The Digital Backpack » Recommendations

Holiday book list for educators

lindseyb — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 16:02:13 +0000

You can tell I’m a teacher, because one of the things I love about the holidays is being able to share the gift of reading. Yup, I’m the aunt that always sends books, the Mom that makes the Christmas Eve gift a book and the wife that points her husband in the direction of the book store as a hint.

Twitter Teacher Reader Recommendations

This week I asked on twitter what book they would buy for their teacher colleagues, I am convinced that all teachers are readers because they responded and I got a wonderful list to add to my own personal reading list on shelfari, and to share here.

@jackiegerstein The Passionate Teacher by Robert L. Fried

@paulbogush The Courage to Teach by Parker J. Palmer

@irasocol Borderlines by Peter Hoeg

@whatedsaid Intellectual Character by Ron Ritchhart

@quirkytech The Art of Possibiity by Ben Zander & Why don’t kids like school by Dan Willingham

@simplysuzy Duck! Rabbit! by Amy Krouse

@mbteach Teacher Man by Frank McCourt

@snappity The Case Against Homework by Sara Bennett and Nancy Kalish

@kellyhines Wooden by John R Wooden

My Recommendations

A Whole New Mind by Daniel Pink

Mindset by Carol Dweck

Full keynote video

What the best college teachers do by Ken Bain

I heard Kathy Sierra recommend this book in a math webinar I attended and wrote about in October of this year.

5 dysfunctions of a team by Patrick Lenconi

Really important to read this if you are involved in PLC’s in your school.

Teach like your hair’s on Fire by Rafe Esquith

I haven’t read this yet, it is on deck. I have heard many recommend this book this year.

Please add your own recommendations for educator reads in the comments.

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Back to School with a Digital Toolbox

lindseyb — Sun, 06 Sep 2009 20:43:17 +0000

Back to school is a good time to commit to searching out tools online that students can really use to make learning more effective. These are the top 12 free tools that I use with teachers and students and they can be found year round on my public netvibes page.

Many of these tools help make learning more visual and offer the opportunity to create personalized meaning and connections. Once these learning artifacts are created, students often feel more ownership and instantly want to share. Mindtools.

Picnik

Edit images and photos online for free Picnik

Visu-words

Explore words and their associations, chack definition and pronunciations using a visu-words

Timetoast

Create interactive timelines, for novels, historic events, your life and share them on the web using timetoast

Imagination Cubed

Draw, write or solve on an interactive whiteboard that has an unique playback feature at imagination cubed

Tiddlyspot

Use a wiki-to-go to save notes and links for each subject at tiddlyspot

Jing

Screencast a concept, solution or key topic to aid understanding by downloading Jing

The Big Picture

Stay on top of a project or organize a complete curriculum using The Big Picture

Etherpad

Collaborate with others to create a document or flesh out an idea using Etherpad

The Awesome Highlighter

Signup and use The Awesome Highlighter, which lets you highlight webpages and share them with others.

Dropio

Share and move files from home to school and back using Dropio (you may never need that flash drive again)

Text 2 MindMap

Gain control and organize all those ideas for your essay with Text 2 Mind Map

Save & Share

Don’t forget to create a space online where you can save all of these useful tools at Delicious. Did I mention that all of these are FREE!

How will you share BLC10?

Stellarium- tour plus classroom ideas

lindseyb — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 17:55:27 +0000

Stellarium was included as a session at the Galileo Teacher Training Workshop, organized by the European Space Agency in Amsterdam in June 2009. As part of the International Year of Astronomy, I thought this program should be explored.

Stellarium is an open source 3D planetarium program that works in real-time and has a database of over 600,000 stars, and can be downloaded from http://www.stellarium.org, a user guide can be found at Stellarium User Guide

The first thing to do after installation is to customize the view to your city, and your time. This will give you an accurate picture of the sky above you. It is easy to use the arrow keys on the keyboard to smoothly orientate and see the sky from different directions. You can zoom in to parts of the sky, and click on any star to see a collection of statistics pertinent to that star.

Stellarium offers many options for the classroom, it is like having your own 3D planetarium. The big difference here is that you can travel virtually to anywhere, staying earthbound is optional. Not just for astronomy, this program has depth offering cultural details of the constellations, plenty of statistics for math teachers, fabulous for use with the projector and could even be used as writing prompts. If, after exploring the standard download, you want more, there are add on databases to download more stars and scripts that take you to a certain spot in the universe. The scripting language is also open source so students could even write their own.

Ideas for the Classroom

The Sky Tonight Screencasts

The BBC program “The sky at night” with Patrick Moore is the longest running show on the BBC, that popularity could easily flow into an astronomy class production by students of the “sky over our school tonight” screencast using a program such as www.screenr.com or Jing (www.jingproject.com). These screencasts would feature points of interest, planets, visible constellations. After recording these could be embedded on the school website or a course wiki.

Interstellar journeys

The feature to set your location to another planet, or a moon of a planet could make a interesting lesson. Students are assigned a different planet or moon from the database, and they are to describe what they could see in the night sky, how bright these objects would be, how far away from home they are. Then these experiences could be presented to the rest of the class using the projector.

Earthbound Journeys

The feature to set the location to different cities around the world could be utilized by assigning students different cities. They would make observations, take screenshots, get together in groups and compare and contrast the view from different parts of our planet. The light pollution feature could also be included in this lesson, comparing the effect in differently populated areas.

Constellations and Star Lore

For cultural understanding and awareness, Stellarium contains information about the different constellations from the perspective of different cultures. Students could research and interpret how these myths, naming systems and folklores impacted culture at different times in our history and how these stories still have impact today.

Have students pick out their own constellation and make up their own star lore.

Putting it all in perspective

How big are the objects floating in the universe and how big can they get? Watch this youtube video about star size.

Then have the students search for the stars in Stellarium to get and idea of where they are and how far away they are using the statistics

Using the statistics

One example of using stellarium is in calculating star altitudes and can be seen in this youtube video of an astronomy lab

The statistics could be used in many ways in math and physics classes. Data is real-time and useful for populating databases, pulling out information and drawing conclusions. Example question might include: Do the brightness statistics correllate with distance and size.

Real-time Sky Watching

How does the sky above change over time and why does that happen? Stellarium is running in real-time, so if you take some screenshots in the afternoon of the sky and make note of major objects and their position. Leave Stellarium running overnight, then compare where those major objects are now and have the students explain why that is.

Sharing

More lesson materials can be found at the Stellarium user wiki. If you decide to use Stellarium with your classes this would be a useful place to describe your lesson and experiences so that other teachers and students can take advantage of your work.

Dropio and voice messages in the classroom

Top 10 tools list

lindseyb — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 00:19:20 +0000

A list is being compiled for the top ten learning tools for 2009.
I added my top ten for 2009. I did this very quickly via twitter and just tried to concentrate on the tools I use and find useful on a regular basis. If you look at the list, my contribution is number 117. It is very interesting to view the lists of others. My list includes the following tools with examples of how I have used them.
1. Netvibes See example of my pages here and here
2. Twitter
3. Elluminate, because the classroom2.0 live sessions have been so useful for me this year. You can play catch up with the archives here. I have posted about some of the sessions here and here.
4. Delicious The only way I can keep up with all the great resources that are shared via twitter. I have rss feeds to our teacher wiki, for my tags for science, math, english, socialstudiespd.
5. JingProject A tool I have used with success with students and teachers for professional development.
6. iTouch the focus of a few blog posts and I continue to marvel at the depth of its’ utility.
7. Picnik recently reinstated as the photo-editor that does the job quickly and easily. I especially like the way you can upload a png file, edit and download as a jpg without having to login. Super easy.
8. Googledocs, lately google forms has been specifically useful with faculty sign ups and surveys. If I had a regular class, I would definitely be using google forms as an assessment tool.
9. Slideshare works alongside netvibes with its easy to use embed code. Check out how I used it in a pd activity here
10. Wordpress, thedigitalbackpack blog runs on wordpress.

If you are interested in adding your top ten tools for 2009 to the list..

Send the names of your Top 10 Tools, by Twitter to @c4lpt, or by email, or set up a blog posting – more info here

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Mathcasts make sense!

lindseyb — Mon, 18 May 2009 18:16:40 +0000

As we get towards the end of the year, so many teachers are acutely aware of how many chapters they have yet to cover. Although it might be a little late this year, screencasting, used regularly throughout the year can help with this time crunch.

I regularly attend the Saturday webinars hosted by classroom2.0 and always learn something new.

This week the topic was mathcasts. I invited my whole math department because they all have either a smartboard or a wireless tablet and the smartboard software in their classrooms. The Saturday time didn’t work out for them so this morning I emailed them the link to the archive of the webinar.

The guest was Tim Fahlberg who is behind mathcasts.org . This website is full of mathcasts for all levels. At the bottom of each page, a direct link to the page is listed.

The easiest way to get started is to share a mathcast from this site that has already been made.

The second step is to create a mathcast. Our teachers have smartboards and the software has a built in screen recorder they can use while teaching. The playback file can be uploaded to schoolloop our CMS so students can review on their own time.

During the webinar, Tim shared the many ways that this can be done. Links to tools are here in the classroom 2.0 sharetabs link .

During the presentation he really stretched the use of the webinar software elluminate which was fun to watch. He demonstrated recording a mathcast using a livescribe pen on livescribe paper, while filming it live with a document camera via USB onto his screen which was simultaneously streaming out to viewers via elluminate. Phew!

Bonus participants with mathcast experience included Graeme McNeil (The Math Maker), Colleen King (creator of the Math Playground) and Shamblesguru who shared a great resource page for screencasting. http://www.themathmaker.com/
http://www.mathplayground.com
http://www.shambles.net/pages/staff/screencast/

The third step is to have students create screencasts and start to create a library of them for students to use inside and outside of school for review.

Not just for math!

Tim mentioned during the webinar, that the idea behind mathcasts would work for other disciplines too. All subjects could screencast their key topics and create a library of examples. Science, language

An idea that is spreading

This morning Wesley Fryer tweeted out the link to this news video from a school training he was at on (coincidence!) Saturday. It encapsulates the idea of how screencasts can enhance how classroom time is spent.

Used schoolwide this idea has resulted in improved student engagement and learning.

To spread the idea around my own school sending out short Jing screencasts whenever I can, models this practice.

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Links to learning with an ipod touch

lindseyb — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 00:07:16 +0000

So many apps so little time.

The potential for the ipod touch in the classroom and in the hands of so many students is exciting. In a classroom recently a teacher asked how many students owned an ipod touch, at least half of the hands went up. How many of them use it for school work? Less hands.

While educators eyes light up at the potential, students see them as mostly music and games. The connection to learning has to be made for them, unless of course the learning is in the form of a game. (Future post on educational apps)

To start to find out more about the ipod touch in the classroom I keep going back to the following resources that have useful examples and ideas.

From the Apple Learning Exchange .
The iPod touch Touching student lives in the classroom.
http://edcommunity.apple.com/ali/story.php?itemID=16472

Tony Vincent (twitterid)
http://learninginhand.com/ipod/touch.html

Chris Webb (twitterid)
ipods in the classroom

Jane Hart
http://www.c4lpt.co.uk/iTouchLearning/topapps.html

My delicious ipod links

Photo: ipod touch screenshot of animoto movie
Related Post: ipod touch as a voice recorder

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Packing for College

lindseyb — Sat, 16 Aug 2008 16:16:06 +0000

Packing for college

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: student packing)

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Back to School Shopping, Mindset by Carol Dweck

lindseyb — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 15:52:46 +0000

As the new school year approaches one purchase on the back to school supply list should be Mindset: The New Psychology of Success by Carol Dweck. This is a great book to help you effectively coach, cajole, tutor and talk to your kids through the school year. The book explains the difference between a fixed mindset and a growth mindset. A person with a fixed mindset believes that their traits and abilities are set at birth and in early childhood and can’t be changed. A person with a growth mindset understands that the mind has plasticity and they can continue to grow, learn and increase their abilities all the way through life. A person with a fixed mindset often has to hide failure and avoid risk as it might expose their true nature, and will disappoint those that believe in their ability. A person with a growth mindset is willing to try new activities and ideas because they know they can learn from whatever happens and will gain the “just in time” skills that will enable them to carry out any task to the best of their ability. They are often looking for the opportunity to learn from each and every experience.
People might have different mindsets for different parts of their lives. Carol Dweck explores the concept from the point of view of the mindset of a champion (sports), mindset and leadership (careers), mindsets in love (relationships) and where do mindsets come from (the role of parents, teachers and coaches).
The ideas presented overshadow the self esteem issue. Boosting children’s self esteem by praising them and telling them how smart they are is not as effective, this praise implies these traits are fixed and are part of the person forever, they are either smart (if they succeed) or not (if they fail). Praising their strategies and praising the work they put in to succeed encourages the idea that their abilities are not linked to static traits, but malleable ones that they have control over. Reflecting on dissappointments and asking what strategies could be used next time shows that the disappointment does not show the child as failing, but only that the strategy was not successful.
The book concludes with a workshop section on how to foster a growth mindset. This involves managing the change from a “judge and be judged” mindset to a “learn and help learn mindset”.
As a teacher and a parent, this is a must read book. It is one of those rare reads that leave you wanting the information stream to continue. I am on the lookout for when the Brainology program is released for teens and young adults.

Picture of brain coral from http://www.flickr.com/photos/40467171@N00/149047693

Creative Commons Attribution License

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Summer Reading Adventures

admin — Sun, 06 Jul 2008 01:11:26 +0000

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Feels like summer reading…

Johnny Bunko & Powerpoint Zen, what a purple combo!

admin — Thu, 08 May 2008 20:40:10 +0000

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