Many folks like to introduce themselves at the beginning of the school year sharing who they are and what their philosophies are for the classroom learning environment. Kids just love this part as well (yeah right).
This is the most painful part of the year for me. At the elementary level when I taught first grade, they were zoned out from me within minutes. They just wanted to hit the centers I had set up. At the secondary level in the middle school classrooms, they sat politely because they knew the drill. First five or ten minutes of each new class was the “Hi, I’m Mr. Floyd, and….” part of the class. Boring. I try. Lord knows that. I just do not have the artsy fartsy bones in me.
Then, I come across folks like Beau Bergeron. This kid (23 years young) has a wonderful sense of conversation. I am more than happy to learn from those younger than me when they are so dadgum (Texas term) creative. I guess I can blame testing for my lack of creativity since it all started when I was in school (thanks H. Ross Perot), but probably not. Anyway, I digress. Take a look at what Beau has created below and enjoy. Most of all, take some time and think through the first impression YOU are going to create when the kids and parents come this year. I realize James Dobson says, “Don’t smile until Christmas.” But what impression do you want the kids to get about what your expectations are? I want to set the bar high and have them live up to them. When they see I put more energy into the classroom than I have to, hopefully they will do the same. It’s worth a try. Realize what you do speaks so much more powerfully than what you say. First impressions. Then, when you are ready to work on your own, shoot me an email. Let me know what I can do to help you create yours.
Enjoy Beau’s mind and imagination. PS - Realize he played this video on the white shirt he wore to the event.
I had the privilege to be a part of a conference call (Yes, land lines. Oh the embarrassment.) with severalotherTexaseducators who blog as well as a few of the important NECC people at ISTE. We spent an hour or so batting around ideas of what was going to happen at NECC 2008 and what could/should happen at NECC 2008, which happens to be in San Antonio this year. From an educator’s perspective, I do not think NECC could be more open and willing to meet our needs and interests.
With the online conference planner to pre-schedule your session and the online planner as a place to create this agenda to print or retrieve online (is this thing iPhone/iTouch friendly I wonder), any participant can be organized and prepared for a full schedule of events.
One really neat thing that came out of the conversation was about the opening social. If you are going to be in San Antonio on that Sunday, do not miss it. If you are not going to be there yet, you won’t have to miss it. You see, ISTE has taken the steps to recreate the event in Second Life. Yep, you will see other SL’ers and the atmosphere, and my favorite part, even the band will be in SL. What a deal! These folks have gone out of their way to show the power of collaboration with these tools. Only if other organizations would pick up on that. Sigh.
So no matter whether you are into iPods, leadership roles, open source software, higher education, tech products, or even just online communities, NECC has a place or a session for you. EdubloggerCon and the Blogger’s Cafe are already in the works to make a return trip to NECC. I assure you, it will be very difficult to stand in the convention center (or any of the hotels) and ask out loud “Who wants to discuss (insert ed tech topic here)” and not find a willing participant or two. It is the perfect conference to unconference.
As for me and my conversations, we will be all over the Riverwalk. After dark, you will find me by the pool with some BBQ, Cokes, and great educator friends during the evening solving all the world’s problems (or at least Texas education’s). Welcome to Texas!
For those who do not blog or read blogs, I truly feel that you are missing out on tremendous resources shared by other educators. I was skimming through my Bloglines account today and found this jewel of a post from Kevin Jarrett over at Welcome to NCS-Tech! Consider this reading site. Free Reading is a site devoted to offering high quality reading resources for grades K-3. They define themselves as:
Free-Reading is an open source instructional program that helps educators teach early literacy. Because it is open source, it represents the collective wisdom of a wide community of teachers and researchers. Free-Reading contains a 40-week scope and sequence of primarily phonological awareness and phonics activities that can support and supplement a typical kindergarten or first grade “core” or “basal” program.
What you will find on this site is research-based reading materials, the research that support them, and a collaborative group of educators sharing their resources to make your classroom instruction the best it can be. To me, this is what Web 2.0 is all about. Share great material with like minded individuals, and you will find equally as valuable resources to partake from. Here is the mission behind Free Reading:
* To help educators worldwide teach kids to read * To make quality, research-based, explicit and systematic instruction for early reading widely available and free (in two senses of the word “free”: “at no charge” and “openly offered so as to be used, reused, mashed-up and shared again”) * To nurture a community of educators who share effective methods in a form that others can easily apply in their own teaching * To disrupt spending in education away from traditional textbooks and towards more customized instructional materials, more support and training for teachers, and better tools for data and knowledge management. * Ultimately, as Catherine Snow has said, for kids to be able to “read books with enjoyment while lying in a hammock under elm trees”.
Though no individual skill taught here may be an end in itself, we believe each is a step on the path to that ultimate goal.
You will find many skills covered in categories including:
Phonological Awareness
Phonics
Comprehension
Vocabulary
Fluency
Writing
So dive into their resources and see what you surface with. I bet you will find it more valuable than anything out of the textbook. Besides, that’s their goal.
PS - Feel free to share some of your great curriculum with them. It is the only way to make the collective grow.
My apologies to Robert Frost. And to be accurate, I actually took two posts marked Unread.
I have had two blog posts saved in my Bloglines account for what seems like eternity. They are too good to mark as read, yet they are blaring at me with each stroll past. I have no idea what to do with them. They make bold statements that educators should hear, yet they can be inflammatory each in its own right without thorough discussion of the context.
So in the spirit of sharing my current thoughts, here are the two things Darren Draper and Sylvia Martinez have published on their blogs that have me pondering:
“Virtually all learning difficulties that children face are caused
by adults’ inability to set up reasonable environments for them. The
biggest barrier to improving education for children, with or without
computers, is the completely impoverished imaginations of most adults.” - Alan Kay (Scholastic Administrator, April/May 2003)
Both make awesome points and serve to inspire the bendable and tick off the rigid. Which one can you relate to the best?
I realize I have not hashed these two things out very well in this post. My goal was to archive them on my blog so that I would be forced to discuss them with others or at least revisit them together on a regular basis until I get it all organized in my head. If anyone wants to discuss/debate the content and context, comment away. Otherwise, these remain in my head until further notice.
You remember how smart you were in high school? You know, headed to Ivy League if it weren’t for that one teacher who hated you or that one bad test day, or not enough money or ….. Yet, you were every bit as smart as any Ivy Leaguer. Right, Uncle Rico?
The best thing about this system is that you have free access to the lectures and course material through the Open Yale site. You get the chance to virtually audit the course. How cool is that? You never leave your (insert where you are on the computer, with iPod, etc.). You choose when to study. You challenge your friends and co-workers to see if they can handle the rigor of an Ivy League course. Or, you impress them by doing it anyway when they say no thanks. You can’t necessarily move your family to Yale, but you sure can take advantage of this.
Open Yale is the direction schools are headed with content (minus the “free” attached to ALL of it). The OCW movement is but one group offering the ability to be a lifelong learner from talented, brilliant, academic minds. Consider iTunes U. Harvard, Yale, Texas A&M, Stanford, and more are filling your iPod with academic lectures, videos, and notes just in case you want to take advantage of them during your self-directed learning. Once again, it is free. These schools are also using the iTunes portal for students who show up in person, so consider the fact that the information you are getting is current and you have one heck of a deal on your hands.
Here is what I am thinking. You have a few high school students who are very bright. They are ready for the D1 university challenge, so they think. Why not corral up a few of them and put together a PLN that meets before school, after school, during a study period, or even virtually. Work through a course with them so they can see what university work is all about. They will either prove their muster or realize it is time to step it up. Regardless, what the Open Yale site says is the goal of the project stands very true in this instance:
This approach goes beyond the acquisition of facts and concepts to cultivate skills and habits of rigorous, independent thought: the ability to analyze, to ask the next question, and to begin the search for an answer.
We hope these courses will be a resource for critical thinking, creative imagination, and intellectual exploration.
I could not say it better myself.
This is learning for the love of learning. Challenge for the intrinsic motivation. Intellectual stimulation as a voluntary mental workout. When did these things get left out of the standards in school? Oh, yeah. When they were not on the test. What an opportunity this is!
Interested in some online Guided Reading practice via games? Then you might find Roy the Zebra worth your time.
You will find digital stories that you can scroll through one virtual page at a time. Included with the stories, you will find pre and post questions and literacy worksheets for vocabulary practice. You will also find games that help with alphabetical order, double consonants, high frequency words, singular or plural words, rhyming words, and much more.
If your early readers need literacy practice then this might be the site for you. Give it a try and shoot me some feedback in the comments as to the pros and cons.
It snowed a lot in east Texas today. Never happens. So our 5th grade science teacher took the initiative and taught the water cycle outside in the snow. The kids loved it. We knew the snow would not last all day, so he did a video podcast about it. Check it out here.
This is his first adventure into podcasting, so let him know what you think in the comment section here. We have big plans to do more science podcasts along the river in Beavers Bend State Park in Oklahoma in the near future. Stay tuned.
At TCEA in Austin last week, I had the opportunity to present with one of my co-workers. She is an awesome educator in general, but her love for her students is obvious in her curriculum. She works very hard to tie in all types of technology to engage the students and make her job more efficient.
Our presentation, “Web 2.0 in the Elementary Special Education Classroom,” focused on a number of technologies and procedures she uses and the process with which we do it. We had a nice crowd of about thirty for 8:00 in the morning. Morning sessions are tough, as we all know. Thank you for those who crawled out of bed for the early sessions. We enjoyed the discussion.
One item that was brought up was copyright. My co-worker shared her next goal was to have her students read their books and record them for classroom use. Her books on tape are wearing down, to say the least. One guest in the audience called her on it saying it was breaking copyright policies. Our discussion with her did not seem to change her mind. She felt that since she was a librarian she was obligated to let us know we were breaking the law. Another audience member attempted to clarify for her that no monetary damages were being had to the book publishers and that they would not have anything to sue for. Besides, who would sue little kids reading stories while learning?
So, I did what every Texas teacher should do. After the session ended, I called ATPE and asked for legal services. I requested a copyright attorney, and after a minute or so on hold, I had the lawyer answering all of my copyright questions:
Question: If we record our students reading library books in the classroom for current and future use, are we breaking copyright law? Answer: Abosolutely not. It is an acceptable practice. Why would that break copyright law? (I thought I as asking the questions here.)
Question: If I post said recordings of those students reading those books onto the website for parents to download them as podcasts to hear their children, am I breaking copyright law? Answer: Absolutely not. If you are not selling them or altering them and selling them, there is no breach of copyright law. Again, they are acceptable educational uses of content.
Thank you very much. I feel vindicated in our actions. I have my attorney supporting my position and our legitimate use of print materials and technology in our instructional purposes. I just wish I had had the time to call the attorney during the session to alleviate any of the concerns our audience member might have had. Her belief came from a session she had attended. Hmmm. A lesson learned for me here is that for legal advice, trust the attorney who specializes in your field and would cover your rear in court. I would also suggest you not say, “I read it on Scott’s blog and it must be true.” Call your own representative that SPECIALIZES in your area of concern. I hope that clears up any confusion that might have arisen in the session conversation. We felt like we were correct in our position, and our attorney supports that position.
Isn’t it nice to have that education attorney to lean on for advice? For those not familiar with Texas and the associations to support educators, ATPE is the largest in our state. Texas does not allow collective bargaining, so spending a lot of money to join a union really is useless. My dues are $130 a year, and I receive all the free legal advice and assistance that I might need in a situation like this. One 800 phone call and I am on the phone with one of the in-house, education-focused attorneys. It is a nice feeling to have for times such as these. (FULL DISCLOSURE: I served on the board of directors of ATPE for four years, but I have been a member since 1997. This has no bearing on the response from the attorney, but my praise for them is warranted from my experience and I did not want my previous leadership with them to be hidden when reading my opinion.)
With all of that being said, below is the Keynote presentation on SlideShare and the MP3 recording (I edited out the lengthy copyright discussion/debate to eliminate further confusion). If you have any comments or questions about the presentation, please feel free to leave a comment here or email me. I can pass all special ed specific questions on to my co-worker.
Thanks again for the great turnout. We enjoyed the conversation.
Michael Wesch, creator of the video Visions of Students Today, recently posted on how the digital divide occurs within all cultures. His video had what seemed to be an all-white make-up. While that was not the intent, it was the outcome. Consider his post and the discussion in the comments section. Nobody is pulling the race card here. What they are doing is generating the discussion about access. What are we doing to close the digital divide?
How can we get more technology in the hands of those who cannot afford it? More importantly, consider that the technology use we implement in the classroom may be all some of our students get anywhere. If every educator uses the same amount of technology you do with that student, how well prepared is he/she at the end of the day?
Ellen Petry Leanse has a powerful story to tell of her escape from the political unrest in Kenya during the presidential elections over the 2007 Christmas holidays. She and her 12 year old son were there volunteering in an orphanage as well as other humanitarian work.
I first encountered her story January 15th on Guy Kawasaki’s blog as a guest post. Her writing moved me. Something inside of me kept saying to contact her and help her share what she and her son went through. As Google would have it, her email came up in the first try, and by 8:11 AM I sent off a personal plea to her to share her narrative through digital storytelling.
By 9:34 Ellen had taken me up on the offer and we were off on a plan. Since she lives in CA and I live in TX, logistics said the use of Web 2.0 tools were in need. With very little instruction, Ellen had read her blog post over the phone into my GCast account (I gave her my PIN to access it). The recording quality was awesome! My next step was to gather pictures of her events. By 9:57 she emailed me a picture to get my mind rolling with ideas. A trip to her Facebook photo album allowed me to harvest a number of great shots. I visited Flickr, did a Creative Commons search, and borrowed a few very well taken photos from others witnessing the events in Kenya. I was well on my way to helping Ellen and her son. Or so I thought.
Honestly, as I moved through the process, the story began to touch me even more. Then it hit me. Now, it was helping me. I needed to tell her story to others soon, and I had plans to present a professional development session to a private, Christian school. Their curriculum is driven by the Classical Education model(I can hear them shriek from here as I link that to Wikipedia ;). For those not familiar with the model, it is founded on a trivium consisting of the school of grammar (K-5), logic (6-8), and rhetoric (9-12). Students at this school must complete a rigorous course load that includes fine arts, several languages (Spanish, Latin, with Greek as a high school option), and a senior thesis. The thesis is based on a 20-30 minute presentation (after a year of research on a self-selected topic) in front of a panel of professionals and then defend it for a like amount of time from the panel’s questions. And this is high school. Wow! Now consider that they start defending and debating their work in middle school and you have some real world preparation going on there.
Since this was a curricular program unlike many that I had been involved with personally (although I had studied in my graduate work), I knew I needed some professional opinions. Enter Jen Wagner and Vicki Davis. These two ladies gave me advice about the Classical private school setting via email, previous blog posts, and even Twitter. Both offered even more assistance, but they had done such a wonderful job with the digital archives of their blogs sharing their work, I didn’t need to bother them any more. The common thread was found, and I knew what I needed to do. Not focus on technology. Huh?
I decided I was going to use digital storytelling to help drive home the importance of these tools for students to use on their own. My focus was the six senses Daniel Pink shares in A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future: Design, Story, Symphony, Empathy, Play, and Meaning. Those senses really drive home the importance of preparing our youth for a continually changing economy.
Classical Education’s focus on logic and rhetoric in the secondary classes are a perfect fit for what Pink has in mind. I zeroed in on Story because it can drive emotion in a person. How you tell a story is so important to how it is perceived/received. The strength of logic and rhetoric from the presenter’s side of the table relies heavily on one’s ability to gain audience buy-in. Story can do that. Story can make or break a case in front of a panel (or classroom). This is what these students are looking for to give them an edge in the world outside of K-12 schooling. As we have read with the articles on over-achievers and their battles to differentiate themselves from the rest of the pack for college admissions, Story can be more important than ever.
Here is what I shared with the teachers after presenting Vision of Students Today (both the K-12 and Wesch’s versions), Pink’s views, and renderings of revised Bloom’s:Blog post from Guy’s blog This post had an emotional appeal to it for me, but not everyone is as visual mentally when they read as I am. So there had to be another step.
GCast GCast Podcast (Click on MP3 link to hear audio recording.)Add to my PageEllen did a wonderful job of reading her ten minute post over the phone. Not only did this add to the impact of the story, it allowed me to have an audio archive in her voice to build on to the story’s presentation. And…GCast is FREE.
Animoto Download Video: Posted by woscholar at TeacherTube.com.
This piece is perfect for those wanting a short, visually driven narrative. It delivers the story (without the personal narrative). Animoto offers a VERY easy method to create 30 second videos for FREE and with NO hassle. I find this to be a powerful way to begin a writing session. Use it for the prompt. See what develops. Voicethread-
Voicethread gave me the chance to use the entire audio clip with 25 pictures. As many of you know, the audio commenting feature of Voicethread will be a great way to extend the conversation for Ellen and her son with others interested in what they lived through. I have comment moderation on temporarily until I am sure Ellen is ready for the conversation to take place. After all, it is her story to tell.
My last piece needed to be high impact. While sorting through the pictures in my office, I dreaded the time it was going to take to choose music for the background. A story this emotional had to have something special. I had my iPod playing in my Altec docking station, randomly choosing the order of songs for me. Since I was concentrating on the photos and the story they were telling me, I was just subconsciously listening to the music. That is, until Brandon Heath’s “The Light” came on. I started humming while I was working. Then the lyrics started coming out (good thing everyone else had gone home for the day). I got to the chorus, and it hit me: “Stay close you people with your broken hearts….as we move toward the light” That was it. Perfect. The good Lord blessed me once again. I fired off an email to Brandon (music minister in The Woodlands, TX) to ensure permission to borrow his song for this cause with the understanding that if he did not like the final product I would pull his music out of it immediately.
Next thing, download Ellen’s audio narrative, edit out parts that fit the pictures and music and yet keep the strong storyline intact. After a bit of time in GarageBand editing the audio and iMovie piecing the video together, I was ready. One week, almost to the minute, after reading Ellen’s post, I found myself presenting her moving story to a K-12 school needing to hear what she has to say and willing to learn about the tools it takes to tell the world.
TeacherTube Download Video: Posted by woscholar at TeacherTube.com.
Thank you, Ellen, for your wonderful heart and willing spirit. Your words are now a part of the many that hear them from this blog and beyond. I pray your works in Kenya expand the lives of the families you touched there.Thank you, teachers of CHS, for your open minds and hearts. I know you have the best things planned for your students. Your enthusiasm is unmatched by any group I have worked with. I thank you for inspiring me to keep up the faith. We can improve what our students face in the classroom. I will be your willing guide any opportunity you will let me.
Photo Credits from Presentations:
Ellen Petry Leanse
http://flickr.com/photos/tarique/archives/date-posted/2005/02/15/
http://flickr.com/photos/dennissylvesterhurd/
http://flickr.com/photos/iaindc/
http://flickr.com/photos/runningtoddler/
http://flickr.com/photos/lo_/
http://flickr.com/photos/7270375@N03/
http://flickr.com/photos/httpwwwactionpixsmarukocom/
http://flickr.com/photos/bjornsk/
http://flickr.com/photos/paulkist/archives/date-posted/2007/11/26/
http://flickr.com/photos/44222307@N00/archives/date-posted/2008/01/01/
Music in iMovie: The Light by Brandon HeathTechnorati Tags: Scott_S_Floyd, podcasting, Kenya
I had the privilege to be a part of a conference call (Yes, land lines. Oh the embarrassment.) with 
Interested in some online Guided Reading practice via games? Then you might find 
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