Pennsylvania

In my post about the PETE&C DEN Pre-Conference Day of Discovery, 2 People + 2 Minutes + 10 Questions = Speed DENing, I tried to get a contest going for the online version SpeedDENing, asking you to answer two questions about 3 wishes and a new tool. Four people responded and one of them is the subject of this post–Jan Abernethy. Here’s what she wished for in her own words:

Wish 1: More comments on my student’s blog called Project S.C.A.T. Why? Students have been working really hard to make a difference in their community. I think it would be great if they knew someone was really reading about their accomplishments. There are three posts in particular that ask for reader input. They are: Project Logos, What is Project S.C.A.T.? (January) and Help us Choose a Theme Picture. (January) http://cyberchickens26.blogspot.com/
Wish 2 & 3: My wish is that my first wish is fulfilled.

She thanked us in advance for fulfilling her wish. I think we should. So, snuggle in with some warm hot chocolate and your laptop nearby, watch the snow falling, and grant Jan her one wish. Help her 5th grade Cyber Chickens Stop Contamination At Trinity. I’ll post my thoughts tonight, and Jan, I promise that on Wednesday I’ll get my high school students to pitch in too. I’ll be with Jennifer Dorman and some other PA DEN members at the two-day AFI Workshop Jen has organized at the Bucks IU on Monday and Tuesday. It’s not too late to register for the event. And it’s not too late to do some Speed DENing online and win a prize from the new DEN Gift Store, which is coming soon.

The PA Leadership Council is proud to host the American Film Institute’s Screen Ed training in Bucks County, PA on February 25 & 26, 2008.  All Discovery Educators are invited!

Location: Bucks County Intermediate Unit

705 N. Shady Retreat Road
Doylestown, Pennsylvania 18901

Dates: Feb. 25-26 (Monday and Tuesday) 

Time: 8:00-3:30 (continental breakfast and lunch are provided)

Click here to register for the workshop.

Both Apple and Windows machines will be available, though participants are encouraged to bring their own laptops and digital video cameras.  Loaner cameras will be available for the day.

This two-day intensive workshop focuses on the process and tools for using digital filmmaking in a standards-based classroom with the intent of increasing understanding of core subject matter.  Designed for K-12 teachers of all subjects, school media specialists, lead teachers, school-site practitioners and facilitators interested in 21st Century literacy.  This hands-on workshop directly aligns with AFI’s “Lights, Camera, Education!” videos, curriculum, and handbook now available in Discovery Education streaming.   Once you have completed the “Door Scene,” you will easily be able to incorporate the visual grammar of Hollywood film making into your class projects.  Breakout sessions will cover the use of media content in digital stories, Web 2.0 tools for storytelling, and tapping into the storytelling potential of DE streaming.  Participants will leave the workshop empowered to employ digital storytelling with their students. 

Joe Brennan (STAR Discovery Educator, Apple Distinguished Educator, Author of the Digital Storytelling Blog, and on and on) will be our fearless leader for this incredible workshop. 

I copied this from the national blog. I can’t wait for the opportunity to hear Vicki Davis speak. Vicki inspired me to start my own flat classroom initiative with fellow STAR Discovery Educator, Anthony Armstrong, a teacher at the Korea International School. I actually presented our collaborative project at PETE&C last week.

If you’re even remotely familiar with the world of educational blogging, then I’m sure I don’t need to introduce you to Vicki Davis. Her blog, CoolCatTeacher, is one of the most popular blogs in the EduBlogosphere. The Flat Classroom Project wiki won an EduBlogs Award for Best Wiki of 2008. She is a master at global collaboration and a phenomenal teacher. And I have the distinct feeling that she has figured out some trick that allows her to squeeze 30 hours every work day. Lest I forget, she’s also one of our most recent STAR Discovery Educators!

On Wednesday, February 20th at 7:00pm EST, Vicki is going to be our guest speaker on EdTechConnect.

In a time when we have to expand our minds, enrich our curriculum, and leave no child behind… there is now talk about “flattening” our classrooms. Learn what a flat classroom is and the steps to easily make your classroom more global, more effective, and more relevant from a pioneer in the practice. How can connecting your classroom with other classrooms in the world be done safely and effectively? How can you integrate it into an already overtaxed curriculum?

Register now so you won’t miss what promises to be a powerful webinar that will help you tear down the walls of your classroom and connect your students to the world!

As promised, Lance’s East Coast Keynote Address: Lost in Translation. Podcast ready, good to go for a trek in the snow.

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And it was fun! Talk about a clever conference kick-off. Here’s the Recipe:

1. Mix 150 +/- DENers in a large conference room with lots of Hershey’s chocolate.
2. Add 10 Discovery Educator Network-related questions.
3. Find a partner.
4. Stir Q/A conversation heavily for 2 minutes.
5. Change partners.
6. Repeat the process several times until the bell (horn, really) rings.

Know what you get? The beginning of a fantastic, fun-filled, action-packed (if Dorman says 37 tools, she does 37 tools) Day of Discovery. A quick way to meet your neighbors in the rows around you, Speed DENing is as much fun as it sounds. You almost hate when the activity ends. Lance said Speed DENing made it debut at FETE&C, but you know the old sing song, so I think PA just did it better.

The questions engaged us, but two of them got me thinking, so I’m passing them along to you for reflection. And maybe a little contest. Let’s show FL that PA is the best. Let’s start Speed DENing online.

Here are the two questions:

1. If the DEN genie could grant you 3 wishes, what would they be? [If you are an overachiever, you can even tell us why].
2. If you could create your very own new Discovery tool/product/interface/whatever, what would it be? [Let’s throw the why in, just for good measure, but definitely optional].

All you have to do is hit the Comment button to start Speed DENing. The kid in me knows that I need a prize. So, how about if we give the winner [no, I do not have a rubric, but originality scores high] a soon-to-open-DEN Store Gift Certificate.

Let’s go, PA. FL might have done it first, but let’s show we can do it better.

A very special THANK YOU to our Discovery Day all-star team of presenters:
Matt Monjan, Nancy Sharoff, Jennifer Dorman, Elizabeth Buyer, Steve Dembo, Julia Tebbets, Lance Rougeux, and Shelley Santora-Jones. We missed you, Jannita, but the prize-winners did the dance just for you. Hall, hope we all see you soon.

P.S. I’m heading out, despite weather, to a four-day Model UN in DC with 45 students. I promise to upload the 6 videos of the day to TeacherTube and then post to the PA blog, but it may take until next week. Resource links coming too. Happy long weekend to all.

We’re fresh from the awesome DEN Virtual Conference and ready for PETE&C. 

Lance Rougeux has sent an e-mail to those who registered for the DEN PreConference EXTRAVAGANZA, but I wanted to post that information on the blog as well.   Every year, the DEN preconference is bigger and better than the year before.  So, I am very excited for version 2008.  I hope to see many of you in Hershey this weekend.

Here are the details. 

DEN PETE&C Pre-Conference Agenda

What a fantastic day . . . it took some time to process everything I learned from the DEN Virtual Conference yesterday. Thanks to Lance, Hall, Steve, Matt, Mike, and the hundreds of Discovery Educators who made the the first-ever DEN Virtual Conference a success.

RJ already posted about Lance’s “Lost in Translation” keynote. I’d like to comment on Hall’s afternoon keynote. By the way, his presentation materials for “The Revenge of the Digital Immigrants” keynote are posted on the Discovery Educator Network Speakers Bureau.

Hall spoke about the power of media to engage and motivate 21st century learners. He reinforced what contemporary brain research is consistently asserting - that our limbic system processes stimuli faster and more deeply than our neocortex.

This is critical knowledge for educators. Patricia Wolfe (Brain Matters) stated that novelty, intensity, movement are key factors in the filtering process to determine if our brain will attend to stimuli and move it to short-term memory.

Robert Sylwester (A Collection of Neurons) concurs: “emotion drives attention and attention drives learning.”

Translation for teachers: if students are not paying attention they are not engaged, and, hence, they are not learning.

Here is some research to explain what Hall was summarizing. (from A Collection of Neurons)

The brain is biologically programmed to attend first to information that has strong emotional content. It is also programmed to remember this information longer. The thalamus is the relay station that receives incoming information and sends it to the appropriate part of the cortex for further processing; also sends a duplicated message to the amygdala. The amygdala is the part of the brain that determines the emotional relevance of incoming stimuli. The cortex is the part of the brain that processes incoming stimuli rationally, to place it in context to make sense of it, and to decide on a course of action. The pathway from the thalamus to the amygdala is only one synapse long, allowing the amygdala to receive the information approximately a quarter of a second sooner than the cortex.

Larry Cahall, of UC Irvine, asserts that “anything a teacher does that engages students’ emotional and motivational interest will quite naturally result in stronger memories of that which engaged the attention.”

What most Discovery Educators already know well is that technology and media have the power to capture the attention of their students and result in more enduring learning experiences. The North Carolina State University / Friday Institute’s research production, Having Our Say, gives students the voice to reinforce the power of technology in learning. When you have the opportunity, watch the Having Our Say video that the Friday Institute produced.

The Kaiser Family Foundation’s Generation M research study has concluded that the average 8-18 year-old American student spends 6.5 hours per day immersed in media content. This saturation has altered the way that 21st century students process information and prefer to learn. Discovery Education streaming provides a wealth of engaging media that teachers can use to appeal to the changing learning profile of the digital natives in their classrooms.

Hall offered some great examples for how teachers can harness the power of digital media using DE streaming content, iPods, and other devices. If you are interested in learning more about the power of media and how it can be integrated into classrooms, be sure to check out Hall’s Discovery blog, Media Matters, and the presentation resources posted on his Speakers Bureau page.

Cross-posted on Changing Connections, where you can view the slide show directly.

The Discovery Educator Network launched its history-making Virtual Conference on Saturday, 2 February 2008 and it proved, as DEN always does, to delight and engage audiences across the nation. What made it ground-breaking? The DEN harnessed webinar technology to face-to-face interactions at host sites throughout the country, experiencing the virtual world uniquely: a national conference hosted locally!

Our East Coast Keynote, Lance Rougeux, opened the virtual conference with a session EVERY teacher should hear: Lost in Translation. His thesis is simple: Every student speaks a second language, and Everyone must become a second-language learner. So, can you read this? Quickly? If not, then you are not proficient in ESL. What is ESL? Emoticons as a Second Language.

Still lost in translation? Here’s your answer on the left. I’d be willing to venture that any eight-year-old (or maybe younger) would have read the ESL slide in 20 seconds or under. Why? Because it’s their language. It’s what they use to communicate, and they are highly proficient at it. Like some of you, I am lost in translation (although I do remember Milli Vanilli, Lance). So I can read Lauren Myracle books every day (Lance says he does; bless you, Martha) written in emoticon, or use transl8it!, or both.

I’ve been working with a student to create our School Profile for AFG, and he speaks yet a third language: code. (At this layer, I am really lost in translation.) He writes code faster than I can type, but he IS a digital native. And he’s typical of many of the students in our classrooms. So, how do they learn? Very much like Dan Pink’s A Whole New Mind suggests: through the 3 Cs: communication, connectedness, and creativity.

Our students are consumers and creators. They write and speak digital; it’s how they like to learn if we let them. While we were engaged in the virtual conference, an interesting side bar chat ensued about how education has shifted from the “sage on the stage” to the “guide on the side” (a wealth of resources appears in any DEN sidebar, so you do want to check it out in the archives). Repurposing the educator’s role is what I call Educating in the Shift. We are all at different levels, but for many of us, we are behind our students’ collective knowledge base. Do we know less? Absolutely not! They just know more–differently.

And they LEARN DIFFERENTLY! They are consumers and creators. Here are their tools. Are we using them too? If not, do we need to catch up to teaching how students learn, as the inimitable Hall Davidson said two years ago at PETE&C, with the things in their pockets. And I can’t think of any better way to engage not enrage students than by beginning anywhere with the resources that the Discovery Educator Network offers, starting with Lance’s presentation and continuing throughout the virtual conference.

According to Lance, and I do agree with him, we need to do something else too. We need to master that second language too, at least metaphorically speaking. We may not go out and learn text messaging or code for that matter, but we do need to rethink how we collaborate academically with our digital natives, bell to bell, as Jennifer Dorman said in the chat room yesterday.

So, how do we meet the needs of our ESL students? Start with any Discovery product or resource. My favorites: DiscoveryStreaming and Kathy Schrock. Or find a content-specific Discovery resources like Discovery Education Science (middle school target audience) or Discovery Education Health. Unveiled at the Virtual Conference: Discovery Education Science (elementary school version).

In the spirit of yesterday’s virtual conference and collaborative learning, I made a slightly bigger footprint, although marginal compared to Jen’s. You can see screen shots (individually or as a set) from Lance’s opening Keynote at my new flickr account. You can also view my presentation slide show at my new SlideShare account.

Super Bowl Sunday is only hours away, so I’ll end with a Mickey story. Yesterday, in the middle of Matt’s presentation, my husband walked into the kitchen with a post-it note on his forehead. It read, in big black marker letters, COMPUTER. On the plus side, it was a Discovery Educator Network round post-it from last year’s PETE&C. I got the message, and will have to, like some of you, view the rest of the day’s virtual conference from the archives. Enjoy the game!

If you missed Steve Dembo’s (aka Teach 42) Discovery Education webinar, Something for Nothing: The Best of Web 2.0, then you might not know you no longer need to use your telephone to connect to a DiscoveryWebEx presentation. Nothing beats hearing Dembo direct, but if you missed the streaming–or you want to revisit a packed hour of great new tools–you can check out the Discovery Webinar Archives. If you are new to the Discovery Educator Network, you really want to explore the wealth of resources available to you when become a STAR Discovery Educator, because the DEN takes social networking to the next level. Now would be the perfect time to pitch a plug for tomorrow’s history-in-the-making Virtual Conference National Event, ground-breaking with local break out sessions at 30 different sites. Thank you, Tracy Standhart, for a great blog. (I borrowed your image.) It’s not too late to register.

Steve’s list of cool tools began with 6 photo-related sites. Want to capture your stories and save them permanently? Then you want OurStoryWidget, created by Word Press, the weblog platform Discovery uses. OurStory lets you save stories, photos, and videos on a collaborative timeline. And that notion–collaboration–was a theme running throughout most of what Steve shared, an indicator of how embedded social networking has become in our lives.

When Steve mentioned the K12 Online Conference, I connected, because I used a segment on social networking by Jeff Utecht in my Digital English class. K12 Online made a big splash when it premiered, but has since lost some of its buzz. You really might want to revisit this site, because it hold a wealth of 21st century learning we can all use in our classrooms.

Kerpoff is a great early childhood tool that takes digital storytelling into a different kind of venue. But don’t let the elementary school look-and-feel fool you; it’s just a great tool with lots of built-in elasticity for mindful yet playful super-doodling, helping kids to connect online and create together. For the children in your lives, or the child in you, this easy web 2.0 site will engage and delight!

We all know Flickr and most of us probably use it for photo sharing, but according to Steve, there are 3 new tools that will make Flickr your first choice for managing your photo world, if it isn’t already. Uploading and organizing was always easy because you could +Add Notes, but now you can edit your photos as well. Flickr’s edit defaults to Picnik, one of Steve’s earlier blog best-of-the-week sites. What’s great about Picnik: edit in a click, no registration, education friendly (not blocked in most schools), adjusts red eye and colors. Got to love Picnik, which you can, of course, use independently of Flickr.

If Steve loves FlauntR, that’s good enough for me. When he says, “incredibly robust,” he wasn’t kidding. How about it integrates with facebook, Picasa, flickr, myspace, orkut, hi5, Windows Live Spaces, Word Press, Live Journal, Blogger, and iGoogle. Not enough reasons to love FlauntR yet? It can make images for mobile devices. Or your best ever Valentine’s Day card. This one’s just got to be my new favorite tool.

By invitation only (email Steve, but after tomorrow), you can browse collaboratively with others inside your own Photophlow room. Interesting way to browse photos, however, because if you are online within your room (account), you see everyone else’s photo uploads. Despite a short browse through this site, it is definitely the most interesting social browsing I’ve seen yet. Definitely a network, because acceptance to the site, for now, is a very private by invitation only. Can you imagine the possibilities for collaborative learning with the CFF Mac laptops. We just had our one day Apple Out-of-the-Box training, and I can’t remember which application had the option to share your photos over your wireless network, but Photophlow and Mac should be a great combination.

The next 2 websites are not Web 2.0 tools, but neat. The World Clock has an almost unlimited number of uses in any discipline. You have to check out the website, and if you are a math teacher who said you could not integrate technology into your classroom, here’s the easiest and best place to start, and the tool is user-friendly. You’ll want to bookmark the website, because googling world clock will likely not get you to this one easily.

Steve’s taught us to teach our students about their new permanent record. We get to see the updated version at PETE&C, where Steve is Tuesday’s Keynote Speaker. So I think about my digital footprint, but now we can think about our eco footprint at the same time using Blackle, which is Google gone black. Same search engine, just black. Why? Because it’s environmentally friendly. Google is a white screen, and white uses the most wattage; black uses the least. If your eyes can tolerate the black screen and you life Firefox, there’s a Brackle plug-in waiting for you to install. At the moment that I accessed Blackle, 438,890.943 Watt hours had been saved.

Back to Web 2.0. Poll Everywhere. Just like it sounds. Free for 100 votes; after that, it’s a purchase, but the site is considering offering educators a package deal, making it your new best poll tool, and economically friendly as well. What makes this poll fun and different: online polling, text messaging polling, embedded into a website, PowerPoint; download results as a spreadsheet or RSS feed. I wish I knew about Poll Everywhere two weeks ago when I made my mid-term for my digital English class. Yet another bona fide educational opportunity to legitimize cell phones in the classroom. And a better polling tool, by far.

‘Tis the conference season, so a timely reminder from Steve about David Warlick’s hitchhikr, the virtual way to hitchhike onto a conference and blogs connected to it. Hitchhikr for PETE&C: right here. Back to Steve’s kindergarten teacher roots for his next pick: Kindersay. Is there a better way to learn to read? You see the word (or letter), image, and you hear a person say it. There’s a word bank of 300-400 and growing, but this site is hard to beat for first-level language as students learn to read and write, collaboratively.

Not just another social network chat, Twitter is a solid educational tool, or can be. Steve’s Twitter group is a collection of educators almost without exception. Or they are technology integrators, or both. The learning that happens inside this group is off the charts. Steve said that he sent a twitter feed yesterday, asking his group if they could list their favorite Web 2.0 tools. That’s how he found World Clock and now we all have it. The value of this kind of collaborative learning: priceless.

Zamzar is one of my favorites. I use it so frequently that I cannot imagine life without it. A great converter, it is fast, free, educationally friendly. It converts almost anything to anything else you want it to be. The list is endless, so for one stop conversions, this is my pick as well. The last item, like Zamzar, is a converter. ConvertTube will allow you to convert online video like YouTube to more popular formats like wmv, mov, mp4,mp3, 3gp. If you haven’t joined us for a Discovery webinar, you really should, because Discovery Education always brings you cutting edge technology, before the edge is cut.

Congratulations to PA STARs, Meg Griffin and Jared Mader.  Both were published in the February 2008 (Vol. 35 No. 5) issue of ISTE’s journal Learning and Leading with Technology. 

Meg, an elementary teacher in the Central Bucks School District, was featured in the Point/Counterpoint segment addressing the Yes side of “Has technology improved your home-to-school connection?”  In her response, Meg highlighted her use of Web 2.0 applications to foster the home-school connections in her class. (pages 8-9)

Jared, a chemistry teacher in the Red Lion Area School District, co-authored an article about using iPods to engage students in the study of science.  Jared and his co-author, fellow Red Lion Area High School teacher Ben Smith, discussed their use of podcasting and vodcasting to extend classroom learning.  (pages 28-30)

We are all lucky to have both Meg and Jared in our learning network!