RJ Stangherlin’ Blog

Live Blogging

Scott Kinney, Vice-President of Outreach & Professional Development, discusses ways to meet our growing diversity of learners by using differentiated instruction using Discovery Education products.  Scott began with a test of our knowledge with a quiz identifying demographics of changing student populations.  Questions covered percentage of ESL students entering school (20), percentage of students entering fourth grade nationwide reading below reading level 36), most frequently watch video channel (YouTube), percentage of public school students part of racial or ethnic minorities (43), website larger than Germany, France, and the UK combined if the site were a country (myspace), and percentage of students requiring special education services (14).  Using a CPS clicker system, teams registered answers for prizes, and Scott came, as always,with great prizes.

Then, we discussed the profile of our classrooms, which included the following topics: ethnic diversity, housing, SES, technology literacy/access, sexual preferences, learning styles, language, class size, special education, religion, households (family structure).  Why are the things mentioned such a good thing?  Because it is an opportunity to collaborate, to see things from a different perspective, and because what we see in  classrooms is a microcosm of the real world.  The more diversity we have, the more learning and information exchange can grow.  So, Scott suggests that first day of school should take a look at where we are and what students know.  What’s the best way to access readiness: Quiz Builder.

Within Streaming, teachers can access and create quizzes with multiple choice and open-ended questions.  Results can be sent to your email (Blackberry) or give you dis/aggregates withing the builder.  Since we need to know our students to teach them effectively, Scott asked what other questions might we ask?   In addition to discipline knowledge, we would want to know their interests, level of entry, how they learn, and access to technology.  But why do we want to discover students’ learning styles?  Because we tend to teach the way we learned, but we know that students learn differently with different interests, so we need to differentiate our delivery.  A great learning style profile that will identify learning styles, along with Scott’s slide show and other links can be accessed here.

What do we know about integrating media?  It’s how students learn, can differentiate learning styles, film is the new text, and it provides relevancy, in addition to providing audio-visual learning and provides more recall because of more engagement of senses.  Short media segments really work to reinforce learning.

What is proven to show significant improvement in: reading comprehension, listening vocabulary, vocabulary acquisition, word recognition, decoding skills, and overall motivation to read…and you probably already have access to it?  The answer is closed captioning.  It adds another level of learning, scaffolding instruction.  Closed captioned titles in DiscoveryStreaming can be accessed by selecting the Advance Search mode and checking “Closed Caption.”  The number of CC videos is 1500 and growing daily.

Another builder is Writing Prompt.  A great feature of this builder is the ability to put any language into the text box.  Using google.com is a Google translator which can translate entire web pages into another language.  As you click on different links, the links will be translated “on the fly” into the selected language.  Next in differentiated learning: using songs from DiscoveryStreaming, which easily embed into PowerPoint or Keynote.  Scott’s example was about homophones, which displayed the words visually while a song coordinated to the text.  For a multi- sensory learner, Discovery Education Science offers a huge variety of ways to deliver instruction, and it has eBooks embedded within it.

For students who want to interact with their learning process experience, you can interact and build experiences with Atlas Interactive Map, a series that began last year and will continue this year.  As you mouse over countries of the world, you can select a multi-disciplinary approach to learning withing the selected atlas.

When students begin telling their stories, they can tap into the Discovery Resources, especially “editable clips.”  These clips can be remixed or mashed up to create a new product.  You can find editable clips by doing an Advance Search and selecting editable clips.  These clips have copyright cleared access, and work back to iMovie and PC platforms.

According to Ellie Scheitrum from Palisades Middle School and an attendee at this session,  “The more senses you engage when students are learning, the more they learn and retain.”  And Discovery Resources and DiscoveryStreaming make that process seamless.

After much stressing with my web cam videos of the sessions at DENs Pre-Conference event, I discovered why I had video sans sound, and it was my fault.  I know better, but I forgot to change the sound platform in the control panel.  Consequently, I have no videos to upload of the great event, and let me tell you, I will never make this mistake again.  What I do have are some great blogs and resources from Jennifer Dorman, so here they are:

The Whole World in Kids’ Hands — Julia Tebbets, Sewickley Academy

PETE&C Presentations — Jennifer Dorman

Learning to Speak Native — Steve Dembo’s Keynote Address

Administrator 2.0 Academy — Bridget Belardi and Chris Stengel

A Positive Solution to School Copyright Issues — Dr. Scott Garrigan

The Digital Generation Grows Up — David Pogue’s Keynote Address

Jennifer Dorman’s PETE&C 2008 Pre-/Conference Materials

A very special thank you to Jennifer for her presentations both at DENs Pre-Conference, PETE&C, and live and reflective blogging.

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.