Technology Infused Learning and Teaching

Let us pause as this writer screams to see that her Google Reader is still showing well over 1,000 unread post after having tackled many of them earlier this week.

Deep breath…

Okay, my intent had been to dig deep into the bowels of my reader to find one of my starred gems, however when I opened it to develop this post, one of the titles of a recent post jumped out at me: 50 Ways to Use a Projector in the Classroom. This post comes from the blog, Langwitches created by Silvia Tolisano, who I greatly admire. She is known, to me at least, for her practical blog posts, which I have always found informative.

This particular post is cuts right to the heart of the title and is a subject about which I have been thinking about recently. One of the issues that I have noticed in my district is that teachers have been using LCD projectors mostly as a replacement for their overhead projector – something she mentions in the post. She goes on to describe the process of how they adopted the LCD’s and how they have begun mounting them. I really liked hearing about this because it’s nice to hear about where other schools are in utilizing various types of technologies.

Silvia then speaks of offering professional development on uses for the LCD projector at one of their monthly workshops. I love the idea of monthly workshops and wish that I could implement this myself, but I would really need people in the schools that I could count on to redeliver this instruction. Yet another item to add to my list of things to do. But given the practicality of her suggestions, which she adapted from a discussion on Classroom 2.0, and her wiki, this will become a great resource for me to use in my district.

As for the second post that I’d like to share, I found this great post by Jennifer Jones of Injenuity. I only wish there had been time to read it before I did my presentation at GaETC. Had that been the case, I think I may have changed the approach I took just a bit. Why? Because in her post, titled “The Job of Personal Learning”, she approaches the building of a PLN by looking at it as a job. I knew that building a PLN was work, knew that it takes time, and knew that you have to dedicate yourself to your tools of choice and to fostering the connections. Even knowing all of this, I didn’t think of it as a job, probably because I eat this stuff up. I quickly realized the benefits of my network and I was hooked!

This part really rocked me, that rang true with me (the grace of 20/20 vision after the fact) was this,

When I look at it as a job, I can see why introducing it to groups en masse doesn’t lead to successful adoption.

Yes, I enjoyed a rather self-depreciating laugh. After all, that’s exactly what I attempted to do. But hey, so did David Warlick and Steve Dembo, too. At least I was in good company, right? Of course. My expectations were a smidgen too high though. Yes, I am a glass 1/2 full kind of girl, but I believe in the power of positive thought. Yes, I thought I might could possibly start a PLN wave. I think perhaps it was more like a pebble dropped into a large lake though.

Regardless, Jen’s quote above is all too true. After reflecting on it, I realized that I have had much more success with colleagues becoming involved in aspects of building a PLN because I have been able to intimately demonstrate the power of my PLN and I have been able to, in effect, mentor them. Those who I have been able to do that with have stuck with it.

The first tool that I decided to explore was Jigzone. It’s a site where you can upload your own pictures and create puzzles from them that can be played online or even produced into real puzzles. Unfortunately, the navigation on this site is rather poor. Typically, you find a place to either login or create an account in the upper corner of a Web 2.0 site and there was no sign of that on this one. I finally managed to create an account once I was in the process of making a puzzle and then found that my account information was at the bottom left of the page.

After uploading my picture, the puzzle is created for you, and you are then given an embed code as well as other options. They offered quite a few embed code options, which I found to be useful given that my blog doesn’t leave a lot of space to embed something of this size. The code I chose allows the puzzle to overflow the space to the right.

When I played my puzzle online, there was timer that kept track of how long it took me to create my puzzle. As far as social aspects of the site, you can play puzzles other than the ones that you created and share your puzzle solving time with “buddies” who also create accounts. Other than that, I didn’t see many social opportunities. I would also have a difficult time finding educational applications for this site. I suppose if students uploaded their own artwork or photos they took, then they could put the puzzles together when there is “downtime” in the classroom – but when do we have that?

What my PLN Means Jigsaw Puzzle

Wordle was another option to explore, which I LOVE. This is a sample wordle that I created with the help of my PLN (Professional Learning Network). It’s the same Wordle that I used to create the puzzle above, but with different colors.

As far as the educational applications of Wordle, here are a couple:

1. Copy and paste student work into a wordle to identify repetitive words

2. Create an “about me” page, but pasting the student’s name in many times to ensure their name comes out large. Then descriptors, again adding them in several times, but not as many as the name so they appear smaller.

Speeches are another piece of text that are great to plug into a Wordle. You can see what the most common “themes” of a speech are because the more the word is repeated, the larger it is.

Since I’ve already been using Wordle, I decided to try a third Web 2.0 tool, Writeboard. It’s a site where you can create a document that can be edited and added to collaboratively. Once you create a writeboard, you’re ready to edit and then save it. After that step, you are provided a link to the write board which can be distributed along with your chosen password allowing others edit it as well. Probably the best thing about Writeboard is the fact that you do not have to create an account. I find this especially useful since it is sometimes difficult for students to create accounts because they a) don’t have an email or b) have an email but they can’t verify it at school in order to use the service.

The bad? I wish it had is an embed code. Also, two people cannot simultaneously edit the document or they will save over each other, much like a wiki. The third most obvious drawback is the fact that you have to use codes to bold, italicize, or underline.

Here is the link to my Writeboard and the password is trymeout.

As far as educational applications, I think a fun project that this could be used for is to create a chain story. The teacher could provide the start to the story and each student then add on. Students can also create a writeboard for school work and share the link and password with their teacher.

All in all, it’s free and for that price, it’s worth at least giving it a try.

Here is my slideshow that I created using Pikistrips. I chose this particular site to create my “slideshow” because the rest of the choices are ones that I have either used or at least played with in the past. I have seen comic creators before, but this particular one was impressive, even if the embed code doesn’t work as it should in wikispaces. It does work here, but this is rather small and a bit difficult to read. If you click on this image below, it will take you to the Pikistrips page and you should (emphasis on should) be able to find a link on the lower right that will take you to alternative sizes, one being larger than this.

Credits for these images are as follows:
Trans Asia Express : Zerega
A confusing street sign : Jellybean
Questions : Oberazzi
The world network: saschaaa
Globes-hands-sm: noticelj
Sharing :ryancr
Learning: Nebraska Library Commission
Ingrid ~ La Fontaine des Innocents XXVI: h_de_c
What my PLN Means Wordle: Created by me with the assistance of my PLN

How do I love thee?
Let me count the ways!!
Thou art more useful for finding an incredible
array of images than any other tool.

And I joketh not!

Okay, all Shakespeare references aside, I am head over heels for Flickr! In my previous post on Creative Commons, I mentioned how I have recently used Flickr for a presentation that I did. I spent hours on Flickr searching for those special images that evoked the meaning I wanted and I found far more examples than I ended up using.

Whenever I need an image, I head straight to Flickr. When someone else needs images, I show them the CC search in Flickr. When I see someone heading to the Google Image search, right after I cringe, I point them to the CC search in Flickr. Certainly there are other photo sharing sites out there, but none are comparable to the depth and breadth you find here. Can you tell I love this site?

Since I already spent so much time searching for images in preparation for my GaETC presentation, I chose to use the same theme for this task. Is that cheating? I dearly hope not. In this instance, I’ll call it dual-purpose tasking just to cover myself . My theme is Professional (Personal) Learning Networks and the images that I searched for were those that, for me, represent what my network means to me.

The image below is probably one of my favorites. Most might see a group of people holding puzzle pieces together. However, what I see is a broad cross-section of people who are joining together to connect, collaborate, share, and create something of value that each person can then use.

Not being a classroom teacher (for many moons), I don’t have specific ideas for how Flickr can be used to support teaching and learning in general. I use Flickr in my professional development courses to show teachers a viable option they can use and that their students can use for project creation.

Personally, in my searches for images to use in my presentation, what I have found in Flickr has broadened my view of how words can be represented. It’s always interesting to see the results that I get when searching titles and tags.

One of the more interesting and recent developments on Flickr is the ability to upload videos. I know that YouTube is the preferred method for that, but in many cases YouTube is blocked for schools whereas Flickr is not. This Life in Florida set contains student-created Photostory movies they are sharing with a partner school, which I believe is in either Central or South America. Since most digital cameras these days can also take decent quality movies with sound, the ability to upload movies to Flickr extends the use of the site and opens up other opportunities for sharing digital media.

I know there are many other aspects of Flickr that can be used in education and that I am just beginning to scratch the surface. This perhaps will become a goal of mine to delve deeper into the world of Flickr so I can then develop strategies for incorporating its use in the classroom. To that end, I created a Flickr in Education group in Diigo to help me and others see the educational applications of Flickr. This is our group’s linkroll thus far. If you are a Diigo user and are interested in joining, you are welcome to contribute!

Group Flickr in Education Bookmarks

Flickr logo photo source – Jing Screenshot
Puzzle photo source: Flickr Lumaxart

Although the task is to think about how Creative Commons “may” affect me professionally and/or personally, I’d like to focus here on how it has impacted me since I became aware of Creative Commons over a year ago.

I tend to be pretty oblivious to badges or logos on websites unless they’ve been pointed out to me. Call it ignorance, but in this case it’s true. If I have ever gone to a website with a CC logo on it, I never questioned what it was because it had no impact on me personally.

After attending NECC 2007 in Atlanta, which is where I first heard the term “creative commons”, everything that I searched for on the Internet to use for professional purposes was viewed in a different light.

How? First of all, I knew that images from Google’s image search weren’t in the public domain. For years when I taught web-publishing, I always told my teachers that you are not to use images from there unless you have permission. Then I would direct them to sources of clip art and images that were freely usable, with the request for attribution. In the cases of elementary teachers, the sites that I found were great for them because most of the images were geared for the eye of a younger child. That left out the middle and high school teachers though who I often found were grabbing images from here and there, without attribution, and using them on their websites.

Then along came Creative Commons.

What a difference this had made! I now have at my fingertips a vast resource of images that can be used legally for free. All anyone needs to do is provide a link (if published on the web) and attribution back to the source. I recall the expressions on the faces of the first group of teachers that I told about the Creative Commons search feature in Flickr. It made me feel like I had given them a present.

For the most part, the video clips that I have needed to use in the professional learning that I deliver has all come with an embed code. However, I know that teachers and their students need access to media that is freely usable. It has become important for me to promote the use of Creative Commons searches more now than in the past because an increasing number of both our teachers and students are publishing.

Creative Commons will, I hope teach both teachers and students about the importance of attribution and how they, too can contribute to the vast collection of CC licensed work available. I believe that if students utilize the media available under this license, they will find a far richer and deeper pool of resources to choose from, which will result in a better final project.

On a personal note, I recently presented at GaETC in Atlanta and created a Power Point presentation – the first I’ve done in years! My goal was to completely avoid clipart in favor of finding images that would evoke meaning. I turned to the CC search feature in Flickr and was able to collect a huge array of images. What made it even more meaningful for me was the ability to search both titles and tags of images for words such as ’sharing’ and ‘learning’. It was interesting to see people’s perceptions of these words in their pictures.

I do share content on the web via Flickr, wikis, and most recently Slideshare. After having found such great content in so many places, I almost feel that it’s my duty to contribute for the benefit of others.

(Word of warning…this Power Point won’t make sense without the presentation. I’m hoping to do a recording of it.)

One of the questions that we could respond to for this blog post was “Who owns your teaching materials?”. I think a gut reaction would be to say “ME!”, but given the fact that the materials I create are typically done both at work and on my school system’s computers, then arguably, they do. I haven’t had the chance to further research what the true answer to that might be. Is there a true answer? That is the piece about copyright and fair use that is so confusing to both students and teachers. There are no cut and dry answers, just simply guidelines that are subject to interpretation. Even though I say that my school system “owns” the content I create, I license it Creative Commons. What I create is not for my personal benefit or only for the benefit of Barrow County Schools, but for anyone seeking to learn.

Now as far as potential drawbacks to Creative Commons, there is always the risk that you might end up using CC licensed media that the licensee doesn’t have the “right” to license at all. I often wonder about some of the pictures that I find on Flickr that are under a CC license, but are photos of licensed media. In those cases, my instinct is to steer clear of it.

In the end, Creative Commons is a very blessed thing!

Image Source: Flickr CC screenshot