Scott's ICT AQ Course Blog

The 21st Century Classroom

My Purchase Proposal (all funds to be spend in year 1)

Rational For Purchase Decisions

While the purchases outlined above do not completely reflect my vision of the learning environment of the 21^st Century Learner, I recognize the limitations of planning and implementing technology across an organization as large as our school board. I feel that the tools that I have selected will meet a variety of important needs in the classroom.

I will address each of the 3 items using the following criteria: Instructional Relevance, Motivation and Engagement, Differentiated Instruction, Digital Literacy, and Equity. Prior to rationalizing the purchases in point form I will explain why I have chosen these criteria for the technology in my classroom. For each tool, I will also list some considerations or drawbacks that may apply.

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Frustration!

I love being in a small school.  It’s fantastic that you get to know your students and their families.  There is a great sense of community.

However, with only 11 teachers, there just aren’t enough of us to fill all the roles.  I’m a SERT, the Tech Lead, the Literacy Lead, and the basketball coach.  I think in the last three weeks, I’ve only been in my classroom for 9 days. 

I had planned to implement my electronic portfolio strategy with two classes.  However, because I’ve been out of the classroom so much, and because I can’t afford to take away too much from the homeroom teachers, I’m looking at just implementing electronic portfolios with my Special Education students.  Getting the students started using this tool is fairly intensive.  It isn’t a difficult tool, but it requires that you slow down and make them think about what they are planning.

When working with one boy on goal setting, in response to the prompt “How will you know that you’ve done a good job?”, he responded “I will know that I’ve done a good job, when I’ve completely finished my work to the best of my ability.”  Does that sound like a phrase that he’s picked up from a teacher or what?  I wanted to refer to the waste products of male bovines.  I had to work with him to really have him set a goal that was meaningful to him.  He ended up reflecting on a past group project where his wiki entry was completely changed by a group member and his feelings and self esteem were really hurt.  What he finally decided was that his goal was to make a contribution to the group project that was good enough that the other group members felt they wouldn’t need to change his content.

So while there have been some frustrations, there have been some small successes too.

ePearl Up and Running!

Success!

I’ve finally got ePearl up and running. 

Wait a minute – what are you talking about?

In looking at our School Plan for Continuous Improvement (SPCI) and completing the School Effectiveness Framework (SEF), one of the elements where we saw a need was to increase student engagement, self-assessment and self-reflection.  After seeing an ePearl overview video we decided that it was a tool that was worth investigating further as a tool we might use in our school.

I had my first “hands-on” look at ePearl back on February 18th when I attended a workshop with my principal at the ABEL (Advanced Broadband Enabled Learning) office at York University.  ePearl is an electronic portfolio package that’s been developed at the Center for the Study of Learning and Performance (CSLP) at Concordia University.  ABEL is piloting the software and was offering some training to help schools get up and running. 

We ran into a few difficulties getting things up and running during our initial attempts, so I decided to download and install the software on my own domain (it’s free!).  I’d had some success with setting up other server based applications like blogs and even setting up a Moodle site, but this was a little trickier.   However, after a couple hours of uploading, installing, configuring, reading and learning about php (don’t ask!), and tweaking some more, I got everything running.  I was then able to populate ePearl with teachers from my school and made up a demo class and a few fake students.

After all that work (and my eyes going a little buggy) I’ve now got ePearl running on my own domain.  I’ve started creating my own portfolio and testing out the various features as both a teacher and a student.  The experience is starting to make me focus on how I’m going to roll this out to the rest of the staff and students.  Luckily, the folks at the CSLP are teachers and have put together a lot of great resources including a teachers guide book, lesson plans.  I’m also wondering if I’ve got enough time to answer my action research question [Can I improve student motivation, reflection and self-assessment using electronic portfolio software (ePearl)?].  It may be difficult to really measure, in a quantifiable way, if these elements of learning actually improve or not using ePearl.  Perhaps I’ll be looking at whether or not student engage in self-reflection and self-assessment when they use electronic portfolios. 

Anyway, if you’re interested in getting a look at the ePearl environment, send me an email and I’ll make you up a teacher and student account for my demo school so that you can go in and play.  I’d be glad to hear back about your ideas.

VoiceThread Presentation

Here’s a presentation that I prepared for Junior Teachers in the YRDSB who are considering using Moodle in their classrooms.  You’ll have to register to comment on my VoiceThread, but I haven’t received any junk mail from them and only the odd email telling me about new features etc.

Click here to view the Presentation in full screen (recommended).

The site I used to prepare it is called VoiceThread.  To learn more about VoiceThread click here.

A Confession

One of the reasons that I depend so heavily on technology is to compensate for one of my own perceived weaknesses.

I’m a poor writer.  More specifically, my handwriting and printing is poor.

It’s been like that since I was young.  I’ve always blamed it on being left-handed, though I know a few lefties who can write neatly.  While my handwriting and printing are legible, I don’t think they’re very professional.  It looks like I haven’t improved much in that department since grade 4 or 5. 

The other issue is that I find my brain works faster than my hand can.  I’ll be thinking four or five words, or even two or three sentences in advance of what I’m putting down on paper.  This leads to frequent mistakes.  Not that I don’t catch them, but I find it doesn’t look very good if ever 7th or 8th word is crossed out in the feedback your teacher gives you.

Interestingly, I find a lot of the LD kids I teach (currently 75% are left handed boys – interesting!?!?) find they have similar issues to me.  They say that they find it difficult to have their hands keep up with their brains while they are writing.

So, that’s a big part of why I use technology.  It lets me model neatness and organization much better, and I create a more polished product (from lessons to feedback).

Web 2.0 and Effective Feedback (Part 2)

Using Google Docs to give feedback

I have my students use Google Docs a lot in my Student Support Centre.  There are a few reasons for this that I’ll save for another post, but what’s most relevant here is that there are a couple of ways that I can give feedback to my students.  My students know that for each document they create, they are expected to share with me as a collaborator.  Often, I will create a template or organizer on Google Docs and share it with them so that I’m already set up as a collaborator.  As they work, I can observe their progress (even if I’m out of the school at a workshop, etc.) and make comments or suggestions as they work.

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Web 2.0 and Effective Feedback (Part 1)

When other teaches ask me why I’ve tried out certain tools in my classroom, one of the answers that I find myself giving is, “It’s great because I can give the student feedback right away.”  It wasn’t until I began thinking about some of my practices as a result of this AQ course and came across a post from Neil Stephenson on his blog, Thinking in Mind, titled using Voicethread for Peer Assessment, that I really put it together – a lot of Web 2.0 applications facilitate the process of Effective Feedback.  I mean, it’s almost like they were designed for it. 

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Windows Live Writer

If you’re doing any significant amount of blogging and want to make your life easier, you owe it to yourself to check out Windows Live Writer.  It’s a blog editor that allows you to write your posts in an environment more like MS Word.  It makes it much easier to do things like add pictures, tables, and embed videos.  When I’ve got a little more time, I’ll post instructions for how to download it and set it up with your Edublogs account, but if you want to check out a review of the software read Windows Live Writer Tweaks, Tips, and Updates on the Lifehacker blog.

Real-Time Collaboration

At our ICT AQ course on Tuesday night, our group used Google Docs to create a document that all of us could work on together in real time.  I find it helps keep my mind straight when there are a lot of conversations going on if I can see something visually that keeps me on track.  If we had an LCD, we could have one person record and project it on a screen, but in this case that wasn’t feasible.  So instead, we used a tool that allowed us to collaborate in real time.  Everyone in our group logged into Google Docs and we created a document that anyone of us could edit and the others would see the changes shortly (20 seconds – 1 minute)after they were made.  Great idea, but Google Docs may actually have been too clunky for what the task called for.  Everyone had to log in, and as mentioned above the changes didn’t show up in “real time”.  Google Docs has a lot features of a full fledged word processor, but it really was overkill for what we needed.  For actual real-time collaboration on a simple document, EtherPad may have been a better tool. 

There is a great post over at ReadWriteWeb that goes over the features of EtherPad, but basically it opens a very simple document collaboration space.  When one person opens the document, he/she just sends the link to the other collaborators (or posts it on a Moodle forum) and those collaborators can join the space.  Everyone can edit the document at the same time or at least see what others are doing.  When I tested it out, changes appeared within a second or two.  One of the things to keep in mind about EtherPad is that it isn’t secure.  Anyone who has the address of the workspace can join and see what’s going on.  So while it’s unlikely that anyone is going to be actively looking for what you are doing, it definitely wouldn’t be an appropriate setting for confidential information.

Additional Information:

EtherPad: Simple Real-Time Collaboration (ReadWriteWeb)

Etherpad Screencast (EtherPad.com)

Google Docs in Plain English Screencast

Screencast – How to Create a Google Custom Search Engine

Click on the link below to watch a companion screencast for the post below.

How to Create a Google Custom Search Engine Screencast
(Higher Resolution than the embedded video below)