I’m sitting in a classroom on a Saturday morning…learning. That’s right, while all of the #satchat people are busy tweeting, sharing, and collaborating online, I decided to take it to the next level and make the trek to Jackson, Michigan to participate in a casual, participant driven conference focused on connecting educators, not just lecturing to us.

The following are my notes, reflections, and thoughts on the day; my apologies for rambling and “stream of thought” composition. Updates throughout the day will hopefully occur.

9:53 am

Typically I’m busy watching Saturday morning cartoons or getting ready for the weekly grocery run, but today I’ve already been introduced to GoSoapBox, an interesting Socrative clone that looks to offer a much more robust set of tools for student discussion response. Students can be directed to respond to reading selections, be given polls in class, and even submit questions and participate in quizzes in real time. I enjoyed the ability for Gary Abud (the BYOD session facilitator), I noticed that the while the tool is amazing for quickly generating rich classroom conversations, it’ still limited by your students’ literacy skills. I’m not the world’s best reader (or writer for that matter), and I found myself lagging behind the rest of the group when Gary gave us a short reading assignment to respond to in the workshop.

Of course, typing up these notes is hindering my ability to focus as well, so I was glad when Chris Stanley brought up a great point of being able to revisit conversations points throughout the GoSoapBox “event”. Sure enough, Gary followed up with a simplistic tool that GoSoapBox has to offer in that participants can simply use an “I’m getting it” or “I”m confused” check in poll (it’s persistent throughout the event) that only the teacher gets to see. So in a way, even though students might be struggling based on their own limited cognitive abilities, the teacher still gets at least an indicator beyond the “vacant stare” as to how well the classroom is getting it. A participant in the session brought up a great point about need the granular knowledge of which students aren’t “getting it” to which Gary responded with a great response; it’s not really all about the technology, you’ll still need some simple “thumbs up/thumbs down” or other face to face strategies to gain better fidelity of where students are at.

I’m sure the last two paragraphs sounds like an advertisement for GoSoapBox, but it’s just me trying to work through the tool, finding some interesting features and applications for the teachers I support. It looks like GoSoapBox isn’t so much a Socrative clone as it looks more like an advanced and feature-rich application for learning.

Gary went on to share a few more applications for helping students organize their learning (Evernote, Google Drive, InFuseLearning), but I was more interested in the elegant was he framed his BYOD session. Far too often school districts are focused on making a myriad of devices work on the school’s infrastructure, interoperate with shared resources, and make the tech “hum” as best they can. Gary’s BYOD workshop focused on the learning and tools that can happen across a wide number of devices (laptops, iPads, Android, etc.). I’m going to call it “Gary’s” ways to incorporate BYOD.

Gary Abud’s 5 Ways to Incorporate BYOD

1. Facilitate Class Discussions

2. Share & Take Notes

3. Interactive Instruction

4. Collaboration

5. Assessment

That’s a much simpler framework to build a BYOD program atop. Focus on the instructional practices that need to happen first (something that I’m always advocating for), and then find the technical solutions to help make that happen. Starting with devices is a recipe for “tribalism” and conflicts that won’t get you nearly as far as starting with the instruction first.

10:44 am

Gary finished up his workshop elaborating on the “interactive instructional space” that he’s created through blending his face to face instruction and conversations with digital tools. Socrative helps anonymize student responses, alleviating peer pressure that stunts curiosity in the classroom. I agree, and subscribe to this theory. Creating discrepant events for your students helps capture curiosity (Gary did a couple of simple physics demonstrations for us, having us pretend to be high school students), but that interest can quickly be squelched when the possibility of incorrect responses could potentially be used to “judge” anyone’s ability to learn. Finding the right “mix” of tools to help create this environment, but still deliver the type of individualized student responses and data we need as educators, can be difficult. Should we focus our scant time and resources into pushing students to use a single LMS like Edmodo or Moodle, often pushing those tools past their intended uses? Or should we find ways to blend some of the tools mentioned in this brief reflection (along with face to face learning opportunities) to create a much more flexible, yet slightly scattered, learning environment?

Click here for Gary Abud’s presentation slides about BYOD.

11:46 am

Lunch time…and trivia! Go team Imagination Dragons! We bombed out, but we had a great time doing it, and I got to chat more with Anthony DiLaura and hear about his work at Zeeland schools (a recent one to one iPad district).

12:27 pm

Saturday afternoon, a time to finish up chores around the house, catch a quick nap, wrestle with the kids, and do a bit of grading for the online class I’m instructing currently….usually. This afternoon I’m headed into another round of sessions before leading my first ever Video Story Problem workshop. I’m a bit nervous about what participants will be able to accomplish in an hour and 15 minutes. I’m going to quickly re-hash my Video Story Problem presentation that I put together for the K-12 Online Conference, and then move into “lab time”. I’m hopeful that participants will be able to capture some video, and still have enough time to edit it to the point of “ready to share”. My ultimate goal is to have at least one video that someone feel good enough to share out to the wider audience of the internet. As an added bonus, Michelle Dubois, one of the awesome Michigan teachers whose great student video story problems I mentioned in a previous post, is here at the conference! And she’s brought a few teachers with her to start working on their own!

12:37 pm

I’m sitting in Andy Losik’s session on iMovie, Keynote, and MacGyver. For those not familiar with the television show, MacGyver is a DIY mastermind, capable of turning a few scraps from your average workshop junk drawer into a torpedo. This was a great session choice right after lunch, when my capacity to engage in serious intellectually rigorous conversation is typically at a low point for the day.  Not that Andy doesn’t have a lot of great to talk about in the instructional arena.

This session was more focused on the mechanics of creating some fun and engaging media. In addition to showing off how to create your own custom “video” titles for iMovie using Keynote, he also showed up the PopcornMaker tool from the Mozilla foundation. It’s a fascinating web-based video editing tool that lets you add your own custom overlays, “pop ups” and other media to your videos. He used it to create a fantastic lip dub video in the style of VH1′s old “pop up” videos. Check it out here or watch it below:

2:28 pm

I led a rousing workshop about Video Story Problems. Well, I led a small workshop at least, with some good conversations. Not so sure about “rousing”. It was an interesting experience as I got to work with some language arts and social studies teachers (a group that I would love to start exploring video with). They had some wonderful thoughts about how to bring in elements of the real world into their classroom via video to help illustrate concepts, and I was excited they saw ways to incorporate video into the classrooms that wasn’t just “flipping”. Not there’s anything wrong with flipping, it just takes up a lot of the edtech conversation space that it’s difficult to make inroads with other forms of instructional practice. Here’s to “widening the plate”.

2:41 pm

And now I’m no longer in the dark on the “Pep Talk from Kid President” video. I have no idea why I hadn’t watched this video before. I had seen it go past my social media streams, but just never clicked on it. I’m glad I finally saw it. Share it widely!

Google has been having a rough go of keeping their cloud services up and running smoothly for all users lately. Today is just another example of the sporadic nature of Google Apps “up time” as of late.

Google Drive is down, this too shall. Although, would be nice if Google’s 3rd shift janitor updated Dashboard google.com/appsstatus#hl=…

— Ben Rimes (@techsavvyed) April 17, 2013

Besides the general headache of lost instructional time that an important educational cloud-based server being down causes, Google’s customer service (or lack thereof) isn’t as robust as many would like it to be. That leaves many Google Apps users to take to Twitter and other social networks just to figure out what’s going on. In my mind, that’s pretty crummy, and leads to all sorts of back and forth speculation as to the cause. Some individuals experience no outages whatsoever, while others have sporadic use of some of their apps.

Enter the Google Apps Status Dashboard. It’s not the best tool in the world for keeping up with service outages in real time, but at least it’s a place to start. While it did take at least 45 minutes from the time outages started appearing this morning and the first “problem” was indicated on the Apps Status Dashboard, you can rest assured that if there’s any hint of an orange or pink indicator light on one of the apps, there’s certainly a problem with other apps in Google’s stable.

Granted, this gives little comfort to those of us savvy enough to br prowling Twitter for updates on the situation.

@kjarrett The Apps Status Dashboard is such a joke. It will be updated at 3pm today after all is cleared up.

— Daniel Rezac (@drezac) April 17, 2013

I’m with Daniel on this one, Google could REALLY step up their reporting of outages and real time status updates of Google Apps. However, there are many educators and technical folks in school districts that are completely in the dark when Google Apps go down. Either they aren’t connected on Twitter, or have other re-occuring problems in their district with bandwidth, filtering, or some other internet related malady. For them, the Google Apps Status Dashboard is at least a starting place to make sure it’s “not just them” when Google’s services go down. From there, it’s wise to head over to Twitter to check out the situation. And then complain a bit (or a lot) to Google that offering up more timely information on what’s happening would be appreciated.

If anyone else has a starting place for checking on Google’s outages, I’d love to know! Until then, someone get back to work on getting those servers back up and running!

Update

@techsavvyed Ben, downrightnow.com seems to do a better job of reporting outages than Google or other services.

— David Prindle (@dprindle) April 17, 2013

David Prindle shared an excellent website that I hadn’t seen before called Down Right Now. It appears to list more than just Googles services, including Facebook, Tumblr, Skype and many other social and cloud services. This is certainly a great “go to” for future outages across a number of sites. While it doesn’t seem to offer the exact details as to the nature of each outage (you would still have to visit the service provider’s site for that level of information), it does have the great advantage of individual internet users being able to report outages.

5:56 am
I’ve been up for about 30 minutes or so. I woke up before my alarm went off, putting me in a slightly off mood. Sometimes I welcome an early start, and sometimes I feel as though I’ve been cheated out of a few minutes sleep when my body decides it’s time to wake up before the alarm. Regardless, toast helps right any early morning grumpiness, especially toast with butter and jam. Yes, my toaster is a bit grubby. It’s my birthday today, I’ll clean it tomorrow.

6:24 am
In the last year I’ve taken up running 3-4 days a week with 50-60 crunches, 20-30 push ups, and a few other exercises on most days. I’ve lost nearly 25 pounds, so while I’m not terribly fit, I’m getting there. Yes, I know I have terrible form. Yes, I know my bedroom looks cluttered. No, I will not show you my pathetic attempts at push ups.

6:38 am
My wife started teaching nearly full time again this week after 3 years of being laid off and part time teaching gigs. I’ve been trying to pick up some extra chores in the morning to help make sure the family still gets moving and ready for the day. Packing lunch for the kids is one of my new chores in the morning. It’s fun to help pack some healthy lunches for the kids, but today held an extra treat for me; my daughter (7 years old) decided she wanted to make the sandwiches for her and her brother this morning, so we got to pack up lunch together and chat about the day before we all rushed off to school.

10:15 am
After a relatively quiet morning (Friday mornings are when I usually catch up on a lot of emails, paperwork, and other clerical work), I got to help one of our school board members setup his new iPad. Our district purchased the devices for the school board members to ensure they had a simple way to communicate and access all of the important school documents and files through the school’s Google Apps account. After setting up the board member’s email, calendar, and contacts, we chatted a bit about technology in the district (it’s decent), how well our money was being spent (we think we’re getting the best bang for our buck), and what the future holds (we both agreed it looks grim for public schools in Michigan).

11:34 am
The Tech department treated me to lunch and homemade desert for my birthday! It was a great lunch at a local place that makes everything from scratch. Country smoked ham and split pea soup on a chilly rainy April day is poetic lunch perfection. As an added bonus, the Systems Administrator at our school has his birthday on Sunday, so our most wonderful co-worker made flour-less chocolate cake and raspberry cheesecake for dessert. My belly is full as I snuggle into my warm chair; it should help me get through the rest of this report I’ve been trying to digest all day amid my other tasks.

2:47 pm
I’ve spent a good portion of my day working through the school district’s Technology Profile Report that Apple helped facilitate for us. It’s not the most exhaustive report I’ve ever seen about technology, but it’s certainly one that you want to look through a couple of times with several highlighters and a full pad of sticky notes. There’s a lot of data covering faculties familiarity with various forms of technology and a great cross section of where staff falls on the continuum of technology infusion with their instructional practices. Some of the data is skewed a bit due to a lack of universal access to the tools that every teacher wants, but it’s still a good look at how far along our teacher are with their technology skills. Besides an overview of the district, I can look at each building’s results of the profile survey, and I’ve been surprised with how well one of our buildings is doing at moving the majority of their staff members through the process together. The other three buildings have bright spots as well, but they’re much more scattered along the continuum of Entry/Adoption/Adaptation/Appropriation/Innovation. The stand-out building seems to be clumped together along the continuum in a positive way. This will certainly help shape some of my strategies in the coming months and into next school year as I look to implement some new professional development with staff.

5:14 pm
I’m so close to a 30 minute 5K. Another 30 seconds faster and I’ll be there. For now, let’s pretend I can run as quickly as I can tie my shoes in this GIF. It was a nice birthday treat for my wife to let me run when I got home from work. She’s actually been quite supportive of all the time needed to take up the past time; 60 minutes three to four times a week is a big commitment to getting healthy, and we’ve supported one another as she’s been running more regularly as well.

6:03 pm
My family went out for a nice birthday dinner at a local restaurant that usually caters to a slightly more upscale crowd than we’re used to dining with. My wife and I usually reserve such an evening for date-night without the kids, but we took them along and we had a blast. The table was covered with thick brown butcher paper that we wrote all over with crayon, and plates piled with chicken nuggets and french fried were a welcome site on the kids menu. They have a pizza oven near the front on the entrance powered by a gas log burner, so while it isn’t terribly authentic, it still gives off a nice glow as you walk in.

With such a diverse crowd of educators in attendance at the MACUL Conference (over 4,200 this year), we could certainly spend a lifetime arguing over the nuances of what traditional classroom notions are. I’m confident there’s a strong consensus that desks in rows, teacher-centered lectures, students regurgitating others’ work, and no connection to digital tools or the media ecosystem omnipresent in our lives today covers most of the big definitions of traditional classroom notions. So how do we try to innovate our learning environments without being labeled as one of the “bad crazies”?

I’m not sure there’s anything we can do to avoid being labeled crazy (whether it’s the bad or good kind.) If you’re the teacher who’s encouraging students to ask open ended questions and challenge the traditional notion of lecture, skill acquisition through repetition, and mastery determined through high stakes assessment, you’re going to get called on it. If you’re not called out as crazy by your colleagues, then perhaps a principal, parent, or community member. That’s alright, Steve suggests; brilliance is often mistaken for crazy in most cases before the big “shift” occurs pushing everyone else into the “crazy” bin. It’s happened already with our culture Steve pointed out; who would have thought 5 years ago that “checking in” at stores and restaurants using your mobile device, and sharing pictures of what you’re eating with the rest of the world would now be considered normal? A few crazy people that are now selling their start-up companies for billions of dollars to the likes of Google, Apple, and Microsoft.

The inner critic in me begged the question, “But how do we know the “good” crazy from the “bad” crazy?” Not every notion of how to move past traditional classrooms leads to greater knowledge acquisition and empowering learning environments. Khan Academy was heralded as a “personalized” learning environment for every student, but drives a farther wedge between districts and communities that have access to technology and those that don’t. The Common Core State Standards have refocused the integration of technology into all content areas, but many parent groups are now pushing back on the idea of students all being put into the same “mold”. There’s a dangerous game we play within our learning communities when we paint ideas as being crazy or brilliant with such bold brush strokes, so I’d advocate that all of those willing to take the “crazier” path of learning, make sure you still have lines of communication back to home base. It’s not bad to be crazy, but it can be extremely detrimental when we breed fear of the unknown in those around us.

The point Steve made about fear was earlier in his talk, but I saved it for the end. He made an excellent point about the fears that legislators, administrators, and even our colleagues use to justify poor policies, and discourage sharing of what others might deem crazy. Fear is a big business in many industries; personal and corporate liability insurance, web content filtering in education, anti-poaching policies and deals among corporate rivals. To build on that point, how do we build encouragement and excitement about breaking down our classroom walls, sharing what our students are accomplishing (both the process and the end product) without creating new atmospheres of fear? I’ve seen the “bright spots” of sharing in my district push teachers and students to greater depths of understanding and achievement. I’ve also seen those same bright spots of sharing breed resentment and fear in colleagues around them. What sort of strategies can we employ to combat those fears and anxiety of “I’m not doing enough?” Do we herald and champion the success of every teacher and student, no matter how small? Do we pour what little resources we have left (in Michigan at least) into hiring more instructional coaches, or steal create time for more dialogue and conversation among teachers?

These are the questions I’m curious about, and I hope others are asking the same. I certainly want to help the exciting learning continue to happen in our more non-traditional classrooms, but I’d love for the rising tides to truly lift all boats in this situation as well. How do we do this, before we miss the boat entirely, and find ourselves on a sinking ship? Or worse, wind up like “Bad Luck, Brian”…with no “ship” at all.

A quick run down of alternative RSS feed reader alternatives to Google Reader, as collected from the greater Twitterverse!

]]> http://www.techsavvyed.net/archives/2950/feed 5 http://www.techsavvyed.net/archives/2945 http://www.techsavvyed.net/archives/2945#comments Thu, 14 Mar 2013 13:06:50 +0000 Ben Rimes http://www.techsavvyed.net/?p=2945 Help, the sky is falling, the sky is fall….er, Google is closing down Google Reader as of July 1st, 2013. I know a LOT of educators use Google Reader for subscribing to professional, casual, and entertainment blogs through RSS. Many students use Google Reader as well to follow blogs for classroom purposes. Sadly, that’s all ending in less than 4 months. Time to start packing up subscriptions and moving to new digital tool for RSS subscriptions!

Here’s how to export your subscriptions out of Google Reader into one neat XML file you can use to import your feeds back into other RSS feed readers.

This is only half the journey! Now you need to import that subscriptions.xml file into a new RSS feed reader. I use Newsblur (they’re getting hammered right now with new sign-ups), but there are plenty more out there! Please share your favorite RSS reader in the comments, and I’ll add them to a post tomorrow about alternatives to Google Reader for RSS subscriptions.

Oreo Permutations
A video story problem in which I use a big math term, wax philosophic on the nature of stuffing an Oreo with Oreos, and challenge students to create their own flavor combinations of Oreos.

Emily’s Driving Dilemma
Andy Losik’s first venture into the video story problem space (at least through the channel) in which a meticulous overview of the problem solving strategies are outlined in expert 5th grade fashion! Love the blooper reel at the end, and can’t wait to see what else these learners create!

Cup Stack
A great video for elementary students working with time and decimals. Plus it has cup stacking, which is always fun to watch, even if it’s not from professional stackers Frank Fitzpatrick put this great video together with the help of students.

Road Trip
The students in Pat Elsey’s classroom in Jackson, MI put together a deceptively easy video story problem about travelling across country, and adding up the duration of the trip. If you don’t think about time zones, you might have to rethink your answer, and think about how you can incorporate social studies content along with math.

Home Improvement Project
Another Michigan educator, Michelle Dubois (click here for her class blog), has created an entire home remodeling project with her students! She gave them all a budget, took the class to Menard’s (A regional home improvement store) and captured a lot of great video story problems about whether the students had enough in their budgets to cover their expenses.

Having played with the concept of turning traditional story problems into video story problems for over a year now, even toying with the idea of using them as formative assessment tools, I’m looking to go on a bit of a digital storytelling “evangelism” spree in the next few months. I presented at ICE this month, am planning on submitting a workshop based on video story problems for the Games, Learning, and Society Symposium in Madison, Wisconsin this Spring, and have already sent in my application for an ICE Indiana workshop for the fall.

I’d love to see more educators using video as a strategic part of developing “new literacy” skills in their classroom; I hope some of these examples help. They push me to create and challenge those around me in new directions every day.

Students get to work on real world presentation skills, public speaking, and share their love of literature with their peers in the next school over, the next city down the road, or the neighboring state or country! I created a Storify to share what we’ve experienced thus far in our district, and if you can’t see it below, I encourage you to check it out here. If you’re participating in Read Around the Planet as well, please consider sharing on Twitter using the #rap13 hashtag so we can all enjoy!

Celebrating reading, writing, and literature by connecting classrooms through video.

]]> http://www.techsavvyed.net/archives/2928/feed 1 http://www.techsavvyed.net/archives/2925 http://www.techsavvyed.net/archives/2925#comments Sat, 23 Feb 2013 18:39:25 +0000 Ben Rimes http://www.techsavvyed.net/?p=2925 I have this little project going over on Vimeo called the Video Story Problem Channel, and up until now most of the teachers involved have been creating a lot of really great student-created videos based around actual math from the real world (video from restaurants, home improvements stores, four wheeler races, etc.). Recently, I’ve been dabbling more with science-based videos, and wondering if there isn’t a way to encourage students and teachers in disciplines outside of the typical math classroom to latch onto the idea of creating videos of curiosity to help provide some learning experiences that are slightly more authentic than what we find in a text book (paper or digital).

With that in mind, I created a short video in an attempt to provide a prompt for talking about viscosity. I intended to have the video serve as a prompt that might engage students to start thinking about what they already know about fluids, how they move, and maybe perhaps formulate a rough concept of what viscosity means. However, it could also serve as a formative assessment piece, one that requires the students to process what they may have been learning about fluid dynamics or viscosity, apply it to the leading questions in the video below, and then try to apply their growing understanding of the concept by creating their own video.

Now, the question I know many teachers are going to ask is “doesn’t this take a lot of time?” My reply would be “yes….and, no”. If you look at just using a simple substitution of your usual content with this video, and then expecting the students to author, shoot, create, and publish the film in your classroom, it’s going to take a tremendous amount of time. More so if they’ve never done a media project like this before. However, if you’re willing to be flexible with your time-tables, and can afford some independence to your learners, you could certainly assign this as weekend homework, or maybe as an ongoing activity over the course of a unit. Students might be given some small amounts of “flex time” in your classroom, and use some time outside of class, to put together their example video.

Regardless of how you set it up, the result is that you’ve got a really nice piece of formative assessment data, complete with some real world application, that will give you a much deeper understanding of how the students are grasping the concept, and more importantly trying to apply it to the world. The videos could then serve as examples for future courses or learners in other sections of the course. Once you’ve completed a few rounds of this type of video-based assessment, you’d have a nice snowballing of students video production skills and a level of comfort with the process that should help the students become more independent in creating and publishing them. Which in turn helps us lean towards the “not really” answer when the teacher across the hall wants to try and asks if it’s going to take a lot of time. Because we’re all supposed to be working towards the long-term growth and acquisition of skills, right?