive when you're talking about the impact of technology on teaching and learning!  Special thanks to all that sent greetings - it was an powerful demonstration of the new landscape of information and a display of the power of Twitter / social media!

I shot a bit of video to give you and idea what it looked like.  
 (Remember, the live version of this screen no longer has Tweets relevant to the workshop.)

New Wiffiti messages are instantly displayed center screen and are easily viewable from a distance. Older messages then fade back and move as an animated cloud. Updates from both mobile and web are displayed synchronously across all screens subscribing to the same tags, encouraging the creation of a wide, cross-channel audience.

 Using Wiffiti in Breakout Sessions

I also created a second Wiffiti screen to use during break outs. This one was designed to capture text messages from participants. For those that did not have cells, we set up computer stations where they could make comments directly from the Wiffiti website.

Here's some sample comments - a nice mix of thoughtful observations, fun comments and a few critiques. (Note: I kept it real and I ran my system unmoderated, but it is possible to have someone monitor comments.) 

“School is where kids go to watch old people work really hard”

“My Brain Hurts!”

“Let's get going!”

"disequilibrium, change, and freedom”

"same old stuff, different day!"

“the table in the back rocks!!”

“English teachers and librarians rule -all others drool!”

“having a blast!”

“science is over here.”

“This is a great workshop!”

“Enjoying the presentation Peter. Especially the film clips!”

“Rigor and Relevance for the English Department: Rigor: Apply knowledge and skills in complex ways to analyze and solve real problems..."

My bottom line? Wiffiti is a great way to harness back channel workshop comments. The free version works well and paid versions offer more opportunities to customize and monitor comments. 

All Points West 09 Music and Arts Festival - APW 09 Liberty State Park, NJ

My son is on the production team at All Points West, a three-day, 60-band festival this weekend in Liberty State Park in Jersey City. APW 09 opens on Friday August 31st with Jay-Z, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and Vampire Weekend as first-night headliners, continuing with Tool, My Bloody Valentine, Gogol Bordello and Neko Case on Saturday; and Coldplay, Echo and the Bunnymen and MGMT on Sunday. Complete lineup here. 

I thought I'd test out Wiffiti, a visualizer that automatically integrates tag-based content feeds for photos and text (e.g. Twitter, Flickr). If it works well, I'll use it to gather and display user-generated backchannel at my next presentation! 

 View timeline or full screen  

 To join the dialogue,  tweet #APW or Text @wif5336 + your message to 87884

Students Tell Us About “Living in a Digital World”

Congratulations to Karen Rose and her 3rd grade class from the Melissa, Texas. Selected by attendees at the 2009 National Educational Computing Conference (NECC) as "Best Picture" from among digital shorts produced and edited by students and teachers from across the country.

Motivating Students - A Make and Take Workshop for Teachers

This week I head back to Edison School of Engineering & Manufacturing, to conduct a two day follow up workshop.  Our previous work together identified four target areas: 

1. Motivating students
2. Making learning relevant
3. Student-centered learning strategies
4. Effective use of technology

We are going to start by modeling a "Brainstorm, Group, Label" activity (See Tool 13).  It will also  set our agenda for the "make and take activities" of the workshop. Day two begins by modeling a "Fishbowl Discussion Group" on the topic of effective next steps. We'll use the ideas generated in the fishbowl to design a Strategic Planning Grid (below) to prioritize their staff development for the fall.

Most of our time over the two days will be spent assisting teachers in designing specific lessons. I've assembled some Literacy Strategies that teachers can use as starting points for modify their existing lessons. 

“Non-readers”  for students who lack decoding skills.

“Word-callers” for students who can decode, but lack comprehension skills.

“Turned-off readers" for students who have the decoding and comprehension skills, but lack motivation or engagement.

I'll also be showcasing some web tools that are very engaging for students.

Wordle (text analysis) 

Many Eyes (data and text visualizations)

Prezi  (presentation tool) 

Dipity  (timeline builder)

Bubbl.us (brainstorming)

Flickr Tag Related Tag Browser (image tag analysis)

Follow the NECC 09 Conference on Twitter

Back in March, I used Twitter to virtually attend the ASCD conference. Unfortunately the visualizing tool I used (TwitterCloudExplorer) is now off line. Here's a new tool called StreamGraph that I'm using to visualize the  latest 1000 tweets which contain the search word "NECC." The 2009 National Educational Computing Conference is being held in Washington DC from June 28 - July 1. Sorry I have to miss it.

Since the conference has ended I have replace the live StreamGraph of NECC with this screen shot of what the graph looked like during the conference. 

Link to StreamGraph

The StreamGraph shows the usage over time for the words most highly associated with the search word. One of these series together with a time period are in a selected state and coloured red. The tweets that contain this word in the given time period are shown below the graph. You can click on another word series or time period to see different matches. In the match list you click on any word to create a different graph with tweets containing that word. You can also click on the user or comment icons and any URL to see the appropriate content in another window. If you see a large spike in one time period that hides the detail in all the other periods it will be useful to click in the area to the left of the y-axis in order to change the vertical scale.

Twitter StreamGraph was created by Jeff Clark. Check out his other great visualizations at Neoformix.

Engage Student Discussion: Use the Social Network in Your Classroom

Watch a typical whole group discussion in the classroom and you'll most likely see a "hub / spokes" flow of information. Teacher to student A and back to teacher. Teacher to student B and back to teacher. So it goes as the "bluebirds" get to show how smart they are. 

Over time, students learn that their comments are of provisional value until "approved" by the teacher. That's because in this style of discussion the teacher is most likely searching for specific replies - sort of playing "guess what I'm thinking" with the "best" students in the class.

Students tend not to listen to each other and only focus on what the teacher says or validates - "will that be up on a test?" When students are put in small group discussion, they rapidly get off subject. With no teacher to validate their comments, they naturally gravitate to other subjects where peer   comments are valued - "what are you doing this weekend?" Often teachers then conclude that small group discussion doesn't work.

In my workshops I train teachers in discussion techniques that foster student reflection and interaction. The strategies are focused on getting the teacher out of the role of information gatekeeper and encouraging student-centered dialogue. 

With practice, teachers find that students are eager to engage and participate. We know they want to contribute, because outside the classroom, students are flocking to social networks to share their thinking with one another. It's unfortunate that our students can't be part of the (offline) social network sitting beside them in class.

While students don't need classroom computers to be part of an engaging discussion, technology can be a catalyst to foster engagement. I was interested to see the following video of The Twitter Experiment - Bring Twitter to the Classroom at UT Dallas.

"UT Dallas History Professor Dr. Monica Rankin, wanted to know how she could reach and include more students in the class discussion. She had heard of Twitter... The following is a short video describing her "Twitter Experiment" in the classroom with comments from students about the pros and cons of Twitter in a traditional learning environment." (Filmed by UT grad student kesmit3.) Link to notes on the experiment.

BTW - I found this video via my Twitter network. Follow  @monicarankin  @kesmit3 

How To Use Twitter to Virtually Network at the ASCD Conference 2009

I couldn't attend this year's ASCD conference currently going on in Orlando. That's a shame, since conferences are such a great place to meet new people and share ideas. So I thought I use Twitter to see if I can virtually meet folks and share thinking.  

First here's my elevator speech introduction - conference attendees pretend we just met over coffee...

Great to meet you... My name's Peter Pappas, from Rochester NY. I taught high school social studies for over 25 year, became a K-12 coordinator and then finished the last 5 years of my career as a assistant superintendent for instruction. Since then, I've been able to devote myself, full time, to expanding my role as a staff developer and consultant.

I've had the chance to work with districts across the country with a focus on literacy, technology, document-based instruction and student engagement. Staff development should model what we want to see in the classroom, so I bring an audience response system and we actually use the techniques I'm promoting!

Follow me on Twitter - hope you have a great conference!

Oh .. and ... have you heard of any good sushi restaurants nearby? .....

Note: As of 4/26/09 the TwitterCloudExplorer seems to have disappeared.  Here's a screen shot of what it looked like during the ASCD conference. Notice my Twitter name edteck was the 4th most Twittered word when I took the screen shot.

Technical Specs

1. Hashtags are a community-driven convention for adding additional context and metadata to your tweets. They're like tags on Flickr, only added inline to your post. You create a hashtag simply by prefixing a word with a hash symbol: #hashtag.  I sought out the relevant hashtags people are using for the ASCD conference. Note: It seems this year both #ASCD and #ASCD09 are being used. For more on hashtags 

2. I used a Twitter Search to look for people using the #ASCD OR #ASCD09 hashtags. Search results here.

3. Then I sent out Tweets to people using either hashtag with a link back to this post. Hopefully their replies will follow.

4. I'm a big fan of quantitative display of information, so I used one the many new Twitter visualization tools - Twitter Cloud Explorer to generate this embedded query. Note: As of 4/26/09 the TwitterCloudExplorer seems to have disappeared.  There are many new Twitter visualizations coming along every day.

President Obama's Education Policy Speech March 9, 2009

President Obama used a talk to the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce as a forum for a major address on administration education policy. Among his "four pillars of reform," he called for an expansion of charter school as "laboratories of innovation." For text transcript of Obama's speech click here. 

I decided to use Many Eyes to do a textual analysis of these two key words from his talk - "charter" and "innovation." I used the word tree visualization. 

Obama's use of the word "Charter"

Obama's use of the word "Innovation"

Many Eyes in the classroom

Many Eyes is a great new website that gives teachers and students a chance to easily use sophisticated graphic tools to analyze data and create interactive displays. Those who register at the site can use 16 visualization types to present data. Why not have your students use Many Eyes to analyze a selection of non-fiction text to uncover the main ideas and key vocabulary of the piece? Or they could compare text from different sources. Want your students to more fully understand your course content? Let them use Many Eyes to visualize and discover patterns as a catalyst for discussion and collective insights about information, text, and data. As they say at Many Eyes, "Finding the right way view your data is as much an art as a science. The visualizations provided on Many Eyes range from the ordinary to the experimental."

When to use a Word Tree

A word tree is a visual search tool for unstructured text, such as a book, article, speech or poem. It lets you pick a word or phrase and shows you all the different contexts in which it appears. The contexts are arranged in a tree-like branching structure to reveal recurrent themes and phrases.

Setting Free the Information (in Museums and Schools)

Museums share at least one thing in common with schools. They have traditionally functioned as repositories of information. 

Visit a museum and you can view the information (art) that a curator has selected, organized, and presented. Often its significance and meaning will be explained to you in a wall label. In the traditional school, curriculum experts select information that teachers organize and present to students. Most teachers talk a lot, so students spend much of their day being told what information is important and why. Later they sit at their desks and fill out worksheets that reinforce what they just heard.

Schools, museums and other traditional information gatekeepers (think newspapers, publishers, etc) got along fine when they were able to control information and its flow. The one who "owned the presses" decided what was important. Most of us were accustomed to this asymmetry of information production and distribution. After all, it was much easier to read a book than to write and publish one.

What is "revolutionary" about the information revolution is not all the "cool" new technologies - it's the fact that the information monopoly enjoyed by the gatekeepers has been broken. We can now control the information we access, save, alter and share.

Today's New York Times features a story about how museums are re-thinking their web presence in light of the rapidly changing information landscape. "To Ramp Up Its Web Site, MoMA Loosens Up" NY Times March 4, 2009.

The museum wants the site to transform how the public interacts with an institution that can sometimes seem forbidding and monolithic.

“The notion of opening up the museum’s singular voice is really the driving thought behind this,” said Allegra Burnette, creative director of digital media for the museum, who has been working on the redesign for a year and a half. She added, “We’re opening the doors, though not necessarily throwing them open.”

The site, which she and other MoMA officials stress is a work in progress, will now include what its designers call a “social bar” at the bottom, which when clicked will expand to show images and other information that users can “collect” and share after registering for a free account at the Web site (moma.org). A user could build a portfolio of Walker Evans photographs or Elizabeth Murray paintings and send them to friends, Ms. Burnette said. The site will also eventually make it easy for users both casual and scholarly to trace lines of interest, digging up more information about works from publications and curators, she added.

So what lessons can school learn from MoMA? 

Put aside all the social networking / Web 2.0 features MoMA is adding to its site, and it's really about giving viewers more functionality and control over how they interact with the museum's collection. MoMA and other museums realize that they will need to stop treating their audience as passive consumers of information. 

I'm not suggesting schools need to run out and build new 2.0 websites. Actually we already have an audience of students sitting in the classroom who can interact with information and each other without the need to go online. What educators need to do is rethink what teaching and learning is all about. It's no longer "teaching as talking." Nor is the purpose of school to simply dispense information to students. Schools need to function as thoughtfully designed learning environments where students can investigate information and be given a chance to reflect (with their peers) on what they learned and how they see themselves progressing as learners. That can be done with a variety of technologies including pen and paper. A social network is already sitting in the classroom.

President Obama’s Address to Congress 2/24/09 - Education in the Word Cloud Top 25!

Note: For full web version of President Barack Obama's speech to Congress Feb 24, 2009 click here.  

I think Wordle.net is a great tool that helps teachers and students to analyze text. Read my post to see some ideas for how you can use Wordle to foster literacy and critical thinking in your classroom. 

I used Wordle to make the "word cloud" below out of the text from President Obama's speech to Congress. I chose a setting to display the 25 most frequently used words in his speech. Glad to see that education made the top 25 of his verbal agenda!

You can make your own Wordle version of  his speech. Here's a text file Obama-2-25-09 of his words taken from the NY Times transcript. (I deleted the applause breaks.) Copy and paste it to the Wordle "Create" page and make your own word cloud. For more on Wordle font and layout setting click here. 

How to Embed a Prezi Presentation in Your Blog

Prezi is a great new presentation software that replaces the lineal PowerPoint style with the ability to present text, videos and images in a unique zooming style. You can find out more about Prezi at my earlier post.  Here are more samples of how I used Prezi to cover the 2010 ASCD conference.

Please note that I updated this post on July 1, 2010.
 Prezi's embed options have changed. 

1. Open your online Prezi presentation and click the embed link (lower right in this screen shot.)

 

2. You will get the dialogue box below. You may want to adjust the pixel size to fit into your blog columns. Copy and paste the html code into your blog.

 

Prezi - Engage Your Audience with a Zooming, Non-Lineal Presentation

I've been having great fun with Prezi a new web-based presentation software currently in private beta mode. (You can submit a request to be included in the beta.) Prezi allows you to easily create maps of texts, images, videos, PDFs, drawings and present them in a nonlinear way. The menu for adding elements has a very unique navigational approach. (Easier to experience than describe.) Once you've added your text and graphics you can define a path through the material. But you can also click on any element in the presentation and zoom until it fits the whole screen. Likewise you can zoom out to reveal the larger presentation canvas. Here's a link to the Prezi online manual. 

Once completed the presentations can be saved on the Prezi server or downloaded to your computer as a fully functional file set for presentation. (Once downloaded to your computer the presentation is no longer editable.) Prezi will host your presentation to share with others via the web. You can set permissions open up or limit viewers. You can even collaborate by allowing group editing. 

I've been working on a brainstorming Prezi (embedded below -click arrow to play). You can click on any element to fully enlarge. For example, click on the image of Ben Stein and the video clip will play. Click on any of the bracket or circle frames and the defined area will fill the screen. Hold down the "R" key on your keyboard and the left mouse will rotate the screen. Use your mouse wheel to zoom in or out. You can explore the presentation using your mouse to pan and zoom or use the path I defined by using the arrows in the lower right. There you will also find a fill screen icon. Here's a direct link to the presentation. 

Creating Collaborative Spreadsheet Art

Looks like the Google gang have some extra time on their hands. They created collaborative spreadsheet art using Google docs. Sure fits my definition of Bloom's highest level of thinking - creating -  a new combination of old elements. Click here for more info and a template.

Sequencing - An Essential Summarizing Skill

I've been experimenting with Dipity, a new website that allows you to build interactive timelines. Open a free account, create a new topic, and then upload text and images (from a file.) You can view your topic as an timeline or flipbook. You can even geocode your events and view the project as a map. You are allowed to set permissions for viewers and editing rights.  I created a sample timeline "How did the roles and rights of women change at the turn of the 20th century?"  Note: One drawback for classroom use - banner ads appear on the page and  I can't vouch for what might show up.

Dipity allows you to configure the display of the topic and copy and paste the embed code into your page. You should be able to click the embedded image below.