Running Low on Excuses - Discovering the Technology Integration Matrix

It's hard to believe, but at this late date in the year 2012, many of our schools still have a long way to go in terms of integrating technologies into our classrooms.  However, with the advent of new devices and web tools, along with a host of new research and publishing of best practices, the path is getting more obvious and accessible all the time.  Schools are running low on excuses for not taking the tech leap.

A new tool that really lays out a clear path is one I discovered last year, that I believe can become a really valuable resource to teachers, schools, and districts. It's called the Technology Integration Matrix. It was developed by the Florida Center for Instructional Technology, and the purpose of the matrix is to help teachers and schools of students in k-12 learn the stages of technology integration that seem to be most effective with student learning. I think that for teachers who struggle with technology - those who are tentative or fearful, a tool like this can be a real game changer.  In a sense, it is a tool that holds your hand through the process, and calms reservations and fears like, "am I doing this right?"

Even better is the interactive format in which the matrix is constructed.  Each cell in the matrix has at least one or more videos which illustrate the integration of technology in classrooms where only a few computers are available and/or classrooms where every student has access to a laptop computer. For schools or teachers who hesitate because of lack of access, this is a fantastic feature!

Besides just suggesting ideas, the matrix has built in models for teachers to explore specific ways technology can be integrated meaningfully into the classroom.

To date, this is one of the best resources I have found on the web for technology integration in education.  Please help get the word out to teachers and schools about this great resource! 

What I'm Reading Lately (weekly)

• Leadership 2.0 – Open Course #leadership20
  tags: leadership edtech edtechsec
• Open Letter to the Teacher Who Said “I Hate Technology.” | Ecology of Education
  tags: pd edtech teacher edtechsec
• The 4 Types Of Students Who Should Consider Online Learning
  tags: onlinelearning edtechsec
• 50 Useful Apps For Students With Reading Disabilities
  tags: apps reading disabilities sped edtechsec

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

What I've Been Using Lately - Screen Casts

I know I know, screen casts are nothing new.  I've been teaching middle school students how to use them for several years now.

Usually at some point during the year, almost every student in one of my tech classes wants to share with me about a new tool they have found that they are very excited about.  Enter - screen casting! This is really an ideal time to show them how to screen cast, and then have them create a screen cast showing off their new tool, and describe how they are using it.  They share these with their class mates, post them on their blogs - fun all around.

I don't know why it's taken me so long, but last year it finally occurred to me that I was spending way too much time searching around YouTube and Vimeo for the perfect short instructional videos to post on my course sites.  One day that bell went off in my head and I said, "Duh, make your own!" I have been a screen casting fool ever since. Here's an example of one of my Hollywood-worthy screen casts about adding a gadget in Blogger.

Why is screen casting better than making a regular instructional video?

One word - time.

I've made plenty of regular instructional videos over the years using my camera and iMovie, and I love them and reuse them at every opportunity.  However, the main downside is, they are more time consuming to make.

It takes very little planning to make a good screen cast. Here are the stages for making a basic screen cast:
1. have a general outline of talking points - if you don't, a lot of your screen cast will be sounds of you going, "aaaaand, uuuummmmm, sooooo," and so forth.
2. Have the pages and tabs you are going to use already open. No sense wasting screen cast time waiting for your lethargic browser to load a page.
3. Keep it short - focus your screen cast on ONE thing.  This is infinitely more useful for students, and far more flexible for you in terms of being able to use the screen cast over again.

What to use?
Nowadays I primarily use Screencast-o-Matic, because it's easy and free.  However, there are other good tools out there. Two others I have used quite a bit are Jing and Screenr - both very easy to use.

Want to increase reading comprehension and engagement? Try making a Book Trailer

Let's face it - book reports are a thing of the past. They are boring to write and boring to read. It's one of those activities that sucks the life out of a a great book for the student, and doesn't give a teacher any more information than what a short discussion or a few quick comprehension questions could address.

However, just because a student has read a book doesn't guarantee a depth of understanding - that's why we do lots of comprehension activities and formative assessments as we go along. But when they are all done, how do we know what they got out of that?

One way to help teachers understand, and to help students engage more deeply with the reading and understand the importance of the elements of literature, is to have them create Book Trailers. 

Book Trailers for Readers is actually a site I found awhile back that contains pre-made book trailers for kids to watch - they are like watching a movie trailer to get you excited about watching a movie.  I used to show them in class once in awhile to build anticipation for a new novel we were about to read.

Book Trailers for Readers also features trailers created and submitted by students. They even have a slideshow (Prezi) that helps show kids how to do it.
Last year, my junior high students started making their own - here's what we did:

1. We reviewed many of the book trailers on the Book Trailers for Readers site, as well as their "How To" page and documentation. We looked for elements they had in common (narrator taking on the 1st person voice of the main character, asking leading questions or making leading statements, setting the scene, building anticipation to the "conflict" point in the story and not going beyond that, use of images, sound, etc.). We used these to develop a checklist of elements crucial to a good book trailer.
2. We built a book trailer as a class using a novel we had recently read.  We used a story board to plan the video and plugged in some of the elements we wanted to use.  Students took on the jobs of script writing, gathering images, narration, filming, finding sounds, etc.We put it all together in iMovie and that was it. As a class we were able to complete this in about 2 class periods.
3. Students selected a favorite book from class from the past year (it's ok if some selected the same), and went through the same process to build their own book trailers - they had to peer review at points along the way.
4. Once everyone had the idea, they looked forward to making book trailers about much of the literature we were studying in class. 

Book trailers are a great way to encourage students' creativity and enthusiasm for reading, and also help them to spread the word about great reads!

What I've Been Using Lately - BibMe

In an attempt to try to be more regular with my postings, I'm going to initiate a series called "What I've Been Using Lately".  This will mainly feature tools that I find myself using often and transparently either with my own prep work or with students.  I have many of these kinds of tools in my arsenal, and over the past few years I've written about many of them in this blog.  It struck me as I looked through my archives recently that many of the tools and techniques I've featured here are ones I still use - I would call those kinds of tools "worth it".

So today, I'm going to highlight a great little tool that English teachers probably hate but that I LOVE!  It's called BibMe and the sole purpose of the site is to help users create bibliographies in MLA or APA format.  Now I learned how to do all of this stuff the hard way back in high school, but after college, my need for such skills kind went way down.  However, now that I am once again taking courses, as well as publishing once in awhile, I do have a need.  Granted, once you learn the system, citing your sources is not all that difficult, but it is time consuming. Besides the usual - books, magazines, newspapers, websites, journals and films - BibMe makes it easy to cite weird sources like interviews, lectures, radio and tv shows, encyclopedia entries, and even photographs.

BibMe searches lots of internet databases so you have to do very little, if any, entry yourself.  Citing a website? Just copy and paste in the URL. Citing a book or journal? Type in the ISBN. Citing an article or something where you don't know the ISBN? Just type in the title and author.  BibMe is fairly accurate at coming up with what you're looking for.

Best of all, if you sign up for a free account with BibMe, it keeps a list of all of the sources you've listed in your account, so you can go back to them any time.  Even if you don't sign up for an account, it still keeps a listing of your works cited for quite awhile.  BibMe allows you the option to download your lists to Word as well. 

With the click of a button, BibMe will change formatting between APA and MLA - simple!

Citing sources can be a time consuming process. I would say that if your high school students have a good handle on how these formats are supposed to look, let them use BibMe!

Beginning to use QR Codes - some quick ideas

I'll admit QR codes were a bit of a mystery to me until recently.  I've seen the funny little codes in magazines and advertisements, and I understood that if you had an app on your phone you could scan them and get...somewhere.  Beyond that I didn't give them much thought. However, it seems I've been reading about them everywhere recently and they really can have some practical uses - even in the classroom.

The first thing I did was get a free QR reader app for my iPhone - I got one called Qrafter.

This app is pretty basic - touch it, hold your phone over a code and it automatically scans and takes you to the site.  Handy. I read an article that talked about how easy it was to generate your own QR codes for a website - another free app called QR Code Maker (for iPad on iTunes).  It's a little glitchy, but when you put in a URL it will generate a nice code every single time.  You don't need an app or a mobile device to generate codes - you can make them for free online at many sites. I made a code for my class blog page, which is my central site for all of my courses.  I printed it out on a big page and hung it on my classroom door.

Then I decided that since those apps were free (and easy), I'd put them on my middle school students' iPads - also easy.  The kids had seen the codes before.  The first thing they did was use the reader on my code I'd put by the door. That was the extent of that learning curve.

A few weeks ago the kids had done some art projects - in the process they documented their work with pictures and video, and later narrated their process and edited these to make personal art documentaries.  They had posted these short films on their blogs.  The finished artwork is hanging up in my classroom.  The students went to the blog posts they'd made of their documentaries and used the URL's to make QR codes on their new iPad app, QR Code Maker.  They printed out small codes, and tacked them to the side of their artwork.  Now the students with their iPads, and visitors with phone scanners, can scan the code next to their artwork and connect immediately to a video the students created which documents the process they went through in creating that piece of art.

WHY SHOULD YOU TRY THIS? This can be a great way to "go deeper" into student work - especially when they are working on projects that may involve skills, performance and various creations.  QR codes are a simple link that can help a student put physical and virtual elements together.  They can bring the depth of a project to a virtual and a physical audience.

My middle school students are currently working on a research project in which they are using some old photos displayed in the school and creating web pages about those photos that expand the information with their research.  They will create QR's for those pages that we can attach to the photos in the hall.  Visitors to our school will then have a way of learning more about the old photographs and our local history.

In the meantime, the kids are really getting into generating codes for their blogs - maybe a little overboard...

Disrupt their thinking - teaching students about propaganda

Digital media may be the single largest divider that defines the gap in generations today.  Kids grow up now consuming far more digital media in the forms of online videos, games, and even television, than my generation ever did.  A reading skill I developed as I matured was the ability to be able to be a discriminating consumer of what I read - but it was so much easier back then!  We could neatly categorize advertisements, opinion pieces, political rhetoric, etc. The techniques weren't that tricky to spot.  One only need to read the back cover of a book and a little "about the author" to be able to figure out what might be the underlying point of view or message of a novel.  What kids "consume" today looks radically different, and can no longer be neatly categorized.  YouTube brings them videos for entertainment and information, but the "about the author", if it even exists, is not as helpful, and often they know nothing about the messenger.  Videos go viral - if everyone is watching them that means they're good, right?  The messages are many, and mixed.

In my middle school technology course, I spend a lot of time teaching kids how to create impactful messages using video.  There is a lot of noise out there, and if they want their message to be heard, there are techniques they need to be able to use skillfully to give it a chance.  In much the same way it is also equally important that they are able to be good, discerning, and critical consumers of what they see.

A new UK website, Digital Disruption, is beginning to be a great resource for helping to teach this important way of thinking and awareness to kids.

Digital Disruption is a website aimed specifically at teens, and focuses on 7 commonly used propaganda techniques in video.  Students are then given a series of simple but thought provoking polling questions - asking them things like if they would share the video they just saw.  The site accepts contributions of actual YouTube videos to use in its lessons, which is very useful for teaching this at a realistic level.

The lessons first introduce students to common propaganda techniques, then move on to a series of thoughtful lessons using actual videos.  Discussion suggestions, activities, and polls are given - all of which help to create an awareness and a savviness among the students.  It may not make them experts on propaganda, but the Digital Disruption headline question, "Who Owns Truth", surely gets them thinking more critically about what they view.

It's important that we teach kids that they need to learn how to use the internet, and not let the internet use them.  Tools like Digital Disruption are going to become a necessity for teachers and parents to have in their toolbox. Kids need our guidance - and this particular skill, or awareness, is something we have to mindfully teach -we simply cannot expect our students to figure this one out on their own.  When it comes to the digital media our kids consume on a regular basis, it's crucial that they understand "No One Owns Truth".

Some help for teaching with your iPad

Earlier this year I came across this great wiki called teachwithyouripad.  For those of us using iPads in class for the first time this year, this simple wiki is a link to a wealth of possibilities for helping students to use these as true learning devices.

On the main page of the wiki are four short sections, from the simple (#1. What is an iPad?), to the more useful for those of us who have fully implemented them (#4. How do I teach with it?).  The number 4 section has one link, which opens to a list of 14 sample projects, links included, that could be easily implemented into any classroom.

The bottom of the main wiki page includes a link to a full "Teach With Your iPad" online  newspaper, which seems to be regularly updated, and is a wealth of ideas, articles, and app lists for all grade levels and subject areas.

I really like that none of the options or projects presented are complicated. The iPads are a pretty straightforward device, and both the wiki and this online newspaper seem to be in keeping with the idea of keeping the mystery OUT of them.

Why can't kids search?

I recently came across an article in Wired Magazine called "Why Kids Can't Search".  I'm always interested in this particular topic, because it's something I struggle with in my middle and high school classes constantly, and I know I'm not alone in my frustrations.

Getting kids to really focus on what exactly they are searching for, and then be able to further distill idea into a few key specific search terms is a skill that we must teach students, and we have to do it over and over again.  We never question the vital importance of teaching literacy, but we have to be mindful that there are many kinds of "literacies".  An ever more important one that ALL teachers need to be aware of is digital literacy.  I could go off in many directions on this, but for the purpose of this post I'm focusing strictly on the digital literacy of searching.

In the past, we spent a lot of time in schools teaching kids how to do library research, and how to use a variety reference materials like dictionaries, encyclopedias, microfiche, card catalogs, public records, anthologies, and other sources too numerous to recall.  Many of these forms of reference are no longer used, as they (or incarnations much like them) are all now available to us on the internet.

However, when we made this switch to internet-based resources, we somehow left a gap in education and made no real focus on teaching kids how to find valid, credible, useful resources online.  The result is our frequent frustration with a generation of kids who will still type in the word "Egypt" and grab the first search result that pops up on Google when studying anything remotely related to the topic.

As they get older, kids often employ the tactic of typing a question into the search bar - "How do I find out about mummies in Egypt?"  This actually gives Google a little more to work with - namely the word "mummies", but this additional boost is thwarted because the search is in the form of a question.  Top results yield links to Answers.com, YahooAnswers, and other equally useless (academically speaking) results.  Anyone - you, me, a 2nd grader, or a Kardashian, can post an answer on these sites.  True the internet is becoming more semantic all the time, but we are far from there yet, and these kinds of searches are almost always a waste of time.

The real answer? SPEND TIME teaching your kids the digital literacy skill of proper searching.  It's never too early for them to learn. Are they old enough to learn to use a dictionary or an encyclopedia?  That's the time!  Here are the levels that need to be taught:

1. It begins as a critical thinking and language skill - narrowing their focus to a specific idea, and then selecting the few key terms and some alternatives that will help them.
2. Utilizing the various "search help" tools that many search engines offer - Google offers the ability for kids to narrow the search by time, type (images, news, dictionary, reading level), and also offers a nice advanced search tool.  Some simple Boolean tools, such as +, "and", and - are still extremely useful to know.
3. Critically sorting through the results - is the top result always the best? Often the answer is no.  Google sorts its results based on the amount of hits a URL gets and sorts that way.  It's not so much academic as it is a popularity contest.  Remember, Google can't think (yet), so it's still up to us to make the determination about what will be useful.  Taking some time to teach kids about credible resources, scholastic research-based resources, and most importantly valid resources, is a worthwhile and necessary exercise.  As an example, my students blog, usually about academic topics they are studying in school.  If one of my students posts a movie of their re-enactment of Lincoln delivering the Gettysburg Address, their post will likely pop up in any given search about Lincoln and the Gettysburg Address.  Are they a valid scholastic resource? Are they experts? 'nuff said.
4. Sometimes, supply your kids with the internet resources you want them to use.  If your focus is on finding the information within a given resource, maybe it's not necessary to always pile on the extra step of searching for the resource - especially if this is still a skill they struggle with.  You can go old school and write the links on the board, or the easier route of pasting or embedding the links into your class webpage.  Either way, this practice actually sets a bar for students - they become more accustomed to the type, format, and quality of resource that is valid for academic research. Obviously, they need to learn and use search skills, but this "calibration" every once in awhile is actually a good thing for setting expectations.

Here are some links that offer some resources for teachers trying to teach students the digital literacies involved with searching.

How to Spot a Fake Website
Great Tech Expectations: What Should Elementary Students be Able to do and When?
Boolify Project: An Educational Boolean Web Search Tool (very visual)
Boolean Searching on the Internet
Rockwell Schrock's Boolean Machine
Web Search Strategies in Plain English
KidRex - a Kid Safe Search Engine

No Excuses for not learning something new!

The "No Excuse List" is a simple page with a list of not-too-many links (I like that) of some great resources for learning.  Links include some of the best resources out there right now in the areas of academics, music, programming, how-to/DIY, languages, and other links. If you want access to some great resources for building your own knowledge, adding to your own units or lessons, or resource links for your students, this site has narrowed the field to a manageable browsing list.

I am always leary of sites that include things like "The Top 100" of anything - it's just too much to look through all at once!  I like this list because it is not too long, and has done a pretty good job of selecting some of the top credible sites that are out there right now.

Want to learn more?  There's No Excuse now!