Several folks shared their WebQuests. A few shared resources for creating a WebQuest. Bernie shared a new Ning. WebQuest.Ning.com.
I am leaving the conference now. Best to all those who are staying and posting.
This was good. I had wanted to see a presentation about using phones in education. The presenter gave all kinds of ideas how to use the cell phone with text audio, and video. He had us do a survey with a free web site called PollEverywhere. It is free for a few questions but then you need to pay. It worked very similar to how the ACTIvotes worked earlier. He also demonstrated GCast where we text in messages. His instructions where for us to tell a story in 6 words—a great language arts task.
The presenter was Hall Davidson with Discovery Education.
A panel discussion by practitioners. This was a Follett Software presentation. I do not dis-like Follett. I love their books and book access tools (titlewave). But it was obvious to me that they had a different attitude and feel than the other 2.0 presentation that I had been attending. The difference seemed to be in the attitude that the company had the answers whereas, in the 2.0 presentations the tools are available free and the Librarian has the freedom and creativity to find the answers or to inspire the students to find the answers. I may be wrong—I did leave early.
Alan asked us a series of questions. We each had been given an ACTIVote. There were almost 300 of us in the audience giving input. It went really well.
Check website “November Learning”.
To get a different point of view in our searching, add a colon “:” and the 2 letter country identifier to get information from that country.
View:timeline add this to the Google search to get most recent and a timeline to narrow.
Link: url at google then tells how many links are attached.
Job 1 - Every classroom should have a student assigned to be the web researcher to answer all factual questions. The teacher is not to answer any factual questions just higher order questions.
Google allows creating search engines like Rollyo. And multiple people can add.
Job 2 – Students are tutorial creators to be put in any digital box you have (tv and dvd for poor communities).
Job 3 – Curriculum review team.
Job 4 – Collaborative note taking - Official editors of social networking.
Job 5 – (missed it)
Kiva Nobel award winning concept of investing in people, not giving money to governments.
Ran out of time.
Marlene Woo-Lin, founder of Linworth Publishing moderated the panel discussion between Annette Lamb, Gail Dickinson, Joyce Valenza, and Doug Johnson.
The backchannel discussion can be found at
The panel discussed the AASL and ISTE Standards.
Check out the blogs of Vaughn Branom and Mary Woodard to see a great capture of this session.
Steve moderated and essentially people form the 200 some audience shared free resources. Here is the list:
Weebly (website creation)
Think.com (a global community of learning User+extratext@gmail.com (gives you through away e-mails—for students)
Delicious (cloud book marking)
Diigo (cloud book marking and more)
scratch.mit.edu (let’s kids make games, animated stories, etc.))
slideshare (PowerPoint sharing)
Tux Paint (drawing for children)
ChaCha (phone text answer)
Audacity (audio editing with some analysis tools within in it)
podOmatic (create, find, and share podcasts)
Vimeo (load videos)
Ustreamtv (live video streaming)
Creative Commons (let students create something then select their own license then go into a lesson on copyright).
Praat (linguistic analysis)
Go2web20 (everything)
Animoto (animated music videos)
Jing (screen capture for tutorials)
Standards toolbox.com (lesson plans with standards from your state)
Gcast (create and host audio podcasts with cell phone)
Splashcast (video storage place)
Bubbl.us (jpg, mind maps)
Freesound.org (free sounds)
Gliffy (flow charts, diagrams, etc.)
Freeplaymusic (free music and sound effects)
Sounddogs.com (sound effects)
Mixwit (mixing sounds)
Gimpshop (like photoshop)
Oovoo (video chat and video conferencing)
Dipity (timeline)
Some of the examples looked really useful. It seemed to me that Google Docs might work as a tool to accomplish what the Sunday speaker talked about to gather information from the “crowd”. I need the notes from Vaughn to really make sense of this.
use these tags for this post.
flat classrooms warlick n08s283
3 points
1. Unpredictable future
2. Networked student
3. New Information Landscape
Something about long tail.
Innocentive a place where problems are posted and solutions are submitted (for money)—possible fund raiser? J
Wonderful World of Wikis by Vicki Davis and Adam Frey
(sort of lived blogged so excuse the messy thinking)
I hope to find a lot of resources out of this session.
This Wiki is used for this session including a link to a backchannel site to use during the session.
Editing, history, groups, monitoring, easy are the concepts that describe the essence of a Wiki.
Research for later:
How can we lock certain pages or make some pages private?
Manage space, permissions, (per page)
How to make public my delicious account?
Explorer the discussion tab?
How to RSS tags from delicious onto the wiki page?
Educationalwikis.wikispaces.com
Another resource that has a lot of teachers’ wikis uses.
iespell – a spell checker for Internet Explorer
Vicki is giving some good information about adding tags and optional notes at the bottom.
Netvibes instead of iGoogle
Vicki thinks that each teacher should be able to control the blocking their own classroom.
When 2 people are editing the same page at the same time. You can do it. The system will allow two sections of one page be saved at the same time. We need to experiment.
Techno-personal skills are a subset of social-personal skills. We need to deal with them. Vicki tells administrator about any new things she tries and to predict what might happen with consequences.
Time to start looking at Firefox and plug-ins.
Adam says – why do we need a wiki? – Its not about the wiki it is about good teaching. If you understand what you want to do with your classroom or what you want to communication then you can figure out how to use a wiki to help you do what you already one to do.
Wiki is about an evolving content. Blogs are for journaling opinion, first person writing, debate, etc. Wikis are for facts, the assignments.
After walking the Exhibit Hall for 2 hours, I stopped off at the Blgger’s Café just to rest and finish this post. I accidentally heard a presentation with some more good resources. The presenter has a wiki of resources. Her moniker is Web20Guru. Go to Best Practices for today’s resources. She quickly showed MixBook where students can write their own books. And she showed something I had seen before but it seemed to make more sense this time—Gabcast.The presenter made a great point, give choice, if students like to speak let them do a podcast, if they like to write let them do Google Docs, if they like visuals let the use Flickr, etc…
Now Steve H. is demonstrating how to create a Ning network. If I don’t post quickly I will never stop. neccunplugged.ning.com
After a little background I hope to tackle the question “Why?”
For the last 2 months (coincidentally the same time I have not posted—hmmm) the Spring Branch Library Information Services Department has been heavily involved with infusing web 2.0 applications and thinking into the curriculum and educators’ creative minds.
Liz Philippi, Vaughn Branom, and I have presented web 2.0 tools to a list of groups: Curriculum Directors, Health Fitness Teachers, Curriculum Writers, Special Education Coordinators, Bilingual Coordinators, Campus grade level representatives, ESC Region 4 participants, Library Directors, Principals, and lots of Teachers and Librarians. We have presented face-to-face using our Curriculum Wiki. Our face-to-face participants probably include about 300 educators. We have organized and supported about another 300 participants in our version of 23 Things called Library2Play. We have seen (or read) where educators have gone from techno-phobia to euphoria. We have seen educators go from confusion and frustration to excitement. We have seen educators go from very knowledgeable computer users to enthusiastic fun players. We have seen them all complain about how long it takes to explore the 2.0 world while they continue to explore and come up with wonderful ideas of uses in the classroom. To get a flavor of the excitement, just read a few posts from our Shared Google Reader Items from the current batch of Library2Players.
With near 600 educators and only 3 or so who have not been totally positive about the experience, why has this been so successful? I am only speculating, but I have asked myself this “why” question many times over the last several months. One local reason is that our fearless and inspirational Associate Superintendent for Curriculum and Instruction, Dr. Jennifer Blaine, has encouraged, no mandated that we will work technology into our curriculum as we buy technology with bond funds. But beyond that, I think the real reason is that web 2.0 stuff is just so darn easy that it build confidence into each and every user. Teachers can accomplish what looks like professional things with just a little bit of effort. They have heard about social networking from the news in a scary way. They have experienced “programming” and trying to learn education programs in the past all of which cost money and need training. Now they are exposed to some very cool things that are free and their confidence soars.
Am I close to the mark? What do you think is the case for this momentum? Inquiring minds really want to know.
Thanks
Barry
