http://screencast.com/t/MjJlOTU3ND

Click the link below to view a PDF handout explaining the steps of how to access Discovery Education’s digital video streaming resources:    

Grant’s Discovery Education Handout–PDF version

Click the link below to view a handout (Word document) explaining the steps of how to access Discovery Education’s digital video streaming resources:     

Grant’s Discovery Education Handout 

Discovery Education video streaming addresses ISTE National Education Technology Standards and Performance Indicators for Teachers standard #3 by modeling digital-age work and learning—specifically letter C by communicating ideas effectively to students using digital-aged media and formats.

http://love2teachtech.hvcomputerguys.com/Portals/7/ed5.gif

Technology is an integral and immediately necessary part of the lives of every person who reads this entry. As teachers, it is essential that we not only prepare our students for a digital world they already have a large hand in creating, but we must prepare ourselves—after all, how can we teach students about a topic (about a whole world) we do not understand? As our students grow into adults, they will shape the world in ways we cannot even imagine. It would be irresponsible for educators to not make an effort to prepare students to be successful in this world.

But technology doesn’t have to be taught in isolation, in fact some researchers argue that it should never be. According to Harris, Mishra, & Koehler’s (2009) article “Teachers’ Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge and Learning Activity Types: Curriculum-based Technology Integration Reframed,” instruction should strike a balance between technology, content, and pedagogy. “Underlying truly effective and highly skilled teaching with technology, we argue, is technological pedagogical content knowledge” (p 401). They call the approach TPACK, which stands for Technological Pedagogy and Content Knowledge, and when used, it can be highly effective and engaging for students in the classroom.

http://cuip.uchicago.edu/~cac/ids/tpack.jpg

I do not think it is enough to simply teach technology, even if teaching a balanced, TPACK-based curriculum. Especially for social studies teachers, it is essential to teach students to be good citizens in the digital world. All through school, from K-12, teachers emphasize positive citizenship—whether it is being a positive member of a group, being a good friend, understanding one’s rights, understanding the importance of voting, or what-have-you. It only makes sense, then, that students should receive ample instruction in being a positive digital citizen. After all, many students spend nearly as much of their free time online as they do amongst the living. Ribble, Bailey, and Ross (2004) point out in their article “Digital Citizenship: Addressing Appropriate Technology Behavior” that schools “must prepare students to be members of a digital society or digital citizens” (p. 7).

I make an effort to use technology in my class where I feel comfortable enough; I am okay with taking chances, but I need to have some comfort with what I teach in my classroom. I have used the TPACK approach to editing and revising using a program call MyAccess, which uses intelimetric prompts to provide immediate feedback for student writing. I have combined pedagogy (instant feedback for revision), content (essays and stories based on literature and history), and technology (providing an online resource for students to utilize). The impact on student learning has been clear as student writing has improved exponentially, particularly with regard to basic writing conventions.

Looking to the future, I would like to put together my own lesson on cyber citizenship. Last year we had an investigator who works with cyber offenses talk to our entire school and it created some invaluable discussions—many students simply are not aware of the criminal implications of a lot of what happens online and with texting. For some reason, it is not obvious to them that real-world laws and expectations would translate to what happens on computers. I would like to continue this discussion further in my classroom and perhaps create an online discussion forum to allow students to practice interacting academically, socially, and responsibly at the same time. In addition to my teaching, I would also like to make a stronger effort in the future to keep up with state and national technological standards, rather than look exclusively at the standards of my particular content areas.

Technology is not exempt from values, and teachers have an opportunity to help instill positive values with their cyber behavior just as we do with their behavior in the classroom. There is SO MUCH out there in the cyber world, and unlike the real world, students can access the entire cyber world with the click of a mouse. This is challenging because there are countless unforeseeable opportunities for students to behave badly under a perceived cloak of cyber anonymity; this also means there are countless unforeseeable advancements in technological opportunities for teachers to keep up with.

 Bibliography:

Harris, J., Mishra, P. & Koehler’s, M. (2009) Teachers’ technological pedagogical content knowledge and learning activity types: Curriculum-based technology integration reframed. Journal of Research on Technology in Education. 41(4), 393-416.

Ribble, M.S., Bailey, G. D., & Ross, T. W. (2004). Digital citizenship: Addressing appropriate technology behavior. Learning & Leading with Technology. 32(1), 6-12.

I think Stephanie did a great job of pointing out that children often follow the behavior modeled for them—whether it’s appropriate or not. Sometime, if negative behavior, they may know it’s wrong but do it anyway because someone else has already set the precedent. Other times, they don’t even know what’s appropriate or not without someone to teach them the ‘right’ way. Regardless, it’s our job as teachers to do our part in teaching them to function respectfully and appropriately in this online community.

We’ve long been teaching citizenship in schools, beginning at a very early age and continuing until graduation. To some extent, citizenship looks simple: knowing how to treat others and live in a community. While citizenship education may look far more complex at times, it typically has the same basic foundation: knowing how to treat others and live in a community. Thus, if we work so hard to teach citizenship in schools, why not make the effort to prepare them for being successful in the digital world–after all, many students struggle transferring knowledge and carrying over the information they learned about functioning appropriately in a classroom to functioning appropriately on the computer. As the article pointed out, schools “must prepare students to be members of a digital society or digital citizens” (p. 7).

Somewhere in this equation comes the whole topic of cyber-bullying. It’s amazing that so many students don’t see it as bullying, even though it has all the same characteristics as bullying.

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_Va3objv1cIE/SaSjW-b_WtI/AAAAAAAAAVU/B6WBDNs2DFU/s400/cyberbully.jpg

I don’t think we need to make drastic changes to curriculum to make this work effectively. We are already teaching citizenship in the classroom; all we need to do is make very clear connections to the citizenship expectations and behaviors in the classroom and apply them to the digital world. I think this could even have a positive impact on children’s understandings of citizenship because it could be more relevant and accessible to the student.

Ribble, M.S., Bailey, G. D., & Ross, T. W. (2004). Digital citizenship: Addressing appropriate technology behavior. Learning & Leading with Technology. 32(1), 6-12.

image used:

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_Va3objv1cIE/SaSjW-b_WtI/AAAAAAAAAVU/B6WBDNs2DFU/s400/cyberbully.jpg

http://rlv.zcache.com/scratching_dog_mousepad-p1446123665994235707pdd_325.jpg

In From SuperGoo to Scratch: Exploring creative digital media production in informal learning, Kylie A. Peppler and Yasmin B. Kafai “argue that youth require some basic understanding of how to construct and  design new media in order to become critical participants in today’s media culture” (2). I agree with this statement. If students are to participate in a media-based society, it’s important that they have a critical understanding of how it all works.

I really did enjoy the basic concepts of this article and  would love the opportunity to bring this into my classroom. What’s holding me down is that I’m an expert (or I aim to be) in Language Arts and Social Studies… not media. It’s obvious the positive impact these programs could have on instruction–students could make videogames that recreate the landscapes of WWII or the American Revolution, they could recreate the challenges faced on the Underground Railroad, and develop settings for a video game that could be translated as the setting for a creative story.  Video game programming could be a wonderfully successful vehicle for teaching all kinds of things in the required content areas. And if students develop a passion for programming, well, so be it.

I’ve wanted to incorporate more media production in my class in the form of stop-motion animation or basic filmmaking, but perhaps I should hurdle those media forms and aim instead for Scratch and company. One thing is clear: this is tool I want to spend more time exploring. I did look into SuperGoo and found that the product has been discontinued…or at least that’s what it looked like from some sites I looked at. Scratch, on the other hand, certainly seems doable.

From SuperGoo to Scratch: Exploring creative digital media production in informal learning, Kylie A. Peppler and Yasmin B. Kafai

Peppler, K. A., & Kafai, Y. B. (2007) From SuperGoo to Scratch: Exploring creative digital media production in informal learning. Learning, Media and Technology. Special ISsue: Media Education Goes Digital. June, 1-19.

http://www.dba-oracle.com/images/fear_technology.jpg 

I think the idea that first catches my attention, even as I was just beginning to read the article, was how potentially outdated the article is. The article was from 2005–and while in some areas that me be highly current, we all know that, with technology, that could be bordering on prehistoric. That’s pre-Active Boards, pre-Vista, pre-flipcharts, pre-OneNote, and before I knew anything about blogs. And much of the research the article cites dates back to 2003. (Whitney, thanks for the VoiceThread shout out!) Now, I understand that the article calls into question a very important trend: do we as teachers effectively utilize and teach the high level technology available that our students might be expected to use when they enter the workforce? I do agree this is a valid question, and I think it questions whether we as teachers strive to remain on the front lines (or the cutting edge) of technology. In my experience there are some who do, yet many who do not.

One point from the article, which to me seems to be the underlying theme of the article, I do take question with. “A great deal of empirical evidence has established the significance of beliefs for understanding teacher behavior” (p 28). This implies that teachers don’t use high level technology because they don’t believe it is valuable. I disagree with this entirely. In my experience, teachers understand the value and importance of technology; it’s the technology itself they don’t understand. And if there’s one thing I’ve learned in teaching, it’s that teachers don’t actually have a lot of time available to them. If teachers had more time, and that time came with access to high level technology training, then teachers would use more high level technology.

Ertmer, P. A. (2005). Teacher Pedagogical Beliefs: The Final Frontier in Our Quest for Technology Integreation? from Educational Technology Research & Design, Vol. 53, No. 4, 2005, pp. 25–39 ISSN 1042–1629.

Image:

http://www.dba-oracle.com/images/fear_technology.jpg

http://img.thedougie.com/assets/imgx/5/1/6/2/6/6/1/orig-5162661.jpg

(I’m sorry, I had to honor the late Jam Master Jay, a pioneer of musical technology far ahead of his time.)

Wikis are everywhere, though most people I know are only aware of the big wiki: Wikipedia.I was happy to read an entire article based solely on Wiki. It’s a topic that I consistently lie to myself by pretending to know what it’s all about, when in fact I don’t. I get Wikipedia, but with all the references this quarter to wikis as part of Web 2.0, I was beginning to realize that maybe there was more to wiki than an encyclopedia that students can’t cite in a research paper. Plus, as a bonus, I learned more about what it means to be Web 2.0!(Below is another Wikipedia article…in case you’re interested.)

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/25/technology/internet/25wikipedia.html   

From reading through the other VoiceThread posts, I get the idea that Wiki can be used to help students explain HOW they know something, as opposed to just KNOWING something. JJ in particular points out the importance of this deep understanding for her kids. But I still don’t quite understand just how wikis, using the collaborative process, help students achieve this.

 Wiki refers to on-line informational sharing that abandons (or at least moves away from) the idea of an authoritative editor. Essentially, editorial responsibilities are shared by the users. Wikipedia is the most famous as an encyclopedia created and edited by its users, whose impact on society has grown to monolithic proportions. The research paper, The Wiki Way of Learning, by Alison Ruth and Luke Houghton, looked at wiki’s potential role in the classroom, and some of the upside and downside. One big upside is lessening the workload of the teacher and relinquishing some power to the students. But one downside, which I contribute to at times with an 11 pm post, is the idea that, if you’re expected to edit and respond to others’ information by a deadline, what if they don’t post until the deadline? From the article: “Another student from the same cohort questioned how collaboration could occur: If people upload their page late (close to the due date) how I can edit it on time. I found that most of the students write their assignment on MS Word first then later they upload it. I might not have enough time to do it” (p. 142). 

I really do appreciate the upside of a wiki and its potential impact on my classroom, but I have a really difficult time seeing me actually pulling one off successfully, to the point where it can positively impact my students without getting in the way of taking the place of everything else we’re trying to do.

Ruth, A., & Houghton, L. (2009). The Wiki Way of Learning. Australian Journal of Educational Technology. Published

2009, 25 (2), 135-152.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/25/technology/internet/25wikipedia.html   

http://img.thedougie.com/assets/imgx/5/1/6/2/6/6/1/orig-5162661.jpg

http://cgi.di.uoa.gr/~mop07195/gap.jpg

First I’d like to respond to what a lot of teachers in the cohort are saying about Lake Washington–that it likes to think of itself as very tech-forward. I agree with that to an extent, but where’s the support with classroom webpages? Okay, I just wanted to get that off my chest.

I really welcomed the information in this article (“Bridging the Divide: Facilitating the exploration of emerging technologies that support innovative learning and teaching” by Mike Bogle). It takes so much to keep up with a new trend in technology, and it’s disheartening when, before you know it, what you worked hard to understand is suddenly obsolete and you have a new trend to figure out.

For instance, I’m only just starting to get comfortable with blogs, and I understand that, with Twitter, blogging is already becoming dated. Additionally, it’s difficult to decide just which emerging (or emerged) technology to grab hold of–do I create a classroom website to post assignments or do I create a classroom blog? Or a classroom VoiceThread? And since I don’t have any of the three, I feel a weight pressing down on me that I need to choose one. But which do I choose? I don’t want to work hard to establish something that will soon become obsolete, leaving me at square one.

I think Stephanie Llanes made an excellent point: I’m okay with learning new technology, but if I invest the time into something, I want to be sure it is worth it. I’d better be able to use the technology in the classroom, and it had better help my students learn.

So here I am: I can feel the technology gap growing. I used to feel tech savvy, but in the last 15 years I’ve danced back-and-forth between savvy and ignorant. But as the gap widens, it’s more difficult to straddle the fence. I feel like I need to really commit myself to keeping up or I’ll be left behind for good. But with so many other professional responsibilities, the latest technologies can feel like such a burden.

Something that I particularly appreciated from the article was the point that teachers need proper support in order to keep up with technology. It’s clear that technology is important to teach, but most teachers are experts in teaching, not technology. We need tech experts to help us do our jobs effectively. It’s important for me as a teacher to prepare students for a technology-driven world, but I need to be trained how to use the technology if I am to teach it well. (And if I can’t teach it well, I don’t know that it’s worth teaching.)

Here is an interesting site with links to other articles that deal with technology in the classroom:

http://www.teach-nology.com/tutorials/teachwtech/

Bogle, M. (2008). Bridging the Divide: Facilitating the exploration of emerging technologies that support innovative 

             learning and teaching. from his Abstract, March 2008.

http://www2.dvc.edu/english/Learning_Resources/Pics/image1A9.JPG

The central idea behind this article was about using technology to establish a participatory, social-learning environment: Dewey with a twist. The article looks at learning as social construct and looks to Web 2.0 opportunities to foster the process. Approaching learning a social construct requires “not only ‘learning about’ the subject matter but also ‘learning to be’ a full participant in the field” (p. 4). Essentially, in looking at Web 2.0, we are looking at shared learning tools and how to use them to get students not only involved with the content but also the many new processes becoming available (like blogs, VoiceThreads, wikis, virtual environments, etc).

I can see myself creating a scenario where students do post blogs, and I would organize them similarly to this class. I think the comment function provides for great peer review while exposing students to a growing method of communication. After all, we as teachers are trying to get kids passionately involved with learning that best prepares them for the world outside the classroom walls.

Reading the other posts and thinking back to the reading, I think it’s important that students (and teachers) continue to question the information provided in Web 2.0 and consider its validity.

I’m wondering what kind of response would I get from parents if I required their kids to blog and interact online? What kinds of risks are there? And, has anyone from this group actually created a blogging group for peer-review in a Language Arts class?

Brown, J. S., & Adler, R. P. (2008). Minds on Fire: Open Education, the Long Tail, and Learning 2.0.  Educause

                   Review, vol. 43, no. 1.

Reading the article, I had the feeling that someone was trying to persuade me to establish an on-line course, and I shifted to look at this as a promotion for me to use these technologies in my own classroom. I’m already looking to do blogging and podcasting, though we’ll see if I ever get confident enough to do that THIS year.

One idea that struck me with regard to podcasts, but that is always important with teaching, is making podcasts renewable. As a teacher, I’m always looking to reuse and borrows ideas year after year. I think it’s important to approach Web 2.0 in the same light: Don’t just create a technological piece to try it or to fulfill a district requirement, but make the effort to create a podcast or voice thread you could continue to use unit after unit and year after year. 

Now, about this whole voice thread thing. I’d never heard of it, but it’s interesting. Very complex with a lot going on, but it seems easy to navigate. What application have you seen for use in Junior High classrooms? How could you envision it being used class-wide?

Below you can see an inactive example of a VoiceThread post.

http://educationalsoftware.wikispaces.com/file/view/VoiceThread.png/33136325

Bacer, Kathleen (2009).  Utilizing Auditory and Visual Tools to Engage the 21st Century eLearner.  Azusa Pacific

                 University. CA: Azusa.