Now that you are digital teachers...

ggevalt's picture
Submitted by ggevalt on Sun, 03/14/2010 - 08:37

What's Next?
Master's Practicum Teachers, this has been a year of change. All of you, to varying degrees, took a leap off the cliff and embraced digital technology in your classroom. You’ve explored, learned, failed, grown frustrated, amazed yourselves and watched as your students responded. You know vastly more than you did at the beginning of the year. You’ve gained some confidence – though some of you may not yet be where you want to be. So what’s next?
 
First an assessment. Where would you put yourself on this scale? Your colleagues? Your administrators? Your students? The parents of your students?

Photo

So what's next?
Plan something cool before the end of the year... What one thing can you do that perhaps you were afraid of to make the year feel more successful? Some suggestions:
  • Have the students write/comment every day for a week or two
  • Do a podcast
  • Identify the one or two "geeks" in your class and conscirpt them to help organize, develop a student created assignment
  • Do several free writes from photo prompts
  • Try video commenting (if you have a Web  cam to support it)
How are you going to use what you've learned next year?
  1. Continue a YWP site?
  2. Use different software?
  3. Branch out to other Web applications?
1. If you want to continue with your site (and we'd love to continue working with you)...
YWP never anticipated getting into the software "sales" business. What we try to do is work with teachers and students to develop something that works and provide it as low a cost as we can -- and still stay alive. If you want to continue the site, just contact me and we'll work something out.
2. If you want to branch out...
Totally OK. YWP remains the Only Guilt Free Project in America There are a lot of possibilities out there and if you like something better, go for it... Some suggestions for sites that have many of the features you used this year: Ning, Edublogs, 21Publish and Wordpress.
3. Regardless of your choice on the first two, there are a lot of applications that you should check out, if you haven't already, that can be brought into a site through embedded code. A suggestion would be to create an account for each of your classrooms:
  • vuvox.com ... this is a terrific program that allows a student to create horizontal collages which can contain words and sound
  • fotobabble.com ... this is an easy program in which a student uploads a photo and then directly records a one-minute narration
  • voicethread.com ... this was one of the first Web-bases sound/image/commenting apps. It, too, can be embedded into YWP site.
  • slideshare.com ... this is a Web-based application that allows uploading (and then embedding) of powerpoint, keystone and the like WITH a sound feature. While a little clunky, you can upload the sound to archive.org and then synch on slideshare.com
    • archive.org ... the aforementioned treasure trove of free digital stuff. check it out.
  • glogster.com ... like so many of these applications, the free version is slightly diminished from what it was as the Web site owners try to figure out how to make some money. But this is an easy-to-use collage maker and is particularly popular for middle school student reports.
  • prezi.com ... A little hard to figure out, but it allows for some cool action in presentation of words. Again, create a class account. Caveat, in order to embed, you have to make the prezi presentation public.
  • animoto.com ... this is an automated moving slide show with sound. The site has sounds that are available. As with many sites involving sound, you need to be careful not to upload copyrighted sound. Essentially if you use a clip that is 35 seconds or less, you are OK under general copyright laws. And, again, for sounds go to archive.org and you can then use under creative commons license.
  • flickr.com ... sadly this (and some other of my suggestions) are often blocked -- but see what you can do. This is one of the easiest programs for uploading images and they can be integrated into other sites (like ours) but have features that are specific and cool. (Check out the flickr maps features!)
  •  youtube.com ... speaking of getting blocked. Very few schools allow access to this. They should; this has three very important teaching opportunities:
    • How NOT to engage in or make inappropriate "anonymous" comments. Including discussion of what incivility and profanity does NOT do to promote expression...
    • How NOT to waste your entire life searching for silly things
    • How to VIEW AND HEAR history. This site has an amazing collection of historical videos and history in the making. Frankly this is the primary reason to make this site accessible, but I also understand the concerns of schools. If only there were a way to allow access by specific video only....
  • journalism sites ... I won't go into great detail here, but I think we should begin to highlight some of the new new media sites -- probulica.org, nowpublic.com, politico.com, realclearpolitics.com, etc. -- paritcularly in high school.
  • Misc... I am sure I've missed a few. Please add any suggestions in comments below.
 
And speaking of checking out sites...
Part of the purpose of this course is to make you more media savvy -- to get you to understand a little more of the world where your students live. You should see this course, though, as a beginning, for two reasons:
  1. We scratched the surface
  2. The Web is changing all the time. Change on the Web, in fact, is relentless
And both of those things can be overwhelming. So a suggestion: Devote two hours a week to exploration of the Web. And use a few tools to help:
  • twitter.com ... Jeesh. Are you kidding? I know you thought that. Admit it. And I agree. I do not understand why you would want to go to twitter, particularly if you use facebook and particularly if you are an already-busy teacher. So now that I've gotten rid of the argument against here's why you should: People like you -- Teachers who are using digital technology in their classrooms -- have been using twitter for years. And they have some great ideas, links and blogs. So how do you find them? Start with me: twitter.com/ggevalt WARNING: I rarely tweet anything. But you should follow the people I'm following and follow some of the people they are following and two hours a week you should open up your twitter account, follow some of the links in the posts and discover a whole lot of cool things that people in your profession are doing. Really.
  • google reader ... If you do not already have a gmail account, get one. Now some of us, like Young Writers Project, already have educational google accounts but, sadly, not all the apps are tied to our educational accounts. So open a gmail account and there you will see something called Google Reader. What this is is the same as the newsfeeds on your site ... you can follow anyone's blog or wiki or news and it will pull their latest posts right into your account. So once you've found some cool Digital Teaching gurus through your twitter exploration, pull in the gurus' blogs to your Google Reader. And here's the cool part: Deletion is easy.
The important thing is to explore. That's what your kids do. Explore, fail, make mistakes, be adventurous. And ask the kids. What are they doing? Where are they going? What do they think is cool?
And this summer, while in the mountains, or on the beach, or on the porch on a cool early morning, do some surfing. Find out what's out there on the Web; embrace it; use it.
 
Keep in touch.
We hope that you see your connection with your classmates – and other teachers – as a beginning. Continue to post on digitalteachers.net – we’re going to spruce that up a bit, but your contributions can help other teachers when you post a public blog. And message your classmates; see what they’re doing. And don’t be afraid to contact some of your peers in CyberSpace; it’s amazing how responsive people are when they’re contacted by colleagues.
 
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ggevalt's picture

Already an update...

Submitted by ggevalt on Thu, 04/15/2010 - 14:29.

... Ning, it appears, will soon no longer be free.
http://techcrunch.com/2010/04/15/nings-bubble-bursts-no-more-free-networ...

Update to update -

Submitted by GLawrence on Wed, 04/21/2010 - 12:22.

I was reading my Ning newsletter and it seemed to say that they would try to maintain the current level of free activity - though they may have to go a beggin' - possibly for grants and maybe donations.

From just the few months that I have been on, I have have learned a great deal and gathered all sorts of materials and ideas for classes. My biggest problem is trying not to spend too much time at the various sections.

Geoff Lawrence