Augmented Reality - Imagine The Possiblities

In our February session I ended my presentation by showing some videos showcasing augmented reality. Turns out there are a couple of websites out there that let you play with it for free:



Try it out yourself:

boffswana.com/news/?p=392
ge.ecomagination.com/smartgrid/#/augmented_reality

Video Credits:
youtube.com/watch?v=oHkUOpYNhoM
youtube.com/watch?v=EL2ByYozGOI

Music:
John Lennon - Imagine

bill ferriter on teacher leadership

Well, there you go. Yesterday I mentioned Bill Ferriter as a thoughtful commentator on all things related to teacher leadership, and today he rewards us with reflections about what teacher leadership looks like in action.

His post is framed around a speech he'll be giving soon to a group of teachers who recently earned National Board certification. To help them chart their professional paths, Bill offers his own definition of what it means to be a teacher leader, a definition developed over "the better part of the past 12 years stumbling through the professional dark." The short version first:

Teacher leaders are practicing educators who are committed to driving
change.

And the expanded version (emphases mine):

For me, teacher leadership started by simply engaging my colleagues
in meaningful conversations about teaching and learning. I figured that it was impossible to drive change unless we had some real transparency around what it was that we were doing with students.

Teacher leadership probably also means supporting new colleagues, don't you
think? No matter how good university education programs are, nothing can really prepare you for this gig! Driving change means lending a hand to the teachers on
our hallway who need us the most.

And I reckon that driving change requires a deep and meaningful understanding of current practices, too. Teacher
leaders, then, are constantly researching and reading about effective
instruction. They've got an almost unsettling fear of stagnation!

Driving change also requires a willingness to raise your
voice a bit. Teacher leaders are always willing to speak up
in faculty and team meetings to lend guidance or expertise.
They're presenting at conferences and finding new ways to use
digital tools like blogs and wikis to share ideas and resources with the world.

But most importantly, driving change means having a steadfast
belief that reform rests in our hands. Teacher leaders don't stand around patiently waiting for others to take action. Instead, they're always acting.

You can take those points to the bank. Better yet, take them back to your school.

how teachers learn

The February 2009 issue of Educational Leadership focuses on the theme "How Teachers Learn." Hmmm. It's timely stuff as we shift from developing our own technology integration chops to sharing knowledge and supporting colleagues' exploration. As you think about the specific challenges and opportunities facing teachers in your setting, and how you plan to approach them as a teacher-leader, you may find some practical gems and immediately-usable ideas from this issue's articles. Many of the articles from the print version are also available online.

Moving Beyond Talk by Debra Smith, Bruce Wilson, and Dick Corbett discusses professional learning communities as a model for teacher learning, and poses the question:

But it's easy for learning communities to become stalled at the stage of
collegial discussions about improving teaching practice. What spurs
communities to progress beyond talk to collective action that brings change
to schools?

They identified six conditions that continually cropped up in their interviews with learning community participants and facilitators. When most or all of these conditions were in place, the quality of adult learning improved, and teachers moved from talk to action:

• a preexisting supportive culture
• time to meet
• satisfying processes
• voluntary participation
• support from principals
• a cadre of trained facilitators

As you work with teachers in your school, how might these six conditions guide your planning?

Also, be sure to give a close reading to Bill Ferriter's article, Learning with Blogs and Wikis. Three passages popped out from the first section as being useful to teacher leaders (the second section, devoted to practical advice on getting started with blogs and wikis, will feel like more familiar ground but definitely still worth a read). Bill opens with a quote from Richard Elmore, professor of educational leadership at Harvard, about how school structures straightjacket adult learning:

As expectations for increased student performance mount and the measurement and publication of evidence about performance becomes part of the public discourse
about schools, there are few portals through which new knowledge about teaching
and learning can enter schools; few structures or processes in which teachers
and administrators can assimilate, adapt, and polish new ideas and practices;
and few sources of assistance for those who are struggling to understand the
connection between the academic performance of their students and the practices
in which they engage.

Then he offers two counterpoints updating Elmore's view, two ways in which times and tools are changing. First this:

Times have changed in two significant ways, however, since Elmore began
describing the hostile learning environments that have often held schools back.
First, there's a new emphasis on the importance of collaborative learning among
members of close-knit teams in schools. School leaders are beginning to believe
in the human capacity of their faculties and are structuring opportunities for
teachers to reflect on instruction together. These joint efforts are targeted
and specific, increasing educators' motivation and engagement.

And this:

Second, digital tools now help fulfill Elmore's desire for fresh "portals
through which new knowledge about teaching and learning can enter schools."
Specifically, thousands of accomplished educators are now writing blogs about
teaching and learning, bringing transparency to both the art and the science of
their practice. In every content area and grade level and in schools of varying
sizes and from different geographic locations, educators are actively reflecting
on instruction, challenging assumptions, questioning policies, offering advice,
designing solutions, and learning together. And all this collective knowledge is
readily available for free.

Bill also reflects on teaching and leadership at his excellent blog, The Tempered Radical. Visit him there for more keen insights.

The Horizon Report 2009

The 2009 Horizon Report is out now! If you are not familiar with the Horizon Report, it is a detailed look at trends and innovations effecting technology and specifically how it will effect education. Each year a panel of industry leaders in the fields of technology and edtech convene to draft this report where they look out to the next five years and attempt to forecast what technologies will be most influential or impactful and to some degree describes how they think these technologies will be used.

This year's report identifies mobile computing devices, cloud computing, geo-tagging, the personal web, and semantic applications as technologies most likely to have a great impact in the coming years.

Do yourself a favor and take a few minutes and browse this and past Horizon Report documents:

The Horizon Report 2009
The Horizon Report 2008
The Horizon Report 2007
The Horizon Report 2006
The Horizon Report 2005
The Horizon Report 2004

educon 2.1: warm up your weekend with networked learning

As a mental warm-up for our session tomorrow, take a look at the goings-on this weekend at EduCon 2.1, an education conference held annually (this year's is the second conference) at Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia.

Pre-conference activities started yesterday. Formal sessions run throughout the day Saturday and Sunday; most will be streamed live, with additional notes and resources archived and accessible later through the conference wiki. Much in these presentations will be worth sinking your teeth into, whether you find them provocative, reinforcing, challenging, bewildering, or eureka-moment inspiring.

Our friend Michael Walker from Edina is at the conference. We're adopting him as our intrepid reporter on the ground. He's already been posting session notes and impressions on the Edina Technology Integration blog. He invites you to follow his EduCon progress and post any questions as a comment on the blog; he'll do his best to come up with the answer, or convene a group of EduCon attendees on the spot to give their thoughts. Who know's what's possible? We'll also follow his updates on Twitter tomorrow and see what develops. Thanks, Mike!

More about EduCon 2.1:

EduCon 2.1 is both a conversation and a conference.
And it is not a technology conference. It is an education conference. It is, hopefully, an innovation conference where we can come together, both in person and virtually, to discuss the future of schools. Every session will be an opportunity to discuss and debate ideas -- from the very practical to the big dreams.

The Axioms

Guiding Principles of EduCon 2.1
1) Our schools must be inquiry-driven, thoughtful and empowering for all members
2) Our schools must be about co-creating -- together with our students -- the 21st Century Citizen
3) Technology must serve pedagogy, not the other way around.
4) Technology must enable students to research, create, communicate and collaborate
5) Learning can -- and must -- be networked.

Disruptive Innovation

Today I found a version of Clayton Christen's talk about Disruptive Innovation slightly different from the one we watched as a group in November. Here it is (click on the "Video" link on the right):

ryan higbea on blogging and podcasting

At our November session, Ryan Higbea shared his experiences integrating blogging and podcasting into his classroom. Here's video of his presentation, shaky camera work and all. Oh, for a tripod! Enjoy.

atomic learning tech skills assessment

If you're fired up about assessment and technology (and really, who isn't?), this is your lucky day. Atomic Learning has developed a new assessment to gauge students' technology skills according to the NETS-S 2007 standards. They're offering it free with purchase of the Technology Skills Collection. More to the point, if your district is already an Atomic Learning subscriber, access to the assessment is gratis.

Atomic Learning's Tech Skills Assessment - Movies via kwout

Interesting. . . the multiple-choice sample questions are formatted as mini-vignettes: a problem is posed, followed by the ever-familiar a-b-c-d range of possible solutions or responses. For example:

Marisol created a presentation about recycling plants for her science class. She
showed it to her classmate Keith before she presented it to her class. In his
feedback, Keith noted that some parts of the presentation didn’t sound natural,
and Marisol showed him where she’d copied and pasted from various Web sites.
What should Keith do?

A "feedback" option can be switched on by the adminstrator which will provide a rationale for the correctness or incorrectness of each item as a way to add formative-assessment zing.

The scenario approach seems stronger for the ethics-driven digital citizenship kinds of questions---what would/should you do, rather than what can you do. But even so, the set-up necessarily forces a "correct" answer; and as we all know, ethical issues are seldom resolved so neatly. The updated NETS-S scrunches down the old focus on technology operations and concepts into a single standard. With the bold new emphasis on creativity and innovation, communication and collaboration, and the other 21st century skills that resist understanding in the old-school definition of "skills," I wonder how close to the mark a multiple choice assessment can really get.

I wonder, too, how Atomic Learning has factored in readability. Are different versions of the instrument available for kids reading at different grade levels?

Does your district use Atomic Learning? The Tech Skills Assessment could be a valuable tool for understanding students' progress toward NETS-S at the school or district level. At the very least, it could help start some good conversations. Check it out and let us know what you think.

K12Online Presentation by Scott McLeod on Disruptive Innovation

Leading the Change: Current leadership models are inadequate for disruptive innovations - In this session from the K12Online conference Dr. Scott McLeod explains the concepts Clayton Christensen puts forth in his books, The Innovator's Dilema and Disrupting Class. Whether you read Christensen's books or watch McLeod's presentation the concept of disruptive innovation and how it impacts education is a must read/see/hear for everyone involved in our profession.

Building Your Own Personal Learning Network

This year at TIES I will be presenting a Sunday workshop on building a personal learning network. I created a 15 minute video for that session that I thought I would share with you as it directly addresses and nicely summarizes what we have been doing in our group with our personal learning networks. This is also a video you can take with you to your colleagues to introduce them to the concept of PLNs.

Enjoy!


Building Your Own Personal Learning Network from Carl Anderson on Vimeo.

Open Source & Education

I came across this panel discussion of education fellows today at Pop!Tech. Fascinating and powerful discussion regarding open source principles in education and education reform.

@ Yahoo! Video

At the end of this video a question is asked, "With all of this technology, what is lost?" What are your thoughts?

pride is the driving force

Over at Meandering, our colleague Mr. Martin writes about launching an exciting vodcasting project with his students. Every day, they're filming, editing, and publishing a new Word of the Day as a class vodcast. Parents can view each day's vodcast (vocabcast?) on the class homeroom website; or they can subscribe as they would to any other podcast. Families can discuss the daily word over the dinner table. Parents, take heed: You may need to set an extra place at the dinner table for any Hollywood agents that come knocking. These kids are budding stars of the Neo Lexica Cinema movement.

Podcast via kwout

The prospect of seeing their work published to the world can be a powerful motivator and point of engagement for students. As Mr. Martin notes in his reflection,

Pride is the driving force of this project. When I first introduced it. . . they were glued from the moment I mentioned they would be published on the web!

That's not to say there aren't challenges, both logistical (sustaining and streamlining the vodcast creation process) and colleagial (helping neighboring teachers find time, motivation, and resources to try the same project with their students). Mr. Martin is already thinking about these issues.

None of these resources are at my fingertips at school so how am I suppose to
share this fantastic process with other teachers?

What suggestions do you have for making "this fantastic process" accessible and practical?

podcast about podcasting

We just can't resist the meta-references.

Just as Carl earlier posted a "screencast about screencasting" based on his October 25 breakout session, I've posted an audio recording of the same day's session on podcasting---a podcast about podcasting, if we don't mind stretching the technical definition. It's posted as an attachment on the October 25 agenda page on the NEMEN Technology Leaders site. Click here to listen. Session notes can be viewed here.

You can also find (and add to) an extensive list of podcasting resources at the Hamline Podcasting 101 wiki, a site developed as a companion to Hamline's podcasting course.

Finally, no discussion of podcasting in education is complete without mentioning Dan Schmit and his excellent book, KidCast: Podcasting in the Classroom . If you're just getting started with podcasting and looking for practical curriculum integration ideas and easy-to-understand technical help in equal parts, look no further than KidCast. And don't miss Dan's KidCast blog and podcast.

Intelligenic via kwout

letters to the next president

Scott McLeod of Dangerously Irrelevant posted about Letters to the Next President: Writing Our Future, a project between Google and the National Writing Project.

We invited young people to write about the issues and concerns that they feel are central to their future, issues they would hope our next president would act on. Topics were chosen by the students themselves to reflect their specific personal, regional, and age-related interests. Teachers and mentors guided students through the process of writing a persuasive letter or essay to the presidential candidates using Google Docs.

Some of you may already be turned on to this project and encouraging your students to craft letters. Scott ups the ante with an open invitation to edubloggers to pen and post their own letters. A perfect time to model civic engagement and thought leadership? Absolutely.

If you're still pondering ideas for that first blog post, or casting around for what to write about next, here's your golden writing opportunity. Add your voice to the conversation. If you're talking about the election with your students, writing a letter to the next president is a pretty shiny teaching opportunity, too.

Scott suggests labeling your blog post with this Technorati tag: educationletters08 . To follow the "Letters to the Next President" posts composed by other edubloggers, either click on this educationletters08 link or visit Technorati and enter "educationletters08" in the search bar.

Check out the edublogger letters posted so far.

educationletters08: Blogs, Photos, Videos and more on Technorati via kwout

How Has Technology Impacted This Election?

I too have been playing around with Flowgram this week. I created the following Flowgram initially for the teachers at Goodhue but thought this group might be interested in it as well.



If you double click on the Flowgram it will open it in full-screen mode. There the websites I visit in the flowgram are live and clickable.

who are 21st century learners?

On October 24, NEMEN Technology Leaders group members participated in an activity exploring the concepts of 21st century learning and learners. Roaming photographers collected images from the morning's work.

This presentation was created using Flowgram. Flowgram allows you to quickly upload images, documents, and other media, and record voiceovers to create a shareable, embeddable online presentation.

Background music is by Chris Armstrong. Find more podsafe music at PodsafeAudio.

the whole of the beast: of elephants, perspectives, and metaphors

Image credit: Elephant by DigitalART2

Remember the old fable about the blind men and the elephant? In the story, five blind men are presented with an elephant and asked, "What is this animal like?" Each man touches a different part of the animal---tusk, trunk, leg, tail---and offers a definitive conclusion about the whole elephant based on his experience of a single part.

"It's like a wall," says the man who touched the elephant's belly. "It's like a rope," reports the man who touched the tail. And so on, until the elephant has been compared to a pillar, a branch, a pipe, a hand fan. The story has been told and retold in various ways in various wisdom traditions. The metaphors may change from version to version: instead of a branch, the trunk is compared to a snake; instead of a pipe, a spear. In some versions, disagreements erupt and the men come to blows; in other versions, cooler heads prevail. But they all agree in a skepticism about definitive statements of truth based on a single point of view, and their conviction that an understanding of the whole beast requires multiple, integrated perspectives.

Debra wrote this on Aoi's Bookroom about the messy (beastly?) business of making sense of the endless amount of information, tools, pitfalls, and teaching opportunities presented by a Web 2.0 world:

I’m an organized person. That’s not to say that everything in my life is
neat and tidy but librarians have to have a good sense of organization in order
to provide access to the resources available in the library. A lot of the
stuff that we are talking about is messy. That’s not necessarily a bad
thing, but I need to figure out how it’s going to work for me and for my
students. If we have things that we know they need to learn, standards
say, then I can go from that starting point and work around that. But if I
have no base or starting point it’s very easy to get off-track.

My comment:

Messy is the watchword, that’s for sure. Perspective is so important, too, in
how we make sense of this huge influx of new information. Kind of like the old
tale about the blind men and the elephant. Your information literacy perspective
seems to me to offer both an important angle for everyone to consider, and also
perhaps some fundamental organizing principles. As we’ve touched on topics
related to Web 2.0 and 21st century learning in our E2T2 sessions so far, it’s
been with the knowledge that we’re only touching on the trunk, the tail, or
whatever schema we can grasp to make sense of the experience. With such a
gigantic subject, no one can ever see the whole thing at once. In order to piece
together a comprehensible gestalt, we’ll need to report from our individual
perspectives, share information and experiences, and give each other feedback.
Our hope is that blogging is a way of combining our senses and understanding
this massive animal.

That's one way of looking at it. You may---should, will, do---have others. What emerges from this for me, though, is a reminder that metaphors are often the most powerful way to organize and make sense of whatever conceptual beast we're trying to tame.

What metaphor helps you make sense of what you've experienced and learned so far?

Displaying Embedded Video In Your Aggregator

I just discovered something that may be a technical issue for some. I use Bloglines as my RSS aggregator. My last post on screencasting did not display my screencast in Bloglines. This may be true of other aggregators as well. So, while the machinema video does show up, my screencast has to be viewed from the origional blog.

Screencasting

As promised, I am posting my screencast about screencasting. I am also posting a machinema video that was done using screencasting. I did not talk about machinema today and really is a topic for another session but screencasting can be used to create machinema movies. Machinema movies are animated movies that hijack video games or virtual worlds for their rich environments and plethora of characters for scenery and actors. I am not going to be explicit here about ideas for integrating Machinema in the classroom, I will leave that to you. Actually, that might be a good discussion for a comment stream.

Enjoy,

Carl

Screencast about Screencasting:

Romeo & Juliet, 2553 A.D. (Pt 1)

drinking from a flowing river

Welcome to the NEMEN Technology Leaders project blog. We launched our project today with a tremendously full day of learning. We're barely out of the chute and the group (you!) has already shown impressively-extensive prior knowledge, a wealth and diversity of teaching and learning experiences, and an enthusiasm for the possibilities of teaching with technology tempered by a healthy, student-focused, pragmatic skepticism about its limitations and appropriate uses. That's a rich mix.

"He who learns from one who is learning, drinks from a flowing river."

This proverb picked up in passing from Wes Fryer speaks to the kinds of connected and networked learning we'll be exploring in coming days through our own blogs, learning with and from each other and beyond to colleagues we haven't yet met.

We've only just gotten our feet wet.

Image: Drinking River by Andrew Turner