Parent Technology Coffee

On Tuesday, October 18th, we hosted our first parent technology coffee.  The session was hosted twice, once at 9:00 AM and then again at 6:00 PM.  Twenty-five parents and members of the community came together to discuss digital safety, security and the Opt-in/Opt-out choices in the iPad User Agreement sent home to students in grades 5-8 earlier this month.
For those of you that were not able to attend (or those that would like to review some of the topics and resources we discussed), this post serves as a brief re-cap of the event.
We started out with some brief introductions of staff members and attending parents.  Staff members present were:

• Ed Longfield - Superintendent (morning session)
• Chris Burr - Middle School Principal
• Russ Vogel - Manitou Springs Elementary School Principal
• Cat Butler-Olimb - Technology Coordinator (morning session)
• Lisette Casey - Technology Integration Specialist
• Glenn Char - Parent and Facilitator for parent meetings

After introductions we talked a bit about the focus and format of the coffees.  The main focus of the coffees are to build understanding of the ways that technology is changing society, and therefore, changing education.  Every month we'll watch a short video related to the featured topic and then discuss the implications of the video on education and learning, always with practical examples from classrooms here at MSSD.  All Manitou Springs School District parents are invited to attend.  We'll always meet in the Multi-Purpose room of the SILC building at 9:00 AM and then again at 6:00 PM.
Norms for the parent coffees are as follows:

1. Start and end on time.
2. Adhere to the agenda and honor the time allotted for each item.
3. Engage in honest, focused, and respectful discussions surrounding the focus topic.
4. The coffee is not a place for discussion of school policy.

Lisette Casey spoke for a bit regarding technology integration in the classroom around the topic of today's parent coffee.  Currently, Glenn Char and she are presenting the topic of digital security and safety to all students in grades 5 -8.  Since many students have internet access at home via computers, personal devices and gaming consoles, the need to keep kids safe and secure online is at the forefront of everyone's mind.  Many kids identify themselves as the family person responsible for performing routine maintenance and tasks necessary to keep their home networks/computers running smoothly.   Detailed diagrams, schematics, and discussion about what network makeup is shared with students.  This leads into a discussion about the importance of making responsible choices regarding the downloading of files. The second half of the presentation is geared toward keeping a person safe from dangerous files, predators, and cyberbullying.  Movies shown during this presentation can be found under today's parent coffee topic in the iPads Wiki.  A simulation is shown to students that reinforces the need to always check for reputable sources before downloading material of any type from the internet.  This simulation was also shared with parents during the coffee.
Following this Glenn Char presented on the subject of digital security,   The presentation elaborated on the differences between filtered and unfiltered networks and what this means for families when iPads leave the school grounds at both elementary and middle school levels.
The presentation is embedded below.

The Home Network Security Page on the iPad Wiki was shared as a resource for parents in regards to securing their home networks.  A call to your internet service provider or a visit to a retail store selling routers and interent connection equipment followed by a conversation with a sales person was recommended to steer parents in the right direction.  Remember, regardless of what type of content filter you employ in your house, the  best filter will always be you.  Talk to your child often about what to do when they encounter inappropriate sites on the internet as well as why it's important not to purposely visit these sites.
Our next coffee topic is social networking on November 15th.

A Google A Day

"Information is powerful, but it is how we use it that will define us."
 -Zack Matere, Kenyan Farmer.

There is no denying the need to teach kids how to search for information on the internet in efficient, safe manners.  There are few sites that teach this skill better than A Google A Day.

A Google A Day is a web search engine by google that helps sharpen search skills by those who participate.
The game is quite simple in design: you're given a question and need to find the answer.
Your efforts are timed, and usually take several layers of searching to arrive at the desired outcome, however, there is of course more than one way to discover the answers. Hints can be given along the way if you get really stuck.

Users can go back in time to complete questions on days they missed, and of course, you could repeat the search of any question as many times as you'd like, trying different query approaches.

Along with the game, is the resource, "Tips and Tricks" which includes the link to "Google Inside Search," where users can learn even more about successful searching techniques in the "Features" and "More Help" sections. (There's plenty more to do at the "Google Inside Search" page, such as enjoy and learn the meanings of all the Google Logos that have graced the past Google pages).

"A Google A Day" is an excellent resource for teachers to use with students together or pass on to students for their own independent study. It can be used as bell work at the beginning of class.  I can imagine classes breaking up into teams to compete against each other, or graphing their best times each day. Each daily answer could also lead to even more research for students.

The site is open at the middle school, not sure about the elementary.

Success

Demitri Martin

I saw this image by Demitri Martin on Facebook the other day.  It resonated.  

Success is seldom a straight shot; it's often messy and adjustments are often necessary in the process of achieving success.  
I'd been thinking about a Winston Churchill quote my friend and colleague Shaunda McQueeney mentioned to me - "Success in not final, failure is seldom fatal:  it is the courage to continue that counts."  Sometimes it takes lots of courage to keep going, especially when the road your own may seem like a bit of a mess.  A clear, communicated vision helps smooth out the road.  Need to work on this.


Winston Churchill also quoted, "Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm."  Just took a dose of enthusiasm and I'm headed forward. 

Teacher Burnout and the Inbox

Learning how to handle the constant stream of information that flows into our inbox on a daily basis is essential if we want to prevent burnout from the inundation of technology.  Taking the following steps will help avoid burnout and lead to a successful venture leading and learning with technology.

How to avoid technology teacher burnout.

• Use Pull technologies (iGoogle and NetVibes) to bring content to your fingertips instead of wasting time going out on the internet and searching for information or visiting a multitude of websites.  Going to one place for online content saves time and energy.
• Set a start and stop time to check your PLN (Professional Learning Network) feed page.  Be habitual about checking in with your PLN daily and adhere to the stop time.  
• Change settings on some of your feeds when you get too busy.  Switching from a daily to a weekly setting may is easy to do on most sites and may ease the burden of email overload.   
• Make sure you schedule down time daily.  This may seem like a silly item to be reminded of but all too often taking care of ourselves is something we tend to put on the back burner.  

Keeping up with and connecting to a PLN is a rewarding and positive experience for those who learn to manage their PLN well.

Classroom Management Portals

Today I spent some time with teachers introducing them to iGoogle so they could use iGoogle as a classroom management portal, (CMP.)  A classroom management portal is a management tool that enables a teacher to easily monitor an online classroom community and presence via a personalized homepage. The benefit of using feed pages are that the content comes to you instead of you having to visit each and every website to see what members of your classroom community are doing.

Since we are a Google Apps school and all teachers have Google accounts, iGoogle seemed the most obvious choice for setting up the CMP.  iGoogle allows content in two forms, feeds and gadgets.  Gadgets are specified online content that can be tailored to meet the needs of the user.  For instance, I can easily add a weather gadget and enter in the cities of my choice just as easily as I can add a Facebook gadget that allows me to access my Facebook news feed.

You can also add any site that publishes a feed to your iGoogle homepage.  The feed looks like any other iGoogle gadget and lets you get automatic updates from the site without leaving your iGoogle page.   This feature makes checking student blogs quick and manageable.  

Tabs on iGoogle can be added, customized and organized based on the teacher's needs.  Some teachers may name tabs according to class schedule while others may organize tabs according to subject areas. Feeds and gadgets can be moved from one tab to another by dragging the feed into new tabs.  Tabs can even be shared among teachers and students to enable blog sharing.  Last semester I shared my iGoogle tabs with students so they had easy access to student blogs.  

The screenshot to the right is a screenshot a teacher took of her recently created iGoogle page to be used as a CMP.  Organized by class period and alphabetically, this teacher will be able to easily monitor what students are writing on their blogs.  A teacher can read blogs by clicking on the plus sign to the left of the title and never have to leave the homepage.  To read the blog post on the student blog a teacher needs only to click on the post title to gain access to the blog and leave thoughtful comments.

Visit your feed pages often!
In addition to using feed pages to monitor online classroom content feed pages can also be set up to monitor a personal learning network filled with educator blogs and websites.

Communication and Mobile Technologies - Sekai Camera App

Sekai Camera App is a social AR (augmented reality) application that enables users to interact in social communication through digital contents attached to the real world.
By holding up your iPhone and looking through the camera view (just as if you were taking a photo), you will see location-based information (just like digital “post-its”) floating in mid air. These are called “Air Tags”.
Air Tags could be either text, pictures, or voice messages, and users can view, post and also comment on other users’ Air Tags.
We've just started using this app in school in science classes.  Teachers/students are able to post questions with pictures in the air for others to respond.  A few ways a teacher might use Sekai is

• Warm-Ups
• Interacting with multiple classes
• Writing prompts
• Posting classroom responses to essential questions
• Alternative ways to provide agendas
• Field Trips

Users must create an account before using.  Comments on tags may be made by all users in the network and students need to understand the significance of this fact.  Tags can be shared to Twitter and Facebook.

Communication

What?

Global communication projects require participants to make connections with each other using synchronous and asynchronous communications. Synchronous communications involve participants connecting with each other live or at one given time.   This type of communication may be accomplished via text and audio/video technologies.  Skype and FaceTime are examples of video chats while Back Channel websites and instant messaging are examples of synchronous communications involving text only.  Asynchronous communications allow participants to communicate with each other without having to be some where at any given time.  In asynchronous communications participants can collaborate and communicate by leaving messages to a group, editing online spaces that multiple participants have access to, or by sending an email and have full confidence that partners will be able to view, listen to, edit, and contribute to the conversation.  Knowing and understanding the technologies that support both of these types of communications increase the chances for a successful project.

So What?

Using both types of communications have been essential in my career as an educator.  This summer we began a 1:1 iPad implementation that required professional development and conversation around the integration of technology.  Employees of our school district our on vacation for nearly 10 weeks during the summer yet professional development had to occur.  Many teachers, including myself, were away on vacation, attending conferences or simply unable to attend physical classes.  Using both synchronous and asynchronous communications, we were able to hold viable professional development on a weekly basis throughout the summer.  

I first created a Facebook Group for our school district around the subject of iPad applications.  This asynchronous means of communication served as a space for teachers to post links to applications and websites that others might find useful as they began a search of applications to include on the student iPads in the fall.  This Facebook group page continues to serve as a space for thoughtful conversations related to iPads and their use in our school district.  Members of the group did not need to friend each other on Facebook in order to be a part of the conversation.  This act respected the privacy of employees who wanted to separate their personal life from their professional life yet continue to use a communication tool they employees were comfortable with.  The downside of the Facebook group was that not all employees were members of Facebook.  These employees needed to rely on email to communicate their findings and others took responsibility for posting these findings on the group page.

I also investigated methods of synchronous communications that were comparable to Eluminate, the online, collaborative software that provides space for an online class among other means of communications.   Enter WizIQ, an online teaching platform that allows a user to create classes and courses at a reasonable rate, sometimes free.  Each week I uploaded content, invited staff members and held an online class.  Sometimes I held the class on campus and several staff members who preferred to have face to face contact attended in person.  Several staff members attended from the comfort of their own home, asking questions in the chat as the class moved along.  I did quite a bit of traveling this summer so many classes were held from lobbies and living rooms of various cities.  All I needed was a fast internet connection.  And though I considered these classes synchronous because people attended virtually at the prescribed time, all classes were recorded and many teachers listened to the recordings if they were unable to attend due to time zone differences.  I taught ten classes in this manner and thoroughly enjoyed the level of communication WizIQ allowed for our teachers this summer.  

The classes on WizIQ were private but the link to my profile is not.  If you are interested in watching some of these let me know.

Now What?
I've participated in three Flat Classroom® Projects.  All of these projects involved both synchronous and asynchronous communications and I became quite adept at using them both inside and outside of the classroom.  What I'd like to do in the future is utilized Eluminate or WizIQ technologies with multiple classes in a project.  I consider the teacher meetings for these projects, and for these classes, incredible opportunities to connect with outstanding educators from all over.  I'd like to take part in connecting students in a similar manner.  When students have increased opportunities to connect, communicate and collaborate with each other the more equipped for a global, digital world they will be.  I hope to educate colleagues about these technologies, provide opportunities for global collaboration and encourage them to participate in such projects.