Building Collaborative Classrooms

The day has started rather inauspiciously as we are in the midst of a Southern snow storm….the best kind.  Warwick delayed by two hours and there were no delays at the IU so I came over arriving about 7:50 for 8 am registration.  An hour later there are about 20 people here and most of the schools in Lancaster County including Warwick are closed.  The coaches are having an emergency regroup meeting since many of them are not going to make it.

I am curious to see what happens here.  I could work on American Literature, poetry, grammar, vocabulary, or writing.

The wikispace that we will use today is http://cffexplore.wikispaces.com

Cindy Anderson:  from the IU Alphabet soup:  How does it connect?

Cindy Anderson gave an overview of how all the initiatives that we are living with in education fit together.  The following acronyms were covered.

CFF:  Classrooms for the Future

SAS: Standards Aligned Systems

Student Achievement requires the following characteristics:

• Clear standards
  • Clear, high standards that establish what all students should know and be able to do by specific grade levels
  • Now have standards for grades 9-12
• Fair Assessments aligned to standards
  • Summative
  • Formative
  • Benchmark
  • Diagnostic
  • Beginning with the “end in mind” (UbD)
  • Assessment Anchors
• Curriculum framework
  • a framework specifying Big Ideas, Concepts, and Competencies in each subject area/at each grade level.
  • LFS a curriculum planning model;  TOOLBOX=the LFS web-based curriculum managements solution
• Instruction
  • Aligning instruction with standards involves identifying strategies that are best suited to help students achieve the expected performance
    • Differentiating Instruction
    • Using 21st Century Instructional Technologies (CFF)
    • LFS–a planning model;  strategies for high levels of student engagement
• Materials & Resources
  • Materials that aligne to the standards
    • units and lesson plans
    • instructional Resources (Media
    • Technology
• Intervention
  • A safety net/intervention system that insures all students meet standards
    • DI
    • Web-based intervention

GCA

DI:  Differentiated Instruction

EdHub:  http://www.edportal.ed.state.pa.us/portal/server.pt

house the SAS and other PDE Tools

UbD: Understanding by Design

AE & EC

LFS: Learning Focused School Toolbox

• • SAS connections to LFS
  • Student Assessment and culminating Activity Tabs
  • Know, Understand & Do in LFS Toolbox

My “breakout” session was with the writing group.  There were four of us led by Jeff Rothenberger and after getting everyone “joined” to the wiki and setting up a Google Doc (Click here), we decided to create a lesson to teach narrative writing.  We brainstormed, shared, and finally came up with a lesson. (Click here).  Although this lesson is simplistic for my 10th grade students, I will adapt it and use some of it to differentiate for the students who need more support when creating their Research Narratives during 4th marking period.

On January 8, 2009, I attended the Central PA CFF Collaboration Day at York County School of Technology.  I was privileged to be asked to give a short presentation at the beginning of the program–sort of a mini-keynote.  I talked about the impact of CFF on my classroom.  This is a link to my PowerPoint that I used for that presentation.    The rest of the morning was spent in three  breakout sessions with a fire evacuation in the middle.  The sessions that I attended were on blogging, Quia, and Google Earth.

After lunch I participated in a “birds of a feather” session where I answered questions about the use of Google Docs in the Language Arts.

On Tuesday, April 29th and 30th, I attended the 2008 One-to-One Computing Conference at the Penn Stater Conference Center in State College, Pennsylvania. This was a hectic conference with 3 keynote speakers and 5 1-hour sessions in a day that began at 7:30 a.m. and ended at 8:00 pm.

Monday Evening

Monday evening we were introduced to a learning environment called studywizspark, created by the eTech Group Henry Patel and WesBaugh presented the program. The plan for the conference was that all of the presenters’ presentations and blogging and chatting would occur through this learning environment. This is not, however, what happened.

Please feel free to log in to the environment and take a look around using my log in:

http://conference.studywizspark.com

User id: mary.hall

Password: spark100

I, along with many others, continued to communicate and post through their usual methods: blogs, wikis, listserves, email, and webpages. Presenters did not post their materials to studywizspark. It would be very difficult for me to evaluate the post since only presenters were given “teacher” privileges while mere attendees have only “student” privileges.

Tuesday

Opening Keynote: Bernajean Porter, author of Evaluating Digital Products: Training and Resource Tools for Using Student Scoring Guides and DigiTales: The Art of Telling Digital Stories.

Affinity, Joy, Passion

What is the concentual reality I buy into?

Critical Conversations: Innovation and Accountability: complimentary or Contradictory? Conversation Thought Leader: Bernajean Porter, Morderated by Anytime, Anywhere Learning Foundation President, Bruce Dixon.

“Is the drive for accountability an icon of conservatism or an agent of innovation? In this session we will look at how schools can make some of the innovative changes discussed in this morning’s keynote while dealing with the need for and issues around accountability. We will look for the benefits and limits, both real and perceived, that our ideas around accountability present.”

Sustaining and Extending CFF with Open source Software and Open Content: Dr. Scott Garrigan, CAPE Center for Advancing Partnerships in Education

Lunch Keynote “Enabling the New Classroom Conversation”: Paul Curtis, Chief Academic and Innovation

Officer for the New Technology Foundation

Google Docs: Using on-line authoring tools; Deb Kerr & Jane Sutterlin, Instructional Technology Specialists, State College Area School District

What Does a 1-to-1 Classroom Look Like? Brent d. Frey, Education Development Manage, Apple, Inc.

Managing the Digital Classroom; Laurie Vitale, West Shore School District

Dinner Keynote: Bruce Dixon, President, Anytime, Anywhere Learning Foundation

Wednesday

Digital Literacies for the English Classroom; Jamie Meyers, Penn State and a panel of teachers from State College Area School District

Incorporating Technology in the Language Arts Classroom; Alison Kocis, Kutztown Area School District

Digital Storytelling using MS PowerPoint: Sam Bundy, DuBois Area High School

Lunch Keynote: Wade Pogany

Closing Remarks: Kyle Peck, Penn State

Books to get for our professional library:

A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future by Daniel H. Pink

Tough Choices or Tough Times: The Report of the New Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce by National Center on Education and the Economy

Confronting the challenges of Participatory

Although I was not able to attend the presentation, Dan Vos, Holland Christian Schools, Holland, Michigan posted a voice thread that I thought was an interesting use of the tool.

http://www.slideshare.net/secret/sQvZqCXEsmHOtF

http://voicethread.com/#q.b118321.i609698

In 2008, the classroom I teach English and writing in looks pretty much like the one I sat in in tenth grade at Battle Creek Central High School in did in 1963. In 1963, there was one teacher with a class of between 20-30 students each sitting in a seat that is equipped with a basket to hold books and a writing surface that is large enough to hold a book for reading or papers for writing, seats in a rows facing forward. Hanging from the wall was a silver screen that the teacher occasionally pulled down to show a 35mm movie or a filmstrip. One of the AV club geeks would come in before class and set it all up. Most of class time was spent facing the teacher while she lectured from the front of the room and I wrote furiously to get every word down to memorize for the test on Friday. Each student learned independently; there were to group projects, no study groups, no collaboration; competition was the name of the game: competition for the class top 10, competition for positions in college, competition for scholarship money. It was a scary time to be a student.

My family had one black rotary phone in the kitchen…and apples went into sauce and Macintoshes into pies.

Until about five years ago, my classroom where I teach English and writing was basically the same as the one I learned in; I did, however, move the seats around into different configurations that would permit small group discussions. I used a VCR to play VHS tapes through a 32″ television mounted on the wall above my desk. I walked around the room and interacted with my students either as a class, small group, or individually. My students wrote on paper and talked with each other occasionally. When I assigned a writing assignment, I took the class to the computer lab to key in their hand written assignments. I had a desktop Apple that was wired to the wall on my desk in my classroom to create all the paper handouts I gave my students. I could email the office…although chances are that no one would notice for several hours. I was still the center of the classroom and students still took notes with paper and pencil (or didn’t) and I still gave them a test on Friday. It was a scary time to be a student.

My husband had a car phone.

Today, I have a cart of 29 MacBooks in my classroom (I share it primarily with two other teachers–another English teacher and a math teacher.); the cable is connected to the DVD/VCR that is connected to the ceiling-mounted projector. The TV is still hanging on the wall, but it is not even connected. Today I am usually not at the front of my room. But when I am I at the front I sometimes am demonstrating on an interactive white board, but mostly I am handing over the stylus to a student who is editing our daily language workout or annotating a passage from the novel we are reading or analyzing a book review for its content or doing a cloze activity for vocabulary or explaining how he would revise his essay. I might be walking around the room monitoring but frequently I online monitoring and commenting and directing what my students are doing online…and I’m not talking about just the students in the room. I have two students on homebound and students in another class who are interacting asynchronously with this class. And soon there will be a student who is hospitalized who is going to participate in class via Skype, and still another class will soon be discussing the sources of violence in Romeo and Juliet with students in a class in the next county. My students are collaborating to create knowledge. This is a scary time. The walls are disappearing around my classroom (although I can’t say as I will really miss those gray walls that I have to keep thinking of different ways to cover up) and they are fading around my school. It is scary as teachers reassess what their role in the process of education is. Many are fearful that they will be replaced by a computer, they are afraid that they can’t teach someone who is not in the same room with them, they are afraid to let go of the control, they are afraid to permit students to take control of their own learning. It is an exciting time to be a student…teachers are starting to “get it” but it is now scary to be a teacher. [I am excited too, scared and excited.]

My husband and I both have hybrid cell phones; my phone has a camera and Internet connectivity. We direct connect with our children (all grown up) and our four-year-old grandson who has been “clicking up” grandma since he was 2 1/2 years old. All my students have cell phones, although I do not “know” it.

And I want an iPhone!

In 6 years, I will be retired from WSD, but I do not think that I will have stopped teaching. I think that I will be teaching from my home…teaching college-level courses to high school students, teaching teachers, teaching homebound students wearing my “jammies and slippers”…or on the road helping teachers learn to integrate the technology…or (I hope) in my jammies facilitating a course like this to help teachers learn technology and integrate it into their teaching). But back at my school, every classroom will be fitted with all the new technologies that promote interactivity between students and the content, between students and teacher, between student and student, and between student and the world. And we will use the cell phones that we now acknowledge that they have. The BlueRay/High Def battle has been won by the Internet so all my multimedia will be available through iTunes. My students will access the text and complete assessments and submit digital projects online (Why would I leave now?)

I hope I have an iPhone!

By 2020, all my students will have laptops or notebooks and cell phones and the community will be under a wireless umbrella provided by Verizon (I don’t have as much faith in Comcast as Mr. Fisch has). Although most of my students will still be from our town, a good portion will be from remote areas. Students from a school in Alaska will join us to take advantage of the “poet in residence” from the Folger Library. We will collaborate with the Chicago Shakespeare Theater and a class in Chicago Public Schools, and visit the “home” of Macbeth and walk the ramparts of the castle where King Hamlet’s ghost walked without a passport. Students “attend” school at times that align with their biological clocks, families’ needs, and work schedules. The can interact with students from other schools in other cities or even countries either in synchronously or asynchronously. Most of the “old school” teachers will have retired to be replaced by “new school” teachers who are comfortable with the technology and who have grown up with the new collaborative education. Students will collaborate with teachers to create curriculum. Students will collaborate on projects based on interest, not on grade-level. Teachers will be mentors and guides. Students and teachers will be co-learners.

And my grandsons will have iPhones! And I will be dreaming of the newest communication device!

Using the Web 2.0 tools is not a matter of merely making learning more “fun” or “cool” to 21st century students. These tools actually work to support, encourage, and facilitate the real learning we want our students to do and the learning our students want to do. In fact, they help to bring the two learnings together! Web 2.0 tools are causing 10 shifts in our pedagogy as described by W. Richardson in his book Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms.

I am currently in the vestibule of Web 2.o tool use. For the past year I have been experimenting on a personal level with wikis. I have used them for presentations for graduate classes in MSIT and then expanded to have a class use a wiki for collaboration on group projects. This year I began using the wiki to report to the administration on in services and conferences I attend. Since I was attending conferences on technology, I thought it appropriate to report using technology. I reported to the district about the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) Currently, while taking this course (Building Collaborative Classrooms), I have begun to use blogs as a means of communicating with my peers. I have this blog (PLS) and another that I set up recently for a group that I am in at my school. I have used these blogs and wikis to replace the notes and papers that I have in the past written and submitted on paper.

In my teaching practice, I am using the web as the storage place for images, files, lessons, communication with my peers and my students. I have posted lessons to use in my classroom on Moodle, and then they are available for anytime, anywhere access by students who need to review or for those who are absent. I also have used Moodle as a component of work with homebound students.

I am working toward a paperless classroom. Although I am far from paperless, I have managed to come up with some ideas to help me toward that goal. In January, I presented these ideas at a meeting of the CFF English teachers at my high school. This is a link to the keynote presentation I used for that presentation. It is posted on a wiki that is maintained by the Central PA CFF Coaches.

My views haven’t changed since taking this class; I selected this course because it could help me to further expand my use of the Web 2.0 tools. What this course has done for me is to give me a deeper understanding and greater facility with using the Web 2.0 tools. My plan for the future is to expand on my use of the tools. From wikis and Moodle, I want to add podcasts and blogs as ways for my students to create knowledge collaboratively with their classmates, students in other classes and other schools, and for instruction and assessment working toward the paperless classroom.

Richardson, W. (2006). Blogs, wikis, podcasts, and other powerful web tools for classrooms. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press.

During my creative writing course, one of the activities that we do is a drama. Students write short plays, actually radio dramas. I have a tape recording of the Orson Wells “War of the Worlds” which we have listened to so students could hear sound effects and the reading of the play by actors in the radio studio that sounds like the real thing. I have looked for a podcast of that radio broadcast and haven’t found one yet. In the mean time, I have been looking for other radio shows that would be appealing to students in their “antiquity.” I have found the Captain Midnight shows on iTunes store and have downloaded them to my laptop. I was also able to find an external link for the series. This is a sight that contains a link to iTunes from which the podcast can be downloaded.

I chose these because they parallel with the action hero movies like Fantastic Four, The Incredibles, Batman, and Spiderman that are so popular with kids today. They are also a manageable length, ranging from 14-20 minutes.  Since my students have access to iTunes on the laptops, they could also search for other podcasts that appropriate examples of radio dramas.  I feel comfortable having them use iTunes to search because their a limited number of podcasts of radio dramas and iTunes rates the content so that students can be directed to get only those that are rated “clean”  and ” family.”

In teams, students create the story board and script including sound effects. They then record their radio dramas. In the past I have had them tape record their dramas; now I will have them create their own podcasts using Garageband.  I am looking forward to doing this.

Marty Petrosky from Shanksville-Stonycreek School District reported on how his school implemented the first year of the CFF grant. He talked about what he thought were the things they did well and the things they could have done better.

He did a good job presenting this information which I thought would be very helpful to school districts that are about to roll out their CFF program and those that will join the ranks next year.

Attendance Code: D181410

Atte

Christian Penny, cultural anthropologist from West Chester University, made this presentation which was loaded with emerging technologies. This one blew me away.

Dr. Penny shared many Web 2.0 tools to us. He defines Web 2.0 tools as those tools that permit interactivity. He has set up a del.icio.us page just for us who attended PETE & C. I will share it with you. Although, at this time I have not had time to personally explore all these, I will keep adding to this page as I have time to do the research. In the meantime, you can look at them on your own at the following site:

http://del.icio.us/cpennywcupa/pete%26c?page=1

Instapaper
This is a simple tool that permits you to mark web pages to “read later” rather than doing a full bookmark and burying it in the pile. When you click the button on your tool bar, it is saved so that when you login to instapaper.com (when you want to and have time to read) the link will be right there. If you then want to bookmark you can…or just throw it away.

Picnik

This is an online photo editor. It is completely interactive with Flickr, Picasa, Facebook, Photobucket, webshots. Cool effects can be done while still preserving the original. No software is necessary on your computer…everything is online.

What’s next? Web 3.0! If Web 2.0 is about interaction, Web 3.0 will be about personalization and recommendation. Web 3.0 is already here! Read this article that Dr. Penny recommended.

Attendance code:  C191424

“Learning to Speak Native: How education can be transformed in 140 characters or less”

Steve Dembo, Discover Educators Network Director, spoke about the democratization of knowledge, the flattening of the earth, and the rise of wikinomics. Dembo talked about how digital imigrants can learn to speak the language of the natives without an “accent.”

The most important point he made was about the social nature of the web. He shared the ways that teachers from all over the world are banding together to share resources, ideas, connections, and professional development.

He talked about social networking as an important tool for teachers to collaborate around the world. I have been inspired by him, Chris Penny, and David Pogue to deeply explore the social networking possibilities of Web 2.0. This conference has really changed my mind about social networking. I am excited about the possibilities for myself and my students. This will take some further study.

Attendance Code:G022102

Michael Baker and a group of other Keystone educators presented their wiki and invited interested people to join this community.

Eduwiki

This community is an example of collective intelligence. As you watch the video below, I want to point out how person-able Michael is. He is a “geek” for whom human connection is very important. The thing that this session really brought home for me is that even though we are connecting using the internet, we are still connecting as humans. I hope that my Keystone nomination goes to the state level so that I can join this group of educators!

Pay attention to the story of “Timmy in the Well,” a great metaphor for how to handle problems: ask the question “How can we get Timmy out of the well?” Stay focused on that question. Only after Timmy is out of the well start asking “How can we keep it from happening again?” not “Who is to blame?”

Some additional links that were suggested at this workshop are:

http://tech4di.wikispaces.com/

The purpose of this public wiki is to collect and share resources linking computer and information technology with differentiated instruction.

www.theedweb.com 

This is a collaboration community of educators in the beta stage.  I have set up my home page and will experiment with this over the next few weeks.

This is the link to my home page.

This link will take you to a video of this presentation.

Attendance Code:  F041214