I am excited to announce that I will be moving to Boston in May. I have accepted a position in the communications office of Beaver Country Day School in Chestnut Hill, MA. While I am sad to be leaving the wonderful people I work with at Sycamore Creek Elementary, I am looking forward to this new opportunity.

Over the next few weeks, I will be tying up loose ends at Sycamore Creek and handing over my technology duties to others. I am proud of what we have accomplished in such a short time. It’s hard to believe that it has only been nine months since we opened the doors to a brand new school. Opening a school has been one of the best experiences of my professional life, and I am grateful to everyone who gave me that opportunity. I will miss you all.

Our Kyle the Crocodile blog has been getting some attention throughout the area recently. Here are some of the places it has been posted:

• Wake County Public School System’s Morning Announcements Blog
• WRAL’s Project Education Blog
• WCPSS’s Internal Newsletter
• Upcoming presentation at NCTIES.

This is the first month that I have tried a new staff development model for my teachers. In the past I have tried to conduct before or after-school sessions for teachers or sneak in five minutes at a staff meeting. These haven’t seemed to go over very well. For one thing, no one wants one more meeting to attend, and attention spans at 7:00 a.m. or 4:00 p.m. are not the best.

My class schedule has allowed my to try something different. I teach a semi-flexible schedule. We have an “A” week and a “B” week. On “A” weeks I teach a tech “special” to K-2 in the morning and have the afternoons available to collaborate with teachers on projects, handle tech matters, and now to provide staff development. “B” weeks are the same except I teach grades 3-5 in the afternoon and have mornings available. The guidance counselor rotates weeks me so classes don’t miss a special when they don’t have tech.

Here’s an example of how this new model works: This week is an “A” week so I teach K-2. I set up a time today to provide staff development to 4th grade teachers during their normal special time (all classes for a grade have specials at the same time to provide common planning time). Next week I have sessions setup for 1st and 2nd grades during their special times since I am only teaching 3-5.

This small group setting provides an opportunity for a grade level team to ask me questions that they might not otherwise want or be able to ask. At the start of the month I give each a team a choice of a few topics we can cover that month. Normally the conversations stray from that topic. That’s fine, because it always is about something the team needs assistance with.

This model works well with the Professional Learning Communities (PLC) that our district is implementing. Each group must have a PLC meeting each week. Our principal has said that these tech meetings can act as the team’s PLC meeting for that week. Teachers are happy because they can kill two birds with one stone.

All-in-all I am excited about how this model is playing out so far.

[Image from Amanda Woodward]

I just finished a project with a second grade class on natural resources. The class was studying the different types of natural resources, why they are important, and how to conserve them. After discussing ideas with the teacher, we came up with the idea of creating natural resource trading cards. Each card would have a picture of the resource, the student’s name, and a few facts about the resource.

Day 1: After coming up with a list of resources as a class, students came to the lab for research. The teacher and I each took half the class and engaged them with guided research using both internet sources and book. We discussed how to find important points when reading, and we developed several facts for each resources. Students recorded these facts onto a pre-made research form.

Day 2: I pre-selected about five different images for each resource so that students would have some choice for the pictures for their cards. I did not want them going out searching for images on their own at this point. When students arrived at the lab, I walked them step-by-step through the process of creating one card using the trading card maker at  Big Huge Lab’s Flickr Toys. Once studnets went through it once, they quickly got the hang of it and finished the remaining cards on their own with minimal help from the teacher and myself.

Students saved their cards to their network space. Later, I pulled them out to print. They needed to be resized so I changed the resolution to 300 dpi and sized them to 2.5″ by 3.5″ — the same size as traditional trading cards. I then used PowerPoint to lay them out for printing (I have found that PowerPoint is a very easy way to do light desktop publishing). Once printed on card stock the teacher cut the cards out and handed them out.

That’s it…two days was all it took. The students loved having these cards for themselves and to show to their friends.

I’m excited to have a presentation accepted for the North Carolina Technology in Education Society Conference in March. I’m even more excited that I will be sharing our Kyle the Crocodile blog. I am so pleased with how this blog has been integrated into our school life (see my previous post). 

Here is the official presentation title and description:

See Kyle Blog: Using Your School’s Mascot (or Other Furry Friends) to Introduce Blogging

Looking for ways to introduce blogging at your school? Come hear how a small green stuffed animal brought blogging to an elementary school – its students, parents, teachers, and administrators. We’ll share the story of Kyle the Crocodile, lessons learned, and how to adapt this project for your school.

Yesterday, I decided to try using the form tool in Google Docs as an electronic worksheet that students would complete and then submit. Normally, if I need students to complete written work, I will have them enter their responses in Word. I don’t print them, but I do go into each student’s network space to see the work. It’s fine, but it is time consuming. I’ve had so much success using forms with our staff and PTA that I thought I’d give it a try with students.

Here are my thoughts:

Pros:

• All of the students’ results are populated to a spreadsheet where I can see them at-a-glance.
• For multiple choice questions  you can use the “Summary” option to quickly see how many of your students got the question correct — sort of a “poor-man’s” clicker.
• Turned into a good lesson on copy/paste when some of the questions required entering the name of a city or some other factual information.
• Students had little trouble using it.

Cons:

• A few students pressed “Submit” before they were finished. Fortunately, if they pressed the “Back” button from the confirmation screen (at least on IE6…yes we STILL use IE6) their responses were still in the fields on the form. When I was viewing their responses in the spreadsheet, I simply deleted the row that contained their first submission.
• No “Save” option. Students must complete the form in one sitting since there is no way to save and come back to it later.
• No numbering of questions.
• I would like there to be a way to either number a question “1B” or indent a question under its parent. For example, I wanted students to enter the source they used to find the answer. Ideally, this would have been nested under the question that it referred to. As it is, the source question looked like it was an entirely new question.

I will use the form tool again. But the activity needs to be limited to a few basic questions. It would work very well as an Exit Ticket activity at the end of class.

One of my favorite things is when teachers come to me and say, “This is what we’re studying, how can we integrate technology?” They know they want to use technology, they’re just not sure how to do it. It’s my job to help them come up with ideas, train them on any tech they need to learn, and help them teach the unit.

Before winter break, two fifth grade teachers came and asked what they could do with technology for a unit on the American Revolution. I always take a day or so to flesh out a few ideas before I present them to teachers.

As I began thinking about this project, I came up with two main things I wanted to accomplish. The first is something I have noticed a lot this year: fourth and fifth grade students are struggling with research skills. So, I wanted to incorporate both online and print research into the project. I’m working on developing a guide to help them organize their research. The second is introducing them to interacting with others in an online environment — i.e., moving from web 1.0 to web 2.0.

Here’s what I am thinking. Students will “become” an individual from the Revolutionary War era (soldier embedded at Valley Forge, mother on the home front, participant in the Boston Tea Party, signer of the Declaration of Independence, etc). I have created a blog that will serve as a compilation of diary entries written by students in the guise of their assigned persona. They will reflect on what it is like to be living during that time and what they are “experiencing.” Students will also post comments to their classmates’ entries. My hope is that individuals with expertise in early American history will comment on some of the posts as well. I believe that knowing that a wider audience will read their writing (rather than just their teacher and parents) makes a significant difference in the quality of student work.

We will begin the project by discussing primary sources and examining actual letters and diaries from that time period. Students will be asked to conduct research about that era in order to accurately portray their character. Using Kim Cofino’s Blogging is Elementary post and the series of posts about blogging with elementary students on the Langwitches blog as guides, I will introduce blogs to the fifth graders focusing on safety and etiquette.

At this point, this is only a rough sketch of the unit plan. The classes do not return from their break until late January (we are a year-round school and these two classes are on a track that finished their nine weeks in school at winter break, so their three weeks off started on January 5) so I still have some time to finish planning.

I’ll post a link to the blog when we get started.

[Image: Spirit of ‘76. Painting by A.M. Willard, 1876. 148-GW-1209.  From the National Archives.]

A couple of weeks ago I sent out a Tweet about ShareTabs, a service that allows you to add numerous links to one URL which then displays your links in browser-like tabs. I didn’t get a chance to spend much time with it when I first found it. Today ShareTabs was mentioned during Classroom2.0′s “What We Learned in 2008″ show, so I thought I’d dig deeper in to the service and see what use it could be for educators and students.

First, it’s easy enough to use. You simply enter a list of URLs and add a unique name to be used in the main link (optional).

Once you click “Tabify ‘em” you will be given the URL for your links. Clicking on the URL will take you to your new page with thumbnails of your links (or that’s the idea anyway) and tabs across the top of the page. Clicking on a tab will bring that site full-page.

You can see in my example of National League Central baseball team web sites, the thumbnail feature was not working. Here is the link to my example — maybe it will work at another time: http://sharetabs.com/?nl-central-teams.

The ability to have many links all under one URL is the real selling point here. It would make Twittering a list of links very easy. I also like the thumbnails on the main page (if they are working).

The general idea of the service is good, but there are a couple things missing. For example, once a list of links is created and given a URL, that’s it. No links can be added or deleted. Also, I would love a way to be able to share the URL with others in a way that they could add more links. This would require an account feature which is currently not available.

So how could this be used in school?

As it stands now, ShareTabs would be a good place to collect a list of links about a subject to share with students.

The lack of an account is actually a plus for students becuase (especially with elementary students) it is difficult to set them up with accounts to all the services we would like them to use. While Diigo and Del.icio.us are great, you need an account. ShareTabs is a very easy way for students to collect links as they conduct their research without needing to worry about email address and passwords.

I would like to see the addition of an OPTION to create an account and the ability to collaborate with others on the creation of your list of links — but please don’t take away the non-account feature, that’s a big plus for education.

I have compiled a list of many of the (mostly) free web tools I use. In addition to this post, I have created a Tools page that I will keep updated as I come across new tools.

Start Page

• Netvibes
  • I have tried several start pages (iGoogle, MyYahoo!, Pageflakes) and Netvibes is by far the best for me. I’ve been using Netvibes for years and love the ease-of-use, the new sharing features, and the customizable layout.

Browser

• Chrome
  • I began using Chrome as my default browser in October. Two things that make this browser stand out: speed and the address/search bar that knows what I want even before I do. Since I didn’t use too many extensions in Firefox, Chrome’s lack of extensions doesn’t bother me.
• Firefox
  • As much as I love Chrome, there are still a few sites that still work better in Firefox. I also use the FireFTP extension as my regular FTP client.

Google Tools

• GMail
  • What can I say that hasn’t already been said about GMail? The new lab features such as tasks and the Calendar and Docs gadgets are great.
• Google Calendar
  • Easily embedded into websites and sharing options. I use Google Calendar as my personal calendar, our school’s public calendar on its website, and the school’s internal master staff calendar.
• Google Docs
  • Collaborative word processing, spreadsheets, and presentations. My new favorite tool in Docs is the form tool which allows you to create surveys. Results automatically populate a spreadsheet and there is a summary tool that allows you to view results as charts and graphs (although no easy way to print this summary yet).
• Google Reader
  • I just started using Reader regularly after my “EdTech” tab in Netvibes was bursting at the seams with blogs. So now I use Reader exclusively for my education blogs and my “EdTech” tab now has only one widget: the web site widget which I use to embed the Google Reader web page.
• Google Notebook
  • Notebook is great for bookmarking web pages and adding your own notes. I have a notebook for teaching ideas, helpful web tools, and funding sources. I also use Notebook as a way to keep school committee resources in one place so all members of the committee can access them.
• Google Sites
  • Every teacher at our school is required to have a class web site. I got them started with Google Sites and I am pleased with the results. We also use it for our private internal staff web site. Free + No Adds + Easy-to-Use = Great for teachers.
• Google Earth
  • A student favorite. Recently used Google Earth in lessons about measurement using its ruler. Discussed when to use feet vs. miles and had students choose different things to measure (ex., distance from Raleigh to Charlotte in miles and the length of the runway at RDU in feet).

Twitter

• Twitter
  • Micro-blogging tool Twitter has become the main way I keep up with my personal learning network of other educational technology professionals. Initially I wasn’t sure I would use it, but have found that it has become indispensable.
• TweetDeck
  • An Adobe Air application that allows you to groups your followers and alerts you when there are new tweets. I have mine setup to only alert me when I have @ replies. I had the Twitter widget for Netvibes, but realized I was missing some replies because there is no alert feature.

Screen Capture

• FSCapture
  • A light-weight screen capturing and annotation application. Since I started using it, the company has started charging $20 for the program (still worth it). A previous, portable version that does not even need to be installed is available here.
• Jing
  • From the same company that creates Camtasia, Jing is a free screencast application. It can upload videos directly to screencast.com. Screencasts are limited to 5 minutes, but who wants to sit through anything longer than that?

Bookmarking

• Diigo
  • Online bookmarking with the ability to annotate web sites and share with groups. Teachers can sign-up for an educator account which will add a “Teacher Console” to their profile. This makes it easy to set up private groups for classes. It’s also easy to bulk-create private student accounts by uploading CSV files.

Wiki

• Wikispaces
  • Collaborative web spaces. I initially chose Wikispaces because of their free educator wikis. Simply state that your wiki will be used for K-12 educational purposes and it will be upgraded to a private, add-free wiki. I’ve stayed with Wikispaces because I like the clean look of their wikis. I have used it with fourth graders and they find it very intuitive.

Blogging

• Blogger
  • Google’s easy-to-use blogging application. One downside for educational use is the “Next Blog” button that appears at the top of every blog. Click it and who knows where you will end up. There is some CSS code that can remove the “Next Blog” bar.
• WordPress
  • If you want more power and control over your blog, WordPress is the way to go. WordPress.org offers the application for download to your web hosting company to run on your domain (WordPress is pre-installed on many hosting provider’s servers). Alternatively, wordpress.com allows you to create your blog on WordPress servers.
• EduBlogs
  • Using WordPress, an excellent blogging service for student use. Blogs are free, but are increasingly displaying ads. Become a “Supporter” for $40 a year and get thirty ad-free blogs as well as power tools such as forums for one blog. I am currently setting up a blogging project for 5th grade students about the American Revolution.

Other Useful Web Tools

• fd’s Flickr Toys from Big Huge Labs
  • Allows you to create motivational-type posters (my example here), trading cards, magazine covers, movie posters, and many more fun things using your own photos.
• stock.xchange
  • The best place I have found for free, professional stock photos. Most allow for free use and some only require that you let the creator know where it is used.
• Sprout Builder
  • Create Flash animations easily and add them to your web site. I have used this tool to create a countdown clock to the opening of the new school, but there are so many more advanced ways to use it.
• Print What You Like
  • Simply enter a URL on their home page and choose the sections of a web site to print. Can save a lot of paper and eliminates the annoying problem of selecting text to print but also getting ads and other unnecessary items as well.
• SlideShare
  • Upload, share, and embed PowerPoint, OpenOffice, or Keynote presentations.
• Scribd
  • Upload, share, and embed Word, PDF, Excel, PowerPoint, OpenOffice, or text files. I use Scribd to embed our principal’s monthly newsletter on our web site.

Before winter break, I finished up a month-long project with a fourth grade class about elections and campaigns. Basically the class was divided into two groups. Each group formed the campaign team for a mock candidate. Students chose who their candidate would be and the results were Snoopy and Cosmo (from Nick’s The Fairly Odd Parents).

Each campaign was then divided into three more teams: publicity, webmasters, and campaign rallies. The publicity team was responsible for creating a campaign commercial for their candidate using PhotoStory. The webmaster were tasked with designing a web site (using a wiki from Wikispaces). Finally, the campaign rallies team created a PowerPoint presentation for a campaign “rally”.

Initially, the teacher and I discussed having the teams discuss issues such as year-round vs. traditional calendar schools, uniforms vs. non-uniforms, etc. However we decided to allow them to choose issues that were at the heart of the real presidential campaign. Thus, they not only learned how a campaign worked, but they also were able to research the real issues.

The thing that really made this project work was that it was self-directed. The classroom teacher provided a brief introduction and helped the class choose issues to research, and then I came in and conducted lessons about the technology they would be using. Students took on the responsibility of completing the project themselves. We did not provide a due date — they would finish when they finished it. There were times that it seemed to be stalled, but the students did not disappoint.

Watching the students work with minimal guidance from adults was an experience that I had not been a part of. If you give students the information and tools they need (and be there for them if they get stuck), they don’t need hand-holding.

In the end, the commercials were played on our morning news for the entire school to see and the web sites were also viewed by school. I created a form in Google Docs so students throughout the school could cast their vote.

There were some things that we need to address for future projects like this. We’re still not seeing students cite sources the way they should and we need to start teaching note-taking skills, but all-in-all, it was a great learning experience for the students and myself.

Here is the main wiki for the campaign with links to each campaign’s wiki, the commercials, and presentations.

By the way, Snoopy won by a count of 160 to 115 vote.

[Image from Woodsy: http://www.sxc.hu/photo/782736]