Expanding on the idea

I have decided to continue blogging as a means of self-reflection and best practice (and the like). I will be doing so at my blog "Take Chances, Make Mistakes, Get Messy." (What can I say? Miss Frizzle rocks.)

I may migrate these posts over there, but I have a feeling that will end up seeming to be more effort than it's worth, and thus won't get done.

A Girl and Her Technology: Take 2

Back at the beginning of this course, I wrote a technology autobiography in which I described the ways in which technology is part of my everyday life via google, livejournal, youtube, and amazon.com (among other things). Not too long after that I determined that I was a "digital native" of sorts. I postulated that we need to be using far more technology in the classroom than we currently are.

And yet, for all my previous knowledge, I learned so much over the course of this class, and I know now that I have so much more to learn. I am incredibly excited to use these new resources, and I anticipate that using them will be of great benefit to my classroom. I already have one digital story that I will be using and a Flickr project that I will be adapting if I can't find a way to get around the school blockade. Beyond the examplars that I've made, I have so many new ideas. More digital stories, of course, made by me and my students, podcasts, a class wiki (for the Earth in Space module), a class blog for keeping track of bellwork and assignments, social networking tools to store links for research projects (editorials, planet brochures, etc.) - and if I go far beyond this I'll likely just overwhelm myself (though I do anticipate using Mindomo during class discussions).

But beyond this list of ideas, I am with Alison in saying that this class has opened my eyes to the ways in which the tools I was already using can be used within the classroom. Of course, I learned about new things as well (firetrail and webquests, for example). I think that my teaching will be far better due to what I've learned here and the revelations that I've had, and I'm hoping that my students will be far more engaged due to my ability to use these new aspects of technology.

I'm also with Alison in saying that this class (along with EDTP 620 and the differentiated instruction conference I attended this past weekend) has me looking forward to teaching again. I was happy for the break - and I still am - but I feel revitalized as a teacher and more confident in my abilities to help my students learn.

Webquests

Dear Principal,

This summer I have taken a teaching with technology course, and we have learned about many different technology tools that would enhance the learning of our students. One of these is webquests.

Webquests are an organized means by which students research a topic on the internet within a rigid set of boundaries. They lead students through the process of web-based research step-by-step with multiple check points along the way. In doing this, students learn how to effectively and efficiently utilize the internet in a minimum amount of time. A teacher can thus use webquests as a scaffolding device to independent research projects while still providing students with a meaningful task.

More specifically, a webquest begins with a (usually interdisciplinary) hook that engages students with its real-life connections. This hook is followed by a section clearly labeled "the process," and each step gives students specific questions to answer and specific websites they can use, all while still giving them some choice in what they study. The webquest is completed with a final assessment piece of some sort - or the entire webquest itself may be the assessment - that has a very specific rubric. (You can see one example here.)

By being so specific, the webquest is a great tool to use as students first start experiencing and experimenting with technology. This would be of great benefit to many of our students, as many are not prepared to be sent straight into the vast world of Google, Wikipedia, and the like. Additionally, a multi-day webquest can also function as the structure for creating student portfolio pieces, as can be seen in the example linked to above that culminates with an editorial. This would serve to make science content area pieces far more advanced than they were last year, for it provided the structure many students need to lead them to a well researched and nuanced argument about a particular topic.

I hope this post allows you to see the great benefit webquests could be for student performance and achievement, and I urge you to advocate for their use in our classrooms.

Sincerely,
Me

Social Networking

Another case where I neglect to consider how the resources that I use could come into play in my own classroom. While I don't have a del.icio.us account of my own, I do use the site to find fiction of interest as well as other resources. It just didn't occur to me how incredibly useful this would be for my own students, particularly when they are doing research projects. It would give them a place to start from, and that would be really helpful for them. They could even share the sites that they find themselves with their classmates by adding it to the class account - much more expedient and helpful to all then them coming to me and letting me know about it.

I'll definitely be using del.icio.us for my student research projects from now on - it's a much better starting point than google (not to disparage google, as I love it, but - as Richardson said - it can really constrict what we find and doesn't always lead us to the best resources out there on whatever we happen to be researching).

Podcasting: Sending Your Voice out into the World

In Reading and Writing across the Curriculum, we created podcasts that summarized the main issues we talked about in a literature circle on Chew on This. We were able to create a product that allowed our professor to hear what we had talked about in our literature circles even though she wasn’t there. This is a really great tool for assessing discussions within the classroom – a teacher wouldn’t have to assess based on a few minutes she saw. She could have them podcast the entire discussion and then do a separate file with a summary. All the summaries would be listened to, and the whole discussions could be spot-checked to help ensure that students don’t get off-task during the discussions.

And that was just one example of the use of podcasting. After reading the chapter in Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms, I can think of many different ways to use it in my classroom: podcasts explaining concepts, screencasts of our lab experiments/activities, newsletters of a sort to convey what we’re learning about, group podcasts, individual podcasts, and let’s not forget using the podcasts of others to teach content. I have a lot of interesting ideas about how to use this medium in my own classroom, and I’m really excited about it.

Digital Storytelling

So now that I've finished my first digital story, I'm already thinking about others in the future. It didn't take as long as it could have, and I'm sure that it will become a much quicker process with practice. I like the idea of being able to make more than just a slideshow put to music, which was my own previous experience with similar technology. Utilizing the microphone just added an entirely new dimension to the process - something like combining a picture slideshow you could make in powerpoint and what I did with Photostory 3. The next step? Video clips - I saw a digital story online that combined both still image and video, and I thought it came out very well.

What I am curious about is how similar PhotoStory 3 functions. I know that it doesn't use video, but it does have sections for inputting both music and narration (though I'm not sure whether you can do both at the same time). It does have additional functions that Moviemaker doesn't seem to have - you can rotate your photos and crop them. However, adding the transitions between the pictures is a bit more complicated - well, there's more clicking rather, which can get annoying if you have a lot of pictures. It automatically pans in and out, so if that's all you want, then I would prefer it. I'm glad I went with movie maker for this particular story, as I wanted to use different transitions than that. I suppose, then, it's an issue of what you want to do with the digital story. Something simple with music or narration in the background and the ability to easily crop in on the faces you want to see (Photostory 3)? Or something with more varied transitions and the ability to slice and dice with your music and narration (Moviemaker)?

But back to that first sentence: my burgeoning ideas. I'd love to do one for my mom (read a poem I wrote and add in some appropriately sappy music) and also to create one with the majority of my picture from the Galapagos Islands. Actually, it would be cool to get out my pictures from when I went to Europe and do the same. A new kind of travel journal. Very interesting idea. You could add in music native to the places you visited too.

I was also thinking of creating class digital stories (or one team one) on "what is science" for the first week of school. On the first day last year I gave them all an index card, and each of them drew an image of what they thought science was. I could have the kids vote on their images (to choose the best ones, especially as I got multiple volcanoes and solar systems last year) and then either scan in their index cards or take close-up pictures of the cards. Then they could choose the best speakers (or I could draw names out of a hat...whatever), and each speaker could say the name of what's in the image or describe why it's science. I could add a little music in the background, and easily throw the thing together to show them on the last day of that first week.

They'd have created a really great representation of where they started off the year. Then I could possibly end the year the same way, and they could compare the two to determine what they as a class/team had learned. Additionally, this would give them an immediate exposure to what technology can do and make them part of the process - something my kids didn't get to do a lot of last year.

Digital Story: Darwin and the Galapagos Islands

Props to Kristin for giving me the idea for this.

• Title Screen: A Visit to Darwin's Enchanted Isles: The Galapagos Islands [image of South American coast, Ecuador labeled, and the Galapagos Islands]
• Science is about understanding how things work [images of machines, people's bodies, tree/flower, aquarium, food web, camoflauging bugs]
• But it is also about people and places [Isaac Newton under the tree, Benjamin Franklin and the kite, Einstein with his tongue out, Jane Goodall and the monkeys]
• Charles Darwin and his study in the Galapagos Islands show how one man and one place can make a huge difference [Darwin old and young, Galapagos Islands panned out, sign, volcano, beach, etc...include picture of Darwin in the Galapagos?]
• In 1831, Charlie Darwin was 22 years old [image of young Darwin]
• His father wanted him to be a doctor or a parson [image of Anglican parson]
• But instead [start fading out] he got a job as a naturalist on the Beagle and spent five years traveling the world. [image of the Beagle, map of its route]
• Of all the places he went [images of South America, Tierra del Fuego, Tahiti, Australia, Cape Town], his travel to the Galapagos Islands is what people remember [sign at island with whale bone, red cliffs, beach]
• While he was there, when he wasn't swimming with sea lions [pic of same], twirling iguanas by their tails [image of marine iguanas on rocks], or trying to figure out how old a tortoise was [image of same], he was studying finches [image]
• Because of those finches, he came up with a great idea [lightbulb]
• But it was new and different...what would people think? [show caricatures, satirical pictures]
• So he didn't do anything. [picture of Darwin sitting in chair]
• Well, nothing other than a lot of scientific research and writing. [images of Voyage of the Beagle, pigeons, rocks, coral, barnacles]
• [black slide: 18 years pass]
• But when it looked like Alfred Wallace [image of young AW] might get all the credit for that great idea, Charlie knew he had to do something. [image of Origin of the Species]
• And so he made history. [Man is But Worm picture]
• He put the Galapagos Islands on the map [picture of map] and changed scientific thought forever [image of Ms. Davis in Darwin Research Station shirt in "thinking" pose.]
• Credits