This afternoon I had the opportunity to connect up with a whole bunch of schools for a video conference from all around North Carolina put on the by the North Carolina Connectivity Council.  It was really cool.  We could see all of them and they could see us.  There should be an archive of the video posted soon.  Here is the excerpt from the announcement.  

The challenge for North Carolina educators is to ensure that every public school student graduates from high school, globally competitive for work and postsecondary education and prepared for life in the 21st Century.  Web 2.0 technologies, such as blogs, wikis and social networking sites, provide students the opportunity to communicate, create and collaborate in new and exciting ways.  However, some educators and parents are concerned that these “just in time”technologies create an unsafe environment for our children.

Technology specialists from four NC school districts will describe their school systems’ approach to using Web 2.0 in teaching and learning.  Panelists will present the best practices from their respective districts while discussing the challenges of implementing these new technologies. 

Ideas from around North Carolina that Teacher are currently using that IS working:

• Teacher Created Wiki’s
• Teacher Created Blogs for Professional Development
• District Blog to model, share resources, and collaborate. 

Things Students are doing that is working.

• Green County Schools have a 1 to 1 laptop program.  (Wow)
• Student created Wiki’s – Creating based on the information that is created in class.  Do it in the class while the teacher is speaking. 
• Kids created blogs and commenting on other blogs. 
• Book Study through Wiki

Tools that People ARE using

• PBWiki (safer than Media Wiki and WetPaint)
• WikiSpaces (Private domain that is password protected)
• Blogger.com or EduBlogs
• Google Docs – Collaboration across district
• Teacher Tube (Block YouTube) (Use Tools to download YouTube if Teacher’s Want)
• DimDim – Collaboration
• Skype – Global Connections
• Animoto – Video Creation
• Glogster.com – Poster Creation
• Moodle - Learning Management System
• PRIVATE Ning Social Networking Group in School
• TakingItGlobal.org  - Place to find some collaborators for all sorts of subjects

Challenges

• Time on Task… there are a ton of kids online and it is hard to monitor what they are doing.  
• Social Networking (Teachers are no longer allowed to be friends with students in some schools… good idea.)
• Keeping Acceptable Use Policy up to date
• Time… there are so MANY tools… not enough time to address them all. 
• Expanding the global learning network so that learning can be global.   Finding people to collaborate with people around the world via Skype and other technologies above. 

Trainings for Teachers

I found it interesting that in many cases the instructional technologist are working with a group of teachers to train and prepare them to use this web 2.0 technology.  It is sometimes done as a monthly meeting, a mandated technology hour requirement, training classes, an annual fall conference, or using the web 2.0 technologies themselves.

• Shift Happens – Did you Know 2.0 - Used as a starting point for Faculty discussion.

Well… let me just tell you that there are some things I can’t fix.  And hard drives DO FAIL!

Since my unfortunate hard drive failure and the resulting loss of pictures and data I have researched dozens of back-up options.  I now have a complex techie solution I use for my pictures, videos and documents that involves a script and automated backups to my own personal off site server where it duplicated the data once more on a Raid network device.  But that is obviously not for everyone. 

That being said I have long looked for a good solution that I could recommend to others.  I finally found it.  It is the Mozy.com folks.

In the interest of full disclosure, I have signed up for an affiliate program that gives me a little bit on money when people do sign up so if you are going to sign up, please consider going there from any of the links on my blog.  I figure this can help pay for the domain name and space I use to maintain this blog out of my own pocket.

Versions

• A FREE version with up to 2GB of data (enough to back up important documents!)
• A super cheap version for $4.95/mo with UNLIMITED DATA (pictures, videos, etc!)
• Even an Educational and Business Version with local institutional administration capabilities.

Check out this comparison page for more information.

They even have a Mac version!  How awesome is that?  I have it installed and running now and it is GREAT!

How it Works:

You install it once, leave it and you can sleep at night knowing you have a backup.  The first time takes a while, but it uses slow network time.  I could still surf and even watch streaming video while it did the initial backup.

Restoring Data – There are three easy ways to restore data with the Free version.

• Use the client version to restore it right on machine.
• Web version to restore
• DVD sent to your home ($)

Overall, I am VERY pleased with this and highly recommend it to everyone!  Even if you only use it for the free version to back up the important documents… give it a try!

Presenters:

• Dr. Paula Hudson – Assistant Professor, Doctor of Physical Therapy Program – Elon University
• Rick Palmer – Instructional Designer, Instructional Design & Development – Elon University

Example Blog They Used in Classroom:

• Tests and Measures

Possible Assignment Candidate’s for Blogging

• A flat assignment – an assignment that is boring. Something that students hate to learn and teachers hate to teach.
• Bored?
• Collaboration is an active model, but you don’t have enough time in the classroom
• Struggle to stay Relevant

How does Blogging Address these Issues?

• Extends the time students are actively involved in the class
• Expands the collaboration between students in the classroom

Other Cool things:

• This assignment can go outside of the classroom
• Can tap into the innate competitiveness in the classroom to kick up the energy
• Small groups can easily work together to create content
• Comments can be moderated (beneficial posted, others not)

Cons

• There is some time and labor on the setup
• There are some things to learn from it.

Response from Students

• They loved it already
• They are looking for something that sets them apart from their peers when they graduate. They liked that they could put on their resume that they have a web publication.
• Anywhere – they can do this assignment at home, in PJ’s, in kitchen.
• My work matters – people are using it and coming to it.

Response from Teacher

• Less time in class
• Achieve goals
• Final product that is awesome, and can be shared
• Students were very engaged
• Liked that students could be competitive and responsive

Game we Played

This was really a cool part of the class. They set up a mystery activity where we all logged in and posted our clues and then read the clues and tried to post a solution. It was great!

Thoughts about Blogging and Us at UNC

I have had the opportunity to help a professor in the past with a cinema course. He had students post video’s online that they found on YouTube and other sites that had to do with the genre they were studying. He also had a course requirement that they post a certain number of posts and comment a certain number of times. It was really productive and when they were done it was a great resource for others.

It would be great to take a look at a syllabus with a faculty member to see what kind of ideas we could generate about boring, but necessary, activities.

Any takers?

Advantages of Wiki’s

• Co-editing: Howework done on wiki’s promote collaboration between students
• Co-assembly: Different people can contribute different parts
• Write more than a traditional word document
• Don’t have to worry about location and version (it’s all online and available)

Pitfalls

• Other’s can “deface” wiki pages (bots) – Precreate accounts and disable login, or don’t put links in public_html space.
• Some techonlogy-adverse students have trouble learning to use wiki’s
• Under FERPA, students need to consent for their required work to be posted publicly.
• Some students are uncomfortable with public writing
• Wiki’s use their own markup language, wich is not as flexible in HTML

Assessing Wikis

• Instructor/TA assessment (but there is a lot to go through and it can be time consuming)
• Student Assessment – Students write up short commentaries on their contributions and collaborations and suggest a grade.
• Wikis are new, so not everyone assesses …
• Peer Assessment – Score authors based on a rubric. (This seems to be the best in his opinion)

Advantages to Peer Assessment

• Adds a new dimension to collaboration
• Electronic peer review of wiki contribution like real world and real job.

Types of Assignments:

• Posting Links to other online resources
• Posting an assignment (using links to online resources and articles)
• Collaboration on Research Project
• Post class notes
• Comments on Articles
• Vocabulary List
• Research Report
• Online Debates
• Class Discussions
• Peer Review
• Really almost anything that can be done online…

There is a correlation between those that do a type of research assignment and those that responded that the wiki had helped them “think critically.”

How this might be important at UNC-CH and for me:

I support several foreign language departments and I think that the literature courses could really benefit from a classroom space where they can discuss what they are reading and link off to other spaces.

The real beauty of a wiki is that it is a webpage that is being built in real time.

I can also think that departments that need a lot of coordination could use a wiki to get stuff together. It is always updated and always available… at least on our campus.

Anyone at UNC want to get together and talk more?

For those who don’t know Michael Wesch, he is the author of the classic Web 2.0 video’s on YouTube that I wrote about a while ago.

This presentation was really great. A lot of it was taken from his “A Vision of Students Today” video. If you haven’t see it.. start out with that!

Notes:

Starts out with description of annual summer trips to New Guinea – no water, no running water, no electricity, and certainly no internet.

Built a house (240 people that helped build) – installed solar panels for computer – no email, but they give it a pilot once a month or two and will send emails off when he gets to somewhere.

Lessons we can learn from the small village in New Guinea

• Sustainable – they can continue to live the way they do now for thousands of years
• Equality – they share everything.

Tragedy of our time and problems with Education

We are clothing ourselves in the global fabric. Everything comes from all around the world… but we don’t realize it.

The most significant problem in higher education is the problem of significance itself.

This means they are just getting by and trying to figure out who they are and what they are doing.

Question – How many students don’t like school – 1/2 of them. How many don’t like learning – No hands. They don’t like the model we’ve set out for them to learn…

So… how do we engage them?

Solution

THIS is NOT just a TECHNOLOGY GAP… it is a CULTURAL GAP!

Teaching has not changed… but learning has.

8 books read – 3000 webpages read – profile reads – That is what they are reading.
They are writing in emails… not that much in papers.

Students are learning through technology… not as much through traditional methods.

Problems with Current System

He gave a great example about what the traditional lecture hall is teaching the students.

Students are not seeing the significance of the learning beyond the grade.

How things are Changing

There is something in the air… the web. WiFi. They have access to the entire human body of knowledge.

There is a massive amount of knowledge that is going to be created this year.

Digital information is different. This is how it being created.

What he is doing in his classroom and what we can do.

Focus less on content but connections. Content is still important, because that is what is used to make connections, but by focusing on connections, students become voracious learners trying to make connections.

Students become experts on some part of the world.

It should become less of an information dump and more of an interactive learning experience!

World of total information is that is enveloping us right now – This is what is going on with iPhone and GPS and always on Internet. A meta-level of data for the world. Imagine standing next to a tree and looking it up on wikipedia and seeing other pictures of that tree from others, and maybe even a history.

We need to move from just simply creating students who are knowledgeable, to those that are knowledge able. One’s that are able to use that knowledge to do good and make a difference!

How I can apply this at UNC-CH and my organization

You know… I’m not totally sure. This is all good information. I think we just need to really take a critical look at the way we are teaching our courses. Is there anything else we can do to engage the students? How can we use the tools here? Not just to incorporate them, but to use them if they are useful.

Anyone want to talk more about this?

So today I am attending a conference at Elon University. It is their 5th annual summer “Innovation in Instruction” conference.

You can see the the schedule here. I will post updates throughout the day. This is my schedule.

• Lessons from New Guinea for the Global Village and the Crisis of Significance in Higher Education. (Michael Wesch from Digital Enthnography at Kanas State… loved his Vision of Students Today Video… hoping to get more like that
• Online Reading & Writing with Wikis
• Applied Peda-Blog-y – Using Course Blogs as a Motivational Teaching Tool
• The Techno-human paradox: How “Keeping up with the kids” fosters community. (Foreign Language Focus)

Oh, and of course there will be a poster session. I will see what I can find out there too..

Of course, any good service costs money, but this one is pretty good with an UNLIMITED plan for only $4.95/mo. I don’t know anyone that wouldn’t pay that to retrieve their pictures/video’s/documents/etc!

I highly recommend that you find a backup solution of some type of you don’t have one yet. They also offer the same for PC’s of course!

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Hello and Happy National Teacher Day,

In 1953, Eleanor Roosevelt persuaded the 81st Congress to recognize teachers with a celebratory day all their own. Since then, the date of National Teacher Day has bounced around a bit until 1985, when the National Education Association declared the first week of May National Teacher Appreciation Week and the first Tuesday of that month National Teacher Day. If you’d like to know the whole story, check it out here: http://www.nea.org/teacherday/index.html

On that note, we’d like to invite you to come celebrate and learn with us at the next Google Teacher Academy, scheduled to take place at the Googleplex in Mountain View on June 25th, 2008. The Google Teacher Academy is a FREE professional development experience designed to help K-12 educators get the most from innovative technologies. Each GTA is an intensive, one-day event where participants get hands-on experience with Google’s free products and other technologies, learn about interesting and new instructional strategies, receive resources to share with colleagues, and immerse themselves in an innovative corporate environment. Upon completion, GTA participants become Google Certified Teachers, who share what they learn with other K-12 educators in their local region. This time around, we’ve listened to your feedback and opened up the application to all teachers everywhere. As long as you are willing and able to get yourself to the Googleplex, we’d love to have you. For more information about the GTA, please check out our full information and requirements page: http://www.google.com/educators/gta.html

The team of people thinking more about teachers everyday is growing here at Google. As such, we’re introducing a new section of the Google for Educators site – dedicated to using our popular Geo Products. Here you will find information about using Google Earth, Maps, Sky, and SketchUp in your K-12 classroom. Along with some of the great classroom activities we’ve collected over the years, we’ve also included starter kits which feature “cool and easy things you can do” with each product in your classroom. Check it out here: http://www.google.com/educators/geo.html

Lastly, but never leastly, a few months back, we asked you to share stories about using Google Docs with your students. You told us about the power of introducing collaborative writing to your kids, you mentioned using our presentation software in class, keeping students engaged with the “chat” feature, and you told us how much you like to be able to drive success throughout the writing process, instead of just grading the final product. http://www.google.com/educators/p_docs.html
While we were reviewing your stories, we realized that Docs may be a bit intimidating to the uninitiated so we developed a “getting started” guide – with step-by-step instructions for creating accounts, sharing and collaborating, editing and organizing your work. Now there’s no reason to be scared, so give Google Docs a try: http://docs.google.com/View?docid=dcdn7mjg_72nh25vq

We hope today is a true celebration of your vocation – and we’re wishing that all of those who are thankful for your hard work take this time to express it. I know I speak for everyone at Google when I say that none of us would be where we are without the amazing men and women who dedicated their lives to teaching us much of what we know today. On behalf of Google, I’d like to say thank you – to each and every teacher – for all that you do every day.

Cheers,
Cristin Frodella
Google K-12 Education Outreach

Google for Educators
http://www.google.com/educators

“I believe that the read/write Web, or what we are calling Web 2.0, will culturally, socially, intellectually, and politically have a greater impact than the advent of the printing press. I believe that we cannot even begin to imagine the changes that are going to take place as the two-way nature of the Internet begins to flower, and that even those of us who have spent time imagining this future will be astounded by what happens.”

He then goes through ten trends that are important for education and learning and seven steps we, as educators can take to make a difference.

Trends:

1. A New Publishing Revolution
2. A Tital Wave of Information (Great statistics on how this information is growing, but he encourages more creation… with good reason.)
3. Everything is Becoming Participative
4. The New Pro-sumers (combination of ‘producer’ and ‘consumer’)
5. The Age of the Collaborator
6. An Explosion of Innovation
7. The World Gets Even Flatter and Faster
8. Social Learning Moves Toward Center Stage.  (I especially like this one.)
9. The Long Tail (Availability of specialization)
10. Social Networking Really Opens Up the Party

Steps we can Take:

1. Learn about Web 2.0
2. Lurk
3. Participate
4. Digest This Though: “The Answer to Information Overload Is to Produce More Information.”
5. Teach Content Production
6. Make Education a Public Discussion
7. Help Build the New Playbook

What are your thoughts? Did you see this yesterday?