And the Winner Is .......

And the winner is.....

http://www.sodahead.com

I've been postponing putting my thoughts into actual characters and words after our recent trip to ISTE - perhaps on some level I feel that the 'magic of learning' will gently fade like the Seattle sunshine! BUSTED!!!
We've had three days of sunshine!!  And the magical connections of learning and learners as contributors, creators, collaborators, global connectors, and critical thinkers are real. Learning is the heart and soul of a school and the SAAS attendees at ISTE are the embodiment of that energy.

This evening I've been looking over some past reflection and theory papers that I've written over the past several months.  The following excerpt from one such paper captures the essence of the teachers we have the privilege and honor of  co-learning with on a daily basis.  They are our artists and scientists!  They have embraced the journey with all of the attributes Dexter describes with added doses of grace, humility, laughter and an insatiable thirst for learning with enthusiasm and passion.

Facilitator of learning

(from July 14, 2011 ed platform)

The teacher is the conductor of the learning environment – balancing the dynamics of the learning: environment, participants, subject matter, connections, and timeliness. The teacher is the facilitator and collaborator of the learning process. The teacher is the “first face” of the school for the community of learners and families, making the school more personal and relational.  The teacher is the keeper of the heart, mind, body and spirit of the learner. The teacher who is passionate about teaching is never finished with learning.  The art and call of teaching is integrated in all that a teacher does.  Marzano (2007) states that effective teaching is both an art and a science. The science of teaching comes from using research and data to guide instructional practices.  The art of teaching is the teacher’s interpretation and expression of that practice.

My dear colleague and friend, Dexter Chapin, is an exceptional teacher and learner. In his recent book, Master Teachers: Making a Difference at the Edge of Chaos, he describes the journey of a teacher: 

“Please do not even try to be a teacher if you do not have all of the attributes of character: integrity tempered by empathy, intelligence tempered by awe, risk-taking tempered by common sense, independence tempered by the desire to serve, and most important, self-confidence tempered by self-knowledge. Even with all the attributes, please do not start or continue on the journey just because it is possible. Start or continue on the journey because it is what you have to do, almost a calling” (Chapin, 2009).

*****

Thank you all for jumping in feet and head first, sharing the swag and going for the gold - or flip cams!!!  May the FORCE be with you on your journey (and play with as many sabers and swords as you can!)

 

AND THE WINNER IS ARE..........

LEARNERS LIKE YOU!

Learning without reflection is a waste, reflection without learning is dangerous.

- Confucius

What I take away from San Diego... other than a sunburn of course!

Essentially, I had a blast this past week in San Diego at the International Society of Technology in Education (ISTE) Conference. I learned so much and cannot wait for the Fall as a result. I love the feeling I had upon returning to Seattle. I am eager for the school year to start up and I honestly think there is nothing better than being excited and in love with your job. 

I found myself feeling inspired and amazed countless times throughout the week. Surprised by the conference, yes, but the ideas, collaboration, and energy that the SAAS group brought to San Diego was the most awe-inspiring part of the entire experience.  I felt nervous at first, having heard from past ISTE goers that the experience would be overwhelming. Some warned that it was entirely likely that I would come home in a drunk-like-tech-information-overload-haze and not implement anything I learned during those 5 days. Haters truly are gonna hate, am I right? 

But despite my nerves and the exhorting words, the opposite effect occurred and the world of tech enthusiasts invited me in with glee and open robotic arms. Sure, the Expo room was shockingly enormous, the sessions were at times above my level of tech intelligence, and all jokes made at the club-like Google party were over my head, I eventually found my way. The "Newbie Crew," though missing a few key players, was in full swing. We laughed the entire time as we navigated the foreign world, negotiated sweet giveaways, swam late night in the hotel, and cracked jokes about anything and everything. We took ISTE with full force and realized at the end that the ideas/resources we will go into our second year at SAAS with are abundant and exciting. The memories of a great week together building friendships will bring a smile to my face for years to come, but the changes I am eager to implement in my classroom heavily outweigh any other benefits of the conference and trip to Cali. 

What I Learned at ISTE 2012 - Mike Park

Notes: What I Learned at ISTE 2012 : San Diego

-Mike Park-

The Oreo Project

Using lots of Oreo cookies, students form groups to compete for tallest stack of cookies, best design using them, and the incorporation of other disciplines. For example, in math: calculate the height of one thousand cookies given the height of one.

Discovery Education

SAAS already subscribes to http://www.discoveryeducation.com/ which is Discovery Plus.

New this year, however, is the Student Center which provides the ability to manage student assignments.

[An Amusing Ap is any application which is of interest but not worth further study]

Amusing Ap: Mad Pad which inputs video clips and outputs an array of them.

Amusing Ap: Http://tinyurl.com/DENbrain which produces a collage of user quotes on a topic.

A great way to convert long urls to a small mnemonic esp. to share websites: Http://tinyurl.com

Worth remembering: A normal timer to buzzer with great options: E.ggtimer.com

Amusing Ap: A timer with the option of having input sound/video instead of final buzzer: http://www.timer-tab.com/

Google “A Google A Day” to find a google site with extra window containing a question whose answer is best found by Googling! Input accepted, hints offered, it’s mostly a guise for a Google ad.

Amusing Ap: Yasiv.com is a shopping safari with an especially amusing results screen.

http://www.symbaloo.com/ is a visual display of your favorite web addresses. An Amusing offshoot is http://Symbalooedu.com/.

For many more Amusing Aps checkout Mike Gorman and his 108 ways to use word clouds.

Good reference for doing what it says: http://www.fakeiphonetext.com/

Where to start for orchestrating pictures, videos, and sound to a video production: Animoto.com

Another way to do the same thing: photopeach.com but here you can embed quiz questions.

Adaptive Curriculum

http://www.adaptivecurriculum.com/us/index.html is a free digital library of math resources as well as interactive options and professional development components. Seems more directed to higher levels than sixth grade.

http://mathlanding.org/ is a good resource for skill games and warm up exercises. These folks are partnered with the math forum at Drexel University.

Thinkport.org is Maryland’s central site for finding acadmic resources.

Top 10 tips for going Google

When Will He Learn: ISTE 2011 suggested I use their foundation to make a website. I did:

https://sites.google.com/a/seattleacademy.org/6th-grade-math-2010-2011/

ISTE 2012 made the same suggestion. I should begin populating this site now...

Google also suggested: use the “more > lab” Google tab to share docs in calendar

http://goo.gl/ is the Google approach to abbreviating long urls. See also tinyurl

On Google Earth you can view historical by date, though older shots are typically less clear.

Google still provides the option to create and grade tests. Roger does this well.

Demonstrated was Google’s Image search: drop pic/image to browser to search for similar images. Impressive. This works in Firefox, as well.

Also of interest: via Google settings (gear) you can search by reading level or file type.

Demonstrated was Google’s search box microphone so you can talk in your search request

Did you know... You can setup a free Google phone number for kids to text you or call you?

It can record both sides of conversation, can send file to Google account. You can also call forward from that Google number to a real phone. See Google Voice for the number.

Arcademics.com

We already use Arcademics.com to provide skills development drills in the form of games online. Kids can create either public or private games and kids can compete with others online. For these multiplayer games, computer will fill in when there are no real competitors. Also, computer will always temper its speed to kids work in order to keep the kid connected. Note this site is more to help develop fluency than for advanced topics.

Note to iPad users, there’s an Ap (Rover) which is a browser that translates Flash products for iPad.

New offering: Division derby. 12 person game.

Note that keyboard entry is faster than mouse input.

Check out Puppy pull which is a tug o war. Interesting note is that the tugging power increases as game progresses

Meteor blaster is an example of an older module from the original game

Games are free now...but the site is now affiliated with a for-profit company. The money will come from Arcademics Plus which tracks kids’ history. Though it says online that the cost is "$200 per class", the presenter promised that it’s really "$5 per kid per year"

The Latest and Greatest

I went to a presentation today about stuff that's new and cool.  Here are a few items you might find interesting (bonus: most of them are free). 

http://www.rockmelt.com/ Tired of flipping back and forth between your browsing, your Facebook, your Twitter, and your RSS feed?  You can have it all with RockMelt, a browser that integrates all that fun stuff at once. Use a button to instantly add things to your RSS feed, and then see it scrolling on the side of your screen.  And your Facebook chat can run right along with. 

http://www.signupgenius.com/ Pre-made sign up forms for all sorts of things (they've got lots of education type sign ups.) You can customize them as needed, and send them via email. 

http://primarypad.com/ Collaboration central.  Create a pad and provide the link and people can join in with typed text, PDFs, or whatever they would like to include.  It sounds a lot like what you can do in Google Docs, but the real bonus here is that there is no signup or login necessary for the participants so you can run with it pretty much immediately.

http://www.tagxedo.com/ This is Wordle on 'roids.  It's the same concept of word clouds, but with far more customization options, including being able to shape the cloud itself. 

http://www.classdojo.com/ Now we're getting into the really education focused stuff.  This is totally free software specifically for tracking classroom behavior.  Set up your participants and customize it to exactly what you need and have one-click ability to track behavior in class.  Not only that, it'll track the data over time, so you can graph and see patterns at a glance.  You can also reward good behavior instantly.  And if you want to share it, that's easily done as well.

http://www.scoop.it/ - Showing your class a list of boring old links (like I'm doing here!!) can be done a better way using Scoop It.  Populate the page with different web resources, all in one place, on a visually appealing board.  It also allows users to comment and give feedback.  Sort of like Pinterest for news and content.

http://www.proust.com/ Students can create autobiographies for free (or a biography of anybody, really).  If they're writing about themselves, it gives helpful prompts, creates a timeline, and can be made into a PDF or an actual book.  The prompts are great for provoking a more detailed and structured story.

http://wufoo.com/  Building online forms is usually pretty wretched, but Wufoo makes it ridiculously simple.  As in, drag and drop simple.  Customize it to get just what you need and send it out.  Bonus:  it gives you stats once the results are in.  It's free up to 150 respondents, and after that the price is still pretty reasonable.

Flip Cam #3

Caitlin rocked a t-shirt and won a flip cam!!! Way to go Newbies. :)

Flip Cam #2!!!

Jacque just won a flip cam! (no math battle neccessary...just good looks and a t-shirt). BALLIN!

Globalize Your Research Using This Simple Tip

When researching certain topics it might be wise to gather a different perspective by searching for content originating from other countries.

Example: the topic Iranian Hostage Crisis would yield a different perspective if the researcher gathers content originating from Iran. But note, the Iranians probably do not refer to the crisis as the "Iranian Hostage Crisis". They may refer to it as the American Hostage Crisis for example.

TIP: Using Google simply add the syntax below to your search substituting the .. for the country code. 

cr=country..    

Country codes can be found here.


Another example: the partition of India in 1948. Searching Pakistan, India or Great Britain would yield different historical perspectives on that topic. 

Photoshop for Film Production

Photoshop CS6 can now edit video. You can apply filters, adjustment layers and colorizing techniques to video clips.
with Joe Dockery / Mt. Si High School

Jacque and I battled (math-style) and won a flip cam from Explore Learning!!!

Data visualization and Infographics

From Mike P (this got lost under Scott's post:  Great conference in San Diego. Mayim Bialik was awesome both in keynote and in her TI talk. Major take-away: teachers as coaches! There is so much more that we cam do and technology can expedite.

Yong Zhao raises some good questions about the connections between creativity, entrepreneurship, test scores, and curriculum. In focusing on common core standards and standardized test scores, we are trying to fix the problems of the past instead of preparing for the future. We need to be asking where we are heading and what are goal is in educating students. He states that confidence underpins the drive to be innovative; confidence underpins creativity and entrepreneurship.  Interesting ideas to consider.

3 Conference Session Recordings

I'm sharing the love from ISTE 2012 in San Diego so you don't have to walk 6 miles per day to learn something. 

• Textbook Deathwatch   (http://soundcloud.com/simkathy/textbook-deathwatch)
• Student Contributions to Curriculums GREAT!  (http://soundcloud.com/simkathy/students-as-contributors-alan)
• Grey Area: Ethics of Fair Use and the Process to Evaluate Use  (http://soundcloud.com/simkathy/ethics-of-fair-use-copyright)

More on Student's as Contributors:

Purpose & Objectives
Participants will be able to design "learning jobs" for their students. These jobs challenge students to create content to help other children learn. For example, students can use screen casting software to contribute to a library of math tutorials (as our own David Johns already does).

Outline
Six learning jobs will be outlined:
* Tutorial Designers
* Official Scribes
* Researchers
* Global Communicators
* Learning Documentary Producers
* Solvers of Real Problems

Supporting Research
Article: Digital Learning Farm: Students as Contributors, Alan November
http://novemberlearning.com/resources/archive-of-articles/digital-learning-farm/

3-3

3 Design ideas

The best event I attended today: http://acelearning.wikispaces.com/.  Hey SAAS Arts Dept, I know you're reading this blog!!!  How about a few master classes for other SAAS teachers who want to design (and help kids design) their own sites, workshops, Prezis, power points, and e-portfolios?  

3 Dimensional education

You will be a science geek after this whether you like it or not:  http://www.designmate.com/.  It's the toooootally future, just today, AND complete with 3D glasses.  

3 Dizillion

# hours combined per year that 20,000 ISTE people must take up in their endless searches for the coolest, usefullest, engagiest, and superffectiveexpialidociousist websites and apps.  For example, bit.ly/iste12web20 or http://anappforthat.yolasite.com should start you off.  

Birds of a Feather!!

Is it Monday? What is Weebly?

In a "Birds-of-a-feather" session with Helen Barrett the passionate portfolio advocate. I love the fact that it is the ownership of work - artifacts - reflections on learning by the student allow that ownership.  We have Mahara linked to our Moodle 2.0+ that is coming on line in July.  I love Google Sites - but not sure as a portfolio platform though her idea of a student creating the goals for learning, posting an artifact representing the learning, and then reflecting upon the learning is very doable. She also talked about blogs as a porfolio frame. They could use the same protocol.

Evernote as a portfolio frame? I can see that working and it works well with the ipad.  Here is the blog Helen suggested: http://blog.evernote.com/2012/02/28/how-to-create-a-portfolio-with-evernote-education-series/

Porfolios for student led conference - love these ideas! Our kids (our personal ones) participated in such practices and they were very proud of what they had learned and what was shared. The model she is showcasing looks like a Google Site - it is a Google Site!! Multi-media added the personal touches and interactivity.

Also love the idea of reflection for both students and teachers in their learning! She has recipes for reflections. This is such an essential part of learning (and teaching) that we often skip because of the 'time' factor.

Hmmm. Doesn't this blog serve as a reflection piece for our ISTE adventures?

Splashing!!!
Vicki

Helen's site is https://sites.google.com/site/iste12eportfolios/ 
Image from: http://www.sportsposterwarehouse.com/detail_PEA0333__633__peanutssplashaj.html

Gamification

I love this concept...how do we make it happen more often? Gamification is the application of game theory and gaming mechanics to common tasks or experiences. When you play a video/computer game, 80% of your time is spent failing but you fail so spectacularly that you just keep coming back for more. We need to bring play and a sense of risk into curriculum and assessment. 

Mapping is Fun

I stopped by the table today, of these presenters....this is a class worth checking out.  Mapping, interactive mapping, free tools to do it.

Mapping is Fun

Culture of Performance

I'm in my first session on computational thinking. There is a rising ninth grade student presenting her work. It would be great if we had a teacher/student presenter pair from SAAS for an upcoming ISTE. I'm hearing about Scratch and it sounds pretty interesting. Anyone have any thoughts or experiences with it?

The Collective Brain

MadPad: create movie file can put it to music with iPhone or iPad. Each student can contribute a word or part of file and then a movie collage is compiled. (might be a lot of work/time for little benefit, but engaging and fun...would need to think about a meaningful use) Class Dojo: enroll students and then give positive and negative "marks" to monitor student behavior. Gives behavior summary for kid and for class overall.  Could kids give positive feedback to each other?  Along the lines of 'catching kids doing good'. Good use for iPad.  Photodcpeach.com.  Take images and makes video for you.  Can embed quiz questions! Also look into creating fake iPhone texts (create historical dialgue) and movie trailers. Have students create text or trailer.

Digital Storytelling 2.0 with Joe Diaz
Our task was to use Animoto, PhotoPeach or ?? to create a story with an opening shark theme -- in 20 minutes.

I used PhotoPeach and came up with this quick story:
http://photopeach.com/album/n3lo4l#

Discovery-Understanding by Design

Ideas: Use images or sounds to spark conversations, to pre-assess and determine prior knowledge. "What do you see/hear?  What do you know?  What do you wonder?" Media Intro:  Give them something to focus on when watching a video--clap your hands when you hear specific words  Media Activity:  3truths and 1 lie. Predict then confirm through video and discussion  Flip the Classroom: Lodge McCammon. http://tinyurl.com/lodgesample Make flip cam one take videos and upload Voicethread: have students post and listen/view their peers' contributions Resources:   Blabberize.com Glogster: multimedia poster   http://edu.glogster.com LiveBinder:  livebinders.com Howard Gardner's New Book: Five Minds for the Future Discovery Resource:  Khan academy type videos math overviews and explanations (Chelsea & Jacque)

Graphic Design for Positive Change w/Jeff Larson 
We are learning to create posters using Adobe Elements 10, a simpler version of Photoshop.

• how to constructively critique another's piece
• how to pitch an idea
• understanding the audience for the product
• how to work with layers to add objects
• Using a preloaded project, we rearranged and recreated a poster on creativity.