Pennsylvania

Over the past few years, interactive whiteboards have become more and more popular in schools around the world.  Many teachers are finding out how to effectively use this awesome resource while others are using them for glorified projector screens.  Maybe we need to reiterate that these are INTERACTIVE WHITEBOARDS…meaning that they are for interacting.  I cannot say that one board is better than the other because I have only been exposed to using the SMART brand versus the others on the market.

As a 2nd grade teacher, I became very curious when I was introduced to Smartboards and really found that by having my students use this awesome piece of technology that I could engage them like never before.  From there, I became very curious, very focused, and very excited about what this was doing for me as a teacher.  My students were used to having a smartboard, used to managing their personal space around the projector, and used to being engaged.  I shared my passion with those around me and created a culture of learners in my building.

 During my blog posts, I will share resources that I use on a consistent basis and tell stories about how students and teachers are using technology.  One of the first piece of sharing is from a colleague of mine who is veteran teacher with a new passion for integrating technology with her students.  Here is what she said after getting a smarboard in her class:

Good evening,I just wanted to thank you all for the mounted smartboard and projector. The smartboard and the programs we use in school have changed the dynamics of learning in second grade. Mounting the projector and not having shadows on our smartboard or to align it 10 times a day truly allows uninterrupted learning. I am enjoying showing my students audio, visual and kinesthetic ways to learn especially when they don’t know they are learning. These pieces of equipment and the time I am given to learn new technology including the distance learning have allowed me to define my teaching skills and are allowing my students to experience success with technology that increases their self awareness and self esteem.  Thank you 

Wow.  This is what it is all about.  Teachers inspiring students. 

I leave you with one of my favorite sites to share.  The site is called Teachers Love Smartboards. This site has ideas for any interactive board. If you check out this resource, you will find informative websites, video tutorials, and online training opportunities.  Daily takeaway!   BE SMARTER THAN THE BOARD…DON’T BE INTIMIDATED!

The start of a new school reminds me to reflect upon experiences as a youngster. This year the kindergarten class is the class of 2022! There are many things these students will not get to experience because they are no longer in existence. From Wired magazine, here is a partial list of 100 things. The rest can be found at their website article: 100 Things You Kids May Never Know, by Nathan Barry, July 22, 2009 Issue.

• “Inserting a VHS tape into a VCR to watch a movie or to record something.
• Super-8 movies and cine film of all kinds.
• Playing music on an audio tape using a personal stereo. See what happens when you give a Walkman to today’s teenager.
• The number of TV channels being a single digit. I remember it being a massive event when Britain got its fourth channel.
• Tweaking the volume setting on your tape deck to get a computer game to load, and waiting ages for it to actually do it.
• Daisy chaining your SCSI devices and making sure they’ve all got a different ID.
• Counting in kilobytes.
• Wondering if you can afford to buy a RAM upgrade.
• Blowing the dust out of a NES cartridge in the hopes that it’ll load this time.
• Turning a PlayStation on its end to try and get a game to load.
• Joysticks.
• Taking turns picking a radio station, or selecting a tape, for everyone to listen to during a long drive.
• Remembering someone’s phone number.
• Not knowing who was calling you on the phone” or even a party line!

If anything, the entire list will give you a chuckle.

If you have been bitten by the ibug, you are not alone. I finally needed a new phone and waited until the 3G was released in June to feed my gadget addiction. Yes it is true.  I could not believe how simple it was to order it online, and have it arrive on time, and ready to go. I made the switch from Verizon to AT&T and even that was simple. But enough on that, let’s get to the good stuff, the apps. On February 5, 2009, David Pogue of the NYTimes said there were about 15,000 apps available. On April 22, 2009 USAToday reported that the billionth app download would be any day. The popularity of the apps is staggering. Stanford and MIT are offering courses for students teaching them to design and market their own ideas for apps. It is a real world experience since the paid programs produce real cash. Some people have left lucrative jobs to pursue programming these little applications. The site http://www.apptism.com/ states that they are tracking over 61,000 apps as of today’s date (July 20,2009). Allof those apps will not fit on your iPhone/iTouch. You can have 9 pages of 16 apps plus 4 at the dock for a total of 148. I can’t imagine having that many apps that I would use frequently, but you never know.

In addition to the confusion about which app to add to your precious iPhone, Apple is considering a rating system for apps. According to a NYTimes article by Saul Hansel in May,  they are looking at four categories of rating apps. The 17+ category I assume would contain some of the more violent and racy applications. Read his article, to get some more insight on this idea of rating.

The number of apps is growing each day. There are so many to evaluate and determine their personal as well as educational value. Here are a few websites that are doing that very thing:

Leslie Fisher :iPhone Support Group Presentation

Apptism.com - new releases, evaluations

AppAdvice.com - daily rates the new releases

iSmash Phone-reviews, how to, tutorials

If you would like to contribute your opinion to a collection of good apps for education then visit this wiki: cfpmsiphone.wikispaces.com It is a collaborative effort to encourage teachers to consider using an iPhone/iTouch in the classroom. I would say one of the most popular FREE apps used at the DENLC Symposium was Bump. First you create a contact for yourself in your contact file, then download Bump. Open the preferences in Bump, fill in the information and find another person who has Bump on their iPhone/Touch. Simply Bump the two devices together and you will feel a shake. That is the magic of the information being transferred to the other device.

I don’t think we have room or time to review the 62,000 apps in the iTunes store, but respond to this post by naming your top 5 apps below in the comments. You never know what you can learn from each other.

More articles from Zemanta about the iPhone:

• Apple distributes 1.5B apps in App Store’s first year (tuaw.com)
• App Store rating system raises questions (macworld.com)
• Happy Birthday, App Store: Revolutionizing Mobile Computing Since 2008 [Anniversaries] (gizmodo.com)
• App Store Lessons: No promo codes for apps rated 17+ (tuaw.com)

Above image from: http://www.walyou.com/img/iphone-art-creations-applications-drink-coasters.jpg

Hard to believe, but school seems just around the corner, especially if you factor in a week of professional development for educators that many districts mandate. Much as I see summer slipping away, I love the new changes in Discovery Education Streaming PLUS and am so excited about bringing this fantastic resource to my students in September. At the Leadership Council Symposium (was it two weeks ago–time does fly) we got a sneak preview, but you can too by registering for a one-hour webinar on July 14 or 21 at 1 PM EDT.

I am also excited about Summer School with the DEN. Where else can you find timely professional development that is fun, fast, and free. Digital Storytelling Week kicks off August 3, with tools and trade secrets to get you to think outside the slide with storytelling made easy with Discovery Education Content, Animoto, and PhotoStory. Director’s Cut using Discovery Education Media and MovieMaker followed by Discovery Education Media and iMovie round off Week 1 of Digital Storytelling.

Week 2 Leadership opens August 10 with The Information Society is HERE: Are Our Schools Up to the Task? I have been reading Scott McLeod, J.D., Ph.D.’s blog Dangerously Irreverent ever since Christian Long wrote “The Future of Education Manifesto” and invited McLeod to mash it up. Responding to it became my English 10 mid-term exam, along with “Did You Know” from Karl Fisch. This keynote promises to bring an exciting beginning to the week. I wouldn’t miss this webinar for anything! Policies, Safety, and Social Networking is followed by Web 2.0 for Administrators and Others: Schools, Tools, and the 21st Century. Data-Driven Decisions with Discovery Education Assessment–love this newer offering and its related blog–The Dean’s List, authored by Porter Palmer (met her at LC Symposium and promise to write about her blog next) is a great finale to Leadership Week. If you can possibly leverage your administrative teams to participate, this week will definitely pay huge dividends to their educational learning communities.

August 17 opens Week 3, so get ready for Myth Busted: Easy Ways to Integrate Digital Media into your Science Classroom. I’m one of those people with an academic allergy to science, but I have been following Brad Fountain’s Science in Action, and he is definitely making me a believer with his weekly lessons (I am actually beginning to understand science). Now that you are getting into the swing of back-to-Discovery-School, you’re ready for Getting Your Hands Dirty with Discovery Education Science. Differentiating Instruction with Discovery Education Science Assessment Manager and More and Muir Tech Tips for Going Green round out a great week of science offerings. You can read about this finale for science week here.

Web 2.0 Week 4 premiers August 24. During this week you Get You Glog On! with The DE Streaming Builders and Glogster. Then, The Thread that Ties It All Together: Discovery Education Content and VoiceThread leads into Virtual Field Trips with Discovery Education Media and Google Earth. We end four weeks of learning on a fun note–Learning Through the Funnies: Mixing Discovery Education Content with Free Comic Tool.

I know that all of these wonderful webinars would be more than enough to rev us up for back to school, but this is Discovery, so there’s more. Between our wonderful partnerships with Mimeo and Scotch® Science Fair Central, teachers and instructional technologists have great new resources to bring to the classroom. You might want to check out Science Fair Central before Science Week debuts. And for those non-digital hands-on projects, don’t forget to put Scotch® Products on your students’ supply lists this fall. With items like Double Sided Tape, Precision Scissors and Removable Poster Tape, they’ll be well equipped for another year of science projects, posters, displays, and reports.

On a personal note, I would like to thank the DEN community’s huge support while I was hospitalized last week. Knowing how much I had your well wishes and prayers meant everything, so much gratitude from me to you. You are quite a learning community family.

DE Summer School
Discovery Education Streaming PLUS
MediaShare
Scotch® Science Fair Central
Mimeo
Scott McLeod
Turbo Tagger

Not at NECC? Me neither, but if wishes were llamas, I’d have a flock of them. If you want to tap into the wonderful world of DEN resources–and you missed Steve Dembo’s Top 10 Web 2.0 tools–no problem. We have it for you on-demand. Warning: watching Dembo definitely supercharges your morning, making him your Starbucks super grande!

DEN
necc09
Steve Dembo
Web 2.0
Discovery Educator Network
Turbo Tagger

According to Dorman’s Trouvailles,

It seems like EVERYONE (and their dogs, goldfish, etc.) are Tweeting these days.

With a short countdown to DEN’s LC Institute and DEN’s Pre-NECC Birthday Party, it seems like a good time to remind educators and technology integrators of several great resources, just in time for the tech festivities. You might want to check out the PB Twitter4Teachers Wiki. Created by Gina Hartman, this wiki helps educators find people with similar interests. Judging from my inbox, this wiki has frequent flyer status.

In case you are new to Twitter, you can check out this great instructional video in “Plain English” from the folks at Common Craft.

If, like me, you are not the best searcher, especially on Twitter, Twitter Search is for just for you (and me).

If you are a fan of Common Craft productions, you can follow them on Twitter, sign up for email updates, or use RSS with your favorite reader.

Twitter
Common Craft
Social Networking
PLN
DEN
PB Twitter4Teachers
Turbo Tagger

The lights are out, the students are gone, and except for the construction going on outside our west wing classrooms, it’s a quiet countdown to tomorrow–last day of school for teachers in our district. For some of you, vacation has already begun; for us, with the benefit of winter snow days, we are just ending later. With vacation barely begun for all of us, why should we get so excited about summer school? Simple: it’s the DEN’s summer school, with an action-packed exciting agenda for four weeks, each with a learning theme. It’s a carefully planned syllabus, with dual platform applications, as well as apps for Macs and PCs. So, tell a colleague, tell a teacher, tell an IT, tell a friend, invite your administrators, and join us everyday at 11 AM ET for summer school with the DEN.

Enroll today at: http://community.discoveryeducation.com/webinar.

Digital Storytelling Week
8/3/09
Thinking Outside the Slide: Creating non-linear PowerPoint presentations and learning centers with Discovery Education Media
8/4/09
Digital Storytelling Made Easy: Using Discovery Education Content with Animoto and PhotoStory
8/5/09
Director’s Cut: Discovery Education Media and MovieMaker (PC)
8/6/09
Director’s Cut: Discovery Education Media and iMovie (Mac)

Leadership Week
8/10/09
The Information Society is HERE: Are our schools up to the task? with Dr. Scott McLeod
8/11/09
Policies, Safety and Social Networking
8/12/09
Web 2.0 for Administrators and Others: Schools, Tools, and the 21st Century
8/13/09
Data-Driven Decisions with Discovery Education Assessment  (This is the week you really want to invite your Admin Team into Discovery Education webinars).

Science Week
8/17/09
Myth Busted: Easy Ways to Integrate Digital Media into Your Science Classroom
8/18/09
Getting Your Hands Dirty with Discovery Education Science
8/19/09
Differentiating Instruction with the Discovery Education Science Assessment Manager
8/20/09
More and Muir Tech Tips for Going Green

Web 2.0 Week
8/24/09
Get Your Glog On! The DE streaming Builders and Glogster
8/25/09
The Thread that Ties it All Together: Discovery Education Content and Voicethread
8/26/09
Two Roundtrip Tickets to Anywhere in the World: Designing Virtual Field Trips with Discovery Education Media and Google Earth
8/27/09
Learning Through the Funnies: Mixing Discovery Education Content with Free Comic Tools.

Enroll today!

Image Citations:

School House Animation: Welcome to School Animation. Discovery Education
(2009). Retrieved June 15, 2009, from Discovery Education: http://streaming.discoveryeducation.com/

Digital Storytelling: PhotoStory

Dr. Scott McLeod: Cable in the Classroom, June 2008

Discovery Science Logo

Web 2.0

Guest Blogger: William Kennington, junior, SHS

Last week, on May 27, 2009, four groups at Salisbury High School in Allentown, PA presented their Integrated Project. IP is year-long endeavor for students who enroll in the courses of AP US History and Honors English 11. IP is a research-based project that incorporates a final multi-media presentation as well as a stage production that lasts for 45 minutes. We streamed our presentations using two backchannels, one focused on the stage and one on the projector screen. We had no problems streaming it, but the recorded videos were corrupt. You can still watch the two separate streams as they were the day we went live, but the downloaded video was buggy. Therefore, a compiled version of the presentation can not be made at this time, but we are working with ustream to resolve this issue. I have tried converting the presentation thus far with vixy.net, zamzar.com, ffmpeg, adobe media encoder, vlc, and other free media encoders. Ustream has been working on a way to convert their video directly through their website, but this feature is still unfinished and unavailable. Hopefully once this feature is implemented (or when we find a way to convert the video), we should be ready to release the compiled video for each of the four IP presentations. We used Discoverystreaming videos in creating our factual and counterfactual histories, so when we get this problem fixed, we can show you how factual Discoverystreaming videos can be used to make counterfactual scenariors look real.

Interesting and timely, Mogulus, which has often been a go-to choice, has changed its name and website. Mogulus, now Livestream, always supported multi-camera streaming but didn’t have have high quality resolution, but with the difficulties we have encountered, we might switch to Livestream. From their newsletter, here’s what’s new with Livestream:

Recently we changed our name from Mogulus to Livestream, and you can find us at our new home at www.livestream.com. As much as we loved our old name, it was time for a change that reflects our growth and more clearly communicates what we do. We hope you like “Livestream” as much as we do.

Along with the new brand and domain come a re-designed website, and most importantly for you, another simple way to broadcast from the Livestream website.

This new tool offers instant streaming from any page on our website. Just click the red ‘Broadcast Now’ button or go to your ‘My Account’ section.

Go live with one click from almost any webcam or camcorder, and chat or Twitter to promote your channel, all right within the application.

Of course you can still use Procaster (our downloadable desktop application) for the highest possible quality, but for instant no-fuss streaming, the new broadcaster is great.

Now that we’ve changed, what do you need to do?

In short, nothing!

Your channel pages and embedded players will continue to function just as they did before. You may want to update any links to your channel page (i.e. change from “www.mogulus.com/yourchannel” to “www.livestream.com/yourchannel”), but the old links will still work even if you don’t get around to it.

If you’re using the old logo, we’d appreciate it if you update it to the new Livestream logo. You can download it here.
» More Details

For more info on the change, below are a few links to the press release and related stories. Or, follow us on Twitter @livestreamcom.
Discoverystreaming
Ustream.tv
Livestream
IP (Integrated Project)
Education
Technology
Turbo Tagger

Copied from the NY DEN post from Christine Southard.

Earthcast is a 24-hour Earth Day webcastathon, starting at midnight GMT (or 8:00 pm EST in NY) on April 22, 2009. Teachers, students and people from around the world will speak live on topics about our environment. You can participate too!

Check out the details at http://earthbridges.net .

They’ve even created a VoiceThread for this event. Check it out!