FETC Virtual Wrap - Up #2

As I was saying yesterday, I didn't get much farther than the blogs at the FETC Virtual Conference last week.  I will need to catch up in the archives.

Someone mentioned a webinar on Innovation in Education: Aligning Teacher Effectiveness to Greater Student Achievement by Kathleen Fulton.  I couldn't find this on the schedule, so I'm not sure it was during the FETC conference, however, I mention it because the post had some good thoughts on students and PowerPoint usage.   We all know PowerPoint can have a bad rap because people read straight from them, but that's a presentation problem, not a PowerPoint problem.  What some mentioned is that they are using Presentation Zen, Slideology, and Sliderocket as ways to get their students to stop reading their slides and be more interactive with their audience. 

In one class, a teacher has given his students time to write a short reflection paper about what they have learned during the unit and then they create a PowerPoint with 10 slides and under 10 minutes to tell the class what they  have learned. Someone else stated this is similar to PechaKucha, which I had to look up.  It's an event held in Japan for designers, which draws from the Japanese term for "chit chat", with the idea of 20 images in 20 seconds. The idea is to make presentations concise and keeps things moving at a rapid pace. Another poster said they have found telling their students to think of each slide like a road map as a way to get slides with not so much information.

Some interesting thoughts! 

There's a history teacher I work with where we've done a lot of PowerPoint presentations in her classes and we like to give her students a little bit more of a template to work from, creating slides with key points for them to remember to talk about on their slides.  For example, we just finished a 1920's digital scrapbook. One slide was about the Harlem Renaissance and on the slide were clues to help the students such as, who was a famous musician during this time period?  Why were they famous?  or we included a text box saying insert a picture or movie here.  Then the students can design it how they want, moving text boxes and changing fonts, etc.

What kinds of projects have others done with PowerPoint? How do you keep students from putting too much on it or from reading it word for word?

FETC Virtual Wrap - Up #1

I didn't get a lot of time to check the FETC virtual conference last week, but I did get a chance to go to the blogging area and see what educators were talking about.  One of the topics that caught my eye was the idea of having online clubs.  There's a school in Florida that has found more members are getting involved by having clubs online instead of face to face: "We currently have 10 online student clubs.  Some have over 150 members, some meet weekly, some monthly.  Students love the flexibility of time and we get many traditional school students that can't participate at their school due to time constraints."   I find this idea to very interesting!

Some of the ways these online clubs are meeting are through Elluminate, blogs, wikis, Nings, Blackboard, and Moodle.  Elluminate can be fully moderated and supervised; blogs and wikis also can be set up to be moderated before posting, as can the Ning. Some of their activities include club happenings, book discussions, and a virtual health club.

I've toyed with the idea of having a student video club, where I would teach students how to make all of kinds of videos and movies and eventually doing something with a school video contest.  I think it would be awfully hard to pull off entirely online, but it might be a good way to get more students involved because they could make their movies and just upload them on their own time. 

The original poster, who I neglected to get a name for, said they would be interested in collaborating, comparing notes, or sharing ideas can be contacted at http://www.flvs.net/areas/studentservices/clubs/Pages/default.aspx.

What are your thoughts about online clubs?  Would this be something you would do at your school?
 I saw another post on John Kuglin's session where he talked about clouds and the free tools available with Google (the docs, apps, calendar, Google Earth, etc.) What I didn't realize is that Google gives free 1 gig online storage for students.  What a great way to get projects from home to school and back, to the library, or to a friend's house!  Apparently, he also talked about Schoolfusion, which is what my school district uses, and the importance of teachers needing websites.  I, too, think this is important so that students have a way to go back and see what was done in class if they need extra support. With the use of electronic files, a scanner, or an interactive white board, teachers can save their lessons from the day and then upload to their site for those students or for students who were out sick.  It's also a great way for teachers and parents to have ongoing communication as parents know what is going on in class by seeing announcements, projects, worksheets, calendars, class notes, or study guides and being able to send email or post messages on a blog or a message board when they have questions. 

Does your school have something similar to Schoolfusion or do you use a website with your classes?  What are ways you like to use it?

FETC Virtual Conference Tomorrow!

It's the week of virtual conferences, it seems!  Tomorrow is the Florida Educational Technology Conference's turn from 10:30 a.m. - 6:00 p.m. (The DEN's virtual conference is Saturday!)  I love virtual conferences, because it gives you a chance to listen in when you want and if you aren't able to, then you can hear the archived sessions.  That's smart thinking!

This should also be a great opportunity to hear about educational technology issues on the national level.  I'm most looking forward to the sessions in the afternoon/evening on computer safety and web 2.0.

You can register here.

Here's the full rundown of the schedule:

10:30 - 11:00 am	Dedicated Exhibit Hall Time
11:00 - 11:45 am	Keynote Presentation - Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology Karen Cator Director of the Office of Educational Technology U.S. Department of Education Washington, D.C.
12:00 - 1:00 pm	A Panel Discussion: How We Will Use the National Ed Tech Plan Ann McMullan, Executive Director Educational Technology, Klein ISD, Texas, Jill Hobson, Director of Instructional Technology and Media Services, Forsyth County Schools, Georgia Brenda Williams, Executive Director, West Virginia Department of Education Moderator: Geoff Fletcher, Editorial Director, Education Group, 1105 Media, Inc..
1:15 - 2:25 pm	The New 21st Century Classroom: Using the Cloud to Create Affordable Learning Systems John Kuglin Retired Associate Dean University of Montana
2:30-3:00 pm	Dedicated Exhibit Hall Time
3:00 - 4:10 pm	Computer Safety and Security Threats Teachers and Students Face: Deal with Them NOW! Brent Williams Educational Technology Center Kennesaw State University
4:15 - 5:00 pm	Dedicated Exhibit Hall Time
5:00 - 6:00 pm	Web 2.0 and Education Julie Evans Chief Executive Officer Project Tomorrow

FETC Fall Virtual Conference Tomorrow!

The FETC Virtual Conference is tomorrow! I blogged about this back in August and here's your friendly reminder about it! Visit http://virtual.FETC.org from 10am - 6pm EST tomorrow for some great FREE professional development opportunities. Register here.

I'll be working with students tomorrow most of the day, but I'll catch you up on what sessions I was able to get to.

Here's the schedule:
10:00 - 11:00 Dedicated Exhibit Hall Time
11:00 - 12:00 Keynote Presentation: Unleashing Teacher Creativity and Effective Instruction in the Digital World*
12:00 - 1:15 Unleashing Teacher Creativity and Effective Instruction in the Digital World* A Panel Discussion with "Beyond Textbooks" Advocates
1:30 - 2:45 Three Types of Immersive Interfaces: Implications for Learning and Teaching*
2:45 - 3:15 Live Chat hosted by Pano Logic in the Networking Lounge
3:15 - 4:30 Beyond Drill and Practice: Developing Automatic Recall of Math Facts for All Children*
4:30 - 5:00 & *5:00 - 5:30 Tight Budget? Learn how K-12 Districts are Saving Up to 60% with Parallels and Achieving Their Student Technology Needs
5:00 - 6:00 Building 21st Century Classrooms in the Clouds! - A Desktop Sharing Presentation*

So Much to Learn

It's been virtual conference week! I've been learning a lot, what with both the FETC Virtual Conference and the DEN Virtual Conference within two days of each other, and a DEN webinar three days later. The first one occurred last Thursday and boy, what an amazing interface! However, I do have one criticism on the FETC Virtual Day; there was hardly any information about it before hand. I received email after email to register for it, and knew it would be 11-7, but that was it. No mention of the sessions or anything until about a week before hand. This seemed to also discourage some teachers from registering too. But was I amazed when I got in! It looked like the Orange County Convention Center on the Internet! You could move from "room" to "room", listen to speakers, chat with friends and vendors, even have your virtual badge swiped for prizes. It was all very impressive.

One of the discussions I got in on, was an educator describing how their district does online trainings and webinars. This year they've done 12 webinars using Adobe Connect Pro, each training is about 20 minutes, with 4 sessions for each webinar that correspond to teacher prep times in the buildings, and focuses on informational or how-to educational topics. Teachers are able to tune in "live" if it fits their schedules or can view the webinars on-demand at their convenience. So far, they've had very good feedback. They prepare each presentation with live links, files to share, and broadast a video feed with integrated VoIP all within the web browser, no application installations needed. Each webinar is archived and made available their district Intranet for viewing later (here is an example of one on WebQuest refreshers https://admin.acrobat.com/_a853141003/p45253355 This particular educator also uses Adobe Connect Pro for in-house video podcasts on their podcast network called TWIRT (This Week in Rockwood Technology). Here's another example where they interviewed Bernie Dodge, inventor of the WebQuest, http://connectpro21991761.acrobat.com/p75077836

I also saw 2 other things mentioned in chats that interested me:
- Try using Talkshoe, yodeo, or podlinz might be good websites to check out for
phonecasting. Not sure what phonecasting is? It's a way to record someone
over the phone for a podcast.

- www.kuglin.com has files and downloads,
for Google Earth and also tech movies

I had a hard time getting much more out of the FETC Virtual Conference, as I kept losing my connection at school. It got a little bit better when I went home that night to finish up with the evening sessions, but I still got kicked out a lot. Luckily, the sessions presented during the conference are archived until July, so I can go back and check out what I missed.

The DEN Virtual Conference was held on Saturday, which ended up being a busy day for me, as my book club was also meeting that day. So again, I get to go back and look at some archived sessions :)

The keynote, called the Benjamin Button Effect by Lance Rougeaux was very interesting and immediately grabbed my attention. The Benjamin Button effect here that Lance was talking about, is if he could go back and change something he taught several years ago, what tool would he use now? For example, he described a field trip they took his class on to Valley Forge. What he do differently now, if they still took that trip? Use Google Earth to give the kids an up close view of the park before going and help deepen their experience and understanding.

Two other examples he gave was a school project where they needed to advertise for a fundraiser and looking at documents (maybe this could be a primary resource). For the first one, Lance would now use www.glogster.com, the digital poster website to advertise for that fundraiser, because he could include pictures, videos, and links. For the second one, he actually took the description of the DEN virtual conference listed on the DEN site and put it into www.wordle.net by pasting into their text box and creating a word cloud to see the description in a new light and get a different understanding of the text. It was incredible to see and very enlightening on how this could be used in other ways.

I also learned about a great resource for those who are new to glogster. An educator, Traci Blazosky, has put together a tutorial for glogster using glogster on their wiki. Check out www.ktitraci.wikispaces.com. I also go to see one of the great class lesson that this educator did with her elementary students on tree frogs. She created a tour in Google Earth where all different kinds of tree frogs can be found on the earth and then linked the placemarks to glogs where she had put information together on each of these frogs the kids were learning about. It was truly creative and made me think that would be a perfect idea for studying cultures in geography or biomes in life science. Traci, also showed how she created writing prompts for her students using the writing prompt builder in unitedstreaming and how she embedded a voki, a web 2.0 tool, into the prompt. This voki character explained to the students a little more about tree frogs and what they needed to do for their assignment. Great stuff here!

Then this past Wednesday, I got to join Matt Monjan, in his presentation on Break It, Bend It, and Bust It Loose, new ways to use the DE streaming tools during the Road Show webinar. He showed some great stuff on unitedstreaming (DE) tools, such as, embedding a video into PowerPoint that has controls. Never used the control toolbox before! He also explained how other teachers are using the images from unitedstreaming in their classrooms. One teacher is zooming in on pictures of things such as sharks and having them use this picture in math class. Another teacher uses the calendar function and images to get his students to class on time and improve their writing skills. You can find more of Matt's presentations on his blog, www.geekybird.com.

I've learned a lot of great stuff this week and really want to use these ideas soon!

Okay, So Twitter Away!

Back in October, I talked about starting up on Twitter. I was really excited to see what this new tech phenomenon was all about. Once on my page though, I kinda of didn't see the whole point. Who would want to read about what I was doing at any given point during the day? I tweeted a few times, but other than that not much; that is until FETC.

What made the difference? Talking with other educators and finding out how they use it. Because I had only subscribed to a few people and them to me, I don't think I was getting the full effect. Friday night at dinner with some other edubloggers (at the edubloggercon meet up at Front Row Friday's), the very first question I was asked was, "What is your Twitter user name?" Technication was how I was introduced. Then we got around to real first names. I was completely taken aback. Was I missing something?

Yes, was the answer, of course. All day Friday, subscribers were posting info about sessions, who was in what session, how their session was going, hoping out of one room to another if they heard another session was better. Now, I don't like skipping out on someone's session, but sometimes you end up in a session that is completely different than the session description, or you hear stuff you already know about. I was excited to see how others were using Twitter during the conference.

Then I received a bunch of recommendations for who I should follow. I went from 3 to I think about 19 and I have a bunch more following me now. And I have a great way to stay in contact with the awesome educators I met. I see how everyone is using it and just the other night, got great ideas from those posting. I found out the YouTube now has a channel with the White House and already four videos have been posted. I also found a great website about the Holocaust that will help out the 8th graders who just finished up "The Diary of Anne Frank". I also found Cool Web Tools for Schools, Using Flip Video in the Classroom, and 28 Interesting Ways to Use a Pocket Video Camera. Most of these came from Angela Maiers, who is constantly posting online resources, I don't know how she has the time to do it! Plus keep her blog up to date! She, along with Steve Dembo (Teach42) and Coolcatteacher, have great ideas to share.

I can strongly say my opinion of Twitter has changed and I will be trying to keep up as much as possible! Here are a few other blog posts you can check out, as well: Twitter and FETC 2009 - a new experience, and Chris Brogan about Twitter from Coolcatteacher
.

FETC So Far

Yesterday was a busy day and with trying to fight off a sinus infection too I was pretty run down by the end of it. My day started out with the first timer's session and was a great way to get introduced to the conference and what all is available.

Then I moved onto Web Tools to Enhance the Classroom Experience with Jerry Swiatek, Technology Specialist at Citrus HS, in Inverness, FL. Found some great free websites to use, such as dipity.com, a website that you can make timelines out of and add links and http://studio4learning.tv, a website that contains instructional videos on a variety of content areas, especially math. Jerry also created a wiki on pbwiki.com to hold all the websites he talked about at Fetc.pbwiki.com.

I debated for awhile on my next session, but finally decided on a SmartBoard session. I was a little leery on doing this because I have attended sessions with SmartBoards before and it turns out that it's just a selling pitch and I learn little to nothing except how great the salesperson thinks SmartBoards are. Granted, I think they're great too, but I want to know how I and other teachers can use them better in a classroom and not just as a presentation tool. This session promised that teachers were involved (as well as the salesperson) and plenty of examples of how students have used them. So I gave it one more chance. I should have gone to the Google Docs session; later I heard it was great. Why is it that whenever there is a session with SmartBoard at a conference, I never learn anything more about it than what I have already taught myself? I want to see what other teachers are doing with them!

Frustrated, I moved onto Tammy Worcestor's session on her Favorite Tech Tips. Much better! I first heard about Tammy last year at VSTE and heard you don't ever miss her sessions! Very true. Got more great free websites. One of the best websites I heard about was vocaroo.com. It allows you to record your voice and then email it! So, students can practice reading, practice a foreign language, and then email it to their teacher. Great idea! I also liked issuu.com, which creates ebooks for free. Students can upload books, teachers can upload handouts, and then you can turn the pages and also embed in a blog, wiki, etc. Go to www.tammyworcestor.com and select handouts and then FETC, you can get the whole list of websites Tammy talked about.

That was the last session of the day as the opening ceremonies began. Our keynote speaker, Phillipe Costeau talked about his experiences with education and how he has tried to give that back to students. One of his first expeditions at sea, he brought high school juniors with him and shared the experience of the oceans with them. They all want off to college to study something with the environment. After that, I got the great opportunity through the DEN, to go to a reception where I met Mr. Costeau and had my picture taken with him. I also got an autograph! Thank you DEN!



Then a bunch of DEN members were invited out to dinner at Front Row Friday's. Overall a great day!

Today, I'm starting out with "It's Not the Tools You Have In Your Math Class, But How You Use Them".

FETC

I'm off to FETC tomorrow! What's FETC? It stands for the Florida Educational Technology Conference in Orlando, FL-it's the one you don't want to miss, and I'm not! The conference officially kicks off Thursday morning and I already know the first session I'll be attending, the first timers session, of course! From there, I'm not too sure, but I know I want to hit some math and language arts sessions, because those are the areas we want to target at my school this year.

I'll be live blogging when I can and reporting back later when I can't! I will report back on the great exhibit hall demos and the reception with Philippe Cousteau, who is currently the Chief Ocean Correspondent for Animal Planet on Thursday. I was one of the lucky winners to get a ticket to this event!

So keep watching this space for updates!