THERE IS NOTHING WRONG HERE

I listened to two very interesting podcast today from Edtech Talk (they all seem to be interesting). Edtech Talk is part of the World Bridges Network, a collection of educational podcasts anyone can take part in, check their calendar for the latest daily podcast.

TTT#98

The first podcast is “Teachers Teaching Teachers # 98 - Learning to be unschooly” The conversation included teachers and students from around the world and its subject was triggered by a post on Youth Twitter by a South Korean student named Soojin. The term schooliness was coined by Clay Burell in his blog. The podcast discussion focused on how to use the Read/Write web to engage students in authentic learning and not as a fancy worksheet.

From elgg to DrupalThe second podcast, Teachers Teaching Teachers #99 - From elgg to Drupal, was very timely because I have been having a discussion with our executive director and curriculum director about developing a CMS. I have used Moodle for a couple of years, but it was installed on our ISP, which we no longer use. I have looked at Joomla, Drupal, and elgg, but don’t know much about any of them. Bill Fitzgerald from DrupalEd was in on the conversation and his advice for anyone wanting to implement a CMS is to write in one or two sentences the goal of the CMS. Dave Cormier advised to write a very detailed description of what several students would do in the course of a day using the technology. Dave is the teacher who helped developed “A partnership project helping Prince Edward Island students bring the past to life using tools of the future.” A Living Archives uses Drupal.

The good thing is that there are many quality choices for a school based CMS.

Exposing students to Big Ideas is a great way to get them excited about the world and hopefully school. Even special ed students can get excited by Big Ideas. I showed this TED Johnny Lee demos Wii Remote hacks to the students in the PREP math classes and they wanted to get a Wii remote and try it themselves. The fact that they felt they could get the free software and instructions and make their own interactive white board is encouraging. We have Smart Boards in our school and we have them use them, so they are very familiar with how interactive white boards function. We ran out of time this year to hack a Wii, but I plan to work with the students to do it next school year

I have finally started listening to Wikinomics (download from Audible). As much as I enjoy listening to the book on the ride to work and home, I miss being able to highlight and make notes in the margins. I do bookmark with my Zen Micro so that I can go back and make notes later. I should have read it a year ago and I would now have a better idea of the changes happening in front of our eyes. The industrial revolution took hundreds of years to develop and make significant changes in peoples lives. The digital revolution is happening in one life time and most people are not aware of it. It is still rare that when I mention wiki to someone they know what I am talking about. I keep assuming that I am the one who has missed the boat and other professionals are blogging and podcasting. Listening to the book I am more convinced that the education system is a relic of the 18th century and just by a force of nature it will change. The choices are that we make the changes conscience and as smooth as possible or unconscience with disruptive changes.

Speaking of podcasting it is time I had my own if I am to teach other how to create and us podcasts. We did create classroom podcasts last year at Glenbrook Middle School, but those are gone now. I want to podcast some blog entries like Wes Fryer and do some interview.

Having the cluster map has maked posting to the blog much more interesting, now I know someone somewhere has at least looked at the blog. They may have been searching for windhorse (a Buddhist term) and this popped up, what a disappointment.

Finding time to write in this blog has not been easy lately. I feel like I have been blogging everyday because of responding to the forums and participant blogs. I was thinking that I should gather some of my responses to the forums and post them in this blog. I do enjoy the back and forth in the forums, but only one or two people read them. Many forum responses get buried 4 and 5 posts deep and never see the light of a flickering screen.

Many of the participants are feeling over whelmed and frustrated with the amount of information they have to process and the software they have to learn. It was a good move to make each session 2 weeks long, I knew that the newbies would need more time to work with each session. To be really effective this should be a series of workshops each teaching only one Web 2.0 tool. Each workshop should be 4 weeks. I would start with setting everyone up with Firefox and Google tools. Then Skype, so that we could use voice and video to teach the other applications. This should be a school year long series of workshops with enough flexibility to allow participants to proceed at their own pace. As teachers new to Web 2.0 get more comfortable with using the tools they will naturally have more confidence in learning each succeeding tools and become more independent learners. Isn’t that what we learned about good pedagogy in graduate school?

After I wrote this post I read Vicki Davis’s blog coolcatteacher.blogspot.com. For those who don’t know, Vicki and Julie Lindsay developed the Flat Classroom Project. Vicki’s blog post is call The 5 Phases of Flattening a Classroom. As I read it I realized this not only applies to student, but also to teachers. The teacher becomes a student when Web 2.0 tools are introduced and moving from the classroom level of connectivity to more complex levels will give the teacher more confidence, just like students. I find that the rush to get every teacher up to speed quickly with technology fails because teachers are use to knowing and becoming a student again means not knowing.

The answer is NO!, according to Alan November. Alan made this point at the MassCUE Technology Leadership Symposium on 3/19/08. An example of his argument is that he has not found any high school that has students taking advantage of the free online courses at MIT, yet over 9000 people in Pakistan are logged on to these courses at MIT.

Dennis Richards, the superintendent of the Falmouth schools streamed the keynote live and now has it posted on Ustream. The video is not that great, but the audio works and that is what is important. As we lean how to use these tool more ineffectually their quality will increase. So take a liste