Thing 21 (Plus): Capstone Reflection on Things 15-21

As I have explained in my last few posts, I will be using a number of the tools from this course in planning and preparing materials for AP World History, Model UN and History of Thought.  This course has exposed me to a number of great tools that will help me reach more kids in more diverse ways and, hopefully, improve their learning of skills and content.  The tools will also allow me to vary the methods kids use to respond to assignment materials and tasks.

What I am planning will involve them applying technical tools and skills to various levels of thinking.  They will also allow the kids to do many of the tasks when it is most convenient for them.  Some of what I will do will allow students to test themselves until they reach minimum competency or higher. I have much thinking, planning and creating to do this summer.  It will be fun.

The Thing that has been my focus for the last third of the course has been Virtual Classrooms.  I am really jazzed to put together a very usable web site for my AP History course and, if I have to, plan and produce an online environment for my Model UN course.  For my AP course, the kids will use the site that I created as well as the publisher's online textbook site.  I have also created a Facebook group called Bacon WHAPped History as a means to communicate with my students quickly and as a container for RSS feeds on topics useful to the course.  While I want them to connect to this page, I do not expect them to "friend" me unless they want to.  I never "friend" a student. 

I have gotten an excellent education through this course.  It sparked all kinds of ideas and fired me up as a teacher to try and to do new things.  I want to thank you, Ron, for modifying the generic version of this course to fit our "needs" and responsibilities here in Michigan. 

Thing 21: Screencasting

Screen cast links from the Summer Assignment page on my AP World History web site. I will be creating a number of screen casts this summer about assignments and how-to for the kids in all my classes. The first two are fairly rough in the delivery, but the content is there and pretty clear and organized.  A number of the kids who are going to take AP World in the fall have already registered for the online textbook.  They told that the screen cast was helpful in know what link to click and what to type in where.  The textbook publisher does put a user through a number of hoops to get access to the site.  The second screen cast instructs kids on how to navigate around the site and to find what parts of it I want them to use.  

The technical aspects of using Camtasia were so easy.  The rough part was me trying to speak clearly and with as little verbal "garbage" as possible.  I am a work in progress.

How to Register for the Online Textbook Site

How to Navigate the Online Textbook Site

Thing 20: Visual Learning

I have used both app-based and online graphic organizers before, but I hadn't used Bubbl.us.  I really liked how simple it was to use.  The learning curve is pretty level.  Kids could pick up on how to use this pretty quickly.  I also had a real reason for creating my web.  I have to come up with various pros an cons to offering Eastern's Model UN class in different ways than we have traditionally done.  It was nice that it automatically adjusted the color of the bubble depending on the layer of the link.  

A number of teachers at Eastern are using Wordle.  I just recently used it, along with Comic Life, to create an invitation for students to sign up for my History of Thought course.  It was pretty easy to use and I think created a visually attractive and useful image with which to "market" what we cover in the course.  We will see how the invite works it magic this week. 

Thing 19: Virtual Classrooms

As I read the requirements for this Thing, I thought back to a conversation I had this week with my principal at Eastern about how tentative the survival of my Model UN and History of Thought courses are right now.  The budget belt is really being tightened and I need a much larger number of kids to enroll in the courses.  One idea I had this weekend was to offer the course as a night course that meets once a week for three quarters of the school year for a half a credit.  Its a structure we had at Forest Hills Central when I was there.  Offering the course as a one-a-week night class would allow kids who are interested, but can't sign up because of prior course needs and commitments during the day to take the class.

Another option is to design the course to run online as a virtual classroom.  This would allow kids to complete assignments when it is more convenient for them to do the work.  For most it would be an overload class in addition to the 6 classes they take during the day.  The major components as structured now are:

• structure and function information about the United Nations and other international organizations
• world geography in the 20th century
• identify specific political, social, economic, and technological concepts and apply them to analyzing current world issues
• training in writing position papers and resolutions
• training in how to speak effectively and extemporaneously in public
• training in how to research information
• training in how negotiate and persuade small groups
• training in how to debate

These course activities are now done on a daily basis because the tradition over the last 8 years was to schedule it during the day to make it convenient for the instructor.  Many, but not all of these components could be part of a virtual course online.  Combining some face-to-face instruction, with screencasts and videos, and online research and writing requirement could be a possible solution to kids who have an interest but not the time during the day to take the course.
Are their potential pitfalls? Sure.  One of the goals of the course is to have students sign up to take it more than one year to build a talent pool that can compete well at Model UN conferences.  That means you would like some freshmen, sophomores, juniors and seniors to take the class.  It would mean a diverse course curriculum to match various grade levels, years of experience and skills with online materials and videos.  Other pitfalls include student access to technology primarily at home as well as access at school.
Time to design and digitalize the course is an issue.  Where to host the course needs to be considered.  Mentoring and monitoring students who you see infrequently is an issue.  However, for all the things you need to think about, this course just might work with an online curriculum.  The district just might go for it because they do want kids to have the experiences.
As someone who has been the Michigan Virtual mentor as both Central High and Eastern, the biggest determining factor for a student to succeed with an online course is self discipline.  Being smart or not being so smart is much less of a factor in my view than how much self discipline a student has. Do they have the emotional intelligence to stay on task, finish work on deadline and seek help when they have a problem.  Along with student emotional intelligence, do the kids have the positive support at home to help keep them motivated. 

Thing 18: Staying Informed

This is the  home page on my computer. I created this iGoogle page about 3 years ago and intermittently change what widgets are on the screen and what blogs I subscribe to.  I check the headlines and blog posts every morning when I get to work (as well as the sites I have bookmarked).  It helps me stay informed and I find interesting articles that I send on to the teachers in my school.  I also find materials that help me in the classroom and interesting tidbits I can share with kids.  Since I am in the midst of creating my AP World History web site, I will try to find a way for me to create a page of world history RSS feeds for use by me and my students. 

Thing 17: Research and Reference

1.  Student Research: I modified the first part of the assignment.  My district subscribes to some Cengage/Gale Infotrac databases.  Additionally, three years ago, I bought a number of Cengage/Gale's reference ebooks.  Eastern has it own page for the databases and ebooks, and, as media specialist, I have worked hard to get both teachers and students to use them effectively. If you would like the non-district login password to check them out, just contact me.  My efforts have been modestly successful.  All the language arts teachers in the high school require students to use the Infotrac databases for research papers, but most of the other teachers in social studies, science, etc. only infrequently require kids to use them.  When I can get kids and teachers to think about using them, and I show them all the ways they can search, cite, and distribute the information they find, they are thrilled that I have saved them a ton of time. 
I compared my databases against those of SIRS Renaissance.  The first thing I noticed is that SIRS allows for natural language searching.  Infotrac is strictly a keyword/subject search engine.  Point to SIRS.  In terms of GUI, I think that Infotrac is more attractive and clearer and cleaner to use. Point to Infotrac.  I did a search on both using the keyword/subject "philosophy".  Infotrac returned many more hits than did SIRS even though SIRS lists the term as a specific subject.  However, while Infotrac delivered more results, it also defaulted to treating the term as a keyword rather than a subject and most of the hits were sources where the term appeared, but did directly deal with the subject of philosophy.  SIRS result list did treat the term as a subject.  More direct hits. On the other hand, Infotrac did deliver more material about the subject of philosophy when the search was modified.  Point to neither.  When I click on the same magazine article of each, I believed that the layout of the page of Infotrac was better organized with its tools more clearly identified, the font was clearer, the citation options included different versions of MLA as well as APA formats.  They both as the same tools for sharing, bookmarking, printing, etc., but Infotrac was easier to navigate then SIRS in my view. Point to Infotrac.

2.  Advanced Research:  One of the many Infotrac databases Forest Hills doesn't s subscribe to is Educator's Reference Complete.  We thought about it a number of years ago, but decided it was too pricy.  For many of the same reasons I like the look and feel of our databases at Eastern, I like the look and feel of this Infotrac database.  I did a search for articles concerning "web 2.0".  The search returned 319 full text articles.  As with our Infotrac results, I like the detail that each "hit" contains.  It is very useful to know not only how many words, but how many pages would printed if I decided I needed a hard copy.  The results list defaults to putting the most recent article at the top.  Sometimes this is useful, but I would prefer that the best results given my search terms are at the top rather than just the most current.  You CAN choose Relevant to resort, but it should be the default.  It is very useful that you can refine your search to only include "Peer Reviewed" materials.  Cuts out the "popular" publications and add authenticity to the results.  As with any database, it does not have everything possible in terms of all publications dealing with every subject of education.  But it comes closer than any other data I have used.

3.  Work Cited-1: 

4. Works Cited-2:

 

Thing 16: Professional Learning Networks

I had enrolled at the Michigan LearnPort site a number of years ago.  Our district used it for us to take the OSHA Safety Review Course. Since then, I have occasionally visited the site, but haven't taken any course through it.  I might have, however, if I hadn't run into this course.

I also have already signed up with Facebook and Twitter.  I joined Facebook primarily so I could communicate with students I had in class about class matters.  I am VERY CAREFUL about what I post.  I NEVER "friend" a student.  They should never be put in the uncomfortable position of having to decide whether or not to accept my request.  I almost always accept a "friend" request from a student and to date have only "defriended" on former student.  Once one Facebook, however, I discovered that most of my out-of-school friends and my family on using it.  It is a great way to keep track of their day-to-day happenings; especially those of my daughter, son-in-law and grandchildren. 

Twitter is something I signed on to, but really don't have the ego to just tweet a grocery list and believe anyone cares.  I do have a couple of students following me as well as my sister-in-law in Boston, but I don't use it much.  I see it as an educational tool.  It could be used as a quick one question quiz tool for kids to respond to.  It also would be very useful for any emergency changes in class work or a schedule.  One of the problems of using Twitter in my school is the iffy nature of cell phone connections.  We are far enough away from a tower at Eastern so that connectivity with some service providers is dependent on weather conditions and location in the building. However, I am connected to a Twitter "newspaper" created by Kelly Kermode called Kelly Kermode's Daily Tweetpaper.  

I have also a member of MACUL Space. Again, I have to admit that I don't take advantage of all the resources and information sources I could use.  I could claim I don't have time, but I what I really mean is that I have not allocated my time to educate myself and use these tools and information sources.

I 

I am presently a member of MACUL.  I have been a member on and off for a few years and I am back on because of the encouragement of Kelly Kermode, a MACUL board member and friend.  Really, I should always have been a member given my job as media specialist and my interests in educational technology.  Part of my problem is that I am not much of a joiner of organizations.  Generally, I will join one, spend the money and think a year later what did I get for the investment.  This happened years ago with ISTE ($39-$212), American Library Association ($65-$130 plus associate group membership fees) and MAME ($50). For the money, I think that MACUL gives me the biggest bang.
If I were to be more active in MACUL, I believe that I would demonstrate a willingness to try new technologies and ideas to get kids to learn whether it is formal content or reading, writing, thinking and technology skills.  Kelly is trying to get me to participate more, share more and learn more from other members. 

Thing 15: Productivity Tools

A few years ago the school district purchased Adobe CS 3 and since then I have had a full version of Adobe Acrobat on my laptop.  I have found it quite valuable to not only see .pdf files (a fairly ubiquitous file type for documents meant to be seen in their original form), but also to create .pdf's from Word files, Comic Life pages, etc.  What I really need to do is spend time with some of the more interesting bells and whistles of Acrobat, like forms, comments, markups, interactive pages, etc. 
I tried to get Media-Convert to load, but it wouldn't.  I used Zamzar before and in a crunch I would use it again. In my job as media specialist, I find having applications on my laptop much more convenient than using an online file converter.  It is a daily occurrence for kids to come in with the .docx files or other Windows files need to be converted to earlier versions.  They also some in with Word Perfect files, AppleWorks files, Microsoft Works files, etc. and I need a variety of software to do the job.  I keep the latest version of Microsoft Office on my laptop along with Open Office, Neo Office, Pages, Numbers and Keynote. The number of kids toting Macs in school is remarkable. It certainly would be cheaper to use an online converter and I have shown kids where to find them and also had kids create text files, etc. using Google Docs, but typically they need this paper, Powerpoint, spreadsheet NOW and can't wait for their document to be converted and sent back to them by email. 
When I want to convert video, I go a bit old school and use a very good application on my desktop: iSkysoft Video Converter. I found that Zamzar was just too slow.  iSkysoft cost me $40 and is worth every penny.  I purchased it because I wanted to convert the YouTube videos I downloaded into a more Mac friendly form.  I download online videos from YouTube and other sites using an Firefox addon called Fast Video Download.  It is one of many, and may not be the best, but it does what I want.  Once I download a video or segments of videos, I can join them and convert them to .avi, .mov, m4v, etc.  I can also take a full video that I have and segment it into file sizes more easily dealt with. 
I created a Google Calendar to link with the AP World History course for the summer. I am working on embedding it on a page of my iWeb-based web site for the course.  I am hoping that using the Google Calendar is easier to work with than the Mobile Me iCal calendars I have used in the past.

Thing 14 (Plus): Capstone Reflection on Things 8-14

As I think I said in an earlier post, I am a word oriented guy.  I have to work hard to visually represent concepts and information.  Some of these tools will be of great assistance to me. The use of Discovery Streaming and iTunes U will aid me not only in visual representations but also help me with visually and audio oriented learners.  I have already begun to require my kids to pay close attention to copyright issues when using photos by having them create a MLA bibliography for all the photos they used or will use for the end of year projects.
For my final project in AP World History, I am giving the kids a great deal of latitude to design their final project using a variety of media and technology.  A screenshot of the choices they have is below.  Once each person or group has designed their final project, I will then go to Rubistar and create an assessment rubric to each project.
My assignment matrix allows kids to read, write, film, record, design, build, etc. They have to choose certain concepts to use, specific regions of the world, and a broad time period.  Within those expectations they have the flexibility to pick a world historical topic.  The one major restriction is that the topic cannot substantially involve the United States. In terms of the form of the project, they can write a paper, write a short story, write poetry, write and record music, create an annotated bibliography, create a Google Lit trip, create a video, create a Photo Story, create a diorama, paint pictures, create a comic book using Comic Life, write and perform a play or skit, or create a strategy and tactics board game.

I would expect that the Marzano criteria that most closely fits this project is similarities and differences.  They certainly will be clarifying, classifying, creating analogies and metaphors. In terms of Michigan standards, most of the projects will satisfy standard 3.2:
Represent ideas using a combination of technologies aimed at reaching a diverse audience (voice, data, video, graphics, etc.)

Thing 14: Online Video and Audio Resources

The Forest Hills District has subscribed to Discover Education alone and as part of the ISD for at least 10 years.  The quality of the videos has gotten much better since it was purchased by the Discovery Channel.  Not only have most, but not all, of the technical glitches been resolved, but the Discovery Channel has included numerous videos and other materials from their own collections.  They have also improved the teacher support for both curriculum materials and for how to save and store videos for particular courses, classes and students.  Below is screenshot of my folders that I created for the high school and middle school.  They are a bit out of date right now, but a year ago I asked our teachers for the key topics they covered in their courses and then searched the Discovery Education catalog and grouped them by core subject and specific subjects inside the folder.
I thought I was doing something that most of the staff would appreciate as a time saver.  What I found out was that most of the staff didn't use it, because most of the staff at Eastern doesn't use the site.  Other schools in the district, however, are regular and heavy users of the site. 
I have just created a new folder for my AP World History Summer Assignment and will put videos in the specific chapter folders that will provide corresponding visual information to the text materials in their book.

As I said above, most of the time there are not technical glitches anymore.  It used to be that the video and audio streaming could arrive out of sync or that the file format of the downloaded video didn't match your player or browser addon.  Today, however, my biggest irritation with the site is that even though the videos are available in QuickTime, there must be some problem with the newest version of the player and the videos.  The site keeps asking me to download version 7 of the player while I am running version 10 of the entire QuickTime app.  I am going to see if this is resolved by trying to watch the videos from home rather than school.  Theoretically, we shouldn't be having any streaming video issues through our specific Forest Hills account.  

Our district just recently opened up iTunes so I can now use iTunes U.  Much of the content is focused on higher education, but I will use some of the shorter audio and video lectures on philosophy in my History of Thought course next fall.  I have looked at the world history offerings and think that many of them are too esoteric for my kids.  But I keep looking for new materials. 

Right now, I think that the video tools are more useful to me than the audio.  In world history, they help kids visualize the concepts and lives of people more concretely than just the textbook. 

Thing 13: Online Interactive Learning Tools

Here is a screen shot of Gig Harbor, Washington.  The home of my daughter, son-in-law and grandchildren.  If my wife has here way, it will also become our retirement destination.

The next screen shot is of Eastern High School during construction in 2003.  The pin locates where my media center is within the building.

On Friday, May 6, I had my AP World History kids go to Quizlet and use the AP World flash cards for review.  Most of they appreciated the fact that the card stack existed and they didn't have to create their own.  I asked them to note some terms they thought ought to have been in the stack and weren't. They gave them to me and I will try to add some cards to the stack.  I could see this as a very useful tool for reviewing key concepts and terms; names and dates; places and periods, etc.

Thing 12: Assessment, Evaluation and Survey Tools

I created a survey of 5 questions that I sent to 10 students by email. 6 replied. Three of the questions could be answered with a choice of button and two were short answer. A flaw with the survey was that when I was asking about their classroom teacher's use of technology I did not mean any course they were taking online through Michigan Virtual.  Almost all of the kids I sent the survey to are taking one or more online classes along with seat-time classes in the building.  Regardless, they all find the composition and tools available in their online classes and, to some extent, the technology of their seat-time classes very valuable.

The rubric I created at Rubistar will be used for the final project of my History of Thought course.  It is a multimedia rubric form for assessing the Comic Life books to be created by each of my students in which they will use two of the philosophers we have studied discussing the key themes of the first film of the Matrix trilogy.  My screen could't hold the whole rubric, so the screen shot will be a partial.  The most important of the criteria to be assessed will be the content.  Using Comic Life is a way for them to have to have a "serious" conversation about the film from the perspective of two different philosophers with, hopefully, much of the padding and fluff removed. 

My district is in the midst of incorporating data-driven decision making, data warehousing, changing our student information system, trying to get more of our teachers to use course managements systems an online assessment tools.  When I was just a media specialist, I learned about these various tools without a vested interest in their daily use because I didn't teach class or have students reporting to me. This year, however, I have been teaching three different subjects and am beginning to wade deeply into each of the data the district uses or will change to next year.  I have to admit that in this first year returned to the classroom, I spend very little time during the school year thinking about or incorporating the data or the tools into my teaching.

I believe that Forest Hills is using whatever data warehousing and analysis system the state of Michigan is using.  I know that some of our teachers have piloted an effort to use the data on their students to refine their formative assessments.  Kelly Kermode at Eastern is taking the lead on assisting teachers in our building.  Two years ago, the district, in a pretty dramatic and arbitrary manner, switched teachers off of Edline to CIMS as our student information system.  It was a pretty painful transition and starting next school year I believe we will upgrade to Power School.  The district, for its part this time, has sought staff imput frequently to review the program and I think it is a "go" for next fall.  

The district itself does not support a particular a course management system.  We rely on the ISD's offering of Moodle and our Michigan Virtual online students use Blackboard.  School Center is used by many of our teachers as the host for their course or classroom web sites. Significant efforts have been made over the last 5 years not to print out surveys and questionnaires, but to use digital systems like Survey Monkey, Zoomerang and, now most prominently, Google Forms.  A few of our teachers have paid to use Quia for the creating and administration of assessments.  

I have to admit I think I have an intuitive sense of both formative and summative assessments, but I REALLY need to formalize my planning and alignment of what I teach to state and national standards.  I want to do it.  It takes time and real thinking beyond the subject content.  I also need to plan out my tests more carefully, especially in my AP World History course. 

Thing 11: Presentation Tools

Here is the link to my Prezi presentation "A Person's National Identity is Determined By..." The screen shot is below.

Here is the Creative Commons license for the presentation.  I just may be dumb, I couldn't figure out how to put it on the presentation itself.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 United States License.

Once I become more facile with how do make presentations, I could see a number of uses for this with students.  In world history I could see kids having to define the criteria for certain concepts and using the visual elements to "rank" which of the criteria were more important for a certain civilization or time period.  In philosophy, I could see my kids using this to create presentations about specific philosophers and the factors that influenced their ideas, both internal and external.
I think this would be much more useful than Powerpoint.  Once you get over the initial learning curve, I think the few choices kids get to make in terms of colors and backgrounds and fonts, requires them to put more into the content.

Here is the screen shot of zoomed in section of my AP World History web page.  I have a Mac and followed the instructions on the System Preferences screen, but it still took me a bit to get just the right feel on the trackpad so it didn't pop up a set of Finder choices.  I also had a problem using Jing to take just the screen shot I wanted.  To engage the app after you have zoomed in requires scrolling across the window and then scroll back.  But I could quite get the selection box to move exactly where I wanted it to snap a picture.  I couldn't get it to go far enough up or to the opposite side of the screen to get the shot I wanted.  Again, this is probably a problem that would get solved with more use and experimentation.  I definitely could use this tool when I try to explain elements of visual primary documents in the AP world history course.  Kids have difficulty identifying symbols and their meaning in cartoons and this would be a big help to spot the more subtle elements.

Thing 10: Digital Storytelling

This has been the most hellacious assignment so far.  It wasn't the technical aspects as much as the concept for the video.  I just couldn't think of anything I wanted or could do in the time allowed in my life.  I then ran into an article on the 7 Stages of Grief and it struck me that I was using some of the same behavior in dealing with this assignment.  The seven stages gave me a structure with which to figure out a short film.  It is not course or teaching related.  I didn't figure out what to do until Thursday and then didn't finish it until Saturday.  It is a short film with the components you required, but I have not shown it to anyone.  Outside of you, I don't think anyone will ever see it, though they are certainly welcome to.  I am sorry if it doesn't meet all the requirements of Assignment 10, but I just had to get it done and move on to the next assignments.  Sometimes you just do what you can do and get on with the rest of what is required.

Here is a link to the video 7 Stages of Grief About a Video

Thing 9: Digital Images

Below is a photo of me taken with the Photobooth application on my Mac. It was uploaded to Picasa.

This is a photo of me taken with the Photobooth app on my Mac with the internal camera.

This is the photo of me after being edited at Picnik.

The photo above was cropped, resized, had the contrast and exposure altered, a drop shadow added and the HDR effect applied.  The link to my catalog of photos (such as it is) is here. I could see myself using the tools to jazz up some photos of paintings or sculpture for my philosophy class to give them some pizzazz.  Of course I would only use images that I had permission to alter.  The coolest use of photo editing software I have seen this year is from one of our social studies teachers who knows something about Photoshop and taught her kids edit a photo of themselves into an historic WWI photo.  Some of the kids are in the trenches, some are in planes, etc.  I don't know if there is an online tool that cuts layers out of a photo. 

 

Thing 8: Copyright and Creative Commons

I gave my students the Copyright quiz I created last week Tuesday.  It was a paper and pen quiz because we didn't have access to computers.  This afternoon I uploaded the quiz questions to Google Docs so you can look at them if you wish. I have two small classes, but the number of kids didn't matter. Most followed the video fine, but did poorly on the quiz.  As a media specialist as well as a classroom teacher, I thought I had done some solid work on teaching kids something valuable about copyright.  Well, the quiz demonstrated that I hadn't done such a good job. After we saw the video and took the quiz, we had class discussions about what main points were made and the questions they asked were astonishing.  They do truly believe they have a right to copy pretty much anything they want and use as much of it as they want for as long as they want.  This summer I will have to use the sites for this lesson to build a much more useful set tools and lessons for me and our teachers to use in the classroom.

I have copyrighted my AP World website using the Creative Commons tools and below is a picture of the welcome page with the copyright notification. What I haven't quite figured out yet, is how to change the html snippet to change the font and size of the type for the text. 

Thing 7: Hands On Activity and Capstone Reflection

Here is the address to the website I created for my AP World History course.   http://web.me.com/infolit/whap/
I had started it last fall, but during the course of the recent weeks (and because of the needs of this assignment) I have added substantially to it.  It is by no means complete, but I have the essential components for the class at the site.  I have tried to create sites that were easy to update and add to and that weren't limited by the rudimentary tools of the district-endorsed host, School Center.  I have yet to find a design or collection of materials that make a site I have created a "must-go-to" place that my students will check regularly.  It has been very much a challenge to get my students to use whatever site I create.  The link above is my latest version of a AP world history site.  I am hoping this one is seen as more useful to the kids.
In the past, I have tried to create a blog for each course, but there were rarely used.  Partly because of technical issues within the district and partly because of lack of interest, my previous blogs went pretty much unused.  One of the biggest reasons I started a Facebook page was because it was a simple means to communicate with a significant portion of my students.  In terms of getting information out to most of my kids, Facebook has proven to be more useful than a dedicated course blog.
I take these courses with you, Ron, because they force me to think out of my normal word and text-based methods of instruction and learning.  I get encouraged to try new things and to discover the new things out there.  I also receive local encouragement from Kelly Kermode at Eastern.  She has been very good at helping me find and try new things. 
Presently, I am having my philosophy students use My Fake Wall to create a fake Facebook page of conversation posts between Rene Descartes and other "friends" and "adversaries" from the Enlightenment.  The posts will revolve around his philosophy and his life.  It will be a "tree free" assignment where they have to send me a link to their Descartes page.  The entire assignment is not "tree free", however.  The description of what I wanted and how it will be assessed was printed out on a single page.  I will look at each of their pages and send them a grade by email.  We use CIMS for our grade management software (hopefully for the last year) and will file their grades digitally from home. 
Most of the class are seniors in their last 3 weeks of high school and I am really enthusiastic with how they have taken to the assignment by using the fake Facebook site.  Previously it had been a challenge for me to get them to use any other source besides their text, but now they are not only using their book, but also actively seeking out additional information from a variety of websites for text and pictures. I am requiring them to cite their sources of information for both photos and text.  They are actively creating a coherent dialog using text and online sources that will explain the ideas of Descartes and his relationships with his actual peers and as well as his intellectual "peers" from the Enlightenment.

Thing 6: Digital Citizenship

Site 1: POP!: The First Male Pregnancy
Address: http://www.malepregnancy.com/

What a great bogus site! Some people put some serious time into creating it. Using Valenza's four criteria, it would superficially seem to meet the standards for a real, valuable website.
Content: many of the subsidiary links works, but when you click on them they really don't tell you much about the science; there is much more about the dynamics of the website itself.
Authority and Credibility: Click on the links to the doctors and you get very strange information. Click on information about the patient and it gets weirder still. Lastly, if you look at the sponsoring organization, it is the John Jay School of Law, a real law school, but not noted for it obstetrics program.
Bias and Purpose: I think this was intended to be a parody site with not real desire to intentionally deceive visitors.
Usability and Design: A very "busy" website with many links to be taken places one or two level deep before the joke is revealed or the link stops working. Attractive design, looks professional, and seems to want to provide you with as much information as it can about this man's pregnancy. It could easily be mistaken for a real site by an unsuspecting user.


Site 2: True But Little Known Facts About Women and Aids
Address: http://147.129.226.1/library/research/AIDSFACTS.htm

Ok, this one is really a fake and seems pretty obvious to me and if you scroll down to the bottom of the page it is all revealed to have been created by a librarian at Ithaca College.
Content: The "facts" are outrageous even for our knowledge of AIDS 15 years ago when the site was first produced.
Authority and Credibility: The sources are bizarre plays on words or strange, but seemingly real journals. Another give-away is the one person cited as a source whose name can be phonetically said as: what a lying fool. Lastly, there is no University of Santa Anita in the United States.
Bias and Purpose: The superficial purpose was to state some "facts" about AIDS, but the real purpose as stated by John Henderson, the librarian, was to create a fake site for his students to learn about critical thinking about the web. I clicked on the link to the Ithaca College library and Mr. Henderson is still working as a reference librarian.
Usability and Design: This was a pretty basic site even by 1996 standards.  It is your typical one-page screed that today would have shifted over to a blog or a tweet page.

For a lesson on the appropriate use of the Internet, I would have the kids read Eight Surprising Web Sites That Schools Can't Access http://mindshift.kqed.org/2011/04/eight-surprising-webites-schools-cant-access/ I would have them brain storm reason why these sites are blocked at most schools.  I would also have them read an a synopsis of CIPA http://www.fcc.gov/cgb/consumerfacts/cipa.html and try to understand why the federal government passed this law.  I would then have them try to figure out how Internet filters could be reconfigured to be more selective in what was blocked and what was allowed.  The class would also have a debate about what was "allowable" content and why deciding what that is is not as easy as it sounds.

For a lesson about personal information on the web, I would have kids read the article Fired for Facebook: Don't Let It Happen To You http://moremoney.blogs.money.cnn.com/2009/04/21/fired-for-facebook-dont-let-it-happen-to-you/  and I would have them read Employers, Get Outta My Facebook http://www.businessweek.com/debateroom/archives/2008/03/employers_get_outta_my_facebook.html.  We would then have a discussion about how much privacy to do have vs. how much should you expect.  Lastly, I would give the kids the assignment to examine their Facebook account and see if they believe they have posted anything that could embarrass them or keep them from getting a job in the future. 

Thing 5: Differentiated Instruction and Diverse Learning

I have tried over my years of teaching to be very conscious of trying to reach different types of learners. I have a weakness in that I am very word oriented. Reading had never been difficult for me. When thinking about concepts, I tend to see them as words and not as images. I KNOW that there are kids who "see" ideas as images much more clearly than me. I work hard at thinking about visual tools like photos, symbols, charts, graphic organizers, etc. that add a visual context to the information I want them to learn. I also try to explain things clearly and provide pronunciation guides and definitions for key words; not just concepts, but difficult vocabulary words from the text they may not have encountered before.
As I mentioned in an earlier post, my philosophy students have just completed a PhotoStory project that required them to answer a series of questions comparing Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, reformulate those answers into a script, find appropriate photographs, paintings, graphic organizers to represent the ideas they are discussing and then add a music track that also appropriately represents the theme and mood of their presentation.
When we get back from Spring Break, we will start a unit on Descartes and they will have to create a Manga book about his life and ideas using Comic Life software. Each student will take a piece of the chapter and translate it the information, concepts, and ideas into two comic pages. While they will be able to use images found at Google and Flickr, they will also have to use a still camera to take pictures of themselves and put them in the documents.
The use of Curricular Supports is an area where I am weak. While I had out pretty thorough project and lesson descriptions, I don't always produce the best assessment rubrics. I really need to work on that and I know my kids would appreciate it more. Generally, I know what I am looking for in the product of an assignment, but I need to be much more specific and clear in communicating all expectations to my students. The Curricular Supports section was very valuable to me. Made me think.
WOW!!! Just got done looking at the history resources at the UDL site and was blown away but the three things there. The Google Maps with Street View and Virtual Museums sites were cool, but the YouTube video on Thinking Like An Historian produced by Stanford University really got me where it hurts. Teaching kids how to use and question primary sources is another weakness and the video made commit to teaching those skills more consciously.

Well, I believe that some kind of text to speech converter software would be useful for some of my students, I don't think Vozme it the tool. It's mechanical voice with lack of emotion would be a problem for some kids who need the auditory context. The good ones with better and more diverse voices are charging, but if the need is there, probably worth the money.

Thing 4: Thinkfinity

I had really hoped that Thinkfinity would have been more useful for lesson plans than it was.  I teach an interesting troika of classes of AP world history, philosophy and Model UN.  Admittedly, I could find some world history lesson plans, but I was really hoping for a substantial number of plans for philosophy and international relations.
Anyway, I did choose a couple of lessons that I could use; one concerning economic forecasting and an interactive lesson from National Geographic on industrialization's impact on the culture and environment of modern-day Japan.

economic forecasting: an internet webquest

http://www.econedlink.org/lessons/index.php?lid=49&type=educator

The Garden: the impact of industrialization on modern Japan’s environment

http://www.nationalgeographic.com/xpeditions/hall/index.html?node=43

I would probably use the economic forecasting and the The Garden lessons in my Model UN course.  Both would be a useful extension of my curriculum and both would require my students to interact with information online.  

Thing 3: Using Skype

My wife and I have been using Skype frequently for the last 3 years; just after our kids and grandkids moved to Gig Harbor, Washington.  I also used it a couple of Sundays ago during my fantasy baseball league's draft.  One of our owners moved to Florida and he participated in the 10 hour draft using Skype between my computer and his.
In my school district, virtually all streaming video feeds are blocked.  If they weren't, I would use it most frequently in my Model UN course.  It would be a blast to try and contact diplomats or kids at other schools in the countries we are representing.  To get some first hand knowledge and just experience the human interaction would be quite an education for my suburban students.

Thing 2: Using Buzzword, the cloud app

I use, and have my kids use, the Google Docs word application frequently.  It has proven invaluable when kids are working in groups and need to share or add information to a document at odd times of the day.  In fact, it was the text tool my philosophy students used to create their script for the PhotoStory presentation comparing Socrates, Plato and Aristotle just before Spring Break.
Using Buzzword instead of Google Presentation took a bit of an adjustment.  The Google Docs interface is very similar to that of MS Office so things are comfortably common and generally easy to find.  Buzzword, as with all Adobe products, take a little time to get used to.  Once I got the feel of the page, I was able to easily start a simple presentation.
Because there are 4 other media specialists in the class, I invited all of them to help edit the presentation.

Thing 1.5: Delicious Bookmarks

There are so many things that one could try to keep track of when using Delicious.  I decided that I would limit my early bookmark focus to Web 2.0, tools, and library 2.0.  There are other tags you can see I used, but I will really focus on these three for awhile.
I also started my own network by going to the Delicious bookmark page for the person who I believe is the future leader for Forest Hills in 21st century educational technology.  That person is Kelly Kermode.  I would strongly recommend that you visit her page.

The link is http://www.delicious.com/coachk

Thing 1: Keyboard Short Cuts

Well, I'm a bit late getting started on the class, but here is the first part of lesson 1.  I had a heck of a time getting the keyboard shortcuts for MS Word to work on my Mac.  What I realized was that I had to overcome the built-in keyboard commands of the Apple operating system to let the keyboard commands of my Office 10 version of Word work. Once I changed the settings, almost all of the commands were identical.  I also had a problem creating the kind of instructional video I wanted using my existing Mac software.  I have had Snapz Pro X screen capture software for a few years, but had never really put it to the test.  When it didn't allow me full use of Word while recording,  I was not a happy camper.  I remembered that Ron had built his instructional video with Camtasia and I downloaded the trial version and it worked like gangbusters.  I made a 4 minute instructional video and uploaded it to Screencast.

Here is the link to the video:  http://www.screencast.com/t/Y9idBJSsv