Herman Wood

Kevin Lane, Podcasting and the Elementary School Classroom- It's how we get our work on the wall!

Kevin is the Music Teacher at Woodstation ES, Catoosa County

Knowing that ES children love to show their work, and want them to, how can we do that when the work is sound?

He cited: http://apple.com/educatiion/profiles/newpormesa/ & Sarah Crenier as inspiration.

Essentially, she carries an iPod with a mic around and records their work, then posts it as a podcast. He uses it as a motivation- "do your best work & I'll record you!"

Kevin is sharing not only student content, but instruction as well. He is at www.woodstationmusic.com (using iWeb & hosting on .Mac)

His podcasts sound fabulous!

He suggested educators Google podsafe music when asked about copyright. Tools are his MacBook, iLife, a Blue SnowBall microphone, a MobileMe account, and a Canon A620 digital camera.

We recorded what will be his 9th podcast right in the session. He came up with the song on his own, as well as the concept for each instrument. If you go listen, I'll let you try to guess which instrument I played ;') One hint- I put my instrument on my Grandmother's ceiling one Thanksgiving and it stuck!

He did a great job of showing how to use GarageBand to create his podcast!

Here's some resources:
Podcasting and Blogging with GarageBand and iWeb by Robin Williams & John Tollett

http://learninginhand.com

Podcasting for Dummies

Apples site for podcasting in education and Audacity's site.

http://www.plyxim.com/free (Easy iWEb Publisher)

Is what we learned in ed school and doing in ed practice bunk?

The presentation will be available under PowerPoints at netsquirrell.com.

This is a very different direction for the speaker, Patrick Crispen. He broke some things down and looked at brain scans to get towards his point, starting with the idea that we only use 10% of our brains at one time. The typical scan of someone doing something shows lots of gray areas. Does that mean that those areas aren't working? Don't think so.

Let's think about multitasking- Studies (uncited) show that a person interupted takes 50% longer & makes 50% more errors.

Learning styles- he says the data does not support the belief. The paper will be released in 2009 from Immordino-Yang & Fisher. Differentiation? Patrick shared a YouTube video from a professor at the University of Virginia. One of the points is we want students to learn content. How can we teach the shape of an object through audio? Some content is audio, some is not.

Gardner himself states that there is little evidence for multiple intelligences theory.

Cramming does work. There can't be too big of a gap before the test. Distributed practice is best, but a limited cram session can help.

Resources & Ref's:
Medina, J Brain Rules: 12 Principles for surviving and thriving at work & home

Byrnes, JP Cognitive development and learning in instructional contexts.

Division 15 of the American Psychological Association

Think this could change some things?

top 10 free web 2 point oh web sites

Steve Dembo is sharing his favorite web 2.0 sites. Here's a link to his site: http://top10freesites.pbwiki.com/

Bloglines is his start point. He seems to be using it in a similar way as delicious. Speaking of... A reminder that you can RSS a person's bookmarks. Collaborative- getting the most of others efforts! What if we do this as a staff or department and share it with parents as resources for our students.

He really likes voicethread- imagine photostory3 online. You can even have it call you & then you can call back to add audio comments. You can even embed a voice thread into your blog or site, as well as download and save locally. A cool use would be to do book reviews here.

flickr is a social photo sharing site, designed to be social. People can build things to add on to it. Free & pro versions, differing limitations. The tagging and annotation tools are pretty helpful. There's tons of services that can connect to your flickr account and create stuff! I especially liked: http://bighugelabs.com/flickr/ Here's another creator for wordpress blog headers: http://bighugelabs.com/flickr/blogheader.php

Note- check out the cogdogblog- I keep hearing that blog mentioned at the conference.

Picnik is Photoshop for most of what we actually need- all online, & free: http://www.picnik.com/

More Google!

Googlebots with Patrick Crispen: http://www.netsquirrel.com/

His materials is available at the website above under the PowerPoint Files area. The purpose of his presentation is to bring us up to date with all the new things Google has done in the past year.

Google image search can now search with face detection or within the past 30 days. Cool! Finance.google.com is another cool tool. Stock quotes aren't delayed 15 minutes here.

Google Earth can be used on Window in the browser. Go to: code.google.com/apis/earth & download the plugin.

Sky.google.com is now a separate website. It's actually a little more user friendly than Google Earth, at least IMHO.

code.google.com/doctype/ is a great wiki for web security. Lots of CSS, dom, html reference guides.

Speaking of foreign languages, translate.google.com supports loads of languages!

Great trick- Go to Google home pages, preferences, change the interface to another language- specifically Elmer Fudd. Save the preference & when they go to google it'll be in that language. Of course the best use of the tool is language translation- never as good as a human, but it could help.

Google.com/support is now their centralized help site. All help for Google in one place!

Google 2001 is in honor of it's 10th anniversary. They've put the search engine database from 2001 up. The pages aren't there. http://www.google.com/search2001.html

Need info on a business on your phone for free? 800-goog-411 They'll give you info, connect you, or have a text message sent to your cell phone. No residential yet.

Most cell phones can do Google Maps. You go to google.com/gmm in your cell phone's browser. They'll figure out what your phone can do and help you do it!

Google's personalized homepage: google.com/ig Available to everyone with a Google account. To set it for your phone, go to google.com/ig/settings. For iPhone, google.com/ig/i

Mobile.google.com points you to all the google goodness for your cell phone.

books.google.com let's you search for books and inside books for information. The goal is to help you find a book in a library or bookstore. Books out of copyright can be downloaded as pdf.

In advanced search, you can go to the more link and look for things that are in under Creative Commons.

Google Suggest fills offers to fill things in as you are typing slowly in the search box. You can also ask questions in plain english in the search box. There is a limit to how much you can type into the search box.

Google can also calculate, dictionary (define: whatever you want to define), weather (weather then zip code), movie then zip code, translate followed by a word in another language (translate put the word here).

To see what's new at Google:
labs.google.com
googlepress.blogspot.com
googleblog.blogspot.com

Anita Rocks (The Google Classroom)

Anita Foster, one of my colleagues, presented at GaETC on all that is Google and how she envisions using it in a classroom. As expected, she rocked!

Go see for yourself at: http://sites.google.com/site/gaetc08/Home

Personal Learning Networks

Are you part of a personal learning network? Do you ever ask a colleague a question? If you answered yes, then you are. Your personal learning network is only as valuable as those who are part of it. What if you could expand your PLN exponentially? If you blog professionally about your teaching practices and read others blogs about their practices, then your network is much larger than your local school or district.

David Warlick made the clear point as we started that we are all learners! Personal Learning Networks allow us to leverage what we know and multiply the effect of our efforts.

Note to self: look at V & review who I follow via RSS feed

He references George Siemens "Connectivism".

He built a wiki about personal learning networks and people went to work. A fascinating image was of a web pages as a graph. It's a graph of people who link to a page, who link to their pages, etc, etc. Now that's a personal learning network.

Here's some links:
http://davidwarlick.com/wiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheArtAmpTechniqueOfCultivatingYourPersonalLearningNetwork
http://davidwarlick.com/wordpress/?page_id=2
http://davidwarlick.com/2cents/
http://davidwarlick.com/connectlearning/

One critical key to this whole idea is RSS. If you don't know about RSS, here's a pretty good link to check out: http://webloggedlinks.pbwiki.com/RSS A very cool use for RSS is setting up a RSS feed for a Google search- the info comes to us!

Netvibes is what he seems to recommend for teachers new to RSS. http://www.netvibes.com/ He has moved on himself to NetNewsWire (NewsGator for Windows?).

His goal is to devote 15 minutes daily to his personal learning network.

Georgia Educational Technology Conference 2008

I will be sharing my experiences with you from the Georgia Educational Technology Conference. In the opening session, we are hearing from Ron Clark. He built a school here in Atlanta and that doesn't begin to cover the reasons we are hearing from him. Instead of me giving you tons of links on him, let's just see if Wikipedia can summarize: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ron_Clark

He is very clear about how important it is to put the passion in the classroom! His conversation will really resonate with parents of high performing children and how we should be teaching to them and bringing everyone else with them. The energy this gentleman brings to the stage and classroom is simply incredible! I've never seen anyone sing and dance so much- believe it or not, while teaching math! It's clear that he sets a tone where everyone is smiling and has a high energy level!

His results say it all!