Remote Access

We're Now on YouTube

I'm really not sure why I didn't think of this before....

Struggling to find something to do with the photostories that we are doing as part of our first major piece of thinwalled collaboration with our partners in Van Nuys, I decided to set up a YouTube channel.

It was just one of those things. I thought we could upload the .wmv files directly to our blogs and when we discovered we couldn't, I suddenly had about a dozen impatient teenagers needing to know what to do with the things they had finished. I went to Ourmedia as I had an account there from a few years ago. I found some really neat stuff that my class has placed online three years ago, but unfortunately I couldn't remember my password and the website was not being helpful in reminding me.

So on to YouTube we went.

I set up an account and gave the account information to the kids. Soon they had their stories uploaded, they were commenting on each other's stuff and after posting a link this account on twitter, their stories soon had about a dozen comments on them. Love my network.

This really has a lot of potential that I fully need to explore. I know that you can set up playlists that kids can use, leaving them videos on certain topics that you want them to watch. It seems that it would also be a great way to hook classrooms and students together, allowing them to explore projects that each other has made and view their playlists, giving them some sense of what is being studied in each place.

Is there danger to this? I guess possibly some, but really there is more danger of them being exposed to tasteless content than anything else. Is there garbage on YouTube? Tons of it. But there is that on my TV at home too and I don't see anyone screaming to ban that. We need to learn to take the good with the bad. We need to learn new ways to teach the kids in our classes to separate signal from noise.

I'm slow to this, but it seems like a new classroom tool I never knew I needed as a publishing space.

Tags: Youtube, classroom, channel

Yes, I do Grade Blog Posts

Does this make me a bad teacher?

I don't grade all of them. My kids write too much first of all. Last school year I had one student who wrote approximately 170 posts in a 200 day school year. I was impressed. While I don't grade all them, I definitely read every single one that passes through my RSS reader, comment on a fair number of them, and take take them all into account when is time to look at overall writing progress through the year.

My kids are free to write about anything that is "appropriate" (yes, I know, a very loaded word. And yes, I am the ultimate arbiter of what is appropriate for my classroom). I consider their blogs to be hybrid spaces where they have to sometimes post on certain things, but where they can also write about their favourite bands or their weekends. So many parents are not aware of what their kids do online that I consider this a time that I can talk to them about being good digital citizens.

But at least once each week they need to write something that is school related. Right now, in our thinwalls collaboration, this post must have something to do with the reading they are doing from iGoogle. Concentrating on world view and global news, each of the students in both classes has a tab called Around the Globe with five blogs on it that we have given them as well as several more of their own choosing. This tab is their textbook. Constantly updated, free and authentic; what more could we ask for. Each week the students in each of the classes needs to spend some time with this tab, finding something that has been posted that is of interest to them. Then they need to write. They need to research, find outside sources of information, insert links, embed videos, find pictures that are appropriate and licensed for them to use. I subscribe to the web adage that the more you send people away by providing additional links and additional information, the more useful your blog will be to your readers.

I think blogging is different from writing on paper. Online writing can be much more complex and involve many more media than paper writing. This is why I think it needs to be assessed, graded and discussed. We will often pull up pieces of writing in the classroom and discuss, looking for high points and low points. Asking how they can be improved and doing an "extreme blog post makeover."

In the end I grade the posts like this:

Each post is usually out of 10 marks.

5 is for the writing itself (including spelling and grammar)
3 is for the links to outside information sources included (embedded videos, links, pictures, etc.)
2 is for the formatting and information architecture (interesting title, included sub titles, etc)

I'd be interested to hear from others about this. Do you grade blog posts? All of them? Some of them? What do you require? How many of them? How do you actually grade them?

Tags: blogging, school

Gaining Perspective

I've been thinking more lately about 2.0 tools and the importance of bringing new and different perspectives into the classroom. Beginning this summer and now extending lately through my trip to Shanghai, I've been wondering about the "homogenizing" of the information sources that are often used in classrooms and schools.

Take for example, any popular, well designed, heavily marketed textbook; especially one that may be in a field such as history, international perspectives, or a current events class. Many of these books have been bought by the millions across North America. Is there a danger in this? While I understand the vetting process that textbooks go through, the committees that design them and write them as well as the rigorous process of approving them for use in a jurisdiction, it still is beginning to concern me that often large multi national publishing houses control this entire process. Whose version of the stories of history and international relations are we getting? While certainly everyone wants their textbooks to reflect "their version" of history, is this dangerous and nationalistic in a globally connected society?

This is where online information is rising to the forefront of my ideas of gathering information in a classroom. Online, we can access newspapers from around the globe. We can examine current events and the stories that concern people wherever they live. Online we get the voices of real people as well; something we don't hear in textbooks.

These sources can be concerning because they are sometimes too real for people's liking. Some people are uncomfortable with real accounts of world events because they may be unsanitized for classroom use. Sometimes they deal with topics that may be unsettling or uncomfortable for us, but I ask, is this not what education (notice I didn't use the word "school" or "schooling" but education instead) is all about? Getting us outside of our comfort zones? Getting us to look at the world in new ways and from new perspectives.

Ethan Zuckerman has written recently about the idea of a plug in for a browser that would, over time, aggregate the number of stories from each place or region that you access on our machine. For example, it may over time simply give you stats about the stories you are reading" 60% are from your home nation, 12% are from nation or region X, 15% are from "Y," etc. Then as a consumer of information you could do something about that, make some decisions about choosing new information sources or expanding out where you access our information from. I think this kind of data is essential for us to alter our behaviours. What would we do with data like this about the information sources we use in our classrooms? What about the information sources that our kids are accessing in class? I think it would be a great tool to have to be able to talk to kids about. Where are you getting your information from? How many sources do you have? Would people from another region or place have that same perspective on that story? Why don't you go take a look at what other people are saying about that issue.

Image Source: The Perspective: http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3132/2505959411_f44c512c5e.jpg

Tags: perspective, textbook, information, classroom, global, learn2cn

Top Ten Tech Tools

I was asked a few times in Shanghai about a list of things that I consider to be "top tools," things that I think are essential both for me and my students. Here's my list:

1.) Google docs - I keep my daybook all online. This way it is with me no matter where I travel, if I'm at home compared to school, etc. It also allows me to share it with parents, kids, other teachers, my administrator, etc. In the classrroom using this suite of tools it allows us to create far less paper. Kids complete their work and share it with me. Then I can comment on it, grade it and send it back to them. No paper created. As well, over the year it gives us an entire record of things they have written. Easy if you need to do portfolios of some kind because nothing is ever lost.

2.) iGoogle - Another free Google product, using iGoogle we can design pages of feeds that we want to share with kids as a starting point to any study. For example, working on environmental issues, I started by designing a page with about five blogs on it that I had found and wanted the kids to read. Once I shared this tab with them, I then ask them to find additional sources of information to add that we can use as a class. This is a great way for kids to begin to evaluate information for their own use and for the classroom as a whole. Tab can turn into the textbook for a class quite easily so it is important for both you and your students to choose information sources carefully.

3.) Blogs - Our blogs are face to the world. They are our personal publishing platforms. They are open and public. Anyone can access them. I teach about safety and responsibility online. Kids are responsible for keeping their own spaces updated and well designed. I tell them that this space is their place to make their first connections and first impressions on the world so it is best if they are good. I consider their blogs to be hybrid spaces. The kids are free to write about their weekends, their home lives, their hobbies. They area also usually responsible for at least one post per week that has grown out of their igoogle reading.

4.) Wikis - Our major wiki is the textbook for our history class. It is a catch all funnel of information gathered from places online, from books, videos, audio files and images. It grows and expands over time, always changing. I love for kids to look back and see who else had edited their pages and what they have added to the information we have access to. I don't clear out this space every year as many people do. I believe it is a growing, living thing, something that kids can legitimately contribute knowledge to and feel proud of, knowing that it will still be there later

5.) Skype - Skype is the one application that for me, as a professional, has had the greatest impact on my life. I have a network of about sixty people that I am closely tied in with. I can talk to these people, in all of their corners of the globe when I need them. They can help me out when I'm stuck, contribute to the life of my classroom and also become real friends. In our busy lives across the globe and across timezones, several people who I consider to be my best friends live half way around the world and I don't think there is a thing wrong with that at all.

6.) Flickr - Flickr is coming on fast with me. While I always have enjoyed just searching around some times in it, the incredible vastness of this resource is becoming much more important to me. I have a pro flickr account for my classroom and this is the one piece of technology that I will pay for. This year I am going to get some of the kids in my class to take pictures each day. Over time I'm hoping this will help students to take better pictures, but also that it will serve as a great resource and record of the life of our classroom over the year.

7.) Phun and Scratch - This summer I listened as John Davitt described software such as this as "struggleware." I liked that. Free products like these require kids to take control of technology, perform some easy programming tasks and use them for creative purposes. Scratch  especially has a large community online where you can go to ask questions, view and download projects made by other users (described by Mitch Resnick, the creator of the software as Youtube for Scratch). I love the idea of being able to download projects made by other people, see the coding they have designed and then remix it yourself. Larning in action.

8.) Audacity - Another free must have, Audacity is voice editing software that allows you to make your own mp3s. They miht be music, voice or a combination of both. Simple to use and yet very powerful, I like Audacity because it allows kids to learn a new medium to express themselves in. Mos students are relatively inexperienced doing this kind of work so doing things with timelines, drawing in effects and generally learning to work in layers of voiceovers, music and effects forces their literacies often into new and unexplored corners. Once kids can do this the move to video editing is relatively easy because it is the same weaving together of information to form a coherent whole that takes place in both.

9.) Google Earth - Love Google Earth. While I don't use this tool as much as I could and definitely need to spend some time with somebody like Dean Shareski or David Jakes on this one, I simply believe that this tool has the potential to change our entire concept of studying geography. The ability to explore a place as you read a novel, study a country and also see the photos and videos that people have built in as well is an excellent, powerful resource.

10.) Video Games - I want to stop at ten so I'm going to cheat and bundle gaming together in classrooms. I use things such as SimCity, Children of the Nile, Caesar and soon (I hope, if I can pull some money together) Spore to explore and simulate things we couldn't do otherwise. These are the language of our students and there is an opportunity with them to extend and promote powerful experiences and discussions which grow out of playing the game itself.

This is a list of tools and it is always dangerous to do this because I don't want to be promoting and pointing to new tools for the sake of the tool itself. Each tool requires its own form of pedagogy and learning that circles around it that allows new forms of learning to emerge. You can play all the video games you like, but if you are not going to adjust your classroom practices to genuinely incorporate new ideas, you might as well keep right on photocopying worksheets.

Tags: classrooms, technology

Leaving Shanghai...

Only a few hours left until I begin the long haul out of Shanghai back to North America. This has been an excellent trip for so many reasons. I have had gracious, generous hosts and have had the opportunity to meet fascinating people as individuals, hearing some of their stories. I still need some time to think about the conference itself, that will come soon. But as I'm getting ready to leave this place, I wonder about some of the things I've seen here.

Shanghai is a city on the move. It is the wild west. Bursting out with life, energy and opportunity, it is not what I expected to find when I first set foot in it. Rolls Royce, Jaguar and Lamborghinis abound. I've seen the cars and the dealerships. Communism 2.0. This is a city that has reclaimed its history and is not stopping to look back. It has burst onto the world stage in a way that most of us in North America are only vaguely aware of. This is a city where the future is being created, crafted and pulled into reality. It is massive in a scale that I have never seen before. Every turn on the freeway brings a new forest of skyscrapers pushed up against tiny traditional Chinese houses. It is international and cosmopolitan. It is fast paced and shiny in ways that our cities aren't. It feels fresh and new while ancient and wise at the same time.

It is Asia.

As North Americans we tend not to get out much. Our nations are so massive that we stay at home while still traveling great distances. International schools and international teachers occupy a privileged space in education. Well funded beautiful schools filled with great kids and families who view education for what it truly is: opportunity. These schools and teachers could give the world a geography lesson and a story about every small waterfall and shop they have been to. Kids grow up traveling the world and become true citizens of it.

I'm envious.

Not that these are all spaces without problems and difficulties. Emerging nations are carving new paths for themselves and redefining global expectations and norms. No one knows where this will lead and maybe that is part of it; we need to get comfortable not knowing. An ever fluid dynamic that is flexing itself in this part of the world is growing. New ways in the world redefining what cities are and what the possibilities are for nations.

We shut our eyes to it and hold our hands over our ears trying to block it out to our own peril. We can be angry about the passage of history, bitter citizens of changing times or we can be global thinkers and doers, joining the stream, unsure often of where it may lead us. I leave here with more questions than answers and even far more questions than I arrived with. In some ways my bag feels heavier and I feel weighed down with new ideas and opportunities, but in many ways I feel the scales once again removed from my eyes, seeing the world in fresh ways and for that I feel great privilege.

Thank you Shanghai.

Tags: learn2cn, shanghai, global

Echo Chambers

I took part in an interesting unconference session yesterday as part of my Learning 2.008 experience about echo chambers. The echo chamber is something that we always talk about in the blogosphere in a not particularly positive way. In a nutshell, when people talk about this, they are usualy referring to the fact that we often talk amongst ourselves a lot and the danger of not having enough outside perspective or enough critical friends.

But yesterday we took a different tact. As most of the people involved in the session were not bloggers, we ended up talking up classrooms as echo chambers. About the danger of not having enough outside, international perspectives on our teaching and our information. This circled around the idea first of information, about using the same sources repeatedly and not encouraging kids (or teachers for that matter) to consider new points of view and different perspectives. This is especially important in international schools for international teachers who most likely work with kids from many different nations who bring an unimaginably vast array of life experiences and social contexts with them into the classroom.

The second thing we discussed was the concept of teaching itself becoming an echo chamber. Many teachers teach how they were taught. So the balancing act of teaching faces the danger of being an echo chamber itself. The methods we use, the strategies we employ, the way we organize, set up and run the day to day business of our classrooms faces this danger because teachers don't often get the opportunity to see others in action. We don't get to spend time talking about actual practice, and schedules, lesson plans and the thousands of other details that being a teacher can mean.

Finally, our last discussion was about the echo chamber in a positive way. About reframing it as "home." The echo chamber may be the place where we retreat to in order to salve our wounds and salvage ourselves. It can be very hard trying to lead a charge into new territory so sometimes we use our echo chamber, our discussions on home base as a place where we can take the time to regroup before heading out to break new ground again.

This was a great discussion and it helped me to look at this issue through a new lens.

Tags: echochamber, blogosphere, learn2cn

Shanghai - Early Impressions

I've been here for about 36 hours now, not nearly enough fr a city that you could probably spend your life in and not know many of its corners and spaces. A few early thoughts:

- this place is absolutely huge, yet surprisingly easy to get around in. A few minutes down one of the freeways takes you to a new part of the city with a whole new crop of skyscrapers. Traffic here can be murder at certain parts of the day, but also fast and efficient at others. Each neighbourhood has its own personality.

- the new and the old are here, pushed up against each other. Yesterday Jeff Utecht was a great host and showed us his old neighbourhood and some of the spaces to see. We went from old winding lanes filled with tiny spaces to live, where the sinks were outside and public toilets on the corners, to gleaming seven story shopping malls filled with products of every imaginable shape and size.

- the people here are incredibly friendly and happy to help if they can. For a city of twenty four million people, I feel more safe here than I have in many much smaller cities in North America. We came upon several groups of older men last night gathered around tables watching others playing checkers while everyone watched; the streets alive with people after dark when the humidity falls.

- a few phrases of Chinese goes a long ways. 

 - the motto here must be: "if you are going to build something, make it the biggest, the best, the brightest, the largest, the newest it can be. Stepping off the plane in the airport, I walked across spaces so new I could still smell the glue from the carpets.

- coming in to communist China, the customs officers were friendly, helpful and efficient. When was the last time you could say that in North America?

- While I understand that Shanghai may not be representative of all of China, this is a forward looking place. This is not China, the coming world power, this is a China whose time is already here.

If you can wrap your head around these two pictures being about fifteen minutes apart be cab: you can begin to understand this city a tiny bit.

Tags: learning2.008, shanghai, china

Learning 2.008

An alternative title for this post might have been:

The Small Town Guy Heads to the Big (Huge Actually) City

It's finally here. I'm sitting here in my classroom about an hour before school begins on Friday morning. This is the last day I'll have to teach before heading out to Shanghai for the Learning 2.008 conference and it's finally hit me: I'm going to China! It's been a crazy few weeks with the beginning if school, trying to write six days of sub plans and finishing my presentations so I really haven't had time to think that much about actually going. In fact, up until yesterday I hadn't even had time to stick "things to do in Shanghai" into Google. If you've got any must see things, please let me know about them.

What's really pumped me up now is that all of the sessions have been posted on the conference ning. Jeff Utecht and his awesome wife spent a few evenings this week putting them all up. Just looking through them, I'm glad I'm going to get to go. There is going to be some powerful learning available in Shanghai next week for those who want to scoop some of it up, turn it over and enter the discussions.

I'm also really excited to be able to meet a whole entire other side of my own learning network that I might never have gotten to know in person. So lets hope through the fog of a 13 hour time change, I'll have enough brain power left in me to learn something from this group.

My session descriptions are posted on the ning, but here they are as well:

Be Kind Rewind: Our Kids are Different

Kids today are different. Period. But just how different are they? There have been many theories about immigrants and natives, about Google making us stupid and about how students don't even know how to read anymore. Is this true? Is any of it true? What kinds of classrooms are kid friendly? How can we organize learning spaces and places to promote the kinds of learners we want our students to become?

Click: Classroom Life in the Fast Lane

A globally connected classroom is a different kind of space. Classroom life is collaborative and fast paced. Tools and time zones come and go, but what do the days actually look like? How do the different technologies fit together? We'll explore how teaching, learning and assessment look different when you connect your classroom with the world.

Literate Online: Reading and Writing are Different on the Web

What it means to be literate is changing. Electronic text is very different from print text. Teaching students how to read and write in these new forms can be complex . This session will also examine how the easy to use technology of RSS has the power to change your classroom. Information on a daily basis from leading experts around the world personalized for every student in your classroom at absolutely no cost. What are some of your options for setting up RSS feeds for use in your classroom?

As well, the one that is giving all of us fits is that we've all been asked to spend 10 minutes in a TED Talks type format the night before the conference begins to try to get people thinking about what this is all about. A small task... Thanks guys.

If you're in Shanghai please come and prop me up against a wall somewhere if you see me curled up in a corner trying to catch a nap!

Tags: learning2.008, shanghai, jeff utecht

Live in the Classroom!

This year, my classroom and the grade eight class at St. Elisabeth school in Van Nuys California are continuing our collaboration. Called Thinwalls, the idea is that this is a year long collaboration going far beyond the normal concept of a project that lasts a few weeks.

This week we went live between our two classes for the first time this year. We used both audio and video Skype to introduce the two classes a bit to each other as well as free online screensharing software called Dimdim. Using this, we had a tour of RSS, discussed what it is and how it works. I then showed the iGoogle tab we've constructed for the students that has five different blogs on it that are focused on global issues and innovation. This will become the textbook for this one part of our collaboration.

A short twenty minutes later, the emails were sent out sharing the tab with the students in both classes and opening the discussions around global living and innovation.

Then today, we opened another live collaboration. This time, David Jakes in Chicago skyped into both my classroom in Snow Lake and Lucy Martin's at St. Elisabeth to talk to both our classes at once about digital storytelling. A planned event, David sent us several videos he wanted to use as examples in advance, and when he reached that point in his discussion, we simply held the call and the students in each classroom took several minutes to watch the videos.

David was a master as he talked to the students about weaving together the elements of video, still pictures, audio files (speech) and music files into a coherent whole. We heard about the importance of planning and writing at length in advance so that when it actually comes time to use the simple yet powerful Photostory software, the students will have concrete, indepth ideas to work with. After forty minutes, we all had new ideas bubbling over. A few pictures on flickr of the notes we took on the whiteboard as a class as David talked can be found here.

This work with David this week is leading us into our first major project of the year between the two classes, a photostory from each side of the border capturing the students' impressions of what it means to be a Canadian or an American. We felt this was a valuable place to start. We wanted the students to dig into stereotypes and misunderstandings immediately and get some ideas of the power of digital communication and storytelling.

It's been a good week for Canada - U.S. relations!

Tags: davidjakes, st. elisabeth school, skype, experts, classroom, digital storytelling, dimdim

Online Politics

    I've mentioned here before that I write a weekly tech column for a few newspapers here up north. I don't usually write about it here, but I thought this week it was a column that was worth posting here as well.

    An election in Canada was called last Sunday. So this week for my column, I decided to take a look at the four major national political parties in Canada and how they are using the web. I found a few interesting things....

Last Sunday afternoon, my home phone rang and my wife, picking it up, was surprised to hear the voice of Jack Layton, the leader of the federal NDP party on the other end. At first confused and then interested, she listened to the pitch he made. Layton's voice went on to tell her that the NDP that day, the very first day the election was called, was calling a million homes across Canada to get their message out. Is there any other news this week?

Dissolving the 39th session of parliament, and sending Canadians into their third election in four years, Prime Minister Stephen Harper set into motion the most technology heavy election we have ever seen. Political parties in Canada are learning that connecting to voters through the web, particularly young voters, is a powerful strategy.

I spent some time looking through the websites of the four national political parties: the NDP, the Green Party, the Liberals and the Conservatives. All of them have taken to the web over the last few years in a massive way. Websites that can provide information on demand to voters and media outlets are hugely important. But beyond that, the innovation and techniques the parties are using, showcase in this very early part of the election where each party is trying to place itself.

NDP: As a huge user of twitter as a place to gather breaking news and make contact with people across the world, I was definitely interested the other night when my wife told me that the NDP are twittering. Twitter is a microblogging site. A 140 character maximum keeps updates short and focused. Not only that, on the NDP homepage I found a party that is making a concerted effort to get information out about their agenda and their travels on as many channels as possible. The NDP has hired someone who understands how people use the web. Not only twitter, but the NDP has a facebook account, a flickr site with photos posted each day along the campaign trail, blog banners for you to download and use and a YouTube channel with all kinds of videos on it. All of this is front and centre on their website. They are pushing hard to get their message out.

Liberals: In contrast to this, I couldn't even get many parts of the Liberal party site to load. They too have facebook and YouTube accounts featured prominently on the sidebar of their main webpage, but the centre of the entire webpage I could not get to even load any images or information. Instead, the Liberals are advertising that they will send you a sign for your lawn....

Green Party: Green Party supporters are overwhelmingly young people. You would think the web would be a natural fit for this party and they have made a giant effort to move information on to the web. Of all the parties this early in the election, the Greens are the party with the most information posted online about their platform and their policies. The Greens have featured blogs that you can subscribe to, they have blog banners you can post on your own webspace and also have uploaded video and audio files of speeches made by Elizabeth May, the leader of their party. But I was surprised to see the outreach part of the web is missing from what they are doing. Unlike both the NDP and the Liberals, their were no links to YouTube channels or facebook accounts. They didn't have a twitter account rolling across their site with updated news or any other place to make contact. All of their information is concentrated on the site.

Conservatives: The Conservatives may be the party with the most interesting web presence, but not necessarily in a constructive way. The Conservatives have a twitter account, a facebook account and a YouTube channel all featured on the frontpage of their website. But they also have links to a site called Not a Leader that is a direct attack on Stephane Dion and the Liberals. On this site they have games you can play with a virtual slot machine and they also have all kinds of Liberal video clips that you can piece together into a nasty anti - Liberal attack ad of your own. Innovative? Certainly; but also the overwhelmingly most negative site of all of the major parties.

Learn the facts for yourself. Check out all the sites and make your own choices. Most of all: vote.

Tags: ndp, liberal, green party, conservative, election, Canada