SDUSD Educational Technology

Summary:
A wiki is more like a web page with an edit button. You can put up text, movies, pictures, rss feeds. This allows the user to see the history of the text evolving over time. Wikis remember every change that has been made. This is a great tool for group writing and editing.

How is it different than a blog? A blog is more like a journal, a series in time.

website for the company presenting www.wikispaces.com

Reasons to use a wiki:
1. Simple web sites
2. peer reviewed projects
3. group authoring or editing of papers where you want to know who has contributed what part.
4. Self directed work or study guides
5. classroom bulletin board, discussion, debate
6. aggregate web resources

Drawback: multiple people cannot edit at the same time

Reflection/Takeaway:
My purpose for going to the session was to better understand what a wiki was and how it could be used in the classroom. This could be a useful tool for students to be a concept over time as a class. It could also be useful to see how the understanding of an overarching idea develops throughout a unit, for example.

Summary:
The overall gist was how to use RSS to bring the world to your fingertips. To use RSS as a means to pull a variety of information that you have created to one location so that it can be published and easily accessed.

My Notes and ideas generated during the session:
• Google blog aggregator – through the google reader
o Google reader will allow you to make stuff public or private
• Brining information to you and be able to make decisions on what you see on the feeds
• This kind of rss feeds could be an informal way that we are able to have teachers blog about what is going on in their classroom with the use of technology – through the reader, we could get a good sense of what teachers are doing – also could be a way to informally publish what is happening in the classrooms as published by each teacher – rss feeds could be published on the esett page somehow so that the public and any other person who was looking to get more info about ESETT – almost like a WHAT’S HAPPENING IN ESETT kind of thing so that those who wanted to see stuff could go and read about what they are doing and what the students are doing in the classroom – we could use the edtech blogs to do this where they would also publish the student Podcasts as well that would aggregate themselves – along with the blogs/Podcasts that we make would aggregate themselves their as well – can this be done on the page automatically
• Google reader will find the feeds for you for any web site
• Could we also pull RSS feeds directly from moodle courses in forums and other stuff to show off the conversations that are happening in the moodle courses – would this compromise the student security in any way? – have teachers who were comfortable with this – if the teachers course does not allow guest access, would we be able to see the feeds or would it block them altogether
• Blogsearch.google.com
• Technorati.com – will tell you how many people have linked to a blog and this will kind of be like a ranking – and will show you who is linking to the blog
• Social bookmarking sites
o Deli.isio.us
• Using this would be a great way to put lots of great links on the web for teachers – we could have a global one for ESETT group as a whole
• David Weinberger – everything is miscellaneous
• Delicious button – allows you to put info in it and tag it a certain way
• RSS feed available from delicious – esett teachers could subscribe to what is available and posted there
• Allows you to subscribe just to a particular tag from delicious – this would be awesome for links and such for each type of science grade level
• Can also subscribe to tags that others are putting in by subject, etc.
• Could organize our tags by grade level, by unit, by lesson, if possible – take the technology matrix that we have put together for each grade level and put it online in delicious
o Flickr – can also subscribe to what people are uploading here
• Flickr/photos/tags/darfur – url for flickr
• Flickr self sensors with the community sensoring
• Creative commons copyright (there is a section on flickr)
o YouTube
o Itunes is the audio aggregator
• Google reader will play Podcasts as well
• Pageflakes.com
o Put all the rss feeds together in one place plus the even the delicious stuff
o This is a portal on any topic that I want
o Dynamically updated content
o The students could create their own newspaper this way by pulling in feeds from blogs that students are writing – this newspaper would be updated constantly
o This site compartmentalizes the stuff
o This can be public or private
o Can use to collaborate as well – i.e. multiple editors
• Superglu
o Mash all the rss feeds together in one long river of information
• Wikipedia
o Can subscribe to an rss feed to an article in wikipedia
• RSS feed
o Rss-to-javascript.com
o Can take any rss feed that you have and this will make a piece of javascript for your page – this would be awesome to put on the ESETT page to pull out what people are blogging about
o The entire web site would be built on blogs – this would be updated automatically as people update their content

Reflections/Takeaways:
Using RSS would be a way to easily publish content in a showcase for our projects. Also, using something like Pageflakes or deliciious would be a way to take information that we have in our project and be able to put it out their and make it easily accessible for teachers. It would also allow us to be able to make a collaborative space for teachers to share their ideas and add value to what we have put out there.

http://weblogged.wikispaces.com/podcastvodcastscreencastnation

Summary:
This session covered the basics of what Podcasting, vodcasting and screencasting is and gave useful information about each one.

Notes:Podcast:
• Lots of great k-8 podcasts
• Radio willow web – great Podcasts
• Opportunity for kids to teach and give back to the community
• Room 208 – how to make a Podcast – this is a good video on how to make a Podcast
• Podcast – weekly show
• Itunes registers the most Podcasts
• Princeton review vocabulary minute – on itunes
• George Mayo – has a lot of Podcasts on greek terminology, etc. for language arts stuff
• Need to have some vehicle to record digital audio
• Iriver mp3 player – can record audio
o Works with windows media player
• Italk for the new ipod – plugs into the bottom
o Very easy to use with itunes
• Garageband
• Audacity – better tool for beginning to record audio
o Very simple recording and mixing tool
o Can also do very simple edits
o Export as an mp3
• Podomatic (possibley gcast, and odeo do this also)
o Can record right on to the podomatic server
o Gives you a blog so that you can listen to the Podcasts from the blog
o Can do video alos
• Jamendo
• Ccmixter
o Offshoot of creative commons copyright
o Based on creativecommons.org
• Cell phone recording
o Jott
• Can call a number and record and then download as an mp3

Video
• 75000 videos uploaded to youtube everyday
• storyboarding, production, etc.
• camera with 40gb hard drive coming soon
o does not have external mic
• video reporting from cell phone
• ican festival (some awesome videos here)
o video festival sfett.com
o use templates in iMovie to produce the video
• youtube can record directly from your desktop camera
• jumpcut.com – online editing program (not open source)

Screencasting
• windows media encoder on pc – free from Microsoft
• smart board recorder – free for both pc and mac
• student essay and using the drawing tablet or mousepose?? Or maybe you could use the highlighter acrobat reader to highlight the text while talking

Reflections / Takeaways:
Podcasting and Vodcasting can be a great way to showcase/publish student and teacher work. This can be a great engaging tool as an end product for the students to work toward in their writing, etc. Could also be a great way to provide professional development.

Screencasting:
Great way to capture screen to make tutorials and such.

Saw what might have potential – http://ourstory.com

Cheryl turn us on to Web Wise kids. I will let her elaborate. – http://www.wiredwithwisdom.org/

Technology Topic:
Using various media to share department and/or district projects.

Summary:
This session talked about the various ways in which technology projects could be shared. The talk included sharing on the local PBS station, podcasting, blogging, and various methods of video on the web.

This particular set of people have worked together at the district, school, and local PBS (KOCE) station in collaboration. Through this collaboration they have been able to showcase student work in shorts and also in 1/2 hour program. When putting together any program to put on a PBS station, it is important that it be to the point and have a message that the audience can glean from it.

They also felt that this type of medium was a way to reach other voters in the population who do not have Internet or cable TV and would not be able to get access to this content otherwise. Thus, by allowing them to see what students are doing in the classroom it would be make them prepared to vote for school bonds and such as they came up.

Websites Presented:
1. http://vc.ocde.us/archive”

2.http://www.ocde.us/technology/showcase/archive/2006/
3.http://showcase.k12hsn.org/
4.Handouts – http://www.dsd.k12.ca.us/menus/inst_tech/software.html

Festival Links:
1. www.mediafestival.org
2. www.ivieawards.org
3. www.ismf.net

Broadcast Video:
www.schoolhousevideo.org

Reflections/Takeaways:
The team presented a variety of ways to engage all members of the community where the school district resides. Contacting the PBS station would help to further publicize our students work and would be a valuable thing to pursue.

Summary:
The overall gist of his presentation is that the world of work has changed dramatically. The creative people are a huge driving force in the design of new products. Design itself is playing a big role in how products now come to market.

With this in mind, his point was that it is important for us, as educators, to make sure that students are getting to be creative in their education to learn the skills that they need for today’s workforce. This also means that students should be provided with a chance to not only work with their minds, but with their hands. These are still valuable tools for kids to know how to do.

Reflections:
This was a nice, global, view of what is going on in the world today. It also was nice to see that we, in our projects that we do at EDTECH, are nicely focused in allowing students to be able to use both their minds, be creative, and learn tools in working with hardware and software that will help them in the future. This was a great inspirational start to the conference.

Takeaways:
We are on the right track as far as the way we are preparing students for future world of work. Giving the students inquiry based work in school allows them to acquire the types of skills that are needed for today’s society. In addition, we are working to help the students to develop a global understanding of the world through the use of technology tools.

Drawing in Flash

Summary:
The overall ideas of this session was about publishing one’s work. The speaker, Peter Reynolds, spoke about how he has authored several books and online type stuff both using water colors and flash to draw. He also read several of his books out loud to the group.

He also showed us a few web sites that he has made where resources are available:
www.fablevision.com/flash
www.fablevision.com/wings

A couple of tips on student drawing:
1. Lines do not have to be closed when students are drawing
2. Kids can use a drawing tablet to draw in flash.
3. 12 frames per second for animation is a good speed

Reflections:
Although the session seemed more like someone who was just there to read to an audience, he made a point several times how important it was for him as a kid in school for his teachers to recognize his creativity and give him a channel for it rather than chastise him for not doing what he was supposed to be doing. This allowed him to really excel in his learning where he went above and beyond what other kids were learning in his classes.

Takeaways:
Giving students the tools in an inquiry based classroom allows the students to bring in their own creativity into the work. It allows the students to come in from different angles but all reach the same end by different paths. This helps to engage students and could really help them to be excited about learning and gain more content knowledge in the end.