In Riverside USD, students bringing in their own devices means that teachers can use tools like Poll Everywhere in the classroom to check for understanding.
http://rusdit.ning.com/video/using-texting-for-review-at
The thing about this that cracked me up was the groan when the teacher asked students to get out their cell phones!
Book Drum is a rapidly expanding site with detailed annotations and analysis of popular books and classic literature. They are currently running a Tournament in which individuals or groups can select a book and write about it in the format of the site. For editing purposes, the site works like a wiki, which means that a teacher could sign up for a book and have her students do all of the writing and analysis.
The book profiles have almost page by page annotations (called bookmarks) with links to media support files. Summaries, setting, and about the author pages are also included. Profiles are not published until they are complete, so what you see at the website is the final product. Books that are in process are hidden from public view, available only with a login.
The amount of work in a book profile seems to be astronomical. But if I taught honors or AP English and wanted to take a very in-depth look at a particular work, I might have my students create one.
Today I came across this resource from the Orange County Department of Education. They have put together some "kits" of materials - photographs, video, audio files, and supporting materials. All of the kits I looked at have photographs, but some had the other media types as well. The kits are arranged by subject area, though I thought some of the picture collections were not necessarily a great match for the topic (pictures of soccer players in math, saying the pictures can be used to teach 1/2). Regardless, it's one more place teachers can get copyright friendly images by content area, and maybe get some ideas of what they could do with multimedia presentations to reinforce certain topics.
The CTAP logo is also on the site, which is a bonus :)
The Bill and Melinda Gates foundation has been conducting some reasearch about indicators of teacher effectiveness. The report was just released, and indicates that value-added assessments and student survey data are pretty reliable indicators.
The report, as annotated by a staff writer at the LA Times, is available at http://documents.latimes.com/measures-of-effective-teaching/.
One of the most appreciated features of digital texts is the ability to
highlight text and add personal notes. Highlighted text and notes are
searchable, making it convenient to find those bits of information at a
later date. But I wonder how many Kindle users realize that their
highlights are being tracked...
Amazon's Kindle site has a fairly new interesting feature, where the highlighting done by users of Amazon Kindle, Kindle for iPhone and Kindle for iPad gets aggregated and reported. According to Amazon, "We combine the highlights of all Kindle customers and identify the
passages with the most highlights. The resulting Popular Highlights help
readers to focus on passages that are meaningful to the greatest number
of people." The passages listed have to be highlighted by at least 3 unique users, but most passages I was looking at had been highlighted hundreds of times, according to the little note underneath each one. I didn't see anything with more than 2000 highlights, though, which makes me wonder if they are aggregating the highlights of all users, or just specific ones.
I wonder about possible implication for digital textbooks. Might digital textbook publishers find a way to collect this data, and then report it out to students? I always hated buying a used textbook that was all highlighted, because I had no way of knowing if the previous owner was a moron. But if the number of people who highlight a passage is noted, that might add to my confidence that the most relevant bits have been picked out already.
In case you're interested, Kindle says that Dan Brown's The Lost Symbol is the most highlighted book of all time, followed by the Bible.
The new Horizon Report focused on education has been released, and it seems to be consistent with the regular Horizon Report that came out in the fall. Cloud computing and collaborative environments are listed as the near-term horizon, with game-based learning and mobiles on the mid-range horizon. Longer term technologies listed as having big impact on education are augmented reality and flexible displays. Flexible display technology wasn't listed in the fall Horizon Report, but could have big implications for education.
You can view the report online or download it at http://www.nmc.org/publications/2010-horizon-k12-report.
In Minnesota, there is a growing push for statewide online learning programs. District 287 has embraced online learning as a way to provide flexibiity and support for their student. Check out this video that talks about the why, an they leadership and vision practices that are needed for this type of program to be successful. The video features Dr. Scott McLeod, creator of the Did you Know? videos and Dangerously Irrelevant.
Several teachers in Woodburn Oregon have benefited from lessons learned by the Woodburn IT director, Chuck Dinsfriend, while he was in Perris. According to an article in the Woodburn Independent, the district has received 2 different technology grants in the past year that have added technology tools into the classroom. The first provided mobile whiteboards, projectors, and student response systems. The second was an ARRA EETT-C grant, focused on using technology to support English Language Learners. A technology integration coach is a piece of that grant, because coaching "works".
Looking at what Chuck has implemented in Woodburn, I can't help but feel that we have played a small part in their program. Jenny and Jody did a lot of fairly high profile Digital Classrooms work with Perris HSD; it seems likely that the success he saw teachers having with engaging students with those tools would influence his priorities as he moved on. And he has some experience with the coaching model for EETT we use; I can't help but wonder if he used some language and research on coaching that we provided when Perris partnered with us in the past, adapting it for his situation in Oregon. I hope so - I like the thought of our successful models being spread to other states!
PopTech seems very similar to the TEDtalks, but with more of a focus on technology and social networking. They describe themselves as "a unique innovation network – a global community of cutting-edge leaders, thinkers, and doers from many different disciplines, who come together to explore the social impact of new technologies, the forces of change shaping our future, and new approaches to solving the world’s most significant challenges. We are known for our thriving community of thought-leaders, breakthrough innovation programs, visionary annual conferences and deep media and storytelling capabilities." Videos are arranged in categories; many deal with sustainable technologies and energy sources.
I know a lot of folks use Wordle to create tag cloud images; did you know you can include phrases in your clouds? When you paste or type text into the “Paste in a bunch of text” window, insert a tilde (~) between any words that you want to keep together. So RIMS~CTAP keeps the two words together!
