Really Simple Stuff

Really Simple Simplification (RSS) has been described as the "new killer app for educators" (Richardson pg. 71). The way it works is truly ingenious. The old method of reading online would generally entail one flipping from webpage to webpage or blog to blog opening up innumerable pages on your computer. By using the RSS feature, the information simply comes to the person rather than the other way around. People may subscribe to blogs, newspaper sections, online journals, or any other informational source of interest. You would then simply check your reader, I use Google Reader, on a regular basis to update yourself on the information and material out there. Once you have acquired a vehicle to begin collecting RSS feeds your "inbox" sill look something like the image below. As you can see, feeds can be subdivided into categories or topics.

Here is a PDF I found on the web on using RSS feeds in the classroom which provides a pretty simple overview and some straightforward instructions on getting started. The directions are so simple that even I could follow and understand them.  Now let's say, for example, that you want to receive feeds from the publication Education Week on topics of specific interest. You could access the list of RSS feeds available on the journal by clicking the previous hyperlink and then select by topic or grade level which feeds you wished. Updates would then be delivered to the reader tool which you could review and link to. I have just recently become familiar with this tool and must confess that it has saved me a lot of time. To quote Ferris Bueller, "Should you have the means, I would highly recommend acquiring one."

@Learning_Curve



flickr.com

I must admit that I have come late to the social media game. I always considered Facebook and Twitter to be for my students, people who subscribe to dating services, and those who have an unquenchable need for attention. About a year ago, however, I was convinced by a couple of my oldest friends to open a Twitter account. I must admit that it has changed the way I get news and information. I dare say that this social media vehicle is my primary source of such. I check my feed many, many, times each day. Twitter allows me to follow only those news outlets, people, or organizations in which I have an interest. Here is my Twitter feed at some random moment today.

These four tweets represent main areas of interest to me; sports, education, punditry, and political/social commentary. I can easily get lost in the Twittersphere at any moment. The primary challenge for me as am educator is developing ways to integrate Twitter in my classroom. I found some great suggestions in the Richardson book. For example the wiki, Twitter Collaboration Stories provides an abundance of valuable suggestions which I could certainly use in my government and Civics classes. Westlake High School in Austin, TX has a Twitter account in which one can find links to student work or live presentations. I follow many educators and professional accounts on my personal account and get some valuable suggestions for lesson plans.
In the spirit of increasing my usage of social media I have established an account for a history-themed trip I run every year. It is my goal to use this tool to send pictures back to all interested parties (parents, family members, students) and as a means of communicating with everyone back here in the "States" while we're in Ireland. We leave on Friday.

Hopefully there will be plenty of shots like this one coming back to Connecticut next week via Twitter. Here I am in front of Lenin's Tomb this past July. I am happy to report that he is still dead.

Animoto

Here's an Animoto I really liked and could use in a freshman World History class. It is on the "Seven Elements of Culture" and was recently created by Lyz who is taking this class in the West Hartford cohort. She is a 5th-6th grade Special Ed teacher. Even though this video was created for use by a teacher at a lower grade level it would be very useful as a catatlyst for discussion and to introduce the theme for the class.

WIKIed Awesome

source: flickr.com

                                                                          
"Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of  all human knowledge. That's what we're doing" -Jimmy Wales Wikipedia founder
(Richardson, page 55.)

That's a pretty bold boast, but as one can see from the table above the use of Wikis in the professional word increased more than fivefold during the two years from 2008-2010.  For educators Wikis would seem to provide a vehicle for constant class participation and collaboration among students. The possibilities would seem to be endless. As a cynic by nature I have a few reservations about this new tool. For example, what parameters would be placed upon student participation and contributions to classwide Wikis? How would participation be assessed? How can one ensure that authentic learning is taking place? How good are these projects?

A search of the web yielded some interesting answers to those queries.  A few teachers at Estanica High School in California are piloting something called the Aristotle Experiment. It is based upon the assumption that anything that needed to be taught could probably best be learned by the students themselves, therefore (hopefully) shifting the focus of the class from the teacher to the student. One can find links to participating classes, assessment rubrics, and online discussions on the site.

What about evaluating student learning via Wikis or even introducing a Wikiproject to students. Here is a pretty good guide/rubric to help students get started with digital group projects. With regard to grading group Wikiprojects, the site flatclassroomproject offers host of suggested rubrics that can be tailored to the specific content and grade level of the classroom. Both of these tools are pretty sound and there are a plethora of resources on the web.

Finally, as I wondered about the quality of the projects completed by groups of students I found numerous examples of sophisticated and intricate work done by student sin many disciplines. For example, this biology project was extremely thorough.  Here's a really good history fair project which pretty much makes story boards look obsolete. In the true spirit of a flat classroom here's a history project that was done jointly by eighth graders from schools in Michigan and Colorado during the 2007-2008 school year. This is incredible.

Virtual Professional Learning Communities

                                                                   zazzle.com

About three years ago our school's administration implemented the concept of "Professional Learning Communities". Now, as I noted in a previous posting, I am pretty cynical when it comes to any edubabble repackaged as the next great innovation in teaching. I'm convinced that there are no new ideas in education, only new fads. This approach encourages collaboration between members of the same academic department as well as among different disciplines. I must admit however, that, in spite of my skepticism I picked up a few new tricks,especially from my younger colleagues.

If this approach works in a small face to face environment, why can't it work in the much larger world of the web? Inspired by the benefits of doing this in my department, I embarked on a search for teacher blogs in my discipline. Wow, there is a cornucopia of resources out there in cyberspace. One treasure trove I discovered is this blog sponsored by Multimedia Learning which serves as a repository for teachers to share resources by topic and time period. I downloaded the image below.

This is simple diagram developed by a teacher which could serve as a rich starting point for a class discussion on the topic.

Another great blog I discovered is HistoryTech a rich site listing all sorts of technological resources for teaching history divided by medium, topic, and grade level.  Another really great blog is Speaking of History. Eric Langhorst, an eighth-grade history teacher, runs this blog, which offers discussions about history, technology, and education in general. There are podcasts, lesson plans, videos, links, resources, and more. I must admit that I have frittered away a good part of this snowy day searching for blogs related to my discipline and "borrowing" some of the materials.

Hmm.....maybe there is something to this professional learning community stuff.

Supplementing Texts With Blogs

One of the great issues facing teachers today seems to be to what degree they will incorporate technology into their classrooms. The most fundamental form this takes is whether or not the school will use traditional "bound" books or ebooks on readers such as Kindle or iPads. The big challenge for me is finding a presentation of history or civics that is objective. All authors have bias in their presentations and this usually plays out in the events, people, and narratives advanced in texts. David McCulloch, perhaps our country's best known living historian wrote eloquently about this dilemma in the Wall Street Journal about a year ago. He bemoaned the decline in historical literacy among students in our country and proposed some fundamental changes to the curriculum to rememdy these shortcomings. Reading Richardson's Chapters 3 and 4, and particularly the parts about blogging with students, sparked some ideas about incorporating this important tool into my classroom as a means of complementing, and at times filling in large gaps, in the text presentation.

One way this could be done, and which I tried with my AP Government class, is having them watch excerpts from a debate between Supreme Court Justices Antonin Scalia and Stephen Breyer on YouTube on the topic of judicial activism versus originalism. You can watch the arguments made by each simply by clicking on his name. Unfortunately, any AP Government textbook I have ever considered using in my class gives little or no treatment to the originalist school of Constitutional interpretation as the authors tend to be on the left of the political spectrum and do not take this school of thought seriously. Although I don't have a blog yet dedicated to my class, I put these links up on Edline, which is the vehicle our school uses to communicate with students and parents. Anticipating a long weekend as a result of the blizzard, I assigned them to watch the excerpts and write a short paper on their understandings of the two judicial philosophies. I can't wait to see what I get on Monday.

Another useful resource for social studies teachers I discovered in this class is American Memory Online which provides both teachers and students with access to over 7,000 primary source documents, The Library of Congress site which has many lesson plans and primary sources, and Thomas which is the official site of Congress and can be used to trck the progress of any piece of legislation. The possibilities are indeed very exciting!

                    

The Overwhelming Silence

I am sitting here in technology classroom NC 4 at the University of St. Joseph's reading the blogs of other colleagues and responding to some of their posts. Two things then strike me as incredibly odd. The first is that the classroom of sixteen adults is eerily silent as if it were empty. The other is that in the midst of this quiet we are all "speaking" with one another in the twenty first century sense of the word as each of us is reading the posted thoughts and insights of one another while at the same time responding to each. There is a high level of communication taking place in this space with no vocalization. Wow, this is amazing.