Capturing ideas has been on my mind lately. I use evernote when working, but I often get the best ideas away from my computer either while on a walk or on a bike ride. I usually have my phone with me, I often message pictures to evernote, but I would love it if I could leave myself quick voice messages.

This email, dropped into my mailbox today. I have one question. Could it be any simpler?

So, I have created a drop and have the link to that in Evernote. No more lost and forgotten ideas.

Check out the message dropio left at http://drop.io/maynewsletter

Uses for the classroom

1. Calls from field trips

2. Use as a homework reminder

3. Use as a parent message

4. Record student responses to a special event or discussion and then embed calls on your class blog or webpage

5. Provide a daily class update

6. Have students call in with their project idea assignments

7. Check out this demo drop showing how a teacher can use drop.io as part of their work  flow at http://drop.io/mrdavidson

Below I embedded the voice message from that demo drop to show one of the many ways you can distribute drop content.

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Massachusetts Computer using educators annual conference takes place this week. To have one place to monitor, listen and watch what is going on I created a public page on netvibes that monitors the tags masscue and masscue09.

As soon as actual attendees post online via twitter, flickr, delicious, diigo, and blogs, it will feed to this page, making it easier to connect and listen to what is going on in sessions. I get so much more out of a conference this way, I lose that anxiety about choosing one session from the many great sessions on offer. I know that I can go back and check out links and bookmarks from most of the sessions, if and when I have time.

You can create a similar page for any conference, you may or may not be going to (just change the tag). The same ideas could work in the classroom, it would be just as easy to set up a page to follow any “tag” that is related to your curriculum topic. For collaboration and teamwork make your own tag & have the group post resources which are then aggregated automatically on the page.

Twitter search widget

This widget feeds every tweet that includes the word “masscue”. Helpful to connect to others on twitter and expand your personal learning network.

In the netvibes Add Content section choose twitter search from the essential widgets list.

Delicious and Diigo RSS feeds

To stay on top of what attendees are bookmarking in sessions, go to delicious and search for the tag you want to include. On the page with the search results you will see an rss icon. Click on that and copy the feed address (url). It will look something like this

feed://feeds.delicious.com/v2/rss/masscue?count=15

In netvibes, go to add content click add a feed, then paste in this url.

Blog Search

This widget will find all blog posts about a specific topic entered into the search. Add this content to your page using the blog search widget

Photos & media

To follow photo posts and other media being archived and tagged at the event, similar feed widgets can be created using

• flickr & rss,
• youtube & rss,
• slideshare & rss

If I was organizing an event, this would be job one, job two would be publicizing it. So, whether you travel to attend a conference in person or crash it via a netvibes page, share what you create & learn so others can follow you there, virtually of course.

Another blogpost with similar focus:

Create a listening dashboard for your organization

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I was reading this brave post by Lisa Thumann “I just don’t like technology” about how to deal with a comment from a professional development participant that really threw off her whole presentation. Great title, about a teacher expressing her fears, her needs about technology. It was not about Lisa, or her activities for the day, although the fallout impacted everyone in the session. Anyone who has delivered professional development to teachers has at some time or another run into a few with this set-in-stone attitude.
After reading the comments, it stayed in my mind, wondering what I would do in that situation, what would the answer be?

Sunday rolls around and another post by Buffy J Hamilton on the unquiet librarian about digital literacy and reading e-books.
Short Stories + iPods= Happy Readers « The Unquiet Librarian
Buffy has a great photo showing one student reading a book and another reading on her ipod. Both can co-exist-of course..and then
in the last paragraph short and succinct, but so true.

“The kids know this—what part of this don’t the adults get? At the end of the day, our focus needs to be about meeting their needs, not ours.”

That was the answer that I was looking for, for the teacher that “just doesn’t like technology”. It’s not about you teacher….it’s about meeting the needs of your students.

It was quite the librarian weekend this weekend for me (and 80 others online). I spent time in the classroom 2.0 session with joyce valenza and buffy j hamilton learning about copyright and creative commons in the library. Archive here.

THEN the final piece of the puzzle was delivered. Joyce Valenza also wrote in School Library Journal about how to retool yourself, a roadmap for teachers to start to learn more, take control of their own professional development and start to remove their own blocks that prevent them from meeting the needs of their students. As teachers become more in control of their own learning, their resistance will drop away as they meet their own needs more easily and can tune it to the needs of their students. The learning network that I am immersed in is made up of most of the aspects mentioned in this article and will form part of a graduate course I am teaching on developing a personal learning network for professional and classroom use next February.

Ta da! PLN works for me, really. On it’s own.

(PLN=personal learning network)

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The students can add their tweets via phone or computer. These tweets are distinguished from the mass of other tweets by using a hashtag. All of the tweets with this hashtag are projected onto the board at the front of the class for all to see, share and respond to.

Benefits to this way of learning:

• All voices can be heard and have equal weight
• 140 characters is a limitation, yet also a filter to quality information
• Participation can include students and staff who are not present
• There is a record of the discussion that can be used as a study guide later

It is only at the end of the video when the teacher mentions that she told the students “it was going to be messy”. I think this is the key component to introducing something like this into the classroom, it will be more likely to succeed if all participants go into it with the knowledge that everyone in the class is learning, that it is a process and that the form will shape itself as it goes along. On the video it didn’t look messy, until the teacher brought it up. I’d love to hear your thoughts and whether you have used twitter in the classroom.

Related posts:

1. Dropio and voice messages in the classroom

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!

Related posts:

1. How will you share BLC10?

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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At MIT Saturday for the Project New Media Literacies “Learning in a Participatory Culture” Conference.

Goals of the conference were to

• Launch the New Media Literacies learning library
  • “the learning library is a flexible online-learning environment that incorporates an expanding collection of multimedia elements and challenges and offers users the opportunity to design and contribute their own related marterials.” Threshold Spring 09 p26
• Have participants engage with the resources
• Share worked examples
• Investigate implementation strategies

The new media literacies come from a white paper published by Henry Jenkins and they include play, simulation, performance, appropriation, multitasking, distributed cognition, collective intelligence, judgment, transmedia navigation, negotiation, networking, and visualization.

Many of the ideas discussed during the conference are featured in Threshold Spring 09, a cable in the classroom publication.

In the screenshot above you can see four required challenges. Before commenting or remixing material from the library these challenges lay out expectations and norms. Three challenges help students understand attribution and one is  to help students understand tagging. These are essential new media skills and I will be using these with students and spreading the word that they are available for teachers whether or not they are going to use the learning library. They are a valuable foundation for the use of the library.

Opening Slideshow

by Jenna McWilliams, project NML’s curriculum specialist.

First Breakout Session

Each of the first sessions were designed to engage and introduce attendees to the media. It was very difficult to choose which session to attend, but when I found myself in the appropriation session with Henry Jenkins, Wyn Kelley, of the literature faculty at MIT, and Ricardo Pitts-Wiley, artistic director of Mixed Magic Theatre, I knew I was in for an interesting hour.

Appropriation and remixing represent important forms of creative expression in a participatory culture and students can grasp this quickly as soon as you reference their favorite music and recording artists. The panel talked about Moby Dick “Then and Now” by Ricardo which can be seen in it’s entirety on mit tech tv . He described how, in rewriting the epic, he had to stay true to the original and keep coming back to it.  In his rendition the tale is retold in a way that engaged his urban audience and introduce them to the classic in a way that leads them to more deeply understand the original.

NML curriculum was featured in work done with a 5th grade class from Global Learning Charter Public School. In their study, they wrote and acted out a prequel to the classic where “Ishy” as a young boy is telling his parents over breakfast his desire to go to sea. Through this appropriation exercise they could connect more deeply with the original text.

Ricardo talked about how students and teachers should learn to be cautious about appropriation, acknowledge the value of the source,  pay homage, but  also understand their contribution to the emerging story.

The teachers talked about how having the students  annotate the text, add ornament to the text brought an illumination of meaning to the text. The collective conversation amongst students made them invest in making it good, the feedback engendered close reading strategies.

Henry Jenkins made it clear that the learning library and new media literacies are not wedded to new technologies. Low tech versions are possible and these still get the students into the conceptual space, developing the habits of mind to navigate across tools. This was a key point as many teachers are still faced with lack of access to technology in schools, teachers with access to hardware ore often blocked from using many game sites, or video sites such as youtube. I would like to think that any network administrator would be willing to open up access to the MIT learning library, they just need to be asked. The weight of the MIT name and the prescreening that has gone into the content should provide enough incentive for action.

Second Breakout Session

The second breakout sessions were designed to feature the case studies of the new media literacies. Zoey’s room is an online curricula for middle school girls to get them engaged with science and technology. Integrating fail and fail often into STEM

The website can be used independently online, it gives girls the opportunity to geek out with things they love!

“The more you use the newmedia literacies the more you see the interconnectedness “ from case study teacher.

The students in the case study reacted positively to Zoey’s Room, but after hearing that they were never allowed to use computers in school, and they had to get special permission to use them for the case study, I have concerns that the enthusiasm for the activity came out of that, rather than the their enthusiasm with the program itself.

Some movies in zoeysroom were authored using  xtranormal

Third Breakout Session

The third session was intended to cover implementation strategies. I atttended reading in a participatory culture: Motives for Reading.

Reading materials were handed out and we had to describe the artifacts that ranged from bus timetable to music score. The conversation led to how much reading is done beyond books that students might not consider. Prescription bottles, bank statements, bedtime stories, cd covers etc.

What other types of reading do we do? Reading clothing, body language, read between the lines, read accessories, odometers.

Teachers from New Bedford High School and Somerville High School facilitated the discussion and shared examples of student work, which was very valuable. Seeing the students annotations made it more likely that the ideas could be replicated by participants in our own schools. The Teacher Strategy Guide can be downloaded for free here

Closing Session

Henry Jenkins closing remarks took a look at today and at New Media Literacies in the future.

Within a story of superman working in a participatory culture, Henry Jenkins eloquently weaved a story of why the new media literacy is required for full civic engagement in society. In recent years their has been a digital divide, we are now moving into an era of the participation divide. Those fluent in the new media literacies will be able to participate and those who can’t will not. He talked about tapping into students passions by looking at their t-shirts. Touching on unrecorded and undocumented learning he brought up the example of game  playing and stated WoW (world of warcraft) as a perfect example of an online culture that encourages civic engagement and leadership skills. He talked about his meetingSenator Fernando Flores Labra of Chile who plays World of Warcraft and is so convinced of it’s benefits he recommends using WoW for educating Chileans. Thinking about the chances of gaming like this being adopted in my school is slim to none. Schools, with state testing requirements, mandatory filters, means that much of this learning is happening and has to happen outside of school. School policies may amplify the participation gap. It remains educations’ challenge to close the participation gap.

Civic engagement through social media was however a great success in recent the presidential election that leveraged online engagement and got young people out to vote in record numbers.

Participatory Culture in the Conference Setting

Participants were encouraged to join the newmedialiteracy ning for collecting resources and conversations. The twitter tag used was #nml09and the sessions were streamed using elluminate (archived ?). The twitter feed was used more than organizers expected. I was using twitter to take notes for myself, I was aware that virtual participants would be watching so I felt that obligation to report out at 140 characters a time. I also knew my own ed-tech followers would be interested, and attendees in other sessions. These multiple points of hyper focus made for a mentally exhausting but exciting experience. I hope bloggers in other sessions write up their experiences, let me know or add a link in the comments. One improvement could have been having more conference materials online.

As a technology integrator, my implementation plans in my school include

• Embed learning library into website
• Utilize required challenges
• Download teacher strategy guide
• Describe and record new media literacy practices in ongoing blog posts. Many teachers have awareness, but don’t use the same language to articulate what they are doing and why, be the interpreter and synthesizer of these activities.

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 This week I had the opportunity to run the monthly faculty meeting, along with the school librarian.

The purpose was to debrief the schools’ recent technology showcase to gather feedback and show off some of the projects that resulted.

We organized 6 groups, each was to discuss one of the following 6 questions

1. Reflect on the level of support you received.

2. Reflect on the flow of time during the sessions.

3. Did you learn what you expected to learn?

4. Reflect on product and process

5. Describe you engagement during the sessions

6. Were you pushed out of your comfort zone during any aspects of the showcase?

To organize the groups, we customized a smartboard interactive dice.  On entering, they were asked to  roll the dice, staff were assigned the group they rolled.

Then we took the staff through all of the technology they had touched since the planning stages.

• Wiki,
• smartboard,
• google forms,
• netvibes,
• delicious,
• slideshare,
• rss,
• powerpoint,
• photostory,
• podcasting with audacity
• schoolloop(cms) and our library online catalog

Then we set the smartboard timer to 12 minutes and set them off to start their discussions.

After the twelve minutes we had a whole group share. We recorded 5 to 10 words that came up during each of the 6 discussions.

The reflection words were recorded and pasted into wordle (above).

Projects created during the showcase were shared

Our last question was what improvements could be made if we got the opportunity to redo another technology showcase.

The recommendations were

• Longer sessions (30 minutes felt rushed)
• (More)Showcase(s) in the fall and the spring
• Preview/Demo the workshops before the showcase
• Make sure software was installed on machines before showcase to allow for experimenting beforehand
• Allow for time to “play” after the workshop

As an unexpected benefit, several teachers post faculty meeting have come to talk about projects they now want to start.  Sounds like a plan.

Links:

The resource page for the workshop

Technology Showcase Post

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Did you know

1. You can backup your delicious account by exporting a html file of your bookmarks. The file can be read by most browsers and the links are active. You can use a “find on this page” to search the file. This could be quicker than searching tags in delicious if you are as disorganized as I am with your tags.

Got to Settings>Bookmarks>Export

2.  Find people to learn with. At the right hand side of all your bookmarks there is an icon that represents how many other people have bookmarked the same site.

If you click on that number you get to see who else has bookmarked the same site. When you click on these people you can lurk through their bookmarks and decide whether they would be worth adding to your network. Delicious also lets users add a profile link, so follow those and find out more about your potential contact.

If they are bookmarking good sites, it only makes sense to join and collaborate with them. Click Add To Network.

3. Tag Search all of delicious for a tag you use. If you have just bookmarked a site and used a tag. Other clever people will have used that tag and you might be interested in those sites too.  Click on tags>explore

This post is tagged 31dbbb (31 days to be a better blogger project) which is an obscure tag, but these types of tags are good to use when you are working on a project with or without others. Quick way to isolate or collect a group of sites.

4. Hide stuff. You don’t have to be so public. Click “do not share” on those websites that you would like to keep private. Birthday wish lists, vacation plans etc. Click to box do not share

5. Stay ahead by subscribing to a particular tag, this means you get the research power of every other delicious user working for you. If you have a particular user you follow, you can specify to subscribe just to their tag saves. I don’t use this often enough, and need to make a mental note to do this more.

6. Go back in time and attend conference that is already over. Search for the conference tag and retrace the online conference story. This is useful to find not only links being talked about at a conference, but also presentations online, people attending, so connect with their delicious account. Tech ed conference tags include NECC08, k12conferenceonline, educon21,  educon.

You can also attend a conference virtually in a similar way, by subscribing to an rss feed for the conference tag. To find conference tags, sometimes you have to be a bit of a sleuth, look at the website, search twitter. Keynote speakers will usually have links to their handouts and presentations on their website or blog which will be tagged correctly. Tags for tech conferences are the easiest to find.

7. Delicious To Go On the iphone and ipod touch, there is no copy paste yet, so to post to delicious while browsing can be done. Check out this video from CNET

Get del.icio.us on an iPhone @ Yahoo! Video

8. And the ultimate delicious game. When you click on the number of people who have bookmarked a link. Delicious tells you who first bookmarked the site. Be the first! It’s a game.

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Webinar 1 Digital Storytelling

The first was an ISTE seminar by BernaJean Porter on how to craft a digital story. The archive can be found here. The ides put forth will be very useful when coaching a good story out of students and teachers. Resources from the webinar are found in the following wiki. ISTE are hoping that educators and students will contribute a story to their 30^th Anniversary Project. To learn more, visit www.iste.org/30 and select the “Tell Your Story” tab.

I got a lot from her six elements of telling a digital story. They apply to all stories actually. How to get to the soul of a story and create impact with power messages.

1. Economizing- getting to the essence of your story

2. Unfolding- what was the lesson learnt

3. Developing tension

4. Showing not telling

5. Craftsmanship

6. Living your story

Webinar 2 PRHS Study Skills 1st online session

I was involved in giving the second seminar of my week with the librarian at my school. We held a 7pm study session open to students using wiziq. We left school on Wednesday hoping that at least a few students would show up. It was voluntary and not part of their regular classes. We were both astonished when 18 students were ready and waiting in the online whiteboard session. Now, we really had to do the lesson. It was useful to have two teachers present. One to teach the lesson and the other to moderate the chatroom. The hour flew by and every student thanked us as they left the virtual room. They thought it was “cool” and had not experienced being in a webinar, virtual whiteboard environment before. We are planning another one for this upcoming Wednesday on “websites that can help you study”.

Webinar 3 Live Classroom2.0 on Twitter

This was the regular Saturday lunchtime live classroom session, from the classroom 2.0 ning. This session was about twitter and featured guest was @thecleversheep aka Rodd Lucier. His fab presentation is below (hours of work I’m sure).

I always, always learn something from these sessions. They are also archived here. I enjoy how Peggy George and Lorna let the show unfold. It begins with participation immediately. There are poll questions and a “where are you from” activity. Then it gets into the newbie question of the week. This one had 128 people participating and the chat screen rolled by in a blur. One nice feature is for each subject they create a sharetab of links like this one. The whole experience is a great model that we are trying to emulate in our own beginnings of online sessions. Join us for the next one, I will tweet it out next Saturday. @lindseyb16

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