Generation YES Blog

Wow2! The Women of the Web discussion last night definitely deserved a double-WOW. Lots of great questions and conversation about GenYES and student empowerment, Seymour Papert, technology integration, project-based learning with technology, and more. The hour flew by, and reading the chat log today it looks like the backchannel was just as informative! Lots of great links and questions.

Here’s the podcast link on the WOW 2.0 website.

Many thanks to Sharon Peters, Dr. Cheri Toledo and Cheryl Oakes for being gracious hosts and expert interviewers. And good thoughts out to Jen Wagner who had to instead attend a funeral for a colleague.

Sylvia

Women of the Web 2.0 hosts weekly web chats about education and new technology. Tuesday, June 3. I’m proud to be their 79th guest!

Join us at 6-7PM Pacific time for a chat about Web 2.0, student empowerment, and gender issues in technology and education. Details here at the Wow2.0 website.

Please feel free to add to the wiki if you’d like to suggest questions and topics.

Sylvia

A couple of weeks ago I participated in a podcast about technology professional development. The interviewer was Matt Vilano, editor at THE Journal. Matt said afterwards that it went so well that it might become an article, and sure enough, it has!

Five on Five: A Dialogue on Profession Development

A quintet of educators gathers to sound off on what works and what doesn’t in the ongoing mission to train teachers to use technology in classroom instruction.

Thanks Matt for turning an audio interview with 5 people on the phone into a great article! Plus, they did caricatures of us — kinda cool.

If you are an auditory learner try this:

Five on Five: Professional Development Podcast

Thanks also to the other podsters - Kristin Hokanson, Jim Gates, Bob Keegan and Cathy Groller. It was so much fun we kept talking after the time was up!

Sylvia

At TCEA 2008, I heard a number of teachers say that they are able to use wikis or make podcasts at their schools, whereas blogs were discouraged or blocked. My initial reaction was that it was simply a knee jerk reaction based on popular uses of each. Blogs = MySpace = pedophiles, while podcasts seem safe and wikis are associated with Wikipedia, which at least sounds educational.

But as I thought more about it, I don’t think it’s that simple. I think it reflects a larger issue of assessment and comfort with the status quo. In most schools, curriculum focuses on student product rather than process.

A wiki is a means to collaboratively get to an end product, something a teacher can look at, assess, and grade. It’s easier to adapt existing curriculum to use a wiki, since most curriculum is also product focused. While wikis may offer some terrific efficiencies for group work, and does provide some support for the collaborative process (like a history of changes,) the strength of a wiki is that at the end of the day, it stands as a completed product.

Podcasts are also a product. Student podcasts can be substituted for the traditional report as the culminating product of a unit. Podcasts created by teachers or other experts are simply a lecture. While there is certainly a lot to learn as a student creates a podcast, the end result is a comfortable, known quantity.

But blogs reflect the process of learning, of going through a learning experience that may not result in a final product. Where’s the report, the culminating evidence of mastery, the final draft? How do you grade a student who might be changing over time? How do you not be involved in the conversation? It almost seems like cheating, after all, you don’t sit down with a student while they are taking a test and discuss their answers halfway through so they can try again.

In this light, wikis and podcasts represent an updated and more efficient way to do traditional classroom assessment, while blogs challenge the status quo. Traditional = more comfortable, challenge = change = discomfort.

Sylvia

Well, we spent time today reconstructing our blog after an attack by a Russian spamer. It’s back up and hopefully a bit more protected now.

Tomorrow I’m off to Austin, Texas for Texas Computer Education Association (TCEA) conference. I have meetings set up and have some sessions marked off to attend. There has been some talk of a Twitter Meet-up (a tweet-up?) at the Hilton lobby bar at 5PM on Wednesday. I’m not sure how to find anyone since all I know of most Twitter-friends is a teeny tiny picture that shows up next to their names!

I suppose I’ll have to use twitter. It’s good that an online tool can help you find out where the people you only know online will be in the real world. (If you’ve missed out on the Twitter obsession, here are 5 Ways to Use Twitter for Good.)

Posts from TCEA 2007
Student Technology Support - Session Podcasts and Handouts
Podcast of a session I did at TCEA 2007 about how to start a student tech support team

But this is what I really believe…
Post about a conversation with a teacher at TCEA 2007 conflicted about her own beliefs about project-based learning and what she was actually doing in her classroom.

TCEA - Austin, Texas
My wrap-up of TCEA 2007. I met Wes Fryer exactly one year ago there, and he was blogging up a storm and creating podcasts. What a year it’s been since.

This year, you can find me on twitter. See you there!

Sylvia

Tired of being deluged by advertising about cartoon bees? Have your students meet a real bee movie maker and neurobiologist Brian Smith. Something for everyone here - from bee vomit to bee dancing, just the thing for middle school! (Article | Podcast)

Arizona State University sponsors a terrific website called “Ask a Biologist.” Since 1997, the site has answered questions from K-12 students and teachers about biology. Now it is podcasting! These range from interviews with an expert on tiger beetles, nanotechnology, and of course, bee movies.

Arizona schools! You have a special opportunity for a student to be choosen as a co-host for the Ask-A-Biologist podcast show. More details here.

Dr. Alice Christie from Arizona State University has a wonderful site packed with great resources and reading for constructivist educators looking for project-based learning resources. We know Dr. Christie well from her research on student collaboration and GenY, student voice, and many other student-centered papers, presentations, and resources.

The educational technology resource page lists subjects like geocaching, webquests, podcasting, multimedia, and more. Not only are there great examples and ideas, but links to many school websites showing these ideas in action.

For example, one subject that many of our TechYES teachers ask about is spreadsheets, and how to find interesting data for students to use. Dr. Christie’s site has data sources, example spreadsheets, lessons, ideas, articles, and more.

Finally, teachers and grant-writers looking for research to support student-centered, project-based programs like GenYES should definitely look at Dr. Christie’s research and publication page.

Monday May 14th the Generation YES Olympia staff had the opportunity to meet a long time GenYES school, Rose Hill JHS located in Redmond, WA. The day was filled with topics on Web 2.0, Generation YES business structure and student voice. Students had the opportunity to take pictures, videotape and learn about web design from our web master Kevin Dibble.

After a demonstration on VideoCue Pro for Podcasting, the students, teachers and myself went to Red Robin for lunch and conversation. The rest of afternoon was spent at Capital High School, another long time Generation YES school. Scott LeDuc, creator of GenTECH, paired Rose Hill JHS students with his high school GenTECH students. Students were asked to blog on the GenTECH Blog Roll about “ How can students use Web 2.0 tools such as Podcasting, Blogging, YouTube, ect. in an education environment?” The students then had a discussion on the topic and shared projects both schools were working on in GenYES and GenTECH programs.

The day was great and I had so much fun with this school, Thanks Rose Hill JHS!

Check out some of Rose Hill JHS GenYES projects:

http://schools.lwsd.org/RHJH/genyes/index.htm

Here’s a great video about RSS (Real Simple Syndication). RSS is the heart of how blogs work, and how you can easily get great content to come to you instead of searching the Internet for it.

If YouTube is blocked at your school - you can find the video here at the CommonCraft website.

Sure, you can show this video to students (or teachers) to explain how RSS works. But this is a terrific example of a video students can make themselves. Student-made help videos can be a vital resource to teach both students and teachers about how to use the technology your school already has.

You could set up a podcast (vodcast) library, put them on school or district portals, or burn them to DVDs and hand them out to teachers.

Things to point out about this video:

1. It’s short. There is a reason movie trailers are 2 1/2 to 3 1/2 minutes long. If someone can tell the story of Star Wars in 2.5 minutes, your students can explain a concept in the same amount of time. Challenge students to edit, then edit again.

2. It’s low tech. This looks like sheets of paper taped to a whiteboard.

3. Audio is separate from video. Sometimes the audio part of making a video is the hardest part. This type of video can shot, edited, and completed with a voice-over.

4. It’s about your technology. A student-made help video will show exactly how YOUR technology works at YOUR school, not a generic example.

Finally, teaching is learning. Want students to learn more about blogging, podcasting, using the active whiteboard or other technologies? Making a video help guide will help them learn more as they figure out how to explain it to someone else.

GenYES teachers can find additional resources about student-made help guides (both video and printed) in the GenYES Curriculum Guide (Unit 10.)

Putting audio and video on the web is not a new concept. Though using this technology in the classroom is. Many teachers do not have the time to seek out what podcast could improve a lesson or concept. However Podcasting has emerged from just uploading audio and video clips to your hard drive to this much easier cataloging and searching community. Applications such as itunes, Yahoo! Podcast and Odeo make searching pretty darn easy. Not only is it easy to search for educational podcast but also itunes allows you to subscribe to podcasts so the newest version automatically downloads to your itunes podcast playlist. It’s like getting that monthly magazine subscription, but it is free and won’t get lost in the mail!

Invite other schools, experts and new experiences into your classroom with a podcast lesson. Subscribe to these Podcasts to give your students a new experience.

Willow Web- Willowdale Elementary School in Omaha, Nebraska

http://www.mpsomaha.org/willow/radio

Mr.Coley.com- Tovashal Elementary School in Murrieta, CA

http://www.murrieta.k12.ca.us/tovashal/bcoley/coleycast/index.htm

OurCity Podcast- Student produced podcasts from all over the country

http://www.learninginhand.com/OurCity/index.html

Special thanks to Tony Vincent for telling me about all of these great resources! Great job at NCCE Tony!

PS Check out our podcasting handout with ideas for GenYES projects, tech tips, and more.