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« March 2011 | Main | May 2011 »

April 2011 posts

Saturday, April 30, 2011

Apple of My Eye: Resources Catching My Attention (weekly)

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Posted by Lucy Gray on Saturday, April 30, 2011 at 07:37 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

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Wednesday, April 27, 2011

Professional Development School Institute at Minnesota State

Today I'm in Mankato, Minnesota as part of a leadership institute for selected school leaders. I'm learning so much already from Sam Steiger, head of MNS's adventure education program which is one of the three university units that helps coordinate and facilitate this program.  Adventure education elemenents are built in to this leadership experience and educators within this institute will be participating in outdoor ed short courses later this summer.  Also, as an aside, experiential education is big here and people come for their Master's degree program within the College of Education's Ed Leadership department.

Each participant gets a journal designed by the program facilitators and published in Blurb. It's a small volume that could fit in a purse or back pocket and has template pages to lead institute participants through reflecting on their activities within the program. I especially like how there are inspirational quotes scattered throughout. What a great, thoughtful and creative gift to teachers. I'd rather have a book like this any day than a stack of handouts at a PD session.

Also, worth checking out are the books Zoom and Re-Zoom by Istvan BanyaiSam also just led a great community building activity using a book called Re-Zoom . I think this a great metaphor for leading in a school. How do you go from the macro to the micro and still have everyone on board and working together?

My main point of posting today was to publish my materials for this afternoon, but I excited about what I'm learning just being an observer and had to share.

Below is my stuff.....I've added some new stuff to my going global presentation, by the way. We'll be on Skype this afternoon at about 2 PM (14:00 GMT)  if anyone want to share their global education projects with us. My skype name is elemenous.

Going Global at Minnesota State University
View more presentations from Lucy Gray

Minnesota State - Going Global: Preparing Students for Global Citizenship

Posted by Lucy Gray on Wednesday, April 27, 2011 at 11:22 AM in Global Education, Presentations | | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

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Saturday, April 23, 2011

Apple of My Eye: Resources Catching My Attention (weekly)

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Posted by Lucy Gray on Saturday, April 23, 2011 at 07:36 PM | | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

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New Google Custom Search Engines and Handouts

For the upcoming Chicago Tech Forum, this week I developed a handout and a Google Custom Search engine devoted to finding iOS resources. I culled my collections of links related to iPods, iPhones, and iPads to identify the best resources and moving forward, I plan to keep adding to this. The search engine is designed to search most of the web sites listed in the handout, and I'll be adding to this as well. If you're looking for a particular topic related to using these devices in schools, this engine might help you refine your search and higher quality results.

Additionally, I updated my High Techpectations Google Custom Search Engine and created a handout of education starting points. It only searches web sites that I consider to be of high quality.

With both of these search engines feel free either link to their start pages, add them to your iGoogle pages, or embed their codes in your own web sites.

Posted by Lucy Gray on Saturday, April 23, 2011 at 10:29 AM in Conferences, Google, Resources, Search, Teachers, web 2.0 | | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

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Paper.li: GlobalEd Collaborative News

I've been experimenting with Paper.li, a free service that aggregates links shared via Facebook and Twitter and publishes it in a newspaper-like format. With Twitter, you can have this online newspaper created by using your Twitter feed, the feed from a hashtag, or from a list you've created in Twitter. I've found that the list feed seems to generate the best results for me personally... I tried one with a hashtag that no one really uses extensively yet so there wasn't enough material available to generate a newspaper on a regular basis. Using my own Twitter feed seems a little self-promoting and wildly varied as I follow 7000+ people. My global list consists of 160+ Twitterstreams of high quality sources, and thus this particular Paper.li newspaper tends to be a decent read each day.

Here's a sample:

 

Posted by Lucy Gray on Saturday, April 23, 2011 at 10:02 AM in Global Education, web 2.0 | | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

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Saturday, April 16, 2011

Apple of My Eye: Resources Catching My Attention (weekly)

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Posted by Lucy Gray on Saturday, April 16, 2011 at 07:36 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

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Friday, April 15, 2011

What Truths Do You Hold to be Self-Evident About Education?

Chris Lehmann: The Great American Teach-In: Listening to Students.

Sam Chaltain: What's Your Declaration of Education?.

What truths do you hold to be self-evident about education? Please join me and many other education stakeholders in exploring the state of US education during the Great American Teach-In (http://declarationofeducation.com/), scheduled to take place on May 10th. 

During this event, we will be examining what it means to be educated in the 21st century and formulating solutions to improve education. I believe that in order to do this thoughtfully, we must look within ourselves to identify and articulate our fundamental beliefs about the purpose of education. Participants will be encouraged to draft their own Declarations of Education in some format and to share these ideas with the world. 

The following questions were developed to help participants reflect and over the next few weeks, I think I'll tackle these in blog posts here in preparation for writing my own Declaration. I see this as sort of an cathartic exercise similar to NPR's This I Believe series. I hope you'll think about these as well and take the time to create your own vision of education.

1. When and where do I learn best?
2. What does an ideal learning environment look like?
3. How closely do our current places of learning resemble our ideal learning environment?
4. What barriers to learning/growth exist within our current environments?
5. What will we do to make our current learning environments more perfect places to work and learn?

I also am thinking about how to involve my own kids, ages 8 and 12, as I think they have opinions on this matter. I'd like to help them better articulate their feelings about school, and to think metacognitively about their learning in order to advocate for themselves. 

Let's change the current tone with education and focus on what works, what needs to change, and how we can do it together. 


Posted by Lucy Gray on Friday, April 15, 2011 at 11:49 PM in Current Affairs, Curriculum, Ed Policy, Education Policy, Innovation, Leadership, Students, Teachers, Teachin11 | | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

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Wednesday, April 13, 2011

On My Mind

A couple of things related to the SMART board sessions I led this week....

First, none of the teachers at this event brought laptops or seemed to have mobile devices. A few had iPhones. This was a second grade conference,  not a tech conference, so that isn't a shocker necessarily, but the fact that some teachers/schools don't see a device as a professional need is interesting. This is also probably exacerbated by funding issues, I would think.

Most teachers in my sessions had interactive whiteboards installed in their classrooms, and big surprise, had had little or no training.  A few didn't know that they had to orient their boards. School districts MUST provide support in this area if they expect the IWBs to used effectivelt and this training must involve more than just an overview of the technical aspects. Investigations into good pedagogical use also must be part of the conversation and on-going.

Also, when encouraging the participants to take charge of their own professional learning through social media, I found that not one teacher was on Twitter. Twitter is not the be all and end all tool, but it's been so critical in my learning. I was surprised by the divide between the educators in my world and this group; I think it's indicative of a larger chasm that isn't being addressed. In short, I think we have a long way to go before the idea of the "highly connected teacher" (as espoused in the National Educational Technology Plan) is a reality. We have a lot of work to do, folks!

Finally, when browsing resources for interactive whiteboards, I couldn't help but notice the plethora of IWB interactives and lessons that have been developed in the UK by not only teachers, but organizations. This is primarily due to the widespread penetration of IWBs in that part of the world. There is a ton of free and accessible content available to UK teachers, and it made me wish that there was more of a priority in this front in the U.S. Are DoE funds supporting the development of  GOOD content in a more comprehensive and practical way? Perhaps more is going on in this area than I realize, so educate me.

Also, while doing my research, I was absolutely stunned to find out that the UK's Teachers TV is shutting down. This follows the equally stunning demise of Becta, their formidable ed tech agency. The UK has been on the forefront of innovation in educational technology, and these are huge blows. I first learned of Teachers TV at Alan November's BLC conference and have been impressed with this method of professional development delivery. Again, I'd love to see something like this developed in the US, but if we're seriously talking about not funding groups like PBS and NPR, I wonder if I should even hope that are priorties are really focused on education. These are definitely dark days... How are we supposed to improve under these conditions?

 

 

Posted by Lucy Gray on Wednesday, April 13, 2011 at 09:34 AM in Innovation, IWB, Policy, Professional Development | | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

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Fun for Kids & Adults: A Google a Day

A Google a Day.

A couple of things to note on the search education front. First and the most fun is Google's new experimental feature called A Google A Day. Test your search skills with a new puzzle each day. This could definitely be used with middle school kids and up to show them that search is a process that involves critical thinking. The answer link not only shows the answer, but describes the path.

Secondly, Google's search guru, Dan Russell has a new search education site where you are looking for educational materials, webinars and classes related to effective searching.

Finally, I stumbled upon this CNET article that describes Google's continued interest in educating people about search, and it sounds like there will be more to come in this area along the lines of A Google A Day.

Thought these resources were worth passing on. Keep on searching!

Posted by Lucy Gray on Wednesday, April 13, 2011 at 08:54 AM in Google, Search | | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

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Tuesday, April 12, 2011

Recent SMART Board Presentations

I've spent a great deal of time recently pouring over existing materials for using SMART Boards and many of what I consider the best options are listed in the hand out and slidedecks below.

During the development of these materials, it's become quite clear to me that there are scads of mediocre Notebook files published on the web and, that most of these Notebook lessons, at least for my target audience of second grade teachers, really do not require a lot of deep thinking on the part of students. We seem to have amazingly low expectations of what second graders can do and the topics they are interested in. I was particularly surprised at the dearth of quality social studies lessons for this age group. 

There definitely is an art to lesson planning without involving technology in the first place, and I think the challenge is even greater when you add technology to the mix. As I mention in my slides, technology ironically doesn't hide poor teaching; it illuminates it. I will state for the record that I am a fan of interactive white boards.... when used properly. I've seen teachers design interesting center activities for kids that encourages independent learning and lead great discussions involving multimedia on interactive whiteboards  while using the plethora of tools in various ways. Kids have been generally engaged and attentive in these various scenarios, and I think their enthusiasm can't be discounted. If teachers aren't actively trying to use these boards to their fullest potential, I can see why some might question their value.

The other item that needs to be addressed more fully in this department is copyright. There is a lot of copying of images going on and then these files are re-published to the web. It's one thing to obtain multimedia under fair use guidelines, but then I think it's a questionable practice to re-publish that content. I'm not perfect in this area, but I just wish there was more awareness in general by fellow educators.

Anyway, hope you find the following useful... hopefully I'll refine this stuff in the future.

 

SMART Board Introduction Presentation
View more presentations from Lucy Gray
More Advanced SMART Board Skills Presentation
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SMART Board Handout for SDE Preso

Posted by Lucy Gray on Tuesday, April 12, 2011 at 05:36 PM in Conferences, IWB | | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

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Sunday, April 10, 2011

Presentations from #D219Tech

Below are my slidedecks from District 219's (Niles North and Niles West High Schools in Skokie, IL) technology conference. These topics have been a staple of my repertoire lately, but every time I present, I tweak the slides just a bit. Most of the things I mention are hyperlinked and will lead you directly to the resources. For instance, in the Google preso, the bullets are linked, but I didn't underline them all for esthetic purposes.

Thanks to Guy Ballard and team for a wonderful day. Great to catch up with fellow Illinois educators and to catch David Warlick's fabulous keynote. He paints a picture of current shifts in learning and as always, I'm impressed with his talent for telling the compelling story. I wish every educator and parent in the country had the opportunity to hear him, so that perhaps we all would be more on the same page.

To those who attended my sessions, thanks for your comments and input. Please stay in touch and join the Global Education Collaborative!

D219 Conference - Google for Educators Overview
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D219 Conference - Social Media Tools for Personalized Professional Development
View more presentations from Lucy Gray
District 219 Technology Conference - Going Global
View more presentations from Lucy Gray
District 219 Technology Conference - Beyond Search
View more presentations from Lucy Gray

Posted by Lucy Gray on Sunday, April 10, 2011 at 09:51 AM in Conferences, Global Education, Google, Presentations, Professional Development, Teachers | | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

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Saturday, April 09, 2011

Apple of My Eye: Resources Catching My Attention (weekly)

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Posted by Lucy Gray on Saturday, April 09, 2011 at 07:36 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

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Saturday, April 02, 2011

Apple of My Eye: Resources Catching My Attention (weekly)

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Posted by Lucy Gray on Saturday, April 02, 2011 at 07:36 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

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