Edina Digital Age Learning

Here is a video from last Wednesday featuring a lecture by Claude Sigmund on the philosphers whose ideas influenced the founding fathers of the United States. After editing the video in Windows movie maker, I saved it out as a movie in the smallest possible size that would still play in a 320 x 260 window, around 20 mb. I then uploaded the video to Teachertube.com . On Teachertube, you can either link to the URL of the video, or embed it as I did here.

EHS Science teacher, Jeff Krause, and Concord Elementary 5th Grade Teacher, Chris Tower are congratulated by Director of Media and Technology Services, Dr. Michael Burke for being honored as Edina's Exceptional Teachers for Technology Integration at the 2007 TIES Conference.

Former superintendent of Bloomington School District Dr. Gary Prest presented on a new STEM initiative: Students (Knowing every student) Team teaching (Collaboration, PLC's, shared planning time, Communities of Practice) Equiped and Ethical (Teacher credentials and experiences indicates our staff are well prepared, teaching is a public activity and character is under moment by moment review-a formal code of ethics) Motivated (Teaching is intensely personal, staff show their motivation everyday) Teachers are present for all of the firsts in students lives, the aha moments, the struggles, etc. It is a privaledge!

Jennifer Oxenford , Associate Director, MAGPI GigaPoP, University of Pennsylvania, spoke about Internet2 and how it is transforming the K-20 community. A number of opportunities are available right now for educators: Megaconference Jr. 2008 is right around the corner scheduled for Feb. 21, 2008 - register now Register for the St. Francis University Holiday Traditions Conference scheduled for Dec. 14, 2007 Here are some K-20 resources from MAGPI on Internet2 opportunities TIES wiki site

Don Knezek , CEO from ISTE (International Society for Technology in Education) spoke about the new NETS (National Educational Technology Standards) for students. In 2006, ISTE began work on the next generation of NETS for Students, which focuses more on skills and expertise and less on tools. Specifically, they address creativity and innovation; communication and collaboration; research and information fluency; critical thinking, problem-solving, and decision-making; digital citizenship; and technology operations and concepts View the new NETS*S TIES wiki site

Suzanne Tomlinson , an educator from Humbolt Community School presented various methods of creating a vodcast. She pointed out that you can convert PowerPoint files to movies using Windows Movie Maker, Microsoft Producer, Serious Magic, SnapKast (which makes an mp4 and RSS feed) Other programs convert movies to mp4 such as 3GP Converter, or you can use a site like Zamzar.com. Snapkast is a one stop option similar to ToolFactory for podcasting. Tips for converting PowerPoint files to movies: Set font as large as possible Use white space between bulleted text 3 bullets per slide Make graphics as large a possible Keep slides uncluttered Use Web friendly colors Compress picture objects to reduce size, delete cropped objects Use empty square bullets on the lists so presenter can check off items Embed atypical fonts in PowerPoint No movies,sounds, or animations She then demonstrated using SnapKast, using 4 steps to create the vodcast: Record Format-ipod is 320x240. ipod touch is 480x320 Pla...

Susan Patrick from the North American Council for Online Learning spoke about the connection between online learning and 21st Century skills. North American Council for Online Learning (NACOL) Online learning is opening up opportunities for districts, teachers and students to share resources. The Partnership for 21st Century Skills wokred to define technology literacy which is a component of NCLB. They identified 6 key elements of 21st Century Learning: Emphasize core subjects Emphasize learning skills Use 21st Century tools to develop learning skills Teach and learn 21st century context and content Use 21st Century assessment that measure 21st Century skills-Where else do you see bubble sheets in our society? Time magazine article about 21st Century students. Problem: The old model in brick and mortar schools does not fit in our world today. We need to rethink how we use time and technology to individualize teaching for every student in class. Here is the framework: Patrick reference...

Editors note: Teachers-This post will not be as interesting to you!! Skip to the Social Networking post ! Tim Wilson , Director of Technology for Buffalo-Hanover-Montrose Schools presented a case study of his district's IT. Mission statement: The department exists to further the educational mission of the school district. Mantra: Efficient and Effective- Guy Kawasaki Problems : Missed deadlines, no data to know if you're improving, inconsistent proceedures, firefighting-not planning, islands of knowledge-getting hit by the bus, short term focus-create a list of projects that will happen in the next few days; months; years. ITIL: IT Infrastructure Library Minnesota industries have embraced this. Started in the 90's in England. Service Support-Incident Management, Service Desk, Problem management, release management,configuration management, change management, Service Delivery- Service level management/agreements, security management, financial management-TCO, Availability ...

U of MN College of Education and Human Development researcher Christine Greenhow presented a 6 month Lit review of the use of social network sites in education. She maintains an emerging site called socialnetresearch.org . She defined Social Networks to Web based services that allow individuals to a)construct a public or semi-public profile, b) articulate a list of other users with whom they share a connection, c) view and traverse their list of connections or others connections within the system. For today's talk, she will focus on MySpace and Facebook.(Boyd and Ellison, 2007) Common Features Public Profile Privacy Settings (Privacy paradox among teens-How much info to share?) Share Prompts (Face book just started a movie preference option, to create groups of like minded users) List of Connections(Public/Semi-Public; "Friends"-some may be "fakesters", researchers see the term "friends" as a problem.) Messaging (Public comments or private mail message...

The final session I attended was inside the Minnesota Planetarium Exploradome! This portable dome which seats 25-30 students can be brought to your school for grade appropriate sessions of 25-50 minutes in length. Along with all of the typical planetarium type capabilities, you can also teleconference with scientists to explore issues on earth. In the session I attended, we were in communication with a scientist from NASA, who demonstrated the capabilities of taking data from the NASA Web site, and "wrapping" the Earth with the images in real time. This allowed us to explore carbon emissions as well as ocean surface temperature. The site has data on Oceans, Atmosphere, Energy, Land, and Life. A really cool feature of this data was the ability to import it into Google Earth! The site is called NASA Earth Observations. You can learn more about the Exploradome here .

Two Rockford, MN middle school teachers teaching Language Arts and Social Studies scheduled their 90 minute block classes into one space so that they could share laptops and utilize Web 2.0 tools (Skype, Google Docs) for collaboration and integrated learning. While they are not doing traditional 1-to-1 computing, they are incorporating tools that will work well in that environment. They spoke to the ability to collaborating with Google docs for team meetings, virtual collaboration, and calendaring. Their Google calendar is embeded on their Web site, which then students and parents can subscribe. South View Media Specialist has set up Google calendars similarly on her site for staff to sign up for labs and media space. They showed how their students who had recently traveled to an environmental learning center used a program called Comic Life to share photos of their experience. We could use Photo Story or Voicethread much the same way. Those of you planning a field trip in the near fut...

Harvard Professor, Chris Dede spoke at TIES this morning about an alien role playing game, where students worked in teams, and each team member had a code that was needed for the group to move on. From a tech standpoint, kids learn the interface in 3 minutes, teachers in 15 minutes, so professional development is not on tech but more pedagogical, on how to have a discussion, classroom management strategies, and engagement strategies to get students to care. By giving the students a common experience, they are then able to have worthwhile discussions. The study is looking at how much face to face vs. virtual time is optimum. He said the active learning in role playing instruction comes from the progressive movement. The technology makes 3 things possible: higher order skills that can't be taught in lecture format Sophisticated forms of assessment Where the progressive movement got corrupted was based too much on teacher engagement, and the technology allows students to continue lear...

Here's our own Scott Johnson, presenting on ToolFactory Podcasting at TIES Monday morning. Over 75 participants learned how to use ToolFactory to podcast with students.

At the TIES conference this morning, keynote speaker Kurt Steinhaus, education consultant to New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson, spoke to conference attendees about trends in Educational Technology and ways to influence policy makers. He quoted a new report from the State Educational Technology Directors Association, ISTE and the Partnership for 21st Century Skills that spoke of the need for schools to incorporate 21st Century Skills, provide Robust leadership, and support inovative teaching and learning. He talked about moving from STEM to StTtEtMt where technology is used as an essential part of learning about Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics. A few weeks ago, Dr. Steinhaus visited several schools around Minnesota, including South View Middle and Normandale. He quoted Stillwater educator Milt Doroughty who said, "If our curriculum continues to be about information, our students don't need us. If it's about personal development, then they need us despera...

Today was the first day of the TIES conference. Scott Johnson conducted a podcasting session using ToolFactory. It was nice to be able to showcase some of the things that staff in Edina are doing with Web 2.0 tools. Stop back for more posts Monday and Tuesday from the conference.