The Village Green » Safety

TIE 2009 – Create, Communicate, Collaborate – Howie DiBlasi

Matthew Woolums — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 17:29:32 +0000

http://www.drhowie.com

Started with Green Eggs and Ham. More statistics about jobs moving from the US to overseas, from Friedman’s “The World is Flat”. Also mentioned Pink’s “A Whole New Mind” and Jim Collins “Good to Great” – get the right people on the bus, get them in the right seats, get the wrong people off the bus. Howie says we also need to get a driver. Short video about people who failed before achieving greatness (lincoln, etc). Can we still reward kids for doing anything rather than allowing them to fail? If you want change, be the change.

Will change happen if we don’t change our classrooms? Short video “Is this what the future in the US looks like” from ScreamingFrog. Skills for success:

creative problem solving
critical and analytical thinking
information gathering
team work and collaboration

These skills are all analytical. Video: “We are sinking”. Overview of outline in distributed documents. Interesting, Howie is talking about using Google Docs, but distributed files as an outline. We used a blog as a form of assessment – collecting comments as an assessment. http://mytooltest.blogspot.com/2009/06/how-do-you-assess-you-students-teachers.html

Web site evaluations - http://www.wiredsafety.org/wiredlearning/Evaluation/evalcriteria/index.htm#slide=1 It is important to foster critical thinking on the part of the web surfers in our classroom.

Web 2.0 100 tools for teachers – http://snurl.com/web2tools (slow loading). AltaVista use of host: (limit the results by domain) and link: (who links to that link) as tools to validate web sites.

Short demo of Jing – screencasting. Scratch – simple programming environment. Audacity – podcasting (This I believe example). What are my beliefs?

Everyone is not the same
Conflict isn’t always negative
Learning is individual to each person
Naps are important
We all deserve the opportunity to share our stories
Failure is a powerful teacher

Don’t be afraid of the technology, give it to the kids.

Podcasting in Plain English. Leads into a curriculum review with Bob Sprankle podcasts as an example. http://www.eduhound.com and http://www.curriki.org. Freeplay Music and others for sources of music to include in presentations. Curriculum links exploration. Google Docs presentation adding examples of ’six words that describe me’. My six words? “relax, reflect, don’t let other restrict you”. Other tools shown: Wordle, VoiceThread. Howie has an interesting style where he brings up a ‘newbie’ to demo the tool and the ‘experts’ in the audience provide support in using the tool. VoiceThread only lets you have 3 free threads. Brain is getting full.

Online tools, 280 Slides, PhotoShow, One True Media, Moblyng, Animoto, Rock You, My Jugaad, PhotoPeach. Look for the Educator (sometimes free) options in many of these tools! ePals. We would have to find a way for ePals and Gaggle.net to work with each other. Anyone using both? Contributions to your community. Johnny Lee, Wiimote interactive whiteboard, video from TED Conference. Ask high school electronics classes to make these for every classroom. Contribute back.

Stay connected (communicate) with Twitter (Texas teacher Twitter Experiment). Creates a back-channel. Increases number of participants in any conversation.

Dreaming. Building planes in the Air video from EDS.

Reflection: There was a lot to digest if you didn’t know about any of this. It would be nice to see the document posted in an online version instead of distributed as a file. Where would teachers start? Is there one best practice to implement?

Twitter Fine

Matthew Woolums — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 02:34:46 +0000

Looks like Twitter and the NBA have something going here. Previously, a player was told not to tweet during games, and another player said he was going to tweet during a game. Now an owner has been fined by the league office for publicly criticizing the referees in public, in this case, on Twitter. Mark Cuban has quite a history with NBA fines, and also has his own connections to the Internet prior to being the owner of the Dallas Mavericks. Seems like someone should have explained to Mark that comments made on the Internet can be seen by anyone, employers, governing boards, just about anyone! At $25,000 a tweet, even Mark Cuban won’t be able to afford that for too long.

Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban fined $25,000 for ref comments – ESPN

Blogging in the Classroom – Langwitches

Matthew Woolums — Thu, 01 Jan 2009 00:52:06 +0000

Silvia Rosenthal Tolisano, author of the excellent Langwitches blog, put together a series of lesson plans to assist teachers who are interested in blogging for elementary students. To make things even easier, she’s posted the entire collection in .pdf format. Well worth looking into, especially if you aren’t sure how to get your students blogging.

Langwitches » Blogging Unit for Download

Careful Where You Click

Matthew Woolums — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 15:35:15 +0000

One part of Internet safety is keeping your own system infection free. This isn’t as simple as it may seem. According to Sophos, Adobe is potentially spreading a virus around through their web server. Have you visited Adobe recently?

Sophos discovers serious threat for vloggers on Adobe website

Cyber-Bullied Don’t Snitch

Matthew Woolums — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 18:08:10 +0000

The New York Times has an article about a cyber-bullying study. Turns out most kids who are on the receiving end don’t tell anyone.

Research indicates that as many as 75 percent of teens have been bullied online, but only one in 10 have reported the problem to parents or other adults, a new study shows.

It would be interesting to see if these numbers differ from the experience of those who are bullied in the physical world, but no comparison was mentioned in the article. Popular reasons for not telling an adult ranged included needing to “learn to deal with it”, worrying that Internet access would be cut off, and fear of getting into trouble with parents. Again, it would have been interesting to see how this correlates or not to the physical world experience.

Parents Often Unaware of Cyber-Bullying – Well Blog – NYTimes.com