Free classroom technology presentations this Saturday

Below is information on "Day of Learning 3" from SimpleK12, which is an online training company. These 30 minute online webinars are free to attend live (online) at the times listed.  Access to the recordings at a later date is not free.  They are given by a variety of teachers, educational tech consultants, and SimpleK12 staff.  I have attended sessions during a previous "day of learning" held by SimpleK12 and found some interesting.

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: SimpleK12 Team
Date: Thu, Sep 22, 2011 at 8:31 AM
Subject: Special Saturday "Day of Learning 3" Just For You

Looking for a FREE day of Teacher Professional Development? Look no further - we've planned a special Saturday "Day of Learning 3" just for you and all of the teachers at your school.

We're hosting this Day of Learning 3 on a Saturday so you can organize your own Professional Development day at school and bring teachers in to view these webinars as a group.  Best of all, we've even planned time between sessions, and a break in the middle of the day, to allow teachers to work amongst themselves!

Be sure to let all the principals and teachers in your district know about this great FREE professional development event so they can enjoy an exciting day of learning too.

If your school doesn't pull together for the Day of Learning 3, you can still join in on the fun from home.  Webinars are viewable from your home PC or even your iPad (with the free Citrix GoToMeeting App).

==============
All sessions are FREE
==============

Space is limited, so reserve your seat now before it's too late!

================================
Join SimpleK12 on Saturday, September 24th, 2011
================================

Here are the details...

Keynote:  Own Your Classroom: The Business of 21st Century Teaching
Date: Saturday, September 24 from 9:00-9:30 AM Eastern Time, USA
Learn how to transform your classroom into a thriving environment of
information consumption and have fun along the way!
Register now. https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/806571138

Session 1: Jump Start Your Digital Footprint
Date: Saturday, September 24 from 10:00-10:30 AM Eastern Time, USA
Look at how to jump start your digital footprint and take control of it so that you can help establish your presence on the web and have something to be proud of.
Register now. https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/659667546

Session 2: Online Activities for Younger Students
Date: Saturday, September 24 from 11:00-11:30 AM Eastern Time, USA
Discover how to integrate the Internet into curriculum, as well as share some online resources, Internet inquiry units, and management ideas.
Register now.  https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/672708290

Session 3: Twitter for Beginners: The Basics of Setting Up Your PLN
Date: Saturday, September 24 from 1:00- 1:30 PM Eastern Time, USA
Learn some of the basics of using Twitter as a component of your PLN, as well as share some resources and tips for using it to maximize learning and communication.
Register now.  https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/941743522

Session 4: Google+ Guide for Educators 
Date: Saturday, September 24 from 2:00- 2:30 PM Eastern Time, USA
Find out how to use Google+ for education and ways to include it in your classroom.  Bring your own ideas as well, and be prepared to share them with the audience.
Register now.  https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/825974498

Session 5: Keep Yourself Organized with LiveBinders
Date: Saturday, September 24 from 3:00-3:30 PM Eastern Time, USA
Get those binders off of your bookshelf and create a virtual space to store your favorite websites, documents, and videos where you can share them with your students and colleagues.
Register now.  https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/588657002

Session 6: Organize and Share Your Favorite Sites with Diigo
Date: Saturday, September 24 from 4:00-4:30 PM Eastern Time, USA
Learn how to enjoy easily accessing your favorite sites from anywhere (computer, iPad, iPod, or phone), creating lists in groups, and even a teacher console - all for free!
Register now.  https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/829828386

The first webinar begins at 9:00 AM Eastern Time, USA on September 24th!

We'll see you there!

The SimpleK12 Team
Twitter: @SimpleK12 or @TlC_edu

P.S. All of these webinars are free and open to the public,
so make sure to share this registration link with your friends!
http://simplek12.com/tlc/webinars

Google Earth resources for teaching Earth Science and more

I was recently asked by a science teacher for resources she could use to independently learn about Google Earth. While I have in no way come close to conducting an exhaustive search, here are a few resources that seem useful. They are pages I bookmarked mostly after finding them via Twitter or blog posts so I offer thanks to those who publicly share information.
Overview and Introduction:

Google Earth overview ISTE webinar (duration: one hour)
This is an archive of the online webinar titled Google Earth Lessons in the Classroom, which includes audio and slides, published by ISTE. Dr. Alice Christie presented this overview of using GE with students on October 29, 2008. It is available for free to Dwight-Englewood staff via the Blackboard A Teacher's Toolbox course under Learning Unleashed > ISTE Webinar archives. A more detailed description and information for others to purchase this archive are available here.

Recording of a hands-on introduction to Google Earth (duration: one hour)
This is session one of an online, hands-on workshop led by Thomas Cooper on 2/9/09 as part of the Powerful Learning Practice program. You can follow along with if you run Google Earth while watching. The session includes information on the Oceans component. Here is a description copied from the PLP newsletter:
"Google Earth can be integrated into almost any discipline. Students can use the tool to explore natural features, historical monuments and characteristics of cities. The greatest power of this tool lies in its ability to promote inquiry-based research and collaborative action."

Earth Science:

Designing and Creating Earth Science Lessons with Google Earth User Manual
Published in May 2007. Creation of this manual was supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation.

Other Subjects:

Google Earth has also been used by teachers of other subjects. For example. Google Lit Trips can be used to help students better understand a novel through familiarity of the geography of a book's various locales. Of course, contemporary and historical maps can be useful in multiple disciplines. I have not explored the sites below much, but they are a place to start if you are looking for more.

Google's Google Earth for Educators page
Published by Google and includes ideas for classroom use in multiple disciplines.

Google Workshop, Part 3: Google Earth at the Assorted Stuff blog
Includes links to tutorial videos and other sites with resources related to Google Earth.

---

I'd be grateful to hear feedback about the usefulness of any of these resource for the next time someone asks. Therefore, please add a comment to this blog post or email me at campbb AT d-e DOT org (if you have a comment you don't want to make publicly). Also, if you have another resource that you would recommended to teachers, please add it via a comment.

Vicarious NAIS conference participation

As someone who uses Twitter to keep on eye on what others interested in education, technology, or both are talking about, I discovered that some of the 2009 National Association of Independent Schools annual conference attendees were sharing the proceedings through blogs and social networking tools such as Twitter.  As a result, I've now had a small glimpse of the conference through the eyes of those others who were gracious enough to share. Since I found some of my vicarious conference participation on Thursday and Friday worthwhile, I'd like to share some of the resources for others who might be interested.

Jason Ramsden (@raventech) and Sarah Hanawald (@sarahhanawald) encouraged live online conversation and blogged notes using the Cover It Live tool during the following presentations. (Click on the name of the blogger to access the notes.  Sessions with two bloggers listed have separate notes from each.)

• Sarah: Setting a Course for IT Success
• Sarah: Revitalizing the Veteran Teacher with Peter Gow
  
• Sarah and Jason: Opening General Session with Dan Heath, author of Made to Stick, Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die
• Sarah: Creating Artists of Learning with Mary Cullinane
• Sarah and Jason: Michelle Rhee on Reforming Education
• Jason: Michael Thompson on The Impact of Technology on the Lives of Boys
• Sarah and Jason: Guy Kawasaki on The Art of Innovation
• Sarah and Jason: Closing Session with Oprah Winfrey

As you read through the recording of the Cover It Live session, you may notice comments marked with a Twitter symbol and some may seem like a non sequitur.  Those comments automatically appear in the blog session because the author thought that Twitter posts from selected authors or on specific topics might be germane and, therefore, interesting to those viewing the live blogging session.  This relates to the next resource.

Instead of creating a live blogging session dedicated to a particular presentation, many other conference attendees used Twitter to post short messages or quotes of interest while attending presentations.  Many people who posted messages to Twitter before, during, and after the conference marked these messages with the keyword #nais09 (called a hash tag).  That made it easy for people using Twitter during the conference (whether actually there or not) to follow some of the activities. You can see a list of all of the Twitter posts tagged with that keyword using Twitter's search tool.  The entries are listed in reverse chronological order, and people continue make Twitter "micro-blog" posts tagged with that keyword as they write related articles after the conference.  This is how I discovered most of the content about the proceedings. (If you are really bored, you can scroll through the that list of twitter posts and find the announcement I recently made about for this blog post.)

If you have read this far, you might be short on time, but you can quickly read some of the best conference quotes and highlights that were posted to Twitter according to Liz B. Davis (@lizbdavis) in her blog post Gr8T Quotes from #NAIS09.

Thank you to Jason, Sarah, Liz, and everyone else who shared the conference live via the web!

For those who prefer more depth and less conversation, there were also three official conference bloggers:

• Jonathan Martin (head-elect, St. Gregory College Prep, AZ)
• KaTrina Wentzel (Mounds Park Academy, MN)
• Michael Obel-Omia (The University School, OH)

While I have not had the opportunity to explore all of their work, I did find Jonathan Martin's post "NAIS: Nine Highlights, Takeways, & Observations on Oprah, Rhee, Thompson, 21st. c. Learning, Chicago, and More" interesting.  Jonathan (@JonathanEMartin) also seemed to be a prolific user of Twitter during the conference so I believe he has included the input of others in his writings.

This experience provided me an interesting example of how blogging and social networking can connect people to a traditional conference when people actually in attendance are willing to share.  This is good news for us life-long learners who don't necessarily have the time or other resources to traditionally participate in theses events.

As I find other web resources of interest specifically related to the 2009 NAIS Annual Conference, I will post them under the nais09 tag of my delicious bookmarks, which you can access by clicking here.

Learning to Change video

Thanks to twitter and Arvind Grover (NYC independent school ed-tech director), I just came across the five minute video "Learning to Change" via his blog 21apples. It is a professionally produced compilation of video comments on technology in education from multiple people including Daniel Pink, author of A Whole New Mind.

The notion of students being part of a community larger than just their school and using that as part of their education is promoted. With that in mind, the following quote from the video interests me in particular:

"You start with the teacher. If I want my students to be making global connections, then I'm going to give the tools to my teachers first and provide them with opportunities to connect with other teachers around the world or other teachers around the country."

That reinforces the notion that teachers need to get connected beyond their school and be provided the technical resources (time, tools, and training) to do that. While some teachers have been doing something like that with an email listserve for years, there are a bunch of newer tools out there that might be more effective and definitely are more appealing to students. Kids are already using some of these for non-school work. Why not leverage their existing skills and interest to further their education and foster a passion for life-long learning?

To read comments about the video (or to add one yourself), check out the YouTube page.

If anyone at D-E has enough interest to spend some time on this, but needs a little help to get started, let me know!

Review of some literature on 1:1 computing and teacher PD

In order for a one-to-one computer initiative or almost any use of technology in the classroom to be effective, teachers need more than the just the equipment. Any professional development related to technology has been shown to be better than none. While reporting on an Educational Testing Service (ETS) study that looked at the mathematics scores of fourth- and eighth-graders on the 1996 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), Archer (1998) writes that the students of teachers who had experienced any technology training scored better than those of teachers with no technology training. However, exclusively skills-based training for teachers provides a limited benefit that may not justify the expense of ubiquitous educational technology. In a two-year, ethnographic perspective study of three middle school teachers at a school with a one-to-one laptop program, Windschitl and Sahl (2002) conclude that:

Professional development opportunities should not focus exclusively on skills with computers. Rather, technology use should be more thoughtfully considered within the context of teachers' beliefs about what constitutes effective teaching and how technology and information access can alter the traditional roles of teachers and students in the classroom. (p. 202)

In addition, Knowlton and Weiss state "when faculty attempt to enhance their courses with technology but do not consider pedagogy, they are usually disappointed with the results" (Knowlton & Weiss, 2000 in Murphy et al., 2007, p. 71).
With regard to the classroom roles of teachers and students, Windschitl and Sahl (2002, p. 169) also report that current research indicates some teachers increase the use of student-centered classroom pedagogies over time in conjunction with the use of technology.¹ However, Moersch (2002) points out that while studies such as Becker and Ravitz (1999) found that teachers' pedagogical beliefs and actions were very much affected by substantial use of technology in the classroom, "the question remains, were those teachers most affected by technology use already inclined toward a constructivist approach in the classroom or were the technology and the teachers' abilities to use different applications the causal variables that changed their pedagogical style from a nonconstructivist approach to a learner-centered, experiential paradigm?" (p. 30).
The issue of technology access for all teachers and students can be addressed by a one-to-one computing program. However, Windschitl and Sahl found that the mere existence of a one-to-one program did not initiate an increase in the use of constructivist pedagogy among the teachers studied. In fact, "the availability of technology was neither a necessary nor sufficient condition to affect pedagogy" (Windschitl & Sahl, 2002, pp. 201-202). Yet, in both the Windschitl and Sahl study and in the Becker and Ravitz study, the researchers found that pervasive technology was a catalyst that enabled teachers already dissatisfied with teacher-centered methods or who were already constructivist-oriented to implement more practices consistent with their teaching philosophy than were possible before the existence of pervasive technology (Windschitl & Sahl, 2002; Becker & Ravitz, 1999). Data collected shows that teachers whose instructional practice has moved in a constructivist-oriented direction are the same teaches who have thoroughly employed computers in instruction among schools where other arguably necessary factors exist: frequent discussion about reform, a social network that informs and encourages the implementation of instructional change, and a relatively technologically rich environment (Becker & Ravitz, 1999, pp. 380-381).
Even though research shows a clear connection between instructional technology use and constructivist or student-centered teaching methods, why are student-centered pedagogies that require students to use higher-order thinking and practice solving problems in a practical context important? To make room for more student-centered teaching is this pedagogical change worth a reduction in the time allocated to knowledge-transmission oriented methods and teacher-centered methods? The skills required by future workers in the 21st century work force are "the need to analyze information, make decisions, and solve problems" according to The Secretary's Commission on Achieving Necessary Skills (SCANS) report conducted by the U. S. Department of Commerce in 1991 (Moersch, 2002, pp. 22-23). Moersch also writes that several commissioned reports during the 1990s recommend that curriculum focus on the skills typically associated with constructivist pedagogies to meet those requirements.
The value of constructivist pedagogy is not a new idea even though it has gained new attention in the context of 21st century skills and teaching with technology. A prominent constructivist, Ernst von Glasersfeld has traced the cognitive construction theory back to a Neapolitan philosopher Giambattista Vico who discusses the idea in a 1710 treatise, where he states that one knows a thing only when one can explain it (Yager, 1991). That idea resonates with any teacher who remembers the level of understanding he or she attained after teaching a particular subject. This understanding often surpasses what that teacher learned while studying the subject as a pre-service student. More recently, Moersch reports that Ryan in 1990, Hopson in 1998, and Lin Hsiao in 1998 found significant improvement in student academic achievement "in classrooms where self-regulated learning was encouraged, higher-order thinking strategies were promoted, and guided discovery learning was nurtured" (Moersch, 2002, p. 53).
Even through the lens of test scores, there is evidence of the benefit of good instructional computer use such as when it promotes higher-order thinking. In reporting the findings of the ETS report by Harold Wenglinsky, which examined math scores from the 1996 NAEP, Archer (1998) states that eighth-graders whose teachers used computers in ways associated with higher-order thinking such as "simulations and applications" scored higher than students whose teachers did not use computers for instruction. Conversely, eighth-graders whose instructional computer use was primarily for "drill and practice" actually scored lower. "What we do know for certain," [Wenglinsky] says, "is that when teachers use the computer to teach higher-order thinking skills, students benefit" (Archer, 1998, Despite his findings section, para. 9).
Back in the context of one-to-one computing, Wambach (2006) quotes Gary Stager, a one-to-one computing advocate: "The success of a one-to-one computing program is in its application" (p. 59).

---

¹On page 166 of Tracing Teachers' Use of Technology in a Laptop Computer School: The Interplay of Teacher Beliefs, Social Dynamics, and Institutional Culture (2002), Windschitl and Sahl cite the following research reports as suggesting a correlation between technology use and the move of teachers toward constructivist pedagogy: Becker and Ravitz (1999), Means (1994), and Mehlinger (1996).

---

References

Archer, J. (1998, October 1). The link to higher scores (Technology counts '98: Putting school technology to the test). Technology in Schools Supplement to Education Week, 18(5), 10. Retrieved 12 January 2008, from Professional Development Collection database.

Becker, H. J., & Ravitz, J. (1999, Summer). The influence of computer and Internet use on teacher's pedagogical practices and perceptions. Journal of Research on Computing in Education, 31(4), 356-384.

Moersch, C. (2002). Beyond hardware: Using existing technology to promote higher-level thinking. Eugene, OR: International Society of Technology in Education.

Murphy, D. M., King, F. B., & Brown, S. W. (2007). Laptop Initiative Impact: Assessed Using Student, Parent, and Teacher Data. Computers in the Schools, 24(1/2), 57-73.

Wambach, C. (2006, September). From Revolutionary to Evolutionary: 10 years of 1-to-1 Computing. T.H.E. Journal, 33(14), 58-59.

Windschitl, M., & Sahl, K. (2002, Spring). Tracing Teachers' Use of Technology in a Laptop Computer School: The Interplay of Teacher Beliefs, Social Dynamics, and Institutional Culture. American Educational Research Journal, 39(1), 165-205.

Yager, R. E. (1991, September). The constructivist learning model. The Science Teacher, 58(6), 52-57.

---

I wrote this in January as part of a research proposal focusing on teacher profesional development in a one-to-one program.