It’s late, and I’m tired and hungry, but I just have to blog quickly about this before going to bed.

First, I’ve started learning about how literacy is changing and what it will mean to be a literate person in the 21st century. First I viewed an excellent video by Clarence Fisher as part of the K12 Online Conference. He described the history of literacy and then bridged into what qualities are needed to be literate now. I also have been paying attention to David Warlick and just yesterday received a copy of his book Redefining Literacy for the 21st Century. I’ve read only the first few pages, but it promises to be another excellent resource.

I am learning that we need to be able to communicate with the many mediums that are available to us now (text, graphics, video, audio, etc.)

Tonight I was grading PowerPoint presentations that my seniors created to support their research papers. The last one to grade for tonight ended up being the hidden gem. The student gave his oral presentation in class today, and he had a hyperlink on one slide, but since the Internet was down AGAIN at school (we won’t get into that nightmare here…) he was not able to show us what he linked to. At home tonight, I was able to check it out, and the most wonderful surprise was waiting for me at the other end of the click. He had embeded the link to a YouTube video. It was so cool. (Of course, it would be blocked at school unfortunately.) His report was on the literature of Greece, and he found a terrific 4-minute video about Greek heroes. It was the icing on the cake, the one little detail that really put his work over the top. Ahh, a literate 18 year old. I feel better about sending this one off into the world soon. He’s ready. He’s literate. He’ll be great out there.

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These links to some of the presentations from the K12 Online Conference will give you more information about all the cool things you can do with Flickr.

Check out this one from Alan Levine. Click on the various “hot spots” to learn more about the cool things you can do (very easily, btw) with Flickr. Really fun!

This video by Jeff Utecht will show you even more–enjoy! Can I embed this puppy? Okay, well, that worked, but I had no controls over the video. It started playing automatically, and I couldn’t stop, pause, etc. so I removed the link to the .swf video file.

Technorati Tags: K12Online Flickr AlanLevine JeffUtecht

This is somewhat belated, but I’ll take a few minutes to write about the grant that I helped work on for our school last spring. I didn’t have a blog at the time we did the grant. Over the weekend, I participated in the When Night Falls… Skypecast as the culminating event for the K12 Online Conference (which was AWESOME, btw). This was brought up in the conversation, and Vicki Davis (Coolcatteacher) asked if I’d blogged about this grant. So here goes…

It all started last Valentine’s Day when my dear husband gave me a 60-gig video iPod.(Roses and chocolates last only so long, but an iPod is forever.) I started searching for educational podcasts in iTunes, and found several that I found interesting. Also, our principal had showed us a video in January that was of an Alan November presentation to the Colorado Association of School Boards. From Alan November’s site, I watched several videos and found Will Richardson, whom I started following. I ordered Will’s book, Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms,  when it became available, and my learning really picked up there!

It didn’t take long for me to see that HUGE impact these Web 2.0 techonlogies will have on education. I wanted to be part of this revolution, and I wanted to spread the word throughout our school. Our district Foundation offered a spring grant period, and two other teachers worked with me to write a grant to get an iPod and microphone for each teacher at our school.  Our grant focused on taking the technologies that students currently use for entertainment and exploiting those tools for educational purposes.

Our grant was chosen as the highest rated of the proposals, and we received half of our requested amount. Our principal matched another $1000, and our local Lion’s Club matched another $1000. We had enough to purchase 18 30-gig video iPods and 18 microphones.

I took an online class about Podcasting for Teaching and Learning from GlobalClassroom and continued studying Will’s book, as well as subscribing to several blogs and podcasts.  (See the BlogRoll on this page.) We scheduled a two-day training class in the summer for our staff, and we offered it to the rest of our district in the Summer Teacher Academy. I thought it would be a popular class, but sadly, only one person registered, so the Summer Academy classes were cancelled. I was disappointed in the lack of interest, but maybe we’ll try again next summer. The training for our own staff had to be postponed because some power-crazed person in our ad. building’s purchasing department wouldn’t allow the PO for the iPods to go through until August (we sent in the PO before school ended in May). It was an incredibily frustrating time. We still didn’t have the iPods when we had training in August, but they finally (!) arrived in mid-September.

I still feel like such a baby at all of this. I used Will’s book heavily as a resource for the summer training. Will sent us a couple of boxes of the book, and most everyone on the staff purchased a copy. We focused a lot of our time on blogs, recording mp3 files with Audacity, and taking a quick look at Flickr. I continue to try to work on staff development throughout the school year, but I feel so inadequate at times, like I’m barely a step ahead. Of course, the K12 Online Conference was a HUGE help in my personal learning, and I feel as though I’ve only scratched the surface with all the resources there. That will be an ongoing gold mine for me to continue to dig in.

At this point, I don’t see many of the teachers using the iPods for school-related stuff. A couple of them are using blogs, but many are not yet “on the bandwagon” it seems. I need to do a better job of showing them specifically how to use their iPods for classes. Maybe if anyone out there reads all this rambling, you could drop a comment and give us some suggestions.

Okay, this has gone on far too long….see you in the “blogosphere”

I just finished viewing the video for Chris Kaminski’s presentation for the K12 Online Conference. In it, he had students from his web design class speak their thoughts about education and technology. They had some very interesting things to say.

One thing stuck out in my mind, however. Where are the girls? Out of a dozen or students who spoke on his video, only one (the last one) was a girl.

Is that a trend in most high school technology classes (electives?) Is it just this particular class, or is there truly a gender imbalance in these classes? Our high school has a video class, and both of my children are in it. There are about 12-14 students, and my daughter is the only girl. I’m so glad that they have this class and that they are learning to film, edit video, and produce real-world products (filming games for our local cable channel, writing and producing a documentary on a former student, etc.) It’s an incredible opportunity, and as a parent, I’m thrilled that my daughter is taking it this year along with my son. But even she has made a comment on their class blog that there need to be more girls! What can we do to encourage that?

Okay, so that was a pretty corny title, but what the hey.

I just watched Alan Levine’s first piece of his Basic/Advanced Training Keynote for the K12 Online Conference. I think it’s really cool that he discusses and demonstrates various Web 2.0 tools with those tools. The first piece is about YouTube, which I’ve only recently heard about, and I’ve watched one video that was referenced on Will Richardson’s blog about Buckle Boy, the seatbelt hero.

Alan Levine pointed out that there is an option to embed a YouTube video, and so I’m going to try that now.

Another option from YouTube is to add the URL to the video.

Let’s try Google Video now…

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These are quotes and thoughts from David’s opening keynote address that really struck me.

“I am here and I am now, but that doesn’t matter because you are there and you are then.”
Time and location are becoming less relevant in the world today. The opportunity to access information from anywhere in the world at a time that is convenient for you is amazing to me. Location in no longer an advantage or a disadvantage. I would not have an opportunity to travel and attend a conference like this. I would be at a disadvantage. But because of the way communication is changing, I now have the advantage. I CAN attend this conference. I CAN particiapte. I CAN learn. I CAN grow. I CAN share what I’ve learned with my fellow teachers. I CAN improve the way I do things in my classroom. I CAN do a better job of preparing the students in my classroom for their not-so-distant lives in college, military service, careers, and families. I CAN contribute to the world.

“Information does not travel in a straight row anymore.”
That’s good for me because I like to be able to step back and look at things again. My mind seems to be less linear all the time–moving from idea to idea, finding different connections, (Alzheimer’s? Adult ADD? Or is my mind possibly advancing into Brain 2.0?)

“We can have some control over how information works.”
I like that–I’m a bit of a control freak. Sometimes is seems that I have control over less and less. The idea that I can make information work in a particular way, that I can customize things for myself or for my classes, excites me. I want to learn more about how to do these things.

Railroad analogy–traditional education and conferences are like the railroad–all going in the same direction at the same time. The rail represents the common knowledge base that we must all have. It is the standards. David explained, “This is important for us to live together as part of a culture.” I agree. Then David explains the importance and the value of the side trips–those diversions where we leave the rail behind and strike out on a different course. We may be following a charted path or blazing our own trail. It is important to have the knowledge base, the skills, and the confidence to break away from the rail and find our own way.

David says that we need to teach kids to teach themselves, how to make themselves experts. YES! How else can they be truly independent? How else can they be truly successful? Do I want my children to be stuck with just the knowledge they happen to pick up in school? Think about school for a minute. If your school is anything like our high school (and it’s a very good high school, BTW) most of the kids are focused on lots of things that aren’t in the curriculum. They’re minds are so busy with thoughts of their friends, their boy/girlfriends, sports, jobs, etc., and academics isn’t at the top of their list. If they are limited to that knowledge pool when the leave and they don’t know HOW to teach themselves, how to be life-long learners, they’re doomed to a much-diminished life ahead.

David mentions 4 types of people who will prosper, according to Friedman’s book. (I’m listening to that book on my iPod, but haven’t gotten to this part yet.)
*Special (like Michael Jordan–these people will make it no matter what)
*Specialized
*Adaptable
*Anchored (like your barber or chef–they have to be there to do the job)
It’s the Specialized and Adaptable people who can learn, un-learn, re-learn, and change who will thrive. Do my children have those skills? What can I do, what can their teachers do, to help them become the type of people who are self-teaching?

“The balance between geography and talent is now shifting toward talent.”
How awesome is that? The only word I can think of is OPPORTUNITY. The idea that certain people are advantated based solely on where they live is going away. Now people in all areas of the country, all areas of the WORLD will have OPPORTUNITY based on what they as individuals have to offer to the world. Location (and in some situations–TIME) are no longer determining factors for an individual’s success.

“Learning is more than sitting and learning. It means being engaged in conversation, sharing, observing, reflecting, discussing.”
The mind is not a passive thing. We’ve known for a LONG time that the more a person is involved with the information, the better they will understand and remember it. Passive learning is about the WORST method (IMHO). I think that the old style of classrooms (which most classrooms still reflect) is the one-directional, teacher-in-front, students in desks lined up, teacher speaks, students listen format. It may have worked many years ago, but I don’t really want to be teaching my kids to be successful factory workers for the 1940’s. Learning is hard work–anything worth having is worth working for, right? Doesn’t matter if that’s a new car or new knowledge.

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Hey, check this out! It’s a world map with pins marking the locations of the participants of the K12 Online Conference. Click on a flag, and you can see information about that person, like name, location, a comment, and maybe even a picture. Pretty cool! Just another way to virtually get us all together.

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Conference FlyerThis conference promises to be powerful and exciting. With a title like “Unleashing the Potential” how can it not be? Join in on the FREE conference to learn more about blogs, wikis, podcasts, and Web 2.0 tools. Learn WHY these are important for our classrooms today. Learn HOW these tools will continue to be powerful to the future of education.