Just as a teaser, here is one of the videos on education which is very relevant to where our education system needs to go.

This was/is exactly what I think about Twitter. Now, the author did become a fan of twitter after having used it and listed their reasons and now there is wiffiti; a sort of cross between a wiki and a twitter. However, I still do not understand what the fuss is. Who has the time to do this? I don’t get to my computer enough during the school day to keep a Twitter going effectively. I have a hard enough time keeping my personal blog and my classblog going let alone get home to my wife after planning, etc to have some quality time.  Having other educators commenting on your thoughts of the moment and sharing their thoughts is appealing. In our classrooms all day, it is sometimes hard to have conversations with other teachers that really reaches deep into the core of teaching and learning. So, having a group of educators at your fingertips you can follow and converse with is appealing. However, I believe that it is missing the meaningfulness of actual interactions that are longer than the instant, quick response twittering enables. Don’t we want to develop deeper understandings of what it means to educate and be an educator? Can we have those types of conversations in the small amount twittering allows us? Or are we moving more into what seems to be the domain of media where everything needs to be in quick soundbytes of information? Don’t we want to teach our students to reflect and develop deeper understandings? Can these be done using twitter? Me personally, I would rather spend the time trying to interact with other educators through e-mail, wiki’s or blogs.

The other thing I wonder about Twitter is how do we bring in the other educators who have just as much expertise and information to share but don’t want to be bombarded with constant messages. It’s too distracting. Sometimes I wonder if what we do as educational technologists is not so much bring ideas and learning together but increasingly seperate ourselves from those who don’t have as much skill with technology thus creating this division. I don’t think Twitter as a tool as to bring the two groups together.

Anyway, that’s my thought. I would love to be convinced otherwise. Maybe somebody out there can convince me.

This week, I thought I would highlight the site Letterpop. This is a really neat site to help with creating newsletters that are eye-appealing and fun. It is a simple tool to use with easy step by step directions. There are numerous templates to choose from and the creators are constantly adding new ones. Editing is somewhat limited but you can move text boxes around to create a better placement of images and text. It is also easy to add new pages. When you are done, you can either print it off or display it publicly on the site for everyone to see.

This is no Microsoft Publisher, Pages or other desktop application that creates newsletters. You are limited in your editing capabilities. When I have gone to create a newsletter, I have had some difficulties getting the edges of the page to align with what the printed version is supposed to look like. Also, there were some small issues with the ability to change sizes and types of text. You are also limited in the types of pictures you can use. It does have a supply of clip art like Microsoft does. You are using pictures that you have downloaded yourself or images from Flickr. I used yotophoto which worked nicely but it also means more time looking for an effective picture that fits with what you want.

This site is still in Beta so these kinks are to be expected. However, I am not sure I would use this yet for full newsletters. I have used it mostly as reminders or requests for help; a quick note to send home to parents. I visited the site today and saw that they are going to be making some improvements soon so hopefully some of these issues have been dealt with. I myself would like a little more flexibility with the text option. However, the site is easy to use and fun and I don’t mind using photos as I think itgives your newsletter a sharper presentation and more professional look to your newsletters.

Tell me what you think of it and how you have used it!!! Let’s start a conversation!

Anyway, today’s site is a great one that combines web 2.0 with art. It’s called Mr.Picassohead (http://www.mrpicassohead.com/). You probably remember Mr. Potatohead, that venerable potato that quite often had facial issues. You put the pieces of the face on the potato to create any variety of face you wanted.

Like Mr. Potatohead, Mr. Picassohead allows you to create faces using a variety of pre-designed facial features. You simply drag the features onto the palette and arrange the pieces into a face. The editing features allow you to colour the lines (not the rest of the picture though), make the lines bigger or smaller, move objects and rotate as well as erase any features you don’t like.

While creating faces is great fun, the really neat thing is to have your students use the facial features to create other kinds of pictures. I have had students create boats on water, volcanoes exploding and other things. Usuall, what I do in my class is have the students start out with making faces and exploring the process of creating faces. Then I have them create a picture of someone who is a hero to them. After the students have done that, I challenge them to create a picture that is not a face. I usually show them an example of something I have done to help get them started as well as brainstorming what each facial feature could represent.

There is one thing to be careful of and a caveat. The caveat is that there is no option to print the image within the site. It can be printed through the file -> print option. However, you get the whole page with all the editing and such. I usually print them off, get the students to cut out the picture and glue them on a piece of construction paper with a black frame around it. There is also a gallery of portraits done by others in the gallery part of the site. While there are some neat pictures in there, some can be inappropriate. I don’t allow my students into the gallery area and so we have not had a problem with that.

Anyway, enjoy the site!!! Why don’t you let us know what you have used it for in your class!

So I thought I would start a topic and see if we can build it. As they say . . . If you build it, they will come!

So here it is . . . Why I am a Educational Technologist!  I will start it off and give the ending. I would love for us to compile a list of reasons why, though technology integration is frustrating and challenging at times, we keep at it in our schools. Your thoughts can be thoughtful, provocative, inspiring, hopeful, challenging or tongue and cheek. As they come in I will keep updating the list so everyone can see it grow!

Here we go!

Why I am a Educational Technology Teacher!

I want to empower my students!!!

I can plug in a computer, projector, tv, etc!

…….

But most of all, I am a teacher working and striving to help all my students reach their potential!!

Let’s get this out there and build this list!!!!!!

As it is Edtech Thursday, I am going to highlight a web 2.0 tool that you can use in the classroom. Now, you might be saying that most of the tools I have been highlighting might be a little light and fluffy in that they are not really heavyweight resources. In my mind, heavyweight resources include things like wikipages, moodles, eluminate, etc. We may get to those. However, there are only so many hours in a day and some of these types of web 2.0 tools can be huge and intimidating for teachers who are looking for something that they can just start using in the classroom. I want to help teachers to find a way to ease into the web 2.0 world with their students; to give them a taste of what is out there and the possibilities. My own learning curve in the use of technology in the classroom has been one of exploration; not being formally taught a tool. This is the key I think. Not waiting around for a workshop. Pick something a work with it. Become comfortable with the tool and find the myriad of ways it can enrich your students’ learning. A tool like “voicethreads” can be used in so many ways that you could just use that all year. You could start with teacher led use and gradually get to the point where students are creating their own voicethreads without help from you. Wouldn’t that be powerful? And that’s just one tool! This is how to get teachers on board with bringing in technology. Helping them to focus one trying one thing. I think though that teachers look at everything out there and get scared or turned off. “I can’t possibly catch up so why start?” If we help others to see all the possibilities, then help them focus on trying just one thing, maybe we can close that gap between where we are and where our students are.

What are your thoughts? What tool helped you become more of a user of these technology in the classroom? What helped other teachers in your school get to that Aha! moment in the integration of educational technology?

Maybe I am rambling. I know I didn’t get to an actual tool today. But we hear so much about these tools from gurus like Kevin Honeycutt and David Warlick and why we need to get them into the classroom. But teachers in the trenches are saying, “Great, wonderful, but I just have too much on my plate. I can’t fit that in. I wouldn’t know where to start. That looks great but it’s for more tech-savvy people than me.” And it goes on. No one is answering the question, “How can I fit that fit into my day to day curriculum considering what I have to do now, not what we hope the future will bring to education?”

Let’s have a conversation!

I’m a little late this week with edtech thursday. I had a busy day with a whole bunch of things going on. Anyway, I thought I would continue with looking at web2.0 graphing and survey tools.

I was originally introduced to a neat tool called Zoomerang a few years ago. Unfortunately, they have gone to a more fee based model. There are some aspects of it that are still free but it has sort of lost it’s appeal to me as a tool. One tool I have started using is Free Website Polls (www.free-web-site-polls.com). It is a nice and easy poll creator. It’s not fancy which is part of its appeal. Once the poll is created you can publish it to your blog, either on the side bar or within the blog itself. Anothernice thing is that you can only vote once. Clicking on one of the selections willtake to the results page where you can see the results.

So, how do we include this in our class?

Well, first of all, there are so many connections to math. You could set this up with students and get other schools participating. Our class will set one up on the class blog and collect data on favorite subjects. We will then use the Rich Chart Live to post the results on the blog. You could do this with any subject. For Language Arts, you could use it as a way to predict what will happen in a next part of a book you are reading. You could also have a book contest where you have students reading a selection of books and poll which book is the class favorite. Students could then do reviews of the book stating why it was their favorite, posting those answers to the blog.

How do you use online polling in your classroom?

Over the next couple of weeks I thought I would talk about a couple of survey/graphing tools I think would be really neat to use with the class.

One tool I really like is Rich Chart Live (http://www.richchartlive.com/). It is a great way for students or yourself to create graphs and publish them. The graphics are rich, colourful and completely customizable. You have control of all the settings including the type of template you want to use, your data entry, the style of the data collection, and layout. It can even be animated. When you are ready to publish, you can publish the information as a flash file or you can place it into a powerpoint or blog or print it off as a web page document. Now, you’re probably thinking, “All this and it’s free?” Well, there are a few caveats. None huge though. The one thing is that if you are not purchasing their services, they will place a small logo on the graph, which is hardly anything at all. The other issue may be the fact that they use ads on the site. I’ve never had a problem with the ads but you never know what may come up and where students might click. So, you may find that these are enough not to use the site or not. I think that with any site, students need to be taught that their movements are being tracked and that if they are going to be clicking on inappropriate links than their privileges may be taken away.

Here is a sample:

How do we use it in the classroom?

Well, for elementary it might be hard unless you do it as a whole class project. After awhile though, they would probably get the hang of it (Grade 3 and up). I used to have students use the Microsoft wizard to make graphs and they seemed to catch on after awhile though they just used the basics of it. This might be a little too much though as there are so many choices. I think it would be an excellent tool for a whole class project and the results could be posted on the class blog. It could also be used in conjunction with a smartboard.

For higher grades, students could complete surveys and graph them posting the results to their blog or incorporating them into powerpoint presentations. Last year, I had a class of Grade 3’s graph heights of famous buildings to create powerpoint presentations as part of their building unit.

Graphs for blogs could also highlight results of questions you may have asked parents thereby communicating decisions to parents.

Let’s have a conversation!

How could this resource be used in your classroom?