21st Century Collaboration

Tempest fugit! Doesn't it? So many things to blog about -so little time. My students are enjoying the technology and I'm very proud of them. For a recent project I asked students to identify shapes found all around us for our geometry unit. This is a foray into project-based learning that I am trying to implement more. Students had to identify five plane shapes that occur around us or in nature. Students got to choose whether to explore the building with a digital camera, create a drawing of a house incorporating shapes, or find images under Creative Commons from flickr that had shapes in them. We will be posting that later this week.
I am having a great time working with the fantastic second grade team here at Kemp. (Yeah, Lisa and Shane!) They embody the idea of 21st century collaboration. (ISTE NETS 3.b:collaborate with students, peers, parents, and community members using digital tools and resources to support student success and innovation). We share files related to lesson planning, delivery, and assessment in electronic formats on a wiki and through Google Docs. It has made life so much easier. Now that Google Docs supports any file format, we can share Smartboard files easier too.
Here is a funny avatar I made for myself.

Fun with TOK and Chemistry

Got to do a fun collaborative live blogging session with Doug Abshire's IB Chemistry class and my IB Theory of Knowledge class around the question: Why Teach Science?

Several of the students were new to live blogging and caught on fast; in fact, some of them not only kept up with the conversation, but researched and posted links that followed the class discussions once they saw it could be done (I posted some YouTube videos to demonstrate the point). It was great to see the kids catching on to and experimenting with the features of the live blog, and their answers took them from the realm of educational theory to the philosophical consideration of whether or not science was itself a form of religion (or indeed the new, modern religion).

Go here and check it out if you get a chance; and comments, questions, feedback and the like are always welcome!

Always great to collaborate with a fellow Global Learner! Thanks!

Todd M. and Doug A.

Many Irons in the Fire

This semester has been great with all the collaborative projects

and fun things I've been trying. Right now it seems like I have a lot of irons in the fire. (photo courtesy of iansand at flickr).

I've wrapped up the Fall Project with Tita Martinez at Haskin Elementary. I'll let her tell you all about it. My students have completed their Monster stories, drawings, and recreations for my project with Esmunda Talamantes at Hanson. I've got a voicethread project going with Sara Zaleski and another just among the students I have for English Language. I'm building a multimedia database to accompany StoryTown stories for second grade for a Star teacher project. I'm as busy as ever but really having a good time. I'll post links later.

On another note. I encourage everyone to nominate the Global Learner Blog as the Best Group Blog for the 2009 Edublog Awards. Follow the rules here and make the nomination from your personal blog. You can see my nomination here.

Google Wave -Interest for Educators?

This upcoming application seems really cool. It has so many features for collaboration that I find lacking in Skype. It looks promising for the ability to have a virtually synchronous conversation as well as asynchronous. The ability to add users seems easy. I like the ability to drop in graphics and other documents and to simultaneously edit items. I could see this as a useful collaborative tool. I'm not sure my second graders would benefit from it as much as I would with my colleagues. What do you all think? Check out the video.

Project Fall

I thought I'd give an update on Global Learner stuff so far. It has been a busy semester. I'm finding it hard to fit in all that I want to do with my students.
We are currently working on a Fall Project with Tita Martinez' class in Center, CO. The idea behind the project is to compare some pictures and share some fall writing with another classroom. We set up a wiki to show our work. So far the students have taken a lot of pictures, charted some weather, done some leaf rubbings, and shared a book, The Leaf Man, with Mrs. Martinez' first grade classroom. We are working on some poems to include too. We look forward to finishing up the project when Center comes back from Fall break.
The project can be found here: http://projectfall.pbworks.com/FrontPage
More updates will be forthcoming as we add to the wiki.

Crossposted on http://mrfishergloballearner.blogspot.com/

3 FOR FREE Online MultiMedia Meeting Room

Check out this great FREE offer from Elluminate. I created my FREE account and it has worked well both in the District and from home. A great way to collaborate live with audio, video, whiteboard, chatting and more. Very friendly user interface, you and your students will be up and running in no time. Here is the link to sign up.

With Elluminate vRoom™ you can meet online FREE with up to two others! That's right. No cost. No time limit. No kidding!

What You Get...
Two-way VoIP
Interactive whiteboard
Application Sharing
File Transfer
Synchronized web tour
Multipoint video

What You Can Do...
Meet online with up to three people (that could be 1 mentor and 2 mentees)
Collaborate on a global level (that could mean Center classrooms and Adams 14 classrooms)
Take students on virtual field trip

If you want help getting started please contact me.

Google Wave

Google later this year will unveil Google Wave, a new species of eMail and instant messaging that lets people communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, and videos--and it could have broad implications for how students use and develop collaborative skills.

The company says the free feature is "a new model for communication and collaboration on the web." Google Wave runs in a web browser and combines elements of eMail, instant messaging, wikis, and photo and video sharing in an attempt to make online communication more dynamic.

Some are touting Google Wave as a breakthrough that will dramatically change education?

Worth your time to view this 1 hour 20 minute video.

Student work on our blog

Hello. Some of you may remember that I was working on a "pigeon letter" project at our last training. I ultimately put the still picture into Movie Maker and put the audio recording in and saved it as a movie that Blogger lets me upload. I got permission from most parents to publish work and sent the website address home to families on Monday. The students are very excited, though we have no comments yet.

Also on the blog, is the beginning of the collaborative project Sara and I are working on. We decided short video questions and answers would be an easier way to get them interacting.

Lastly, I want repeat how great United Streaming can be. Our story this week is about rock formation. I downloaded a few United Streaming videos on rocks and rock formation into Movie Maker. I picked out only the pieces that directly refer to concepts in our story. All three of our second grade teachers showed the video and gave our second graders a quick dose of background knowledge and raised their interest (with video of lava and volcanoes, you can't go wrong). It meant they had already heard "igneous rock" several times and had a visual in their head before they had to read the word.
Thanks,
Lisa
http://kelloggclass08-09.blogspot.com/

Global Voices Podcast

Todd, Liz and I had a Skype conference call in December to create the first installment of what we are calling "Global Voices". During these monthly conversations, our plan is to talk about a specific topic that we are dealing with in our respective classrooms around technology like, SmartBoards, distance collaboration or technology and assessment. We are turning these conversations into podcasts and publishing them here along with any resources that are referenced during the conversation.

Our December conversation was about student blogging. In this podcast we talk about:

1. How we got our students started blogging,
   
2. How to set reasonable expectations,
   
3. What constitutes a good comment and
   
4. Establishing a network outside the classroom.

At the end we talked about a couple of resources we have used for student blogging:
Blogs, Wikis and Podcasts by Will Richardson
Ning: teacher technology resource group.
Global Education Collaborative GlobalEducation.ning.com

We are still trying to find opportunities for the three of our classes to collaborate and hope that these conversations may spark some ideas.

Have a listen and we welcome your comments.

One of the coolest days EVER

Today in my 2nd block class we discussed the goal of education. My 2nd block is an epistemology class of juniors and seniors, and we always have some pretty amazing conversations, but for this one, I wanted more people involved, especially some of my colleagues, so I sent out an invitation to the staff inviting anyone that had that period off to come in and join us; then Tonia gave me the fantastic idea of using Coveritlive.com as part of the class for those who couldn't be there... it was GREAT! I had a student doing the blogging as we talked, and I recorded the conversation for podcasting later as well (yeah, I was totally and completely geeking out). The only downside was that Blogger didn't post up the whole conversation, so the comments of those who participated didn't show up- they were on a sidebar that got cut off. Another very strange thing is that when you look at the page itself, the blog appears to be in Latin; now I'm working with some of the best and brightest in the school, for sure, but we're not exactly fluent in Latin... I'm not that good! Fortunately, once you click on it, it goes to English, so it's really not a problem... it's just odd.

At any rate, there is a transcript of the class discussion and a podcast (Dec. 17), so anyone can listen in that wants to. I'm actually thinking of making that a regular part of the class now. It was a way cool way to dissolve the classroom walls, and I want to do it again. Dave is going to let me use a projector tomorrow as well, so that way the students can not only see the question posted, but they will also be able to follow along with the live blogging discussion.

Actually, since we didn't get to finish our conversation, we plan to continue it tomorrow. I will happily post up the link to it here and anyone who wants to join us on Coveritlive is welcome to do so. The class conversation will run from 8:45 until 9:15 or so. Come join us!

Kinder and First Grade Collaborative Reflection

Dorothy (Kinder at Rose Hill) and I (First Grade at Alsup) hosted our initial collaborative lesson.

Lesson Overview/Objective (Original) - Students will collaboratively create a pictograph with another class as an introduction to Data and Graphs. Small groups (11) from each class would complete a pictograph representing the number of letters in their names. Using Dabbleboard, students would write their name, then the other class would move the name to the correct vertical position on the pictograph. This continued alternately for 10 students to put their information on the collaborative whiteboard.

Positives
*ALL students were excited about being on camera.
*Students were initially engaged as they saw each other through the web camera.
*Students from both classes received an introduction to graphing.
*Students collaborated within their own classroom as well as through the web.

Challenges
*Everyone wanted to have their 15 seconds of fame!
*Explaining to 5, 6, and 7 year olds about the internet delay.

Ideas for Improvement
*Use smaller groups (maybe eight from each class).
*Give students more opportunity to be on camera.
*Others???

We're excited to try our next project and we're thinking about using Dabbleboard or Twiddla. Using the online whiteboards are a challenge for both of us, but we think they offer a great resource to capitalize on the abilities of our students.

First Grade Internet Workshop

An internet workshop can be a great introduction to working on the web for your students. An internet workshop helps:

develop content knowledge

develop strategies for using web resources

develop skills for working collaboratively

For my class at Walden University I've developed an internet workshop that I will be using with my students.

You can check out the internet workshop here.

Box.net - Online Storage and File Sharing

Box.net makes it easy to get your files from anywhere you have an internet connection. Once you've uploaded your files to Box, you can also share them with anyone, or just keep them safe for as long as you want. The free personal account allows for 1GB of storage. This may be a way for students to store and share files for your classes. It has many features including a widget that can be posted on your blog as I have done with this post. Do you see any applications for you and your students?

No Boundaries

In order to create a global learning environment, we must discard our sense of traditionally defined classrooms. The classroom is no longer four walls, some desks, a black(or white)board, and one teacher with many students.

The classroom exists in the students' minds and in the global community. Students will become leaders in the online communities in which they live, work, and play. We must facilitate this process by creating an atmosphere that fosters collaboration and communication with the world. The best way to accomplish this is using the web and employing such sites as ePals.

Check it out and turn your "classroom" into a "classworld"!