CRSTE Day of Discovery

I spent my Saturday this past weekend in Arlington, VA at the CRSTE Day of Discovery. The Captial Region Society for Technology Educators (CRSTE) is a newly formed educational technology group and they partnered with Discovery Education to create this day. I apologize in advance as this is a long post describing my day.

It started at 8:30 with a keynote address from Matt Monjan, from Discovery. One of my colleagues who I attended grad school with commented, that she felt like she was back in class again hearing about the concepts of digital natives and constructivism. I think that describes a real attribute of this organization, is that they are current and know what students and teachers need to grow in their use of technology. Matt did a great job and I was ready to start off my day with Jen Dorman's session on "Roundtrip Tickets to Anywhere! Google Earth and DE Streaming". Jen's presentation is available on her DEN blog at http://denblogs.com/jendorman here.

I've done a little dabbling in Google Earth (GE), but really need to use this tool next school year. Jen had some great ideas and advice: First, the Google Earth pro version is free to educators by sending an email to GEEC@google.com. You'll receive an email with a download after a couple of weeks. Next, she told us about the "my maps" feature in Google Maps, which can be a good substitute while you're waiting for that GE Pro version to arrive, or if GE is not allowed your computers, which luckily is not the case in our district. The "my maps" feature allows you to add hyperlinks and more to your maps and is great for collaborating or for group work. The teacher can create the map and then "invite" students to join and each students can add to the map. Looking at this on my own, I also found some groups that had created their own and shared. There is one for teachers who use technology and you can placemark where you are in the world. There are other topics including real estate, islands, and points of interest. I would have to look at this some more though to create my own map.

For GE, Jen explained an example she did with a history class, where each group was given one major battle from World War II and they had to add events and placemarks as the battle occurred. Her greatest piece of advice, was making sure the first step each group was to create a folder for their project and to make sure all placemarks, videos, etc. were placed in this folder. This sounds like a great way to learn about events in history!

Another idea Jen had was to use the ruler tool for studying math. I had no idea there was a ruler tool in GE. She said Washington, DC is great place in GE to use this for. For example, students can find the circumference between certain parks or buildings, measure the distance from the Capital building to the Lincoln Memorial, etc. She added that Africa is another great place to use this tool.

After the GE session, I attended "Getting Interactive with Glogs and DE Builders" with Mike Hakkarinen from Frederick County Schools in Maryland. Mark did a great job and has some fantastic products from his classes. Mark just created a new blog for the builders at http://discoverybuilders.blogspot.com. Everything from his presentation is this site, as well. If you don't know much about the DE builders, they are the assignment, quiz, and writing prompt builders in DE streaming's teacher center. Each builder helps teachers with creating online assignment, quizzes, and writing prompts. Some inventive teachers have begun using web 2.0 tools with the builders, which is what Mark talked about in his session and the results are pretty amazing!

The first tip Mark gave was to put a link to the student center on the desktop computers students use, for our district, our CTT could add an icon to our Novell windows and it would take the students directly to the page, where they could sign in to use the online tools the teacher has created. The first builder Mark used was the writing prompt builder. He's a science teacher and recently his students were learning about the relationships between grass, crickets, and anoles. So he took a picture of a cricket from DE streaming and embedded it into the prompt builder and added a writing prompt for the students to type up. When they're finished, students submit their writings and it's automatically sent via email to Mark.

For the Quiz builder, Mark embedded a video from DE streaming. After students watched the video, they could then take a quiz on what they watched. The best part is that students can read the questions first, then watch the video; they can watch and then take the quiz; or they can watch, take the quiz, and refer back to the video when needed. Another great feature is that when you are setting up the quiz you can decide on how the students view it, such as multiple questions at a time or one question at a time.

In the assignment builder, Mark talked about using a web 2.0 tool called Blabberize, which is similar to a voki. If you've never heard of either, they are two tools that allow you to record messages and then post onto a website, blog, wiki, or just about anywhere! With voki, you actually create a character that talks and with Blabberize, you can make images talk, such as a lion. If your students are studying about Africa in Geography class or biomes in Science class, a talking lion could come in handy! Mark uses this as a way to describe to his students what they need to do in their assignment. He simply embeds the html code from Blabberize and pastes it in the learning objective box and he's all set! He also suggested trying Dabbleboard, an online interactive whiteboard, Voicethread and Glogster.

The last session I attended was on Professional Development in Second Life with Fred Delventhal, from Arlington Public Schools. I've heard lots of talk about how educators, especially DEN Stars are using Second Life, but I haven't really tipped my toes into this yet. So I was interested to hear what this is about. Fred talked about how Discovery has set up PD sessions here and the different tech society's that are located in Second Life as well, such as ISTE and VSTE. It was a good overall tour of what's in Second Life, however I would have liked to have seen how you get started, create an avatar, and get them to move (I hear this is not easy at first).

Overall, it was great day, with a few surpises. I got to see old and current colleagues that I didn't know were going to be there and chat with some teachers from other districts, as well as learn some great ideas!

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!