Alphabet Soup

Right now I am attending the Pennsylvania Educational Technology Expo and Convention 2010 at the Hershey Lodge and Convention Center. For each session I attend I will be taking notes posting resources on our Hempfield Reporting Back wikispace. Check it out at this link! You can also follow the Twitter feed using the #petec2010 hashtag.

Twitter and blogs have been in the news a lot recently with good reason. Twitter is a social networking site that allows you to microblog to people who follow you. You select who you would like to follow. I have found it to be a fantastic resource to get ideas and resources for teachers and students and to stay on top of news and events. Tweets are limited to 140 characters and usually include links to website so that the reader can get more information about an event, resource or topic.
Blogs are another good resource for teachers and students. There are several blog hosting sites available to anyone who has something to say on a blog. We have a public blog server and a private blog server at Hempfield to meet the needs of each classroom teacher whether it be posting student work, classroom events, newsletters or just staying in touch with parents and students. Teachers and students can subscribe to, read and comment on blogs ranging from current events, sports, educational technology, hobbies to history to name just a few topics. I am have added a blog feed to this blog as an example of how a teacher could add a blog feed to their blog for student use without having students subscribe to the blog themselves.

I learned about this site through our CFF listserv. It has potential for classroom use especially as an alternative to students “googling” for basic data and statistical information. Only about half of my inquiries ran and returned usable data for what I was looking for. It was just released on May 14 so it will continue to grow and be refined. I am curious to see how it evolves and if the educational community embraces it.

On Friday I worked with the entire Knights team at Centerville Middle School to begin their Middle Ages Encyclopedia on wikispaces. Michele Waltz, the Knights Social Studies teacher, wanted to incorporate technology into her curriculum and create a resource for her students at the same time. In collaboration with Deb Getz, CMS librarian we created the wikispace site. Each student is assigned a topic. Each topic will be explored by multiple students so each student will design their own page exploring a different question about the topic - yes the site is going to be very big. The questions range from straight definitions to how their topic influences our life today to finding images to represent the topic. Currently the site is private, viewable only by the students and staff working on its creation. After it is finished we plan to open it up. Watch for an update on the Technology Blog site.

Want to learn more about biomes around the world and why they are important to save? Ask any seventh grade student from LMS. The entire 7th grade both Knights and Nobles are learning about biomes by creating a digital story about their biome, the organisms that live there and how humans have affected the biome. Their stories will be posted to our private blogserver that they can use to show their parents and classmates what they have learned. It was an exciting project to watch develop and the students needed very little guidance other than troubleshooting during their movie creating.

I am working with several HHS classes who using the educational version of Glogster to create interactive posters. Tenth grade English classes are using Glogster to introduce readers to books or short stories that they have read. In Spanish classes students are creating Glogster posters as their product for a research project on Spanish culture. Glogster is a web 2.0 product that allows the user to integrate images they have found or created with text boxes, graphics from within the program, sounds and videos into a single poster. Students are using a Creative Commons search to find images that the creator allows others to use. Students will be sharing their glogs as printed posters in the library or by doing a museum walk within their classes.

Several Science, Social Studies and World Language teachers at HHS are using wikispaces with their classes. Students are using the class wikispace site to create class presentation websites on selected topics in Honors Biology classes. German students are using their class wikispace site to document the life and times of their gnomes as a digital portfolio including images, podcasts and audio recordings. In Social Studies classes wikispaces is being used to create a resource site featuring individual student work, teacher presentation resources, and collaborative diagrams and charts.

Student projects are going to be posted on the district technology blog site. The first projects to be posted were created by Mrs. Ruhl’s class at Farmdale Elementary School. I was very impressed with the great stories that the first graders created. They are entertaining and fun stories!! Fantastic work!!

Take a look for yourself at  http://einstein.hempfieldsd.org/technology/ Click on the link for Farmdale Digital Storytelling.

I have been contemplating launching a wikispace resource page for several months and have taken the plunge. The site can be accessed at http://hsdalphabetsoup.wikispaces.com. I will be using is as a resource site to topics I discuss in this blog. I am currently working with a HHS English teacher who is doing a DI project on Casear. Students have a choice of technologies in creating their product. The project is designed to provide background information to students about the time period, the location, and the characters. One of the student technology product choices is Animoto. Animoto offers education accounts which enables students to create products that are kept private NOT able to be shared publically. I will repost on this project when they wrap up next week.

I had the opportunity to spend the last five days at the state technology conference PETE&C. The keynote speakers were fantastic and inspiring. I attended a session on Saturday for CFF coaches where we looked at our coaching data and made plans for coaching through the end of the school year. Sunday I attended a day long Discovery Education session that was awesome!! I learned how to look at digital storytelling in new ways and how to create digital movies using the AFI curriculum. Monday through Wednesday I attended breakout sessions on interactive whiteboards, Google Earth, staff development, new Apple products, differentiated instruction and technology, geocaching in the classroom and Diigo. I used a Ning for the first time and found that I really enjoyed the collaborative interaction that it provided. There were many live blogs, chats and skype sessions going on during sessions creating a backchannel for discussion and processing of the content of presentations. I will be sharing many resources over the next weeks from this fantastic conference.