PortablePD.ca

We have had requests for a copy of the permission letter that we send home to parents at the start of the year explaining what podcasting is. Nathan and I created our own letter to meet this purpose. Our school has the parents sign a media release document and computer use document as well but we wanted something specific to podcasting. I understand that some families and school administrators are leery about posting student work on the Internet. This is something that Nathan and I have had a lot of concerns about too. Initially we never identified students by name either on the class blogs or the podcasts. In the beginning, we used nicknames or numbers but as time has gone on we have relaxed a bit, and now, with permission, we use student first names (sometimes the kids prefer to make up names. Billy Bob is a very popular name with our students).

When addressing concerns about maintaining student privacy and security I would point parents and school administrators to the community newspapers that we have. If you look at local papers you will see that in almost every edition there are pictures published of children involved in sporting events, community events, school events. These pictures often contain captions identifying the children with both first and last names and often the schools that they attend. It’s exciting for the kids and parents to see their pictures in our local paper. It is funny to me how many people are not concerned at all about this sort of coverage but have fears about predators finding kids on the internet. I guess it is all about what we read in the paper?

Anyway…here is what we send home in September to our families. I  post it here as an example.

September, 2008

Dear Parents/Guardians

Our classes maintain class websites (5nt.ca and 56js.ca) and a podcast (portableradio.ca). These sites are used to share information about what is going on in class and provide an opportunity for continued discussion outside of class. Students will use the sites as areas to explain their work and interests to a larger audience. We teach our students lessons of safe internet use through the experiences that we offer on the websites and podcasts. All work is moderated by Mr. Toft or Mrs.Smith before it is posted or uploaded.

Please read the attached permission form and return it to Mr. Toft or Mrs. Smith.

Sincerely,

Jane Smith and Nathan Toft

I consent to allow my child’s school work (text, audio, video, art,…etc) and first name to be used on the class websites and podcasts.

Student name: _____________________________________

Signature of parent/guardian: __________________________

Date: ____________________________________

Jane and I will be giving a presentation at the next Ontario Educator Meetup.  We’ll be talking about our experiences in integrating technology in our classrooms and talk about our podcasts Portable Radio and Portable PD.  We’ll also dig into our classroom blogs (5nt.ca and 56js.ca) as well.

The presentation will be at 1pm EST, Thursday, July 30 using Adobe Connect.  Click here for time zone information No software to install, just click on the following link close to that time:

http://connect.tcdsb.org/ontmeetup/

The presentation, about an hour, will be recorded and we’ll be sure to get a link up for that as well.

A big thanks to Rob De Lorenzo for making all of this happen.  We are the 8th presentation. All presentations are archived at http://www.ontmeetup.net/.

I decided in June that since my children were keeping me close to home this year, I would take whatever tech workshops the OCDSB was offering this summer. It was a great decision, I enjoy my weekly trips to Confederation Learning Centre computer lab. Today’s workshop was about Excel. It was called “Advanced Excel” and I don’t mind saying that I was a little nervous about the “advanced” part of the billing. Fortunately, it was all good. I actually figured some stuff out on my own! We imported text, learned about Pivot tables (really cool) and how to tweak some formulas (the IF ones are my favourite). It was a morning well spent.

It was a predominantly secondary teacher crowd. I think there was only one other elementary teacher there. I don’t normally get to hang out with secondary teachers. Our tasks in the workshop were to import student records and have Excel organize the data, sort it and play around with the numbers. The records that we imported included marks like 23/25 for different assignments. We worked on having Excel calculate averages, percent, highest score and lowest score. The secondary teacher beside me was really enjoying all that she could do with the program to organize her marks and classes. I was finding it neat too but I don’t know that I will be using Excel the same way she does.

Over the past few years, I have experienced a lot of change around assessment and reporting. With the reporting that we do, and the comments that we write, anecdotal records now hold more information for me than marks. My mark book that used to have things like 23/25 or 72% has been replaced with copies of rubrics with levels 1,2,3,4 and scrawled comments. I wrestle with how to marry my achievement chart based comments with a final A, B, C or D. I try use Excel to keep this data in some order. While the workshop today was looking at coming up with an overall average to create a final percentage mark, I think that I will be looking at finding the “most recent, highest scores”. I am looking at how to organize my data to sort different level readers into guided reading groups. I am thinking of doing “IF” formulas that colour code my level 4s as red, 3s as blue, 2s as green and 1s yellow in order to differentiate my program. I wonder if I can do that.  =IF(J3i=4=red) … this is going to take some thinking. I didn’t ask at today’s workshop, didn’t want to sound too elementary, pretty colours and all.

I really enjoyed today’s workshop and learned a lot about Excel that I will put to use in ways that make sense to me. But, I wish that I had spent some time speaking with the secondary teachers to find out the mysteries of their jobs and assessment methods. I have always known that elementary and secondary schools are not the same. I began to wonder about how different we are. It made me think about how we don’t really have a dialogue between elementary and secondary teachers. I hope that someone out there sees the “big picture”. I really hope that we are doing things at the elementary level that support our students as they go on. Perhaps we at elementary could learn a few things from our secondary colleagues and vice versa … Oh, oh sounds a bit like crazy talk, too much time spent with IF,OR,NOT,TRUE,FALSE, and AND.

I have spent the day at an excellent workshop that was offered by my school board (Ottawa Carleton District) on the Small Wonder camera. I have used one before but I like going to workshops to see what I haven’t discovered myself or to learn what other people are planning to do with their classes and the technology. It is also a great opportunity to reconnect with people who I haven’t seen for a while.

We spent the morning playing around with the cameras. The cameras are fairly inexpensive, about $100.00. They are really easy to use. Big red button means record. Delete means delete. On and off, well they let you turn it on or off. Kids would have no problem using them. I can think of many different uses for my class next year. There is one downside though…. Movie maker!

The Small Wonder cameras are plug and play making it easy to import video, and still pictures, into the computer. Once on your computer the material can be edited and combined to make a “movie” that can be shared or uploaded. Movie maker is what we are using to do the editing and so far today Movie Maker HATES ME. I have copied my video onto the computer. I have created a folder to store it all in and I save every two seconds because Movie Maker keeps crashing. I don’t know if I want to put my students through this.

The advantages of Movie Maker are that it is free and that it is already on my school computers but I think these might be outweighed by the crashing issue. Does anyone have a solution for me? Please don’t point me to iMovie. All the computers in our schools are pc. I would love to hear how others deal with the crashing problem.

And for your entertainment, I was going to add my little video created this morning with the Small Wonder and Movie Maker. However, I saved all my video files, I saved my Movie Maker project but…I did not do the final step of finishing the video in Movie Maker to make it a final copy. I thought that I could take it all home, do some finishing touches to the project and then publish something truly great and Oscar worthy. Now on my home computer I can see all my video clips in my storyboard but when I play my video I just get the sound and a black screen. AAARGH! This is all good learning, I guess. It would be really frustrating to encounter these problems taking student work back and forth from home and school.

The long cool summer drinks are helping. Thanks for the red wine suggestion Roger.

The idea of digital natives and digital immigrants has been around for a while. For those who haven`t heard about it… digital natives are the kids who are growing up with technology and digital immigrants are those of us who are older and for whom technology has come into our lives at a later age.

I admit that I am older but I like to think that I keep up with what is happening with technology and how it is being used and can be used. This week I realized that for all my reading, for all my playing with technology, for all my interest, I will always be an immigrant. There is nothing that I can do to change that. I will always be the “come from away” in Tech Land.  Who taught me this lesson? My sixteen year old daughter.

The photo at the bottom of this post is a picture of the back of my daughter’s head. She had just returned from a band trip to Halifax and was sharing her photos with us. I was surprised at the number of photos she had taken of the back and side of her head…Why does she have these photos? Can you guess? I couldn’t.

You see (my daughter slowly and carefully explained to me in small words so that I would fully understand) a digital camera isn’t just a camera, it is also a mirror. Want to see the back of your head? Hold the camera over your head, behind you. Press the button down a bit so that you get the little red eye light that comes on before you take the picture. With the camera behind your head and a wall in front of you (or even the ground if a wall is not handy), use that light as a way to guide your hand and click. Instant picture, instant view of the back of your head. You now have a way to be sure that every hair is in place without benefit of a mirror or eyes in the back of your head. Seems obvious right?

Another thing I learned is that digital cameras are also binoculars. For this feature to work you don’t even need to take a picture. Use the zoom feature on the camera and you can get a close up view of something far away. Why didn’t I think of that? Because for me it used to be a waste to take pictures that you didn’t really want to keep. It cost money. My head is still back in the dark room ages…in more ways that one.

Our kids are using technology in ways that we would never consider. They understand it and use it to suit their needs. They solve problems with technology, they create with technology, and they manipulate technology. They own at technology in ways that I never will. All I can do is keep watching and learning. It is all very cool but it does make me feel a bit old. I don’t remember finding different uses for our eight track player other than to listen to Glenn Campbell sing Wichita Lineman…guess I was kinda slow.

Please click here to fill in a survey about our TLLP program.

We would like to get some feedback from you about the usefulness (or lack of usefulness) of these past four sessions. We will use the information to help us in planning other workshops, in our report to the Ministry and as feedback for B & LT (they were the ones who paid for all your toys). Please take the time to fill it in. There are no names on the survey, we can’t track you down, we will not take things away from you, your families will not come to any harm.

My grade 6 students studied explorers of North America this past term. One of their assignments was to do a talk show with an explorer to give us an idea of the explorer’s life and accomplishments. The students researched an explorer of their choice as an independent project. Then they worked with other students to do the talk shows. The students quite enjoyed working in pairs or small groups, one person as the interviewer and another as the explorer.

Adrianna started working with a partner but her partner was ill or away on a trip during a large part of the assignment so Adrianna did the project herself. Using Audacity, she recorded herself asking all the questions. Then she recorded herself as Sir John Franklin and answered the questions. Using the Change Pitch effect in Audacity she altered her voice for the Sir John Franklin part. In editing she went from the question track to the answer track. She added a little ghostly music and I think that she has put together a very strong project.

Audacity is a powerful tool and motivator for the students in my class.

Listen to Adrianna’s interview with Sir John Franklin by clicking here.

This screencast will show you how to take pictures from web pages, and insert them into your blog posts and pages. I use Flickr as the source for the pictures that I use as it has copyright friendly material available on it. This method of inserting pictures should work from other websites as well, but be certain that you are not violating copyright with your picture choices. Due to the size of the screen that I used for this Jing, it might be easier for you to see this by clicking the larger version. This is a large file…it will take a while but it is worth it (if I don’t say so myself)

Click here to see a larger version

Nathan introduced me to the Common Craft videos a few years ago. Lee and Sachi Lefever create short and elegantly simple videos on tech and other subjects. The videos are all done with paper cut outs and voice overs. Well worth a visit.

We Make Videos

Our videos are short, simple and focused on making complex ideas easy to understand. We use a whiteboard-and-paper format we call Paperworks that is designed to cut out the noise and stick to what matters.

We are dedicated to building a library of videos that are focused on helping influencers and educators create change through better explanations.

Their blog is available at: http://www.commoncraft.com/blog

  Here is a their latest video: Computer Hardware in Plain English

Here are the links we are planning to talk about this morning:

Our classroom blogs (56JS.ca and 5NT.ca):

…………

post daily agenda

continue the day’s learning at home

Banana Hunt

encourage conversation between students (sometimes the conversation is academic!!)

Our PortableRadio.ca podcast:

15 minute variety show made up of what the students are interested in

2 minute POVs dealing with current event stories (i.e. Should the Ottawa’s NHL team trade their goalie?)

CBC Radio’s Ottawa Morning has played many of these POVs

We’ve been published by Scholastic

Our books

Our professional development blog/podcast:

PortablePD.ca