Michelle's EdTech Cafe

When I saw this book in a local book store, I immediately thought it would provide an excellent model text for my primary students to use to help them create an interactive multimedia story.

The book lends itself to creativity and imagination through the use of fun literary tools (the book uses interjections throughout the pages to engage the reader to participate) and a unique "hook": asking the reader to actively take part in the story! . When you add iPad technology, students have an incredibly engaging tool to help them tell their story and a storytelling portal (Educreations.com) that allows their multimedia creation to be read by the world!

For the iPad app, I chose Educreations. The app is incredibly easy to use and publishing to the web was possible in just a few short clicks (once the free school account was quickly setup on http://www.educreations.com/). For me, this is an important step and one where technology can provide motivation for many students that may not be possible with simply writing a story on paper and sharing it with the teacher and peers. Research has shown that the wider audience of the web has positively influenced student performance in regards to creating quality work and completing their written work and this finding is supported in the book Handbook of Research in New Literacies, by Julie Coiro, as well as other research.

This app is similar to the ShowMe app. Both are free at this time so explore both and choose the one you feel fits the lesson best for your kids.

I have included a step-by-step process for the lesson below.

1. Register for an Educreations account to that publishing from the iPad is quick and easy. You can register for the account HERE. I chose to create one generic school account since I am using this lesson with primary students.
2. Read the book, Press Here by Herve Tullet. After reading, work your teacher magic to help identify strategies the author used engage the reader. Use of interjections, talking directly to the reader, giving the reader instructions. I also plan on using the Visible Thinking routine "See, Think, Wonder". My goal with this routine is to help the students see past the dots used in the story and imagine other objects they could use for the story they will create. The routine will have to be tweaked a bit to fit with the book but not too much.
   
3. Next, it is tie to demonstrate the app and show the sample video (see bottom of post). It truly is a very simple app. I think the hardest part for primary students will be understanding when the app is recording your voice and actions (illustrating) and when it just "shows" or displays the drawn picture.
   
4. I will use a simple graphic organizer/storyboard to help the students plan their story. This tool will be important in helping the students efficiently create their story on the iPad. I have embedded the organizer below. It allows for the student to create 5 scenes. This could be adjusted for students age and ability. Students will draw the picture they intend to draw on their iPad on the left and write their script (as best they can) on the right.
   
5. Once the organizers are completed and I have checked them, the students can begin creating their stories. I will have to work in small groups as each grade has 6 iPads.
   
6. Once all stories are complete, we will have a share day. Again, the stories are all published under our account on Educreations.com so access will be simple and easy. I can also embed the stories on the classroom teacher's website or just send the link to the teacher and parents.

A student sample is in 1st grade. She did a great job asking the reader to interact with the weather!

The storyboard graphic organizer is below. You can use the tools on the screen to downloaded if you wish.

I am not sure why kids find QR codes so intriguing but if you can include them in a lesson, they are completely engaged! The most difficult part about QR codes is getting the teachers on board with the lesson when they may have never seen or been exposed to a QR code in the past. My brave 6th grade teachers implemented the lesson below and I am hopeful it is just the beginning of QR code lessons at our school.

QR stands for quick response and is a method used by companies to push information to mobile phone or iPod users. The picture on the right is from Target and if you scan it with a QR code reader app (there are several through iTunes) it will open your mobile phone's browser to a promotional page. Try it!

Our lesson focused on math. Our objective was to have kids create word problems that involved factors but the focus could be anything for a QR code lesson. There are basically three major steps involved for the students with this type of lesson:

1. Creating the web content (web page) that the user who is scanning the code will be taken to.
2. Creating the QR code from the web address of the web page that contains the content.
3. Users who scan the codes and solve problems (in our case-math problems) from the web page that they were taken to.

The detailed lesson plan steps are below:

1. We had our students work in pairs and basically had two classes participating. With that in mind, I will use about 26 kids in each of our classes for this lesson plan example.
2. Break students in each class into pairs to create a math word problem. With 26 kids, that means there will be 13 word problems to solve and therefore 13 QR codes generated.
3. Once the students have created the word problems, have them write the word problems on a web page. We are now a Google Apps district so we used Google Sites. However, there are other free website tools out there that could be used (Weebly). The web pages are easy and only contain the word problem itself so pretty simple text. So each classrooms website had one page for each team or 13 total. Here is the website created by one of our teams.
4. Once the page is complete, the students can begin creating the QR code. We used http://qrcode.kaywa.com/ because it was so simple but there are many out there. They simply copy the web address of their page and generate the code. We then had them print the code.
5. Once the codes were printed, we had them label with their question number and tape them up around their classroom.
6. When both classrooms were done posting their printed codes, the teams took an iTouch from the cart and switched classrooms. Once in the other classroom, they began to scan the codes created by the other class and try to solve them.
7. The teachers then brought the classes back together so they could score their answers. They also had a pretty in-depth discussion about word problems and the thinking that went into both creating and solving them.

Thanks to iLearnTechnology for the inspiration!

Image citation:
http://www.mobilemarketer.com/cms/news/advertising/9191.html

The article Student Inquiry and Web 2.0 by Pam Berger was an interesting article that allowed me to think more deeply about my practice. Although I am familiar with the idea of linking technologies to instructional and learning strategies, inquiry based learning is newer to me. The article defines Web 2.0 and then maps specific technologies and web-based tools to the Stripling Inquiry Model. In an era when so much about my practice is changing so rapidly, from the technologies to the delivery models, this article provided a clear map to an inquiry based classroom.

I am familiar with student centered learning since I recently finished a masters in eLearning Design from CU Denver. Much of the programs instructional strategies utilized Kolb's model Experiential Learning (Dave Young was my student adviser and taught many classes). We were always creating, building, experiencing, questioning, and reflecting. We were taught to create lessons that followed these same steps. However, much of what I create in the classroom is project-based learning. Students are still experiencing, building, creating but often with defined projects as a goal. Compared to the Inquiry Model outlined in the paper, many of my project-based lessons are more restrictive and do not allow for the construction of of new knowledge and projects based on wondering and questions.

However, I am learning!...we hope:) I had one main goal this year: to introduce Fox Creek to a global learning community. To achieve this goal, I had our students reflect on the topic of Cyberbullying in a blog. However, I wanted the students to critically think about the information and to question the content. So, we discussed critical thinking as defined both by the new Bloom as well as the discussion the students have in their classroom. We also posed questions about the information using Bloom's verbs as a guide. I am SO fortunate to co-teach with teachers such as Angel Wolf, Shari Griffin and Maggie Granat (to name a few) and  the discussions in these classes were so exciting! Each class posted their questions on this Google Doc and then read the questions posed by other classes. This type of questioning is also outlined in the article as important in helping students construct knowledge. I feel the blog lesson was hugely successful. For the most part, the students were deeply insightful in their blog post. They also did a great job of commenting on each other's posts as well as blogs around the world!

I plan to take the idea of student inquiry one step further. Our next lesson will be centered on the Siemens We Can Change the World contest. Students will follow the scientific process of inquiry to solve an environmental problem in their classroom and/or our school. The process focuses heavily on developing a plan, collecting data to evaluate the plan and reflecting on its outcome. This process very closely follows the Stripling Inquiry Model outlined in the article. The most difficult part for me is not knowing "the plan" on day one of the lesson! The students determine the plan solely based on their questioning and research. As the teacher facilitating (not delivering) an inquiry based lesson, I must provide the support to keep the students on track and the objectives clear yet allow them the freedom to discover answers on their own. This article provides a nice resource to help guide me through our next journey in inquiry learning!

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The Blooming Verbs list poster by Learning Today is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

I finally got around to reflecting on the sessions I attended at ISTE. As I was writing, I was pleased to note that I have already begun implementing some of the ideas I learned about at the session.

Backchannel:

1. Main wiki here: http://backchannel.sswiki.com/Structure UN: backchannel PW: everyvoice
2. Must have focus or conversation will get away from main topic.
3. Communicate rules. Keep them simple. Ex: Be nice, Be clear, Be open
4. Can put the backchannel tool into website or wiki.

My Takeaway from Backchanneling:
I have since discovered drop.io's chat tool (http://drop.io/dropname/chat) that, at this time, is not blocked by my district. It is simple to use and will work for almost all my grade levels. For my next backchannel event, I will spend more time setting ground rules for the chats. It is such a powerful communication tool and an amazing way to assess students and drive instruction based on results.

Managing the 21st Century Classroom

1. http://web.me.com/alwayson
2. http://sites.google.com/site/managingthemodernclassroom/

My Takeaway from the 21st Century Classroom:
I did not attend this session. It was closed. Nice resources and presented by a collegue in my district.

Google Enhanced Classroom:

1. http://my.uen.org/myuen/58239/2
2. Google Squared: http://www.google.com/squared. Allows searches to be returned in the form of a table with rows of information and infinite numbers of columns of data.
3. Gmail has video chat. Both users must have plug-in
4. If you use Google Calendar and make public, allows followers to subscribe and add into their calendar
5. http://earth.google.com/ then to gallery allows you load new layers into google earth to see some amazing pieces of data. Ex: World Oil Consumption graphically shows which countries and how much oil they use
6. http://googlelittrips.org
7. Literature Tours in Google Earth - other tours? historical figures, animal migration. Use image tag in location marker to add graphic or image.

My Takeaway from Google Enhanced Classroom:
I need to more deeply explore Google Earth. This tool can have the most significant impact on learning in my setting. I really liked the Google Earth gallery and I imagine that this gallery can meet the needs in many subjects from language arts to science. My goal will be to explore this tool for some of the science units my teachers have near the beginning of the year including weather for 6th and 2nd grade.

Math and Technology and Spreadsheets

Spreadsheets

• http://mathcats.com/spreadsheets/
• For estimation, setup a square root formula (multiply a cell by itself)
• Use Google Spreadsheets to gather birthday data and use scatter plot graph.

1. http://www.themathplace.org/

My Takeaway from Math and Technology and Spreadsheets:
Math is a weakness of mine. I have succesfully integrated Excel/Google Spreadsheets into some lessons but the ideas presented here will definitely broaden my lesson ideas. This session also reminded me that integrating technology into a lesson doesn't have to be grand and time consuming. It can be as simple as having kids come in and create their own multiplication table and allowing them to add colors and formatting to customize it to make it their own.

Assistive Technology

• Here is new technology, how to use it, how to manage it. Should be asked and answered for all new technology.
• ePortfolio can be as easy as a PowerPoint. Should be a learning journal.
  
  • Selection - academic social physical
  • Collection - work videos pitures
  • Reflection - identify artifacts that show growth and needs
  • Projection-Update goals based on growth and needs
  • Presentation-create presentation that includes artifacts in ways that show progress toward goals
  • Demonstrates how much student grows. EX: copy of a page from Harry Potter. Student went from 47 missed words to 27 to only 9 words missed. All demonstrated on a PowerPoint eLearning Portfolio.

  My Takeaway from Assistive Technology:
  This session was one of the two most powerful sessions for me that I attended (see Alan November session below for the other). By powerful, I mean a session that will significantly drive my practice this year. This will be my third year teaching technology and each year I feel I am not quite using technology to help those students whose learning is affected in some way. I feel I can use technology to better meet the needs of our sped and ssn students. I also feel technology can help our students who have difficulty processing information and even our gifted kids. I am writing this reflection near the beginning of the school year and we have already done so much to help many of these students. Our school purchased 5 iPads and I am working with learning specialist and building resource teacher in implementing this tool with apps like Dragon and Storykit. I am excited about this new direction in my practice and hope to reach more students than I have in the past.

Primary Classroom

• Blog - Parent meeting includes my teacher web address
• http://classblogmeister.com/ -
• Start first week. Many parents or volunteers to help
• Can use an expert system. The one or two who know a skill teaches the others.
• Blogs as digital portfolios, This teacher uses blogger,
• Videos to teach sequencing to tell a story.
• Global collaboration project - rock our world.
• Use the commoncraft story telling with cutout characters.
• Videos that show (and reinforce) learning to teach planning (storyboarding), tasks, roles, props, setting/location,
• Kids can also creat how-to tutorials for sequencing
• photobabble allows students to talk about their learning with a photo in the background.
• Skype to talk and learn with others. Practiced with staff and buddy class.
• http://plan4tech.wikispaces.com
• Weather conversation for skype, classes in other locations, experts like scientist, doctors
• Start small, practice, take your time

My Takeaway from Primary Classroom:
I got some great ideas from this session such as how-to tutorials to teach sequencing. This session also showed me that I am doing many things right. For a new teacher, this is great positive reinforcement. Every now and then, we need that reassurance.

21st Century Skill-Empathy

Alan November, November Learning
Learn how to design more rigorous and motivating assignments that engage students in global communications and help them understand different cultural perspectives and points of view

• Working with people around the world requires skill and sensitivity as to cultural differences.
• We need to globalize our curriculum.
• Your job now is to say hello and build partnerships with other teachers around the world that fit your curriculum.
• Challenge every single teacher to find teachers around the world to connect with.
• Empathy - the most important skill in a global economy are people who can hold different points of view at the same time (wow) BTW - americans are not very good at that ..as a group.
• swesch
• In a global economy it is insufficient to do test scores as your mission
• root zone database is the alphabet of country codes.
• We should teachers how to give assignments they have not given before
• find essays by students in england about the american revolution. Email the teacher and invite the teacher to view the analysis our class did on the essay.
• Debate the other class (in england) over course of events
• Students should be having conversations with students around the world
• If we are studying other cultures we MUST get in touch with somebody living in that country!!! Same for books based on other cultures. Go to websites from those countries to learn how that book or information is viewed.

My Takeaway from 21st Century Skill-Empathy:
This session was one of the two most powerful sessions for me that I attended (see Assistive Technology above for the other). By powerful, I mean a session that will significantly drive my practice this year. Of course, I am aware that technology can open the world to our students but in my first two years of practice, I have not utilized the technology that would allow this. There are many reasons for this including a building that was new to technology integration, the difficulty in finding tools that are easy for primary kids to use while keeping them safe, and simply knowing how to design lessons that open the world with technology. Alan November's session gave some great ideas that were "out-of-the-box" and basically stated that it should be mandatory to use technology to open the world to our students. It was a wake-up call for me and one that I have already started to implement into lessons. All of our 1st-6th grade students will participate in the National Day on Writing using a 21st century tool. Our primary kids will use Storybird.com and our 4th-6th graders will each get their own blog. This is a start for us. It is a beginning. It is a small step in moving from posting our writing on our school walls but hopefully the crack in the door will grow wider through this year and the years to come.

This is an update for the iMovie 09. There are few changes although fairly minor. This document should show you how to get to most of the major tools.

This lesson was accepted by ISTE for their 2010 conference in Denver, CO. I will present the lesson with two Fox Creek students on Wednesday, June 30th at the 11:00am Student Showcase. Here is the link to the session.

Lesson Abstract:
Students will create a self-directed eLearning project that teaches the viewer about the phases of the moon. Viewers will be able to click on any phase of the moon from the “home” slide to go to a slide that explains more about that particular moon phase.

This lesson uses moon phases as its topic but this same presentation could be adjusted for many different lessons. Some include: biographical timelines, historical event timelines, lifecycles, story webs. Do you have other ideas? Please add them to the comment section below. Any other comments for the lesson are welcome as well.

As resources for the session I have included the following below. The embed tool will allow you to download the documents. I kept them in Word format so that they can be edited:

1. Lesson Plan
2. Rubric
3. Exemplars

Here is the Lesson Plan and Rubric. They are located on tabs within the embed tool:

Below is a link to two sample presentations. They were created on a Mac with PowerPoint version 2003:

• http://drop.io/nonlinearppt

For my teacher portfolio, I was asked to read several books. I found many of the books to be excellent resources that would benefit any teacher's toolbox. Below are the reviews and reflections I wrote. I hope you find a book to add to your toolbox. I have starred (**) the books I enjoyed the most.

• Creating Culturally Responsive Classrooms~A Reflection
• Decoding and Phonics ~ A Reflection
• First Days of School ~ A Reflection
• **How to Differentiate Instruction~ A Reflection
• How to Grade for Learning ~ A Reflection
• **Lost at School ~ A Reflection
• Making Standards Useful ~ A Reflection
• Other People's Children~A Reflection
• Results Now~A Reflection
• Teaching Reading in the Content Areas~A Reflection
• The First Year Teacher's Survival Guide
• **The Way Schools Work ~ A Reflection
• **When Kids Can't Read~A Reflection

Do you feel like you don't have enough time to teach all the amazing ways technology can expand your students' learning? A technology club might be your answer. For us, it was also about building strong "technicians" in our classrooms. If our teachers had a "techy" student that could help them solve technical problems, it would build the confidence of our teachers and hopefully lead to more technology integration in the classroom. Here are the steps I took in building a technology club. I am still on the road to our first meeting so I'll continue to update the post as I achieve each step.

Step #1: Develop your goals
What do you want to achieve? What do you see as your outcomes? Here were the goals that I initially developed.

1. Foster a deeper understanding of technology by exposing students to a wide variety of software and technology applications.
2. Promote technology integration at Our Elementary by shaping student technology leaders within the classroom.
3. Provide authentic opportunities to apply new skills through school-based projects.

Step #2: Seek approval
Who must approve the club? Do you need to go to a committee or simply obtain permission from your principal? I put together a document that gave a basic outline of what I envisioned a meeting to look like and sent this to my principal.

Step #3: Permission forms
Since our club membership was all elementary, we needed to obtain special permission for attending the club as well as for participating in the various Web 2.0 tools we would be using. The permission form includes allowing the child to use an email address to communicate and log into certain tools, permission to post work online and permission to use backchanneling tools.

Step #4: Select membership
Determine how many your feel is appropriate for your club and then determine how you will choose your membership if more students express interest than you have room for in your club. We will use an questionnaire to select membership. The questions will be simple and posted as a Google Form. Questions will be:
o Why do you want to join the technology club?
o What ideas do you have for club projects?
o How are you responsible at home?
o How are you responsible at school?

Step #5: Plan your first meeting
Make sure your first meeting goes smoothly. Make sure the session is well planned and that you give the students an idea of what they can look forward to for the rest of the year. Make sure you build a learning community just as you would in a classroom.

Permission Form:

Do you feel like you don't have enough time to teach all the amazing ways technology can expand your students' learning? A technology club might be your answer. For us, it was also about building strong "technicians" in our classrooms. If our teachers had a "techy" student that could help them solve technical problems, it would build the confidence of our teachers and hopefully lead to more technology integration in the classroom. Here are the steps I took in building a technology club. I am still on the road to our first meeting so I'll continue to update the post as I achieve each step.

Step #1: Develop your goals
What do you want to achieve? What do you see as your outcomes? Here were the goals that I initially developed.

1. Foster a deeper understanding of technology by exposing students to a wide variety of software and technology applications.
2. Promote technology integration at Our Elementary by shaping student technology leaders within the classroom.
3. Provide authentic opportunities to apply new skills through school-based projects.

Step #2: Seek approval
Who must approve the club? Do you need to go to a committee or simply obtain permission from your principal? I put together a document that gave a basic outline of what I envisioned a meeting to look like and sent this to my principal.

Step #3: Permission forms
Since our club membership was all elementary, we needed to obtain special permission for attending the club as well as for participating in the various Web 2.0 tools we would be using. The permission form includes allowing the child to use an email address to communicate and log into certain tools, permission to post work online and permission to use backchanneling tools.

Step #4: Select membership
Determine how many your feel is appropriate for your club and then determine how you will choose your membership if more students express interest than you have room for in your club. We will use an questionnaire to select membership. The questions will be simple and posted as a Google Form. Questions will be:
o Why do you want to join the technology club?
o What ideas do you have for club projects?
o How are you responsible at home?
o How are you responsible at school?

Step #5: Plan your first meeting
Make sure your first meeting goes smoothly. Make sure the session is well planned and that you give the students an idea of what they can look forward to for the rest of the year. Make sure you build a learning community just as you would in a classroom.

Permission Form:

I will begin with full disclosure. This incredibly fun idea is from Kelly Tenkely. This lesson is a great way to reinforce knowledge of actions verbs while creating a simple project that the students can relate to: an iTunes ad! We only slightly modified the lesson and used a green screen since we had recently purchased one and thought this would be a great way to use it!

This lesson was done on a Mac using Pages (word processing). Our version of Microsoft Office for the Mac does not have transperency. I am guessing that version MS Office 2008 for Mac does have transparency (the "wand" on the Picture Toolbar). Using the same tool, (the "wand" in the Picture Toolbar), you could also do this activity on a PC.

The lesson we did is outlined below:

1. Begin by taking each student's picture, posing in some kind of action, in front of a green screen (walking, running, dancing, etc.).
2. Next, make sure the images are compressed. I used iPhoto and exported them as the lowest quality (smallest size). Pages seemed to work much more easily with the compressed images.
3. We opened Pages to the "blank" layout and turned the paper to landscape so that it looked like an iTunes card.
4. Drag in the picture with the green screen onto the Pages paper.
5. While clicking on the image, go to Format --> Instant Alpha. You may see a small pop-up window and your cursor will turn to a small cross hair. At this point, you can click and drag on the color you would like to make transparent (green). If you did a good job of compressing the image, the green will slowly turn a purplish color. Try to turn all the green this color and when you click away, the white background will come through.
   
6. Now it is time to turn the student to a solid silouette. go to View --> Adjust Image.
7. In Adjust Image, you will do 3 things:
   1st: Slide contrast all the way to the left
   2nd: Slide brightness all the way to the left
   3rd: Slide the bottom most levels all the way to the right.
   
8. Now resize your image so it takes up most of your page.
9. Add a text box and add your student's name.
   
10. Print the image on bright paper of any kind.