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Evernote - online personal organizer

I use Evernote personally, and would recommend it to students and colleagues alike. 

Evernote allows one to store 'notes' - little text files - online.  Easily accessible from home, work & cell phone.  Notes can be tagged and categorized for easy sorting.  In addition to text files, one can also record audio notes, or take photo notes with the camera on your cellphone.  What's more, Evernote has OCR built in, so a snapshot note can be searched as text just like any other text note.  All free.

For teachers, it's an extraordinary organizing tool - recording and categorizing the many tasks one has to manage and plan throughout the day.

For students it can serve a similar purpose, as a place to stow reminders on what to bring to school the following day, hints or tips on solving a particular math problem, or even a record of the current working draft of a writing piece.

Podcasting in the Classroom

I've begun looking into the prospect of using podcasting & vodcasting in the classroom.  There are any number of excellent uses for these technologies, and I'd like to highlight one such use.

Students at Woodlands Academy in Castle Rock, Colorado use podcasting to produce 'Owl Bytes'; a weekly student-produced show chronicling the history of technology.


It's actually more of a video podcast, or vodcast, because it displays images and links in sync with the audio narrative that plays.  It demonstrates student ownership over a project, and could obviously be extrapolated into other areas. 

I chose this podcast because it focused on technology, and I am the technology education teacher at our school.  I am considering using this podcast in my classroom to introduce my students to the idea of student-generated content in podcasts, and also to suggest the serial format as one that we can also employ - episodes in a series, rather than one huge master work.

I learned a thing or two about the history of technology from this podcast, and comment both the teacher and students on a job well done!

Robust Visual Literacy: Flikr in the Classroom

I'm just now becoming aware of the possibilities of using Flikr.com in the classroom.

I do a project with my 4th graders titled 'Globally Connected', where they look at the lives of children their age growing up in a country other than our own.

I don't allow students to choose the same country. This usually produces some angst, as most Jewish kids want to do Israel, the Irish kids Ireland, etc. The Korean kids routinely choose South Korea first, and choose North Korea as a distant second place selection only if they have to.

The information sites I direct them to for their research have sparse details about North Korea generally. and even less about the daily lives of kids. But with Flikr...

http://www.flickr.com/photos/yeowatzup/ / CC BY 2.0
Retrieved October 12, 2009

Simply typing the country's name and the additional tag 'children' yielded an array of compelling, relevant images utterly different than what Google Images yields.

There are additional classroom benefits to using Flikr:

• The annotation tool offers the prospect of running commentary about given images.  I wonder if an email address (which many of my young students don't have yet) is the price of admission...
• There is a great opportunity to discuss intellectual property & source citation via the commons.

I'm sure there are others, but these are my initial thoughts.  What a resource!

Save the Earth, My 5th Graders!

So I've got a real, genuine quandry.  This is not a made-up 'doing-it-for-the-class' type of post.

I need to flesh out a rough idea I have for my fifth graders this marking period.  I'm their technology education teacher, and have had the idea that they could get into a project that focuses on environmentalism, but which hits on the ISTE standards at the same time.

I've got my plans set for my 4th graders.  6th, 7th, & 8th grades are all dialed in.  But I'm totally hitting a roadblock with 5th. 


Here's what I've got so far:

• I'm about to do two lessons on internet research, focusing on how to determine the relability of an information source. 
  
  
  
  Thoughts on this topic would be great, expecially in light of our ongoing discussion about the read/write web.  In the era of citizen journalism, how to determine veracity?
  
  
  
  
  
• I'm calling the project 'Earth 2060', and asking my 5th graders to imagine the earth in 50 years - within their lifetimes.  It's a place where non-renewable energy sources have been depleated, and new sources of energy have needed to be instituted. 
  
  
  
  
  
• I want them to work in small groups (I'm thinking groups of 3) to research select energy resources, including:
  
  
  
  
  
  • Wind
  • Solar
  • Geothermal
  • Nuclear
  • Hydroelectric
  • Coal
  • Natural Gas/Oil
  • Biomass
    
    
    
    
    
  
  
• At the end of the project, I'm anticipating that they will be able to:
• Pros and Cons of their energy source
• Defend the energy source they
  
  
  
  
  
• So, I'm asking myself:
  
  
  
  
  
  • What will my students be able to do at the end of this unit?
  • PowerPoint basics
  • Internet research basics
  • MS Word basics (table, list, insert picture, footnotes/endnotes)
  • Use citations
  • Articulate pros and cons for different types of energy
  • Read charts and analyze data!
  • Understand unfamiliar units of measurement (ex: Kwh)
    
    
    
    
    
  • What will student know at the end of this unit?
  • How different energy sources actually work.
  • Energy needs are projected to increase
  • There are tradeoffs for any type of energy (pros and cons)
  • Different websites and information sources have different agendas and points of view.
    
    
    
    
    
  • What will students produce to demonstrate their understanding?
  • A PowerPoint presentation about THEIR selected source of energy, it’s pros and cons, and the ability to argue for it in the face of other alternatives.
  • An accompanying paper articulating their main points.
  • Possible: Research the history of a given energy source, and be able to articulate the positive and hopeful discoveries, along with the discoveries of it’s dangers and negative attributes.
    
    
    
    
    
  
  

Here's what I need help with:

• The PowerPoint & Word skills are ones that I think are necessary at this stage - foundational skills that they can build and expand on in other classes and later in their academic career.  But they feel stultifying and dry.  How to pep them up?  (I'm thinking maybe of using voicestream as an extention for the PowerPoint - you can load a presentation right up in there...)
  
• Any one know of age appropriate resources for students to find this data?  I've been hunting, and so many resources are over their heads.

Something about this whole project feels incomplete.  I'm hoping by posting what I've got here, some of you might help me see what's missing.

Thanks, hive mind!

Globally Connected; Finding Answers

After a little digging, I found answers to some of the questions I had:

1. Question: Where to find blogs specifically from other places around the planet?
2. Question: Do I pre-screen the blog for age-appropriate content?

• Answer: http://comments4kids.wikispaces.com/ - A wiki established to post links to kid-created content worth commenting on.

Details of the origins of #Comments4Kids from Twitter conversations between a group of like-minded educators can be found at:

• http://attheteachersdesk.blogspot.com/2009/04/comments4kids-wednesdays.html?showComment=1254015322109#c4730878677880691336 - 

The question of assessing my student's posts is still an open one...

Globally Connected

I’ve been thinking about ways I can incorporate blogging into some of my student’s lessons, and came across what I thought was a great example. 

• http://mrcsclassblog.blogspot.com/2009/09/dear-kaia-voicethread-and-video.html
• http://mrcsclassblog.blogspot.com/

Mr. C teaches at Noel Elementary, and holds a session called ‘Comments4Kids’ once a week, where his students:

 “…have the privilege of reading blog posts from around the world and leaving comments.”

For instance on one day, his students looked at blog posts from both Qatar and Iowa.

I thought this was an excellent introduction to blogging, in that it permitted students to interact, collaborate, and publish with their peers, and encouraged cultural understandings and a global awareness by engaging with learners of other cultures. 

I’d love to incorporate this type of lesson into some work I do with my 4^th graders, who currently are at work on a long term project titled “Globally Connected”, in which they look at similarities and differences between their lives growing up in the U.S., and the lives of same-age students in other countries. 

I do have some questions about implementation, however.  In particular:

• Where to find blogs specifically from other places around the planet?
• Do I pre-screen the blog for age-appropriate content?
• How to assess my students’ posts?