So what are the NETS? According to the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) website their new National Educational Technology Standard (NETS) of 2007 “identify several higher-order thinking skills and digital citizenship as critical for students to learn effectively for a lifetime and live productively in our emerging global society.” The NETS Project has developed a set of profiles describing technology literate students in four grade brackets (Pre-K-2, 3-5, 6-8, and 9-12). “These profiles are based on ISTE’s core belief that all students must have regular opportunities to use technology to develop skills that encourage personal productivity, creativity, critical thinking, and collaboration in the classroom and in daily life. Coupled with the standards, the profiles provide a set of examples for preparing students to be lifelong learners and contributing members of a global society.” When I looked at the profile for technology (ICT) literate students I became much more aware of what is expected of me in my students technology education.  When I looked at the third profile “Engage in learning activities with learners from multiple cultures through e-mail and other electronic means” I immediately thought of ePals. I didn’t know much about this organization. There is a great video on their site and a document that explains how ePals can help in reaching the NETS.  EPals was created about 12 years ago with 10 classrooms in 4 countries. Now there are 16 million students and teachers in 200 countries. “The company’s mission is to support lifelong learning through collaborative experiences that empower and inspire.” This free service to schools provides the means for students from around the world to connect over their website. Pen pals learn about each other’s countries and cultures. To enhance communication between students of different languages ePals has language translation software in both their community site and in their email browsers. This translation software has provided an additional benefit for non English speaking parents. These parents use the translation software to overcome previous problems of communicating with their child’s teacher. This software if provided free to schools and they gave access to the parents.  EPals provides safe collaborative tools designed for K-12 use, specifically emails and blogs. The project sharing part of this organization would address three of the K-2 profiles:  

2. Identify, research, and collect data on an environmental issue using digital resources and propose a developmentally appropriate solution.  

4. In a collaborative work group, use a variety of technologies to produce a digital presentation or product in a curriculum area. 

10. Demonstrate the ability to navigate in virtual environments such as electronic books, simulation software, and web sites.

EPals projects promote the use of higher order thinking skills. When students have an authentic reason for writing they are motivated to do their best work. Students will write much more for a peer that they are working with and learning with. Working within the ePals framework would also address the seventh profile, “Demonstrate the safe and cooperative use of technology.” I will definitely have to look into ePals for my class next year.  

This week I will be describing Web 2.0 tools for both my use and the use of my students. Diigo has been a terrific tool for me. I’m thinking it is more than my second graders need. But if I were to teach students a little bit older, I think I would sign up for the educator account. I used to have a hard time keeping track of the great websites I had found and bookmarked. Diigo has changed all that because it allows the user to put multiple tags on a website and organize them in lists. Another great feature is that you can share the sites you choose with others. You can share not only the site but your tags, comments and highlights.  My group did this a lot while working on our group project. I am always sharing sites with other teachers at my school site. This site will make it so much easier to do that. I love the highlighting feature. Last year I used to print out web articles because I wanted to highlight important sections and write notes in the margins. I don’t need to print out web sites and articles anymore because Diigo has highlighting and sticky notes features.

Diigo’s introductory video asserts “you are what you annotate.” In terms of social networking, this aspect of Diigo’s social bookmarking helps you to connect with others. There is a description of the Diigo bookmarking tools in Blogs, Wikis, Podcast, and Other Powerful Web Tools by Will Richardson.  I also like the WebSlides, a show of websites in a list. I haven’t used all the features in Diigo yet but it is a great site to know about.

I am going to try Edmodo with my second graders. The site says it was built for teachers and students. It was “built with the privacy of students in mind.” It was easy to set up my side of the Edmodo account. My students weren’t in school this week so they are not signed up. Students are asked to sign themselves up and I think this would be good practice for them. It looks fun and I think students would like to know that they are actually micro blogging.  I can add links of useful websites for them and some of the PowerPoint presentations and videos that I use in class. My students often enjoy watching the PowerPoint presentations and videos over again. This would be an easy way to allow them to do this. There is a lot of great information in the section “Read about Edmodo on…TechCrunch, Mashable, Instructify, Box of Tricks, and Mr. Warner.com.”  Mr. Warner wrote, I can make the homework / spelling posts on Edmodo public (simply by ticking one box), so that the parents can see what their child is expected to achieve and when it is due.” This is a great idea. I think I will try it too. It will help those students that lose their homework and keep parents more informed.

The second site I would like to review is Wikispaces. My district prefers wikispaces for teachers to make their classroom websites.  This site is free for teachers and you can have more that one account. I like the fact that wikispaces can be private. I have parents that have concerns about having their child’s face on the web. Of course you need parent permission to include their child. I didn’t see any requirement that students need to be 13 to use it. Since I know that many primary teachers let their kids post things on their wiki, I am thinking that it must be okay. Another teacher lets her second grade students post on the wiki. I have not done that yet. I am just at the point of starting to post the work of the students whose parents have given permission. I have posted many resources for my students on my classroom website wikispace.

Group 2’s wikispace was a good collaboration tool for our group project. I can now see the value of wikispaces as a collaboration tool. Since my class website wiki is private, I created another wikispace to show other (especially primary) teachers some great resources for them and their students.

I have not done much with publishing yet. I loved Gcast when it was free and so did my kids. When we were coming home from our field trip two weeks ago, my cell phone was passed around by the students and everyone that wanted to report got a chance. Unfortunately, you can no longer make podcasts by phone for free anymore. I will now look into recording on my computer and adding it to Gcast. I used GCast when I created a virtual field trip on Google Earth and when I made a sample podcast to describe for parents a technology project their children would be participating in at school. Gcast is very easy to use. The Gcast website has a lot of good information under Podcasting 101. 

An October 2006 article in Partnership for 21^st Century Skills reported on deficiencies of young people entering the workforce. This article states, “applied skills such as teamwork, critical thinking, and communication are essential for success at work.” Global PBL projects provide students opportunities to work on these essential 21^st century skills that will be required when they enter the workforce. In addition to the benefits provided by PBL projects, Global PBL projects allow students to experience multicultural understanding of their world. Through Global PBL projects students learn to understand the commonalities and diversities between them and their global peers.  Global projects provide many challenges for the educator.

The first, and often the biggest, obstacle is TIME. Teachers are always pressed for time. Project-based learning takes even more time, both in terms of planning and instructional time that would be needed to prepare students for the project.  

Learning today is mandated by state content standards. I don’t see how we could find the time for a global project that was just technology. I don’t see how I could justify a project that just taught technology skills. A few years back our district directed us to teach technology as a tool. This means that students learn about technology as they are using it to meet state standards.  

Time zones are a challenge in global PBL projects. Most of my students don’t have internet access at home. We do have an after school program that might be able to allow students to use school computers until 5:30 p.m. and our technology rep allows students in the lab before school from 7:30-8:00 a.m.  That might bridge he gap if the other class had more flexibility.   

Language would be another challenge. Many of my students are second language learners. They can speak Spanish but they don’t know how to write it. It seems that Spanish is a very diverse language. I had a parent from Cuba tell me it was easier for her to understand English than the Spanish spoken by many of the other parents of our students.  Since most of my students are still learning English, I think I would need to find another class of English speakers for my young students. 

My administration does not know or support project-based learning (local or global). Staff development of both teachers and administrators would be necessary to solve that challenge. It would also serve the added benefit of having another teacher at my school or in the district to work with.  

To solve these problems it would take a lot of perseverance on the part of the teacher. I think that for my young students and my expertise, we need practice with PBL projects before we expand to global PBL projects.