Reflections – Page 6 – Teaching Technology

Another Weekend & Another OC PD Opportunity

The weekend after edCamp OC, it was time for the OC Cue 2011 Tech Fest. I had debated throwing a few suggestions into the mix as a presenter for this one but never got around to it so I headed down to Santa Ana to take in some sessions and spend some time with friends.

Session 1

After registering for the event, I headed to room 610 for Greg Dhuyvetter‘s session on PowerPoint. About two years ago I blogged about how I love PowerPoint and I’ll tell you a secret, I still do. The session was not all about never using PowerPoint (whew!) but how to use it effectively and creatively and why other options might be better than PowerPoint for some things. Greg used and suggested Prezi as an alternative to PowerPoint for presentations. I do have a Prezi account but I haven’t used it much. I think I’m much too linear to get Prezi but I really should try it again sometime. I may be biased, because as I said, I do still love PowerPoint, but I think a lot of the objections raised about PowerPoint (not just in this session) can apply to any presentation tool. The effects in Prezi can be overwhelming as can animations and transitions in PowerPoint. You can have too much text and read your text on any type of presentation tool. PowerPoint is more linear than something like Prezi but it can be made more interactive and less linear if slides are designed correctly.

I am issuing myself a challenge to create a presentation both in PowerPoint and Prezi to learn Prezi and to see what I can and can’t do in PowerPoint vs. Prezi. Why do I still love PowerPoint? Well, I have it everywhere – at school, at home, etc. I use it as school with students for much more than just creating presentations – maybe it’s time to revisit PowerPoint on this blog.

Session 2

I didn’t have to move very far because I stayed in the same room for the next session which was Technology and the Developing Needs of Adolescents presented by Stephen Davis. Stephen had the attendees contribute to a Google doc as we discussed the physical, intellectual, emotional and social needs (PIES) of Middle School students. Seeing my Middle Schoolers only twice a week for 45 minutes at a time, it can be hard to fit all of the intellectual topics in. However, after this session, I am looking at ways to fit in even more – ways to meet not just the intellectual needs of my students but ways to blend in the physical, emotional and social needs whenever possible, too.

Session 3

After a great lunch with Jen Wagner and a teacher from her school and some time spent in the Student Technology Showcase, I headed back to the same room for Jen & Sean Williams‘ session, Digital Footprints and the Impact of Online Navigation. I was interested in this session because it was a session that had been given to parents at some schools and I am in the process of trying to put together a parent education night on Social Networking and Digital Footprints. The session actually ended up with Dennis Grice stepping in to co-present with Jen since Sean ended up not being able to be there.

This session was a very casual conversation since most of the people in the room knew one another and the information provided gave me a lot of great ideas to use when I have this same type of discussion with the parents at my school. It also raised a lot of questions in my mind again on when we as educators should should start helping our students to develop a positive digital footprint. One of the slides showed some statistics which included the fact that 43% of students have shared their first names online. We have recently started allowing this at our school Is that wrong? Should we not be? When is it okay?

Session 4

Guess where I was for the final session? Yes, I stayed right in the same room and attended Jen Wagner‘s Googling Forms Effectively session. I use Google Forms a lot in my class and with various projects online but Jen reminded me about the go to a new page on an answer option in forms that I haven’t tried out yet. In the past, I’ve just added questions that had instructions about only answering this one if you said yes to a previous question. I need to try the new page option sometime to see if that works more effectively for what I need.

It was a great day with a lot of learning and time spent with some wonderful Twitter friends including @jimconn @Matt_Arguello @jenwagner @cbell619 @danielabolzman @bbarreda @dgrice @GDhuyvetter and @rushtheiceberg.

February 15, 2011 Reflections No Comments

What I Learned at (ed)Camp

The first edcamp in California is history and I’m humbled to say I was one of the organizers along with fellow educators Matt Arguello, Chris Bell, Lisa Dabbs, Stephen Davis, Jayme Johnson and Sean Williams and our silent contributors Daniela Bolzmann and Scott Schang.

There is no budget for professional development at the school where I teach – the money just has to go to the kids. I don’t let that stop me though and I constantly look for opportunities for PD. So, back in September, when a call went out on Twitter for educators interested in bringing an edcamp to southern California, I added my name to the wiki. I had read blogs and followed edcamp tags on Twitter and been excited by the energy and passion that I had seen in previous edcamps and was excited to be involved.

What I Did

Things got underway and people stepped up to handle the website and the money and the graphics and organizing donations. I really didn’t feel that I was contributing much other than adding my 2¢ in group conversations or Skype calls and posting some Facebook messages. We only had one face-to-face meeting during the planning and only three of us were able to make it. During that face to face meeting, I volunteered to put together the on site sessions board and set up a Google spreadsheet for an online sessions board.

I spent some time checking out pictures from edCamp Philly and edCamp NYC and looked at both of the websites for these previous edCamps to see how they handled an online session board. I didn’t find any information on whether these worked well or didn’t work so well. I contacted Ann Oro, who was one of the edCamp NYC organizers, to ask her some logistical questions about the session board and what to expect the day of the event. I was starting to panic that maybe we had forgotten something. Ann was kind enough to Skype with me about it and set my fears to rest. Thanks Ann!

I set up our online sessions board grid in a Google spreadsheet and spent some time creating a grid on bulletin board paper using painter’s tape for the squares. I also printed out session cards that people could fill out and velcro to the board in the morning. This seemed to work well and in fact Scott Schang, who attends a lot of BarCamps, said he’d never seen such an organized sessions board. HA! We’re teachers! I can’t take the credit for the idea. I got all of the ideas from the previous edcamps so thank you to them.

Speaking of Scott, he set up and maintained the edCamp OC web site for us and did a great job with it. I felt that we needed something more interactive and collaborative that attendees could add to themselves on the day of the event and suggested and set up an edCamp OC wiki for this. If you were a session leader at edCamp OC, we’d still love to have you add your information to the wiki!

The morning of the event was a little crazy trying to get the board up and the session cards out to the registration table and then getting the online sessions board filled out after the sessions were established. However, after the morning rush to get it all set up and going, the day really did run itself. I had been told this would happen and it really did.

Photo by: Matt Arguello

During the day, I also set up an edCamp OC Contact Form to collect names and contact information from attendees for future conversations and collaborations. This is on the wiki and we’d still love to have anyone who attended add their information to the form so that the conversations that started can continue.

What I Learned

Conversations about learning were what the day was about and here were the highlights of my learning from the day:

It really is possible to organize an event like this without meeting in person until the day of the event – gotta love Google Groups & Skype.
People are flexible and will wait for lunch when the catering truck is late – especially if the ice cream truck is already there!
Using Facebook pages for connecting with kids is a great way to be where they are but not have to be their friends.
Dan Callahan Rocks! It was so awesome that Dan came to the first edcamp in California.
The best idea of the day was from the staff of The Children’s School in La Jolla – they brought their students to share in the conversations.
I judge a successful conference by how many times I want to be able to clone myself during the day. By that measure, we were successful since that was pretty much every session. Great conversations all day long.
I truly enjoy the unconference model for sessions. Learning should be about conversations and I need to remember that in my teaching as well.
The edCamp OC organizing team are all amazing people. It was truly an honor to work with all of you!

Created with flickr slideshow.

January 29, 2011 Reflections 3 Comments

There’s a Million Little Thoughts Swirlin’ Round Me

I just read Jen Wagner’s Today My Kids Have Pencilogy blog post and chuckled but then quickly realized that I am the Pencilogy teacher at my school. Yes, my students still come to the lab twice a week for 30-45 minutes at a time depending on the grade level. I sat down and figured out that if my students never have a holiday and aren’t ever sick and never leave early for a game or some event at school, my Elementary students will have 35 hours of technology instruction for the year and my Middle School students will have a total of 52 1/2 hours of technology instruction for the year. So, not only am I the Pencilogy teacher, I have very limited hours to teach whatever it is I should be teaching.

I really wish that technology in my school could be described as Chris Lehmann says “.. like oxygen: ubiquitous, necessary, and invisible.” Unfortunately, it is not. At our school, in the computer lab, we have 18 10-12 year old computers with 9GB hard drives and 256MB of memory that mostly work – slowly but they work. They don’t have the newest graphics cards and can’t run things like Google Earth and a few of them have CD drives that don’t work. There is no projector (or IWB) but we get by with a large monitor and a connection to allow projection of the screen onto a large TV – not the best resolution but it works. We do have Internet access in the lab and I’m fortunate that not much of anything is blocked. Our classrooms have, at best, 1-3 even older computers and no access to the Internet from the classrooms.

I have been struggling with what to teach during the students’ time in the computer lab and have felt guilty that we’re not integrating technology into the classroom. I have, however, come to the conclusion that I need to do the best with what I have and continue to try to find resources to make things better. To me, doing the best with what I have means that I need to teach my students the skills they will need when (not if but when) our school gets the funding to upgrade the equipment and move the technology into the classroom. So, for me this means that I will concentrate on:

Digital Citizenship – More and more of our lives are being spent online. Employers and colleges are looking at the digital footprints of applicants. Something posted today can come back to haunt someone years from now. Many of our students apply to local private high schools and I can see the high schools looking up a student’s online presence at some point. It is imperative that students learn what it means to be a good digital citizen and I feel that this needs to be my primary focus in the computer lab.
Productivity tools such as Microsoft Office – our students need these both now for required projects and reports and as they go to High School. I also intend to expose them to Google Docs and maybe Open Office (if I have disk space to install it) and presentation tools such as Prezi. I want them to understand what they are doing with these applications and not just where the button is they have to push to format a paragraph or change a font, for example. If they understand what they’re doing, it won’t matter what the tool is, they’ll be able to figure out how to create the document or spreadsheet or presentation they need.
Keyboarding – I still believe that keyboarding is an important skill that students need to know and that if they learn how to touch type, they will be able to type faster and more accurately. This will only help them as they move on in school and have to type more and longer reports. I can see keyboarding going the way of handwriting as we move toward touch screens and touch pads but right now my students still need this skill so I still include it.

Does this mean that I’ve given up on trying to integrate into the classroom curriculum? Not at all. Integration is a great way to teach the productivity tools and to practice keyboarding. What better way to teach search skills, how to cite sources and how to format a report or create a presentation than by using the real work that the students need to do. Joining online projects that can integrate into the classroom and the computer lab helps me with my goal of teaching digital citizenship and how to communicate responsibly online and it helps to get the teachers excited about using technology to go along with their lessons.

Sometimes I feel like I’m the only one still stuck in this older model – still running the pencil lab. Is there anyone else out there doing the same thing? What do you feel are the most important things you should be teaching?

Note: The title of this blog post comes from the song You’ve Got No Time by The Cowsills

October 25, 2010 Reflections 4 Comments

Presenting For the First Time … Again

Back in the days before I was a teacher and before I was a mom, I was a computer programmer & designer and wrote business applications for a variety of different industries. Part of what I did during that time was to develop “train the trainer” classes and presentations. I would travel to various offices and train the people that would actually be training our customers or train the sale people who would be selling the software. Sometimes these were hands on classes and other times they were short presentations on the software. I also attended trade shows and technology conferences and would put on demonstrations of our software for people who visited our booth.

So, I had presented before but I had never presented at an educational conference – that is until the T.E.L.L. Conference on October 9th.

Last year, I attended this conference and decided this year that it was my turn to share at this conference rather than just attending again. I debated what I would present but since I had spent quite a bit of time during the summer learning online with a variety of free resources I thought something about being a lifelong learner for free would be a good subject to cover. I know at my school there is little (if any) money for conferences or other forms of professional development and I’m sure that we’re not the only school where this is the case.

With my subject decided, I collected resources into a Live Binder and created a presentation in PowerPoint and ran through the presentation until I knew the material. Did this make everything go exactly as I planned? Well, not exactly:

Most of the attendees at my session did not have laptops or even cell phones with texting ability so there went my techie interactive question. I should have known this would be the case and not planned on using an online tool but I think at least one person in the session thought it was a fun.
For some reason my sound driver decided that it was corrupt the morning of the conference, so there went the video I was going to use to introduce YouTube and how you can learn anything on YouTube.
I had too much material for the length of the session. I wasn’t sure how many questions I would get so I planned more material than I would need – too much more. Next time I’ll remember less is more – I feel I really rushed some things and would have liked to have had more time at the end for additional questions. I wonder if Prezi would have been a better choice for presenting since it’s not as linear as PowerPoint and may have been better for skipping things as time ran out? I have never been able to wrap my head around Prezi but I think I need to look at it again.

I enjoyed the experience and hope to present at more conferences in the future. I have debated throwing my hat into the ring for the CUE LA Tech Fair but I see you have to bring your own projector (which I don’t have) and I’m not sure where my presentation idea would fit into the Curricular Areas on the Presenter Registration Form. Maybe I’ll think about the CUE OC Technology Festival instead.

In addition to presenting, I also attended the keynotes and some sessions at T.E.L.L. ’10 – I love being able to share something I’m passionate about and learn something on the same day. It doesn’t get much better and here were some of the highlights of the day for me:

Brent Coley‘s Keynote, “Educational Technology: Without Why, How is Irrelevant”, was inspiring and full of advice on both why and how to use technology in the classroom. It’s great to have someone who is actually using the technology in the classroom be a keynote speaker.
Kevin Honeycutt closed the day with a fun ending Keynote that unfortunately was marred by technical problems since he was presenting remotely. I just wish he could have been there in person or the connection had been better.
I didn’t get to participate live but I have watched the archive of Diane Main‘s session, “Google Earth For All Grade Levels” and it was amazing. I just wish Google Earth worked on the computers in our lab. I can only run it on my laptop but I think I’m going to adapt some of the ideas and use Google Maps with my students.
Sean Williams‘ session, “Give Your Students A VoiceThread”, has inspired me to use VoiceThread again. I do have a class subscription on VoiceThread but haven’t used it yet this year. I loved the ideas on differentiation and the examples Sean showed were great. And, don’t tell Sean, but I hope to someday be as good at presenting as he is!

I would love to have attended both of Dennis Grice’s sessions and both of Greg Dhuyvetter‘s sessions and any session that Chris Bell does is always worthwhile. I lurked a bit outside of Stephen Davis‘ session and it looked amazing – if I hadn’t been trying (in vain) to fix my sound driver I would have attended that one!

Thanks to everyone involved with the T.E.L.L. ’10 Conference – I had a great time, learned some new things and look forward to next year in Orange County!

October 18, 2010 Reflections 1 Comment

Race To Nowhere

This past week it was time for another what’s wrong with education documentary. This time it was the film Race To Nowhere.

While Waiting For Superman concentrated on failing schools and the students who don’t have access to quality education, Race To Nowhere focuses on students that are succeeding and the pressure on them to excel. I found myself identifying with the issues in the film because they are my issues:

I don’t work in an inner city school so much of what was in Waiting For Superman just wasn’t something I had experienced. I work at a small Episcopal school that like most schools could use more money but does not have the problems of the failing public schools.
My daughters have both gone to private schools for their entire lives. They have both faced the pressure of doing well in order to get in to a good private high school in our area.
I just went through the roller coaster experience of having my older daughter apply to colleges and be accepted by some and rejected by others. I guess her over 4.0 GPA & 6 AP classes just weren’t enough in some cases.
I also wonder where the mindset that going to a junior college instead of going right into a 4 year college indicates failure has come from. That is the culture at my daughters’ high school and it’s one that I hear from the parents at my current school who have children in other high schools in our area.
I’ve seen for myself that while my daughter was told that a 3 was a pass on an AP exam, a 3 gets you nothing in college – maybe it helped you get accepted but it gives you no credits. A 4 might give you an exemption from a lower level class and if you’re lucky a 5 will get you credit.
I’ve watched my younger daughter, who started high school this year, stay up until 12:30am working on homework when she has to be up at 6:30am for school the next day.
I’m trying to decide if my younger daughter is offered the AP track in high school if I should let her get on it. She doesn’t test as well as her older sister and she takes longer to get the work done so just because she has an “A” should she go into the AP class? If she doesn’t take the AP classes will it affect her chances to get into college? During college tours we were repeatedly told that admissions people look at what you could have taken at a school and what you did take and that it does affect your admission chances.
At one point in the film, some successful college dropouts were shown such as Bill Gates & Steve Jobs. I just couldn’t help but wonder if the companies that these men founded hire college dropouts these days?

As I struggle with some of these issues with my own children and wonder if I can convince my younger daughter’s school to have a screening of the film, I have to say that I am glad to be a teacher at my current school. We are certainly not a model of a 21st century school but we are a school that realizes that there is more to life than academics. We are a school that does limit the homework load and does not place an emphasis on standardized tests. The students do take standardized tests once a year in the spring, but our school culture is not one of teaching to the test – thankfully.

The crisis in education in this country is real. There is too much emphasis on testing and racing to the top or not leaving a child behind (by whatever name it’s currently called) and there is a definite inequity of access to quality education. We need real discussions about this and not the media hype that’s been going around lately. I would urge everyone to read Chris Lehmann: This Isn’t An Education Debate and attend or view the archive of Elevating the Education Reform Dialog.

October 3, 2010 Reflections No Comments

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