Building Collaborative Classrooms

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.

I don’t see individual students Skyping in school, but Skype could be a cool tool to use as a teleconferencing tools between classes within the school or between schools. In the past I have had students use a moodle forum to discuss issues in Romeo and Juliet with students from a school in another city. They have then create public service announcements with classmates in their own schools. In the past, we have talked about getting the kids together “for pizza and a movie” to watch the products of their work. That has never worked out because most of my students are not field-trip eligible. A Skype teleconference would make a face-to-face meeting more of a reality. Students like social network sites because they can be themselves and some even like to adopt a persona and enjoy a sort of anonymity. On the other hand, they like to have the face-to-face connections. They like to connect a face (They post their pictures) and a voice with the posts that they are reading. This has possibilities. I’ll let you know!

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.

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

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

This blog page is a place for me to present some of the technology integration I have observed, heard about, or actually done in English classrooms. Many of these are from teachers at Warwick High School, but there are also some that I have found through searching or collaborating with other teachers.

Program Description: The presenter will share lesson ideas that have worked to engage reluctant (and not so reluctant) learners in her English and writing classes and still meet the standards. This includes the use of Comic Life, iPhoto, iMovie, wikis, moodle, and podcasts to name a few.

If you would like to see the wiki with my notes and links, please go to http://english230.wikispaces.com

I just looked at a wiki that was created by the state for CFF English teachers…I bet ya there’s one for each of the other 3 core courses. It has a page for finding partners. Want to have your students collaborate with students at another school? You can put a post there and someone with a like desire can find you. It is a new site and so far there are no postings, but I’m going to watch the site…since I’ve subscribed through my Google Reader.