71. 06/26/09 Vicki A Davis, Cool Cat Teacher - http://coolcatteacher.blogspot.com Every student learns differently !
72.
73. What does the best education in the world look like? “ What Makes Finnish Kids So Smart” The Wall Street Journal By ELLEN GAMERMAN February 2008 http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB120425355065601997.html 06/26/09
106. Learning Styles Widgets & programming Blogs, Wikis Pictures Video Film Recording Making music Educational Networks Reflections Google Maps Virtual Exp Differentiated Instruction Tools
115. Backchannel “ a live chat that accompanies a live presentation”
116. Google Jockey A person who watches the backchannel and posts information and hyperlinks in response to questions that are posted.
117. Backchannel Moderator A person who monitors the backchannel chat and informs the speaker of predominant questions and issues arising from the conversation.
156. vs. Traditional Classroom Flat Classroom Separated by LOCATION Unified by the INTERNET Separated by TIME Unified by ASYNCHRONOUS communications tools
211. The power of Three! Backchannel Today’s Backchannel! “ a live chat that accompanies a live presentation” http://tinyurl.com/ncties Password: ncties
215. Team WORK “ Working with people across the world has challenged me.” “ The majority of my partners wanted to contribute something meaningful to the project.” Horizon Project Students http://horizonproject.wikispaces.com
217. C itizenship Why did you delete stuff off the wiki? BTW I didn’t delete anything Sorry for accusing you, the history makes it look like you OMG I JUST SAW THE HISTORY ON THE WIKI..Really sorry for any problems Presenter Julie Lindsay Qatar Academy
small town of Camilla Georgia – population 8,000 people
At a small school, Westwood, which is about 360 students k-12 and is a private school, although the tuition is very low – about $3300 a year but people outside Camilla know me as
The cool cat teacher which has a little over 8000 readers now and has opened the world up for me and my classes,but truly, despite the awards my classroom and blog have won, I most like to call myself
, the ”poster child for the beginner” Like my youngest son, who has just learned to read, I’m a relative newcomer to these technologies. In November 2005, I attended the
Georgia Educators Technology Conference in Atlanta with a commission from my curriculum director to bring technologies back to my classroom that would enable me to better facilitiate
Research based best practices such as
Authentic assessment
Cooperative Learning and
Project based learning. I must admit, I felt a little like this (pause)
Pause for them to get it.
So, when I came back to Camilla, I started using wikis with my students immediately and sat down in my classroom to begin blogging. I turned to a student and said, “I have to create a blog and I have to name the thing – what should I name it?” The students sitting there said, “Well, Mrs. Vicki, you’re cool and we’re the wildcats, so, why don’t you call it the cool Cat teacher blog
.” Little did I know, now people know me more by Cool Cat Teacher than my real name, Vicki Davis. It has become my personal brand – although I really wasn’t looking for such a thing at the time. Little did I know, I’d find myself here later with a blog that has a little a quarter of a million views a month. It has been a lot of fun. But that blog, led to another pivotal event
event for my classroom and I when I wrote a blog post in October 2006 called “My students weigh in on Friedman’s Flat World.”
Julie Lindsay, now one of my dearest friends responded with a simple request: “ It would be great if we could interact with your students! Would you be willing/ have the time to participate in an online debate or discussion? My students are Bangladeshi and Indian nationals and have a perspective from the ‘other side of the flat world.’”
She was at the International School Dhaka, Bangladesh. Her students were primarily Indian and Bangladeshi nationals who practiced the Muslim, mine, primarily Anglo Christian background.
So, Julie and I began to correspond and kicked off the first Flat Classroom project in November 2006.
write a group report on a collaborative tool called a wiki
about each of the 10 trends in Friedman’s book
like Mobile Computing and Virtual communications and their impact on education and business.
In addition to the wiki, the students also created videos about their topic where that to outsource, or receive video from their partner on the other side of the world and this is the type of video that emerged.
Within the first week, something amazing happened, Thomas Friedman found us – gave us his hearty support and praised what we were doing. He went on to include us in the update of his book in July 2007, but
But the second week was when I was sold forever on the power of this method. I was at break and had 3 students come line up at my desk and say they had to tell me something. I was afraid – it usually is something serious when they line up at my desk. They said something like this: “ Mrs. Vicki, the news media is wrong.” I got chillbumps on my arms. “ About what?” “ They say that all muslims want to kill us, and that is just not true.” My eyes teared up and I looked at them again, wanting to let them finish and to know that the words coming were their words, not mine. “ And why do you say that,” I whispered. “ Because they are great and we are having fun working with them. They are people just like us who happen to live on the other side of the world.” Another chimed in, “You have to judge people for who they are, not by the labels they wear.” And at that moment. Although I knew they were learning a lot about my topic, computer science, and I knew they were learning a lot about movie making, wikis, and other tools, at that moment, I was sold. I knew that a new chapter of my life and the life of my students had begun and that this model of teaching would be a part of my life for the rest of my life. My students, my tenth graders, had experienced a change in world view without ever having left Camilla, Georgia. And my friends, if we can do that, then that, is the truest, highest form of education we can impart on future society.
Don’t get me wrong – these projects aren’t just about feeling good and meeting new people – they are about intense, deep learning experiences where a topic is learned thoroughly and well and higher order thinking is our goal.
But here, we’re talking about a higher order of iving and that, to me, is the most important take away.
Now, I’d like you to meet a young man named Steve. Steve is from inner city Houston and his teacher, Estie Cuellar participated in Flat Classroom in the fall of 2008.
By then, Julie and I had won several awards and many teachers had joined 7 projects including new ones called the Horizon Project, studying emerging technology trends in education,
and the Digiteen project, a digital citizenship project for younger students.
And later that school year, we’d have the NetGenEd project, a collaboration with another award winning author, Don Tapscott, based upon his research in Grown Up Digital .
These projects had linked more than 20 countries
And more than 2000 students and their teachers.
Steve’s class, led by a newcomer to blogging and Web 2.0, Estie Cuellar, saw that we were having a conference in Doha Qatar and although we offered 4 scholarships to pay their expenses once they got there, they had to raise their airfare – almost $1600 a person! Without local support, what did they do?
They made a rap video about their dream and you can see Steve here leading the group. They raised enough money for three students and two teachers to attend the conference
In Doha, Qatar – in the middle of the middle east where Steve traveled last January.
and this is a glimpse into the students that were there. Now, let’s see Steve at the conference talking about all the friends he made! To me, the respect he shows here for his friends including pronunciation is beautiful. Then, when he returns, what does he say? (show clip) He has learned not to stereotype. And look at what the students proposed and voted as their project. Students are the best book ever written for one another!
All of the classrooms that attended had their classes participate virtually. Interestingly, when I returned, and asked my students what they learned,they said, “I learned not to stereotype.” Why? How?
Well, this is something powerful called a vicarious learning experience. For example, if scientists want to help someone get over the phobia of snakes, then they just have to watch someone else holding a snake. The person then gets closer and closer and eventually can actually handle a snake themselves! This is talked about in the influencer.
Well, Joy learned a deep lesson by watching her classmates travel to Qatar and come back safely – she learned that the Middle East is a place with real people just like every where else!
We would never have gone to Qatar, however, without the lose connections built first through the Internet – through these powerful social networking tools. But it starts with safe, academically productive connections and that is what Flat Classroom is. It is a model of teaching where you merge your classroom with that of others.
Now, let’s see how these projects work by experiencing first hand a simulation of the projects!
It is amazing we can do this and truly, global collaboration has been around for some time. So, at this point, you’ll ask – what is the difference between this and having an email penpal or other types of connection? The difference lies in a relatively new use of the Internet that we call Web 2.0.
In the pioneer days, children were taught in one room schoolhouses and shared a slateboard and writing utensil, in fact
if you were in one of these classrooms, the chalkboard would have been your textbook and workbook.
Then, with the industrial age, paper became affordable and the tools in school changed to paper, at first that old mimeographed paper (that we would smell) and then to copy machines. We have been in this age for some time where we use paper by the truckload, literally. Then,
The Internet came along in the early 1990’s but only was an information source for schools because web pages were difficult to create and required knowledge of HTML programming. Because of the difficulty and expense, schools did not publish on the Internet, so this first internet is often called the read only internet or Web 1.0.
How many of you have heard of some of these websites? You see, around the year 2000, we started being able to easily publish things on the web – it started with eBay ratings and Amazong book reviews, but quickly morphed into many of the websites you see here. Let’s look at this transformation in a school context by looking at just our libraries.
In Library 1.0, students would say: “I need to go to the library and look something up.” Well, now that we’ve moved to the read/write web and the read/write classroom – why do students at my school ask to go to the library. Here is what I hear:
I need to go to the library and blog
wiki
ning
Shoot video
Contact my teammate in Qatar
The point is they need to go DO something. School and libraries are active places and
What you can access is what you get!
Write? Can they take photographs and share them? Record? Film? Create and connect with other students via educational networks?
The read/write library has not only text and pictures, but audio, videos, immersive experiences, people – rich connections through the Internet. Or at least it should.
So, why do we want to do this? Why isn’t paper good enough? In addition to being a genius, Einstein was known to be a good teacher, and what was his definition of a good classroom, a place that had the “conditions in which they can learn.” We say we can’t keep their attention and yet they do
This for hours. They are learning, but are they learning what we want them to!
power of technology is seen in the fact that every student
Learns differently.
How many of you have had courses on Differentiated Instruction? Well, having these different technologies allows our students to learn in a differentiated manner. Technology lets us teach people differently. But what about test scores? Well,
If we look at arguably the best education system in the world, the Finnish teachers pick books and customize lessons as they shape students to national standards. "In most countries, education feels like a car factory. In Finland, the teachers are the entrepreneurs," says Mr. Schleicher, of the Paris-based OECD, which began the international student test in 2000.
Photo: - Today we’re talking about Teacherpreneurship to an audience of people I would consider teacherpreneurs. I’ve seen your videos and this is who you are, although you may not know it!
Include Information on having a global audience here from CARET So, we see that customization of the classroom is important. Another important element is that of audience. Students are a great audience for one another and can provide far more feedback and reinforcement than even the most involved teacher. But, here is one thing you have to remember,
The technology misconception is that
it is not about the technology. We don’t teach blogging, wikis, podcasting for their sake, but for what they let us do.
We’re on a journey. However, we need to know that
In that movie, the “precious” ring was evil. In our cases, we must know that
most technologies are morality-neutral. It is how you use them that determines its use.
How many of you think cupcakes are good! Are they?
What about when it is used to hurt someone’s feelings?
Or how about when a compulsion to eat them makes a person obese? What do we do?
Ban cupcakes? That is preposterous! We teach people to be kind and to use cupcakes in good ways? Shouldn’t we do the same thing with?
Cell phones
Cell phones
Cell phones
We don’t ban scissors and they could kill someone! We teach kids not to run with them! To use them well and our schools are full of other dangerous weapons such as
Man. Men, women, boys, and girls can do irreparable harm, and yet we don’t ban humans. Instead, we teach the humans in our school out to behave appropriately. That is what we do in school and
What we need is digital citizenship education. Just as we teach children how to
Look both ways
Stop Drop and Roll and
Don’t talk to strangers. We also need to teach them to
No cyberbullying
Stop, Block and Tell, as done with this Kentucky Film Contest
And don’t meet someone you meet online without an adult with you
What we need is Digital citizenship education. This is our internet, it is our world, and we are building bridges today that the society of tomorrow will walk across. We’ll come back to digital citizenship later. But, the tough thing is that all of this requires change…
My husband always says that the only people who like change are babies with dirty diapers and even then, they cry the whole time
But the thing about change is you only have two choices – you can be the victim or the victor. Victims are the ones that have people force change on them – the victors, or winners become PART of change.
But we need these tools so that we can
Differentiate and reach all of the students and their different learning styles and
These tools can do it. You can combine these tools to reach every child in your classroom with your content. Every child. So we can
Insert cartoon of boy about running through sprinklers Bring their attention and energies INTO the classroom – like this little boy. But in addition to needing these tools, in a post 9-11 world
We also need each other
Students are the greatest textbook ever written for one another and
We need more global cooperation and collaboration as shown here at the Flat Classroom conference.
So, let’s jump into these tools and learn how to connect ourselves. http://flickr.com/photos/extranoise/350901033/ - Green Stairs by extranoise accessed 4/8/2008 –
http://flickr.com/photos/tostie14/93877458/ by Tostie14 4/5/2008 4:01 pm – We will spend the next two days teaching you how to flatten your own classroom. And, as you’ve already seen you learn by doing. So, the first step of
Flattening your classroom is connecting yourself. And the first step is to connect yourselves to others.
So,first,let’s connect ourselves through a backchannel.
A backchannel is a live chat that accompanies a live presentation. We will use my chatzy room today that costs me $9 a year to take the ads off.
Before we move into our presentation, let’s get a few things out of the way.
Before we move into our presentation, let’s get a few things out of the way.
Before we move into our presentation, let’s get a few things out of the way.
Before we move into our presentation, let’s get a few things out of the way.
Just remember, the lesson of the watermelon as you consider today’s menu. How do you eat a watermelon?
If you eat it whole, you’ll choke.
No, the way you eat a watermelon is one bit at a time.
This is why things like “23 things” are so successful at transforming people into technology mavens – it is embedding technology in part of their life.
And that is what I suggest for you to do today. Your assignment for this webinar today is to come up with your “Big Three” at the end of the webinar. Pick three things – start there!
What are the rules? What are some examples of how this is being done now? What disciplinary measures will be in place WHEN something happens (not if.)
We’re going to look at the teacherpeneur in four major areas today: student relations. Personal habits of teacherpreneurs, class structure, and administrative relations. We’ll also highlight what has changed and what has stayed the same throughout the history of teachers. Note to self: put a globe around this.
http://flickr.com/photos/extranoise/350901033/ - Green Stairs by extranoise accessed 4/8/2008 – The effective flat classroom has both of these methods.
Number two http://flickr.com/photos/spilt-milk/357015070/ - yoppy's photo stream accessed 4/5/2008 6:08 pm Defining Asynchronous and Synchronous Communications The two types of communication are asynchronous and synchronous.
Sychronized Swimming http://flickr.com/photos/krhamm/171302038 by KRHamm accessed 4/5/2008 5:52 PM Synchronous means doing things at the same time and in the same place such as these synchronized swimmers. The classroom is a synchronous environment – we are synchronized and all inhabiting that classroom in the same time and space. We are together. Schools are already good at enriching our synchronous classroom environment using tools like video conferencing, webinars, and live broadcasts from around the world. However, synchronous is no longer enough.
http://flickr.com/photos/seatbelt67/502255276 Brian - Progressive Spin's Photostream on Flickr accessed 4/5/2008 Asynchronous means NOT at the same time – for example this famous statue by Rodin was created by him over 100 years a go and we enjoy it now. We did not get to enjoy it or interact with him while he worked.
The traditional classrooms is also separated by time. This has made classroom to classroom cooperation between the continents difficult if not impossible because while one set of students is in class, another is at home eating dinner or asleep. This has made it difficult to videoconference and communicate directly, however
is unified by internet tools like wikis, blogs, social networks (which I prefer to call educational networks) and cooperating teachers. The classrooms may then cooperate with objectives, projects, and assignments created on these common platforms.
So, the flat classroom removes the barriers of time and space, allowing students to collaborate across the world and even across time with legacy projects… our student’s grandchildren could literally contribute to a project that today’s students did in gradeschool.
Likewise students may write a group report together using a wiki as shown by the history of this wiki page from the Flat Classroom 2007 project. - http://flatclassroomproject.wikispaces.com/page/history/Connecting+the+World+Online?o=20
Did you know that you are here because of Web 2.0?
We can implement technology but it better be for a purpose and not just to look cute, so today we’re going to talk about technology driven differentiation and the other things to make our schools successful.
That the things we used in school are efficient, effective, and transport us to a better education for our kids.
Did you know that you are here because of Web 2.0?
These are quotes from the students in the project.
As we look at this, we see the primary obstacles to such projects.
The technology misconception is that it is not about the technology.
The technology misconception is that it is not about the technology.
The technology misconception is that it is not about the technology.
Did you know that you are here because of Web 2.0?
Did you know that you are here because of Web 2.0?
Seven countries and more than
All of these things are part of the fact that we are redefining literacy.
I listened to a book on the way here? Is that literacy. Book Shown: Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett – I recommend for adult readers only.
How about this person who listened to it on their mp3 player, posted the picture to Flickr and wrote a review. Notice that this person downloaded the book from Nisten NJ’s digital catalog.
And take it one step further – is the person unable to make an audio recording and upload it a virtual mute?
And take it one step further – is the person unable to make an audio recording and upload it a virtual mute?
To learn more about this see – Google SMS - http://www.google.ca/mobile/sms/index.html
To learn more about this see – Google SMS - http://www.google.ca/mobile/sms/index.html
Because that last definition took 10 seconds for me to find. I’d challenge anyone to find it in a dictionary at that same speed?
Is acquiring information efficiently part of literacy?
Is acquiring information efficiently part of literacy?
Is acquiring information efficiently part of literacy?
And take it one step further – is the person unable to make an audio recording and upload it a virtual mute?
And take it one step further – is the person unable to make an audio recording and upload it a virtual mute?
And take it one step further – is the person unable to make an audio recording and upload it a virtual mute?
Igoogle is my life. If it is worth managing – it is worth having an igoogle gadget for.
Brian Crosby, who works with students in Nevada could have settled into a comfort zone that comes from 27 years of teaching, and yet, he reached out and used Skype to bring a child with leukemia into his classroom.
Just a moment we’ll talk about Web 3D and this immersive world that we are in. If you will please share your favorite slurls and places to network in SL – or if you are here and represent a group, please share the information and the links as I present these next few topics.
Peggy will have 6 islands now in SL. I’ve got the money for our first island, but no budget for building it – we’ll be building from scratch! Oh boy!
We’re here to talk about Library 2.0, and yet to understand library 2.0, we must ask ourselves.
We’re here to talk about Library 2.0, and yet to understand library 2.0, we must ask ourselves.
We’re here to talk about Library 2.0, and yet to understand library 2.0, we must ask ourselves.