Digital Story - Real Life Math

Digital Storytelling is a great way to help motivate and inspire students create a multimedia project. This type of project appeals to all types of learners and has the potential to cross so many content areas. It is an exciting way for students to showcase their knowledge and talents.

The digital story I created, Real Life Math, identifies aspects of life that display or use mathematics. Once the pictures were gathered, I developed a script, set it to music, and posted on the web. This simple idea helps students see the ways in which math relates to their everyday lives.

Click here to see a list of Digital Storytelling resources.

Mac OS X Leopard

Attention Mac fans! Apple recently debuted it's brand new operating system, Mac OS X Leopard. It is loaded with over 300 new features including the ability to run windows on your Mac. Now every picture, document, or PDF can be seen as a tiny icon displaying a small snapshot of it so you can easily find what you are looking for. Time Machine automatically backs up everything you do on your computer. iChat also has new features which allow you to have video conversations with several people and work on projects together simultaneously. There are also new parental controls and the ability to create stacks to help keep your desktop organized when working on several different programs at once. With the abundance of great new features Mac OS X Leopard is sure to be a hit!

Space Colony Web Quest

Web Quests present unique opportunities to provide students with a technology-rich learning experience that stimulates higher level thinking skills and promotes the collaborative exploration of a particular topic. Developing a successful Web Quest requires a great deal of time and energy to ensure that it is developmentally appropriate and possible for students to execute.

This collaborative effort to create a Space Colony Web Quest was a great experience. There are so many different areas that need to be addressed when developing a Web Quest. Finding resources, creating student roles and activities, and providing the necessary information for teachers interested in utilizing this project for their students takes a great deal of time and hard work.

Click here to find links to information about WebQuests

Creating a Website

Creating your own website is an incredible journey. There are so many options and so many resources at your disposal, the most difficult part for me was choosing how to display my content. Since this was a project for my graduate class, Using the Internet in Education, the deadline was the only thing looming over my head forcing me to make design choices. Truth be told it was fun, the most rewarding project I have had to date and one that is practical and helpful in my daily life as a technology teacher. I was so excited about the possibilities I decided halfway through the project to scrap my site and try to teach myself html. Although I made some headway and taught myself quite a bit, it wasn't the most logical idea I've ever had.

www.techteachingtools.com

Check it out & let me know what you think. I appreciate all feedback!

Sarfall.com

This is an excellent site for beginning and emergent readers. It features many short stories and activities to help students learn to read. Students have the option of having every letter, picture, and/or word read to them. One of the great features is that the site uses a child's voice to show them how to practice sounding out each letter, word, and phrase. It is an amazing resource for young students!

PEW - Internet & American Life Project

According to the Pew Internet Project survey "87% of all youth between the ages of 12 and 17 use the internet." and "78% (of those teens) say they use the internet at school." That means that 22% of teens do not use the internet on a regular basis at school. This is an injustice to those students as they are missing out on a wealth of opportunities to learn. As digital natives the students in today's classrooms are quite different from those of past generations and they need to be treated as such. They live in a media rich world where they are constantly connected and have the ability to access information on any topic at their fingertips. As educators we need to embrace this reality and use the internet more in our classrooms to bring learning to life and teach them they skills they need to survive in our technology-driven society.

Teacher Tube - Pay Attention

This video highlights the technology defecet facing the digital learner in traditional classrooms and challenges educators to reflect and create a more stimulating and positive learning experience for all students. It is filled with thought provoking statistics as well as ways to use technology to maximize productivity in the classroom.

Final Reflections

It's hard to believe that the course is over. As they say, 'Time flies!' I learned so much about authoring tools and technology integration. Viewing peer PowerPoint presentations of various authoring tools helped give me ideas for activities, lessons, and applications for the coming school year. The articles I read on hypermedia and student achievement and 21st century skills solidified my beliefs that the educational system needs a major overhaul because the students of today require a new approach to instruction.

The knowledge gained throughout this semester has inspired me to restructure my approach to addressing the curriculum. I see the completion of this course not as an end but as a beginning to start planning and expl0ring my options for the upcoming school year. The possibilities are so exciting I just hope my approach will have my students feeling the same way.

NECC Sites - Scoped Out

Google Apps - Docs & Spreadsheets
I used this with my Authoring Tools Assignment #2 partner. It was a great resource for us to easily and effortlessly edit and email changes to our project outline without having to worry about attachments or downloads.

Gaggle.net
Free email accounts for students! This looks like a great idea for class communication because it is filtered and monitored for inappropriate content.

Teacher Tube
This is a great resource! What a great way to hook students as you introduce a concept! Especially great for those of us who don't have a United Streaming membership.

Spector 360
This software provides the ability for employers to document your computer use...emails, chatting, Internet sites, Watch Out!

Ball State Electronic Field Trips
The scheduled electronic field trips look very interesting. What a great way to plan thematic lessons for older students.

21st Century Skills

The article on 21st Century Skills defines the approach that has the power to change the educational system and maximize the effects of teaching and learning. The students in the classrooms across the U.S. are digital natives and differ in many ways from every other generation in their learning styles and interests. To be successful in educating them and helping them carve a path in the world towards their full potential we need to keep this in mind and restructure the classroom experience with 21st Century Skills as our guide. The pedagogy that drives this method will enable students to gain the knowledge and skills necessary to excel in a competitive society. The skills developed throughout this process will strengthen the whole student enabling him/her to have knowledge of the world, the ability to communicate effectively with the world, and understand his/her role within the world.

21st Century Skills

• Digital Age Literacy
• Inventive Thinking
• Effective Communication
• High Productivity

LINKS TO 21st CENTURY SKILLS INTERNET RESOURCES
Partnership for 21st Century Skills
Framework for 21st Century Learning
The Gateway to 21st Century Skills (NEA sponsored site loaded with resources)
Evalutech Technology Literacy

SMART Boards

I recently went to a SMART Masters workshop and learned so many exciting ideas for the classroom. If you don't have a SMART Board...do whatever you can to get one & if you are lucky enough to have one already, please don't just use it as a projection screen, it is so much more than that! The SMART Notebook software is easy to use, if you can handle PowerPoint you can master this. This feature provides the opportunity to create lessons ahead of time and print what your students see displayed on the SMART Board. Your files can also be saved and shared with other teachers or posted to share with your students. If you have a SMART Board you and all of your students are allowed to download the software onto your home computers so students can not only read your presentations but they can also create their own to show to the rest of the class!

Follow this link to find links to sites with ready-to-go activities, interactive lessons and games, tutorials, templates, troubleshooting tips, and more!

SMART Board Resources

iLife Suite: Authoring Tools

The iLife Suite has the potential to offer so many exciting tools to the educational experience. The seamless integration of photos, audio, and video clips from one application to another makes multitasking the multimedia process a breeze. Giving students the power of creativity is a remarkable tool. The applications offered in the iLife Suite such as, iPhoto, iMovie, iWeb, iDVD, & Garage Band can provide numerous opportunities for authentic assessment where students can display their knowledge on many levels. Check out the following resources for ideas on how to incorporate educational activities using the iLife Suite.

CLASSROOM RESOURCES
iLife Social - Studies Gallery
iLife - Language Arts Gallery
iLife - Math Gallery
iLife - Science Gallery
iLife - Additional Subjects Gallery

SUPPORT & TUTORIALS
iMovie Support & Tutorials
iPhoto Support & Tutorials
iDVD Support & Tutorials
iWeb Support & Tutorials
Garage Band Support & Tutorials

Tips For Making Your Movie

PISA - Partnership for Improving Student Achievement

This week I began a 2-week professional development partnership with Stevens Institute in Hoboken, NJ. The cohort of 80 teachers will meet for 2-weeks each summer for the next 3-years to learn how to implement teaching methods and student centered activities to increase achievement in Math and Science. This year the focus of the workshops is Life Science. The partnership is funded by a grant from the NJ Department of Education and involves teachers from Bayonne, Hoboken, and Jersey City.

We have been involved in some excellent hands-on activities to help advocate and inspire questioning, researching, imagination, and exploration. The site also contains links to excellent web resources, activities, and information about this exciting opportunity.

NETS: New Standards

The NETS (National Education Technology Standards) have recently been redesigned to maximize effectiveness. The former NETS were in place for a decade, so an update was necessary and perhaps even over-due. In light of the ever-evolving aspects of technology specifically in the educational arena, ten years is an eternity to go without even a slight change in scope or structure. The new NETS for 2007 are designed to increase teacher and administrator accountability and enhance student performance through technology integration. Standards have been developed to identify the specific objectives necessary for students, teachers, and administrators to achieve success. Standards for students are now more focused on the productivity and abilities of the student to create, design, and solve problems rather than the focus being on the technology itself.

In reading "Refreshing the ISTE Technology Standards" by Gary Stager (http://www.districtadministration.com/viewarticle.aspx?articleid=1186&p=6) I was struck with the sense that he had lost site of something instrumental to the learning process, student motivation. While the new NETS do require more sophisticated and widespread use of technology in education they also offer a new way to ensure that technology is being utilized within the classroom in a way that is challenging and motivating for students. Yes many of the concepts can be and have been completed in classrooms without the use of technology, but many of the students of the Digital Age fail to be interested in such tasks void of technology integration. The bottom line is the implementation of the new NETS and the use of innovative ways to teach our students is what helps us as educators reach our students and provide meaningful and inspirational learning opportunities for everyone.

Thinking Blog - 'Visualization' Technologies: Bringing Organization to Internet Research

Vivismo has set out to revolutionize the way we search the Internet. It has designed 'visualization' technology to provide structure and organization to the vast amount of information on the web. Through linguistic and statistical analysis, Vivismo's Clustering Engine doesn't rely on typical methods such as predefined categories to generate hot lists. Unlike Google which generates lists according to the popularity of the site which is determined by the number of sites that link to it, Vivismo provides a number of related topics and subtopics so the user is the one who determines the parameters and relevance of each individual search.

This technology can significantly help students find information more easily when doing research. Through the classification of each list and the organization of clustered results students can see the relationships between ideas and decide for themselves what to focus on. The convenience of automatic results organized to maximize time and quality of information is available at http://search.vivisimo.com/

View this article at http://www.eschoolnews.com/news/showstory.cfm?ArticleID=4833

Crunch Time!

The countdown is on...8 days left of the school year. I am so busy with end of the year activities, video taping special school events, editing them for our local news network, report cards, and my 2 graduate courses there is barely time to breathe! September and June are always crazy months filled with lots of fun activities and hectic schedules!

Opening Night - Blog Style

This is it...I am now an official blogger. I just started exploring the blog world and I am looking forward to this experience. I hope to incorporate this technology into my teaching and I am beginning to think of some ideas as to how to make that a reality.