RJ Stangherlin’ Blog

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.

As promised, Lance Rougeux’s East Coast Virtual Conference Keynote, Lost in Translation. Podcast ready, good to go for your 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, 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.

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 (feel free to adapt it).

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. It’s not too late to register. Thank you, Tracy Standhart, for a great blog. (I borrowed your image.)

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.