Unlike a regular search engine, It DOESN’T give you links to webpages or descriptions of the content, so the interface looks a little different from what we’re used to.  A sample search on the topic of cyberbullying looked like this:

You can see from the image that it shows you the size of the file, the date it was published orginally, the format type of the media and the link to the website it came from. Some files have an icon that indicates that it is certified to be virus and malware free. Because this icon doesn’t show up on all files,  you’ll need to make sure your protection software is up to date and running before using this service.

Next up is  how and why you would use this service. You might:

1. Proceed carefully. Make sure that you stay within educational fair use guidelines. This is not an opportunity for you to create a media rich digital textbook and publish it on the web. Respect the intellectual property of others and don’t distribute anything without proper licensing or attributions.

2. Use it ss a resource to provide information to accomodate a variety of learning styles. You may find that you can point students to resources that are created in a format that fits the way they learn best. You could also use it to find ways to “front-end load” the information prior to attacking a reading piece.

3. Use it ss a way for students without internet access at home to have access to material. Because the files are provided for download by the authors, students can download them to their laptops or iPods for personal use.

Take a look- see what’s out there. Send some feedback with your thoughts.

In pursuit of this model, many teachers are videoing themselves doing the direct instruction part of teaching. These may be used for review or as a way for students to familiarize themselves with the concepts prior to coming to class. Regardless of what the purpose is, there is some research out there about multimedia design that will help you prepare these videos. It doesn’t require you to be a film expert; it does require that you review what you provide for your students with a critical eye to get the maximum learning.

1. Editting is important. Our learning channels, both auditory and visual, can only hold so much information. Cut out extraneous information. If there is background noise, consider deleting the original audio and doing a voiceover. Make sure that you can be heard, especially if you are working at the board.

Take a look at your board or background area. It should be clear of all extraneous material- notes from other classes, reminders, etc. Frame your shots to focus on what you want your students to learn.

2. Make sure you have visuals and narration- but not too much. Think of the PowerPoints you have endured. If you are hearing words and seeing words, you are dangerously close to overkill. Use images and spoken words whenever possible. Don’t layer words on images (unless they are labels)  and then provide audio as well. If the narration can follow the visual by a couple of seconds, even better.

3. Break your videos into segments. If you are explaining a complex or lengthy concept, break it into chunks and use some sort of transition to visually create a segment. This will help the viewer make connections and not get lost.

4. Allow user control of the video. YouTube has a feature called Deep Linking. In essence, it allows you to link to a specific time in your video. Using deep links can help you create  a menu to different parts of your video. There are two ways to do this:

You can  create these links in the comments section of the video. Just type the name of the section and the time it appears (as shown below) in the comment box under your video and you will provide your students a menu. A caution- you will want to limit others’ ability to post comments if you use this option. Otherwise your menu will move farther and farther down the page as comments are added. This can be done in the video settings once it’s posted to Youtube.

If you’d prefer to incorporate these links into a webpage or provide them via email, you can add the entire URL with the timestamp as shown below:

Intro: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iymb0ra4Mfo#t=0m11s
Finding Your Lists: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iymb0ra4Mfo#t=0m29s
Creating Custom Lists: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iymb0ra4Mfo#t=0m52s
Adding Friends to Your List: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iymb0ra4Mfo#t=1m14s

Directions for both methods are posted here.

Creating a digital fluency log can be an easy way to show students their progress in reading- and it’s easy when we use NoteShare. NoteShare is a tool that allows you to create a digital notebook that looks and feels like the spiral notebooks that many of us are familiar with. It allows you create sections that are made of pages. These sections and pages can be arranged (and easily rearranged) to suit your particular needs.

The fluency log is a collection of audio files created by your students at different times during the year. It’s easy enough to do that you could set a notebook up as a center activity and have your students do it themselves. Here’s how it works in a nutshell:

Open the page you want to use for your audio recording.

1. Click the Record Voice Memo icon

2. Check your sound meter to make sure your microphone is working well. Then click record and have the student begin reading. When done, click Stop.

An mp3 file will be embedded directly into the notebook page and can be played from here by clicking the Play button. I have added extra details on the bottom line to show how you can add what you need. You can also replace the date and time if you wish.
Printable directions for this project can be found here.Digital Fluency Log handout

Our AUP is a good first step but it’s crucial that we involve students in the development of a code of ethics for technology use. Our AUP refers to the laptop- but students have so much other technology available to them that we need to encompass it all as we teach them not only how to use it, but how to use it ethically.  My goal is to separate the expecations for behavior in school and out of school and create a culture of responsible technology use 24/7. This year this will happen on day 1.

Our school has adopted the RISC model. As part of this model students are involved in the creation of classroom codes of conduct which are referred to regularly throughout the year. We’ll be branching off of this and creating a Technology Code of Ethics to help guide students to make good decisions when no one is there to watch them. In a nutshell, here’s how it will work:

• As students enter the room, they will be given a closed envelope with a scenario in it. This will be used to create discussion groups later on in the lesson.
• Students will determine what values are important to them in general, and then will align those with behavior with technology.We’ll use a Wiffiti screen on the whiteboard to collect the original values- then edit the text in the values so the technology behavior is in the same post.
• They will look at a series of scenarios involving ethical questions that arise when using technology and discuss what they should do versus what they might actually do.
• They’ll determine as a class  their 3 or 4 most important values. I will collect the data from all three classes and put it into Wordle format. We’ll use this to narrow down the most important values and create a written code of conduct- what they will actually DO (or at least try to do) while using technology of all kinds.

We’ll post this around the school in written form, and I’ll post it on our classroom website so they have the opportunity to see it often.

I based this lesson plan around one created by Amanda Gentine at HSJournalism.org. 

Sample technology scenarios

This may seem an odd topic to be posting in late July, but bear with me- you’ll see the relevance shortly.

School starts in about a month, and the first week or so usually goes quite well. We are enjoying seeing colleagues and meeting new staff. It’s fun to reconnect with the kids, some of whom are unrecognizable from just 3 months ago. We have a lovely couple of weeks, or, if you are lucky, months.

Then reality creeps back in. Kids stop doing work. Your “across the hall” teacher won’t keep her kids in the room. The administration’s requirements pile up. That one parent is beginning to work your last nerve and it isn’t even Thanksgiving yet.

The common denominator here is that real work requires us all to address conflict. Some of us hate it, some of us relish it, but many of us wait until it has us sleepless and/or in tears until we address it. Amy Pope Castro, president of Innovative Communication & Training Solutions, offers 10 Valuable Tips to Conquering Conflict that can be customized to work in and around the classroom environment.

Her suggestions are simple and doable. As I try to use them myself, I’ll also be teaching these tips to my 10th grade advisees. I’ll spend some time this month thinking about how can become living parts of my classroom management strategies.  How will you use them?

THINKPORT  is a site that is a collaboration between Maryland PBS and Johns Hopkins University Center for Technology in Education. It is based around Maryland’s content standards, but don’t let this put you off. In the ThinkClassrom K-12  section you will find links to videos, interactive resources, lesson plans and connections to STEM resources.

The Teachers’ Domain is also a great resource for high quality video clips, lesson plans, and support materials. It allows you to make an account and create folders of resources that you can share with students individually or in bulk. This could be a great tool to use to make differentiated units for students. These folders can be linked to a teacher webpage for easy access. And best of all- it’s free.

Just announced is PBS LearningMedia. This service offers both free and premium services, but at least for now, the free service looks pretty robust. It contains over 14,000 resources that are searchable by content area, grade level, media type and accessibility level. It also has a large number of professional development resources  showing teachers using different strategies to accomplish their goals.

Now that it’s summer I’ve settled back into reading those emails that aren’t marked URGENT!!! and found this link to movies on YouTube from Edudemic. I’m not a proponent of showing movies just to fill the time in the classroom- but the addition of full length movies for free (for educational purposes of course-it has to tie to your curriculum to pass Fair Use muster) surely helps in these times of budget slashing.

YouTube has added over 3000 full length movies. They have conveniently separated them into categories and allow you to sort them by whether or not they are free (many are, so don’t be scared away!). Those that do require a fee are less than $5.00 in most cases.

A word to the wise- start the movie early so it can buffer- this way you won’t have it trying to load while students are watching it.

I should have known that I had the tool all along. If you use Safari, you have a built in “Reader Tool” that will do the same thing.

When you load a page in Safari, you may get a small box on the right side of the address toolbar that says “Reader.” Click that box. You will get a PDF looking page that is mainly text. It can be printed or emailed, and you can zoom in and out.

A great way to use this is to click the print button and then save the document as a PDF. You can then use the annotation tools to make notes and highlight text.

Here’s how it works. Delicious allows you to make an account, save bookmarks to it, and add tags and notes to those bookmarks. It’s online, so you don’t have to have your computer to access your bookmarks. It’s social, meaning that it’s available to the world unless I choose to make bookmarks private- in which case only I can see them.

Each time I create a bookmark I give it a tag which puts it into a specific category- history, science, LA, etc. I can put more than one tag in for a bookmark, allowing me to further categorize them for easy retrieval. I can also add notes about the site for clarity.

Once you have a couple of bookmarks saved, Delicious allows you to search by the tags you have created. For this example, I’ll search by the tag “biology” to show what the search results look like:

Click to see larger image

I have 6 sites that are tagged for biology. You can see that each of the results also has other tags. That’s because I added more than one tag for most every site. This will allow me to further customize my bookmarks.

I can provide the address for this site to my students. In this case, the address is:

http://www.delicious.com/lleimbach/biology

Here’s the beauty of using a tool like Delicious.

• You have eliminated the need to write an address on the board and hope that your students can copy it correctly. Your original Delicious address can be emailed or posted on your website. Once.
• This is a dynamic site, meaning that each time I add a site and tag it with “biology,” my students will be able to see my new content immediately. No republishing or resending of links.
• You can create “tag bundles”- meaning you can tell Delicious that any number of tags are shown in one category. For example, I can tell Delicious that I want “ecology” “anatomy” “plants” to all show up under the Biology tag.
• You can create whatever tags you want. Perhaps it’s easier for you to create tags with your class names on them. You have the freedom to use whatever names you wish.
• Students do NOT need an account on Delicious to access your bookmarks.

Hints for use:

• Your students can search for you on Delicious. I made a simple username (lleimbach) that makes it easy to find me. Kids can all spell my name.
• I have over 1,000 sites bookmarked and did NOT have a good tag system before I started. Take the time to map out how you will categorize your sites before you start adding them.
• Teach students to use Delicious as a search engine. It can provide those that get distracted by Google with a more focused set of results.

The Frequently Asked Questions section of Delicious has a treasure trove of information about what you can do beyond the suggestions here.

There’s a lot of talk about the positive impact of a good teacher on students, and the focus is on how to get better teachers in to work with our toughest kids.

Some states base how “good” teachers are on how much their students improve on standardized tests. Others assume that the longer we work, the better we get, and base our pay accordingly. All require ongoing professional development to keep certification current.

I wondered what my students thought about what makes a teacher great. I asked them to fill out a brief questionnaire. In it I asked them to simply tell me what attributes a great teacher had without naming names. The questionnaire was anonymous and administered to 8th grade students in our small Maine public school.

I took the results and removed the word “Teacher” and “makes” as they showed up many times. I then pasted the rest of the students’ writing into Wordle to come up with this image:

(Clicking the image brings it up in a larger size.)

It helps to have the student responses when interpreting the Wordle.  They can be accessed here: Student Questionnaire Responses.

I found the answers interesting. While is seems as though everything has changed, nothing has changed. Our students want us to know them as individuals, listen to them, make learning fun, and be nice. They want us to know what we are doing and be engaged.

Sounds a lot like what we want from them.