Top Ten Tech Tip of the Week Videos

Yes, this is another top ten list. What’s worse, it’s a list of my favorite videos that I have made. Sorry! :)

For the past two years, I have been posting a weekly video podcast with fellow coaches Jason, Wendy and Glenn. We’ve put a lot of time, effort and creative energy into these weekly video episodes, and I know that educators will find many of these useful, if not just amusing. Here is the best we’ve had to offer over the past two years:

10) Comic Strips with ToonDoo ~ October 28, 2011
This week's tip showed how to get started with ToonDoo, where your students can create their own comic strips in a few easy steps. It was our Halloween episode, so there were audio clips and sound effects aplenty.

9) Worlde ~ October 14, 2011
The topic was using Wordle to create word clouds that visually illustrate the key points and most frequently repeated words in any writing. We also used some quick and easy stop-motion video to demonstrate digital storytelling this week. We received many more requests for help making stop-motion video than we did for Wordle after this episode… and that’s OK!

8) Reducing Electronic Clutter ~ October 26, 2010
This quick podcast about the Inbox Zero movement, which encourages us to simplify and focus by reducing our electronic clutter, was one of the ones I sent out to colleagues more frequently than any other, mostly because the message can really help improve your focus at work. I sent this in response to help requests and showed it at professional development sessions. The principal behind it came from Jason, and it was certainly a fun one to make!

7) Social Bookmarking ~ September 22, 2010
Links all over the place? Can't find the one you need? Can't find your "favorites" when you switch computers or your classroom computer was reimaged? Maybe it's time you start social bookmarking! This podcast covers the basics of getting started with an account on Delicious. This was one of my favorites because it really shows Jason’s personality and humor, and we got to talk fast like “the Micro Machines Guy” at the end.

6) Behind the Tech Tips ~ November 11th, 2011
In our Tech Tip each week, we mention that everything you see can be done using district equipment. Many of our colleagues have asked us what specific equipment and programs we use to make our videos, and how to use them so this week, we take you "Behind the Tech Tips" to show how your students can make videos in the classroom using the equipment available in you building. Instead of listening to us this week, we figured it might be more fun to ask your students to show you how to make movies. This one was fun because we took a look back at some of the videos we had made to this point, and with the help of some 5^th graders at Montgomery, showed everyone how we made them.

5) Prezi ~ November 18th, 2011
This week's special Thanksgiving Tech Tip introduces Prezi, a site to create dynamic, web-based presentations. We went on location to one of our elementary schools and enlisted the help of some 6^th grade students, and had a lot of fun with the turkey theme while showing teachers how to get started with Prezi.

4) Podcasting ~ October 8, 2010
A podcast on podcasting, using just the equipment and programs we have at our disposal on North Penn computers. This was one of our first episodes, and it was used as part of a district PD day to show a few different ways teachers and students could podcast using PowerPoint, Sound Recorder, Movie Maker, and various free websites.

3) Inbox Management in Outlook ~ September 23, 2011
This week's tech tip looks at ways to keep your inbox under control, including creating folders and moving messages directly into events on your calendar for later action. This was a follow-up to last year’s “Inbox Zero” podcast, with some new ideas and strategies for using Outlook more efficiently.

2) Welcome Back! ~ September 1, 2010
Hello & welcome to a new school year! This episode explains how to contact an Academic Integration Coach, as well as how to put a link to our site on your main Intranet homepage. This was our first podcast; the one that started it all.

1) Thanks for Your Feedback ~ May 10, 2011
This one is my favorite because it features the words of our colleagues, whom we asked to take a few minutes to share their experiences in working with us during our first year as Academic Integration Coaches. We received nearly 100 responses within the first few hours! We wanted to thank our colleagues for their kind words, so we shared their feedback with this week's podcast.  

Here’s a bonus…

Outlook Desktop Notification ~ October 7, 2011
This week's tip showed how to turn off / turn on / change the new e-mail desktop notification from Outlook 2007... and it was our first time experimenting with the green screen. We had a lot of fun with this one.

And one more...

Skype ~ September 29, 2010
This week's Tech Tips podcast focuses on classroom uses for Skype, a free application that allows users to make voice calls and video conferences over the Internet. This was by no means high quality or well-made, but Wendy was cracking up the whole time and we were having fun as we showed how to use Skype in one of our earliest Tech Tip of the Week podcasts. 

This week will be our 53^rd Tech Tip. Some have been great, some have been pretty rough. All of them were fun to make, and I know I learned a lot in researching and preparing the topics we covered.  You can see all of them here by topic or by date.  

Thanks for reading… and watching.

See you next Tuesday!

Great Skype!

Two great Skype projects already this week...

The first was from a 5th grade teacher at Knapp Elementary who linked his students up with the students of another 5th grade teacher from Sioux Rapids, Iowa, whom he'd met via Twitter. The theme was "Mystery Skype," and the educational skills included geography, history, and research skills. Each class appeared on screen and were able to hear and see each other while taking turns asking yes/no questions in an attempt to be the first to determine the location of the other class. Early questions included, "Do you live in one of the 13 original colonies?" and, "Are you located east of Lake Michigan?"

The teacher from Iowa had her students working on Macbooks and others taking notes on paper. Our teacher had students in groups with assigned roles, including researchers on the classroom desktop and a few mini laptops, note takers, question runners, and several students with dry-erase maps, which they marked up as the question-asking team asked queries that helped eliminate states.

Our team did very well, having narrowed the location of the Hawkeye kids down to an area between two highways, but the Sioux Rapids students used our sports team allegiances against us, then narrowed down our district, and guessed from our many elementary schools until they got the right one. Win or lose, it was a very educational and engaging experience, activating prior knowledge from social studies and applying research and reasoning skills. Our teacher said he definitely plans to repeat the Mystery Skype experience again, linking up with students in a different state.

The second great Skype experience I was fortunate enough to help facilitate in our district this week was put together by two teachers of completely different age groups: a high school science teacher with a 12th grade class, and an Oak Park Elementary teacher with 4th graders. For this lesson, the high school seniors were dissecting feral pigs, and showing the process to the younger students using an Ipevo camera over Skype. The 4th graders were able to watch and ask questions of the "big kids."

In addition to easy communication between faculty members, the sharing of quick information and links, and the ever-popular "Skype an Author" project, these two projects continue to show how technology can be integrated into curriculum in a way that enhances communication, collaboration and learning.

Please share any other great uses you've found for Skype!

What Will Follow Facebook?

I saw it happen to Friendster, Xanga, and MySpace. It guess it is inevitable that any social networking trend is destined to eventually supernova.
 
Facebook's incredible run might be coming to an end. Today's news about GM pulling its 10 Million dollar advertising campaign from Facebook because "it wasn't working," closely follows yesterday's reports that Facebook users are saying in overwhelming numbers that they don't trust the site on privacy issues. Couple all of this with Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin renouncing his U.S. citizenship just before Facebook goes public on May 18 and we seem to have a perfect storm that spells trouble for the social networking giant.

A lot of people are speculating about what will come next. I've heard people talk about Twitter, Google Wave, and even Four Square or Pinterest as the "next Facebook," but each of those, like Linked In (professional networking), Groupon (social commerce), Delicious (social bookmarking), and Flickr (photo sharing), serves a specialized need that is different from Facebook.

I don't think Facebook will disappear the way some are imagining it will. I imagine the next big thing is going to be more along the lines of an app like HootSuite (or countless others) that streamlines many networking sites together most seamlessly, so users can post their thoughts, network professionally and socially, share pictures and news, tweet links, post status updates, cash in on group discounts, pass along memes and humorous videos, bookmark and tag web pages, and much more, using the sites they already prefer (or later discover) to their network.

But which network? If it is an app that wins out, the app would have to somehow be the main network, connected to all the people in each of the networks to which a user already belongs. Right now, most people have built their largest networks on Facebook, and wouldn't want to have to recreate all that connecting. And Facebook already does pretty much everything that the hypothetical app I described would do. If Facebook can rehabilitate it's public image and continue to adapt, the next Facebook will be Facebook.

What do you think?

Will another social network replace Facebook? Is it one that currently exists? Could it be an app that syncs everything together instead? Will Facebook prevail?

Finding Focus

This week, I am assisting with Advanced Placement testing, helping students in World Language and Music AP classes record their audio for the spoken part of the exams and save them as .mp3s onto the CDs provided.

I will also assist with the Wildcat News program at Walton Farm, meet with Gwyn-Nor teachers about Sugar Sync, and run a Geo-caching station for a 6th grade Science field trip to a local park.

Since my last post, I've had a birthday, run my first 10-mile race, the Broad Street Run, and registered for my second, a 5-mile race for this coming weekend. I've also celebrated my son's 5th birthday, taken the kids shopping for Mother's Day presents, learned how to play three new songs on keyboards for the cover band, and increased my use of Twitter as a PLN.

I've watched the Sixers surprise us in the playoffs, the Phillies falter, and the Flyers, as I type these words, get eliminated from the hockey playoffs.

I've got a concert to look forward to attending this weekend, as my all-time favorite band comes to town. I have two shows of my own to play on Saturday, at two different venues, with two different bands. We'll also have great friends visiting from out of town who we'll hope to connect with at some point.

There is a lot going on, but I've been spending a lot of time running, which gives me time to think. Some of those thoughts have been about my tech coaching goals for the upcoming weeks. I've decided to focus as much time as possible on streamlining all the resources, references, links, podcasts, tutorials and other information I've amassed during my time as a coach so they can be accessible for the teachers next year when we won't have tech integration coaches. Making the websites more searchable and organized will be a good focusing mission as we race closer to June and a much-anticipated Summer break.

Five Websites for Use in Most Classrooms

After five years out of the classroom in various technology integration coaching positions, I've seen hundreds of web sites and apps for the classroom. I might use dozens of them for small projects here and there, when the right use arises, but I think it would be most beneficial to my students, for the sake of classroom routine as well as out-of-class efficiency, if I limited my use to a small number of sites that work best for my class.


As I started thinking about how I will focus the use of technology in my classroom next year, I started realizing that the websites I will use could really work in almost every classroom I've encountered K-12.


That probably is a testament to the diversity of these web sites, as teaching and learning is very different all along this spectrum. Teachers can use the functionality of these sites in very different ways with their students, making them very valuable tools for us to be using with students (and their parents) from Kindergarten through graduation.
 
1) Edmodo  - this classroom management site will be my primary form of communication with students. It is safe, secure, and approved in our district's Acceptable Use Policy (AUP). Students "opt in" by joining the site with a code provided by the teacher, create an account in less than a minute, and can even specify if they want to receive notifications via email, text message, or on the website. This provides some level of choice for older students, while teachers of our younger students could just have students use the website itself. Also of great benefit for the younger students, Edmodo will generate parent codes, so parents can join the site and see the posts of their own students and the teacher, without seeing the other students' posts. Teachers will LOVE the ease of setting up and getting started. There is little to do in terms of design or layout. You create a class (or several) and give the code to your students. You post messages, questions, polls, assignments or documents, and your students can reply and post their own. Edmodo works a lot like Facebook, having a news feed that comes into your home page from all of your classes, and other discussion groups or colleagues you connect with. It already features a great network of other educatorswith whom you can share ideas.

2) Wikispaces - this free wiki site is approved in our AUP, and can easily be made secure and private, so only members who log in to their accounts can see the page. Students can create and edit their own pages, perfect for collaboration on projects or sharing ideas in brainstorming or organizing sessions. There are also discussion boards for students and teachers to post their thoughts. It is easy to upload files, share links, embed videos and calendars, and much more. I often say Wikispaces is like the bowl that holds the ice cream and the toppings. Students might create projects using a variety of other sites like Prezi or Voki, do work using Office applications like Word, PowerPoint or Excel, or make videos and post them to TeacherTube or YouTube... but Wikispaces is the site where it can all come together and be organized in one place.

3) Google Docs - Teachers can create forms to survey their students and collect information (or do formative assessments) quickly and easily. Students with accounts can share documents, spreadsheets, presentations and forms with each other or with their teachers for easy collaboration, or paper-free grading.
It also makes it so much easier for students to revise work when it is submitted electronically (or shared) to a teacher who can comment and suggest changes directly in the shared doc. I really like the idea of students doing ongoing work. Google Docs also lends itself well to portfolio assessments. I plan to have my students submit a variety of projects through Google Docs and they will be saved, with teacher and student having access over the whole school year, to track progress and growth. In our district we have our own private label that teachers should use, and we hope that student accounts will soon be added.

4) Kidblog - For any classes with a writing component (and this really should be all of us, to some extent!), Kidblog provides a safe & secure venue for students to write online. The blogs are only visible to the classmates and teacher, and the site is very easy to set up and populate with students (just paste your class list in Excel and save it as a .csv file to upload to Kidblog - the teacher can even create the user names and passwords for the students). Kidblog is mentioned in our AUP as the approved and supported blogging site.

5) Teacher Web Page - in our district, Schoolwires is the website for the official teacher web pages. I will use my Schoolwires web site as my primary means of school-to-home communication. While it is not a two-way communication street (it has web 2.0 features, but it is a PUBLIC website, so not the right venue for the posting of blogs, discussions, original student work, etc.), it makes a great place to post official documents like grading policies. It is also going to be the jumping off point for everything else I'll use in the classroom. My Schoolwires Teacher Web Page will be a "first stop" for students and parents, featuring information about important due dates (possibly pulled in from a classroom Google Calendar?) and links to the great activities and projects we will be doing on the other four sites mentioned above.

That's not all! I'm sure my students and I will do projects with Prezi, make announcements with Blabberize, make video podcasts, create talking avatars, make interactive posters and more, as the situation calls for these programs. I won't be telling them to use one of these given sites, either. I'll be giving assignments based on content, standards, and essential skills, while leaving the means of demonstrating mastery in these skills up to the students. The focus will be on the content. In fact, the name of the game for me next year is going to be FOCUS. I want to focus on using these sites effectively and seamlessly, so my students will not even notice that they are learning the technology as they are engaged in the learning.