In an attempt to document the trials and errors of using a classroom set of 20 iPads in our K-8 school, I am adding a new post to the collection of iPads in the Classroom:

• Transliteracy- QR Codes and Art
• Working on iPad Fluency with Lower Elementary Students
• Step-by-Step: How to Create a Collaborative Class eBook
• Students Create ePub iPad Book for the World
• Finally! A Book Creator App
• Plan, Do and Review iPad Exploration (by Andrea Hernandez)
• ShowMe App for the iPad- Good Tutorial Designer App?

5th Grade- Storykit- Creating a story in Hebrew

One of the Hebrew teachers approached me with an interest in having her students create a story book in the target language on the iPads.

We chose to test the free app Storykit with this project.

Students read a poem by Leah Goldberg called: (That’s Not Me). Based on the poem, students wrote their own story and created a storyboard how they could illustrate their story.

We had the Hebrew letters added to the iPad keyboard by going into: Settings> General>  Keyboard> International Keyboards>Add New Keyboard> Choose Hebrew

Once the International keyboard is added, a globe appears on your keyboard. Tap the button to cycle through all the different keyboards you have installed.

Once the storyboards were finished, students were ready to work with the iPads. The app allowed users to create their own illustrations, import images from elsewhere or take photos with the built in iPad2 camera and insert them into their story. Students could also add audio recordings to their story.

I showed students how to go to Microsoft Office ClipArt, search for images and download or take a screenshot and edit the image.

Students also used each other to stage scenes from their story to take a photo.

Problems we found along the way:

• students could not re-order the pages of their story in order to imitate leafing/swiping through a book from “right to left” (opposite from the way we turn pages in books in English).
• students were not able to place punctuation at the end of a sentence, since the Hebrew keyboard in Storykit (maybe because it is an iPhone, not an iPad app) does not include a period.

Once the stories were completed, students

• shared (tap share button) their story
• emailed themselves the story link
• went to their emails to click on the generated URL
• took a screenshot of their story pages
• wrote a blog post about their experience
• inserted the story pages into their blog post

I will probably not use the Storykit again, since I want to be able to easily embed the stories on the student blogfolios, as well as export them into our school iBook library.

Take a look at some student samples.

Sarah’s Story

A blog post from Sarah, one of the 5th grade students:

Today in Hebrew class we made a story on an app called StoryKit. We made this on the IPads. My story is called , or in English the name is: It’s Not Me. Our Fifth Grade Hebrew teacher, Morah Liat read us a story about a boy who is acting bad, but is usually a good child. Everyone had to make a story based on that one. Typing in Hebrew on the IPads is very tricky. In English the words go left to right, but in Hebrew the words go right to left. That makes deleting letters difficult. I  spent a lot of time on this Story.

Sydney’s Story

Rachel’s Story

There is something about doodling…illustrating… as you are listening to, absorbing and reflecting about content or an experience. I have questions…?

• Does doodling calm a mind, that is constantly bouncing of its walls?
• Does doodling help one focus on auditory material?
• Can doodling help clarify content?
• Does doodling only work for the artistically inclined? (What if I can’t draw?)
• Is doodling only beneficial for the visual learner?

I have been wanting to find out about these questions for a while now. During an experiment with a fifth grade class last school year, I showed them parts of Ken Robinson’s TED talk “Changing Education Paradigm” that had been animated by RSA Animate. You might think that this age group would not have been interested in that topic, but surprisingly they were fascinated and begged me to watch more of the video clip. I wrote about the different jobs students took, including the one of a Doodler/Illustrationist, as they watched another movie about the American Revolution. Take a look at the post The Official Scribe: It’s All About Learning Styles & Collaboration.

My little informal experiment showed that students, who doodled their notes, retained more details of the content they heard and were able to narrate and explain content, connections and sequence better than their counterparts who took text with bullet type notes.

In another post, titled Third Graders- Called Upon As Experts, I mentioned the “Doodler” using an iPad to illustrate during a Skype video conference.

A few days ago, I clicked on a link from Twitter, which took me to the following TED Talk: Doodlers Unite! by Sunni Brown

In this short five minute video Sunni answers many of my initial questions I posed above.

She makes a point of the importance of doodling as a means to use visual language and talks about the perceived notion that doodling is too often NOT considered serious learning. She advocates that doodling has a

profound impact how we can process information and solve problems.

How can we, as educators, ignore this statement above? Processing information and solving problems are critical 21st century skills!!!

How can we not take advantage of Sunni’s definition of Doodling below?

Sunni defines Doodling as:

to make spontaneous marks to help yourself think

Take the five minutes to listen to Sunni and maybe you will doodle on a piece of paper or on your iPad about what YOU think? How can you connect what you are hearing to YOUR classroom and YOUR students and all of OUR learning. How can me make doodling acceptable in schools and even take a step further by strategically teaching and supporting it?

I posted a few weeks ago about the ongoing Teddy Bears Around the World (now in its fourth year) project.

The project blog and hub can be be found at http://www.langwitches.org/blog/travel/teddybearsaroundtheworld/

I have created a How-to-Guide in order to articulate how and why to join such a project, to make participation easier and to facilitate the process of passing on the information.

Feel free to forward via email or print out the flyer and hand them to a teacher who might be interested in participating.

Global Project: Teddy Bears Around the World

Twitter, without a doubt, has become the social network for educators to take their professional development into their own hands. Twitter allows teachers to connect with other educators from around the world, join discussions related to their interests and have a steady stream of resources (to help them teach and learn) available to them whenever, whereever and however. Creating a network on Twitter has catapulted educators to be part of a connected world where learning happens anytime, help is only a tweet away, collaboration partners meet and communicate, conversations that directly or indirectly impact their physical lives take place 24/7.  Twitter is helping educators gain many 21st century skills and literacies which could easily transfer to their classrooms.

So the next question is…

How do you bring Twitter into your K-8 Classroom?

If your students are under the age of 13, they cannot create their own Twitter account (Minimum Age Restriction). The solution is to create a classroom twitter account and start tweeting as a class!

Take a look at the following guide I created to help you think of a few ideas to use Twitter in your classroom and how to introduce tweeting to your students:

1. What is Twitter
2. Getting Started
3. How can you use Twitter in the Classroom?
4. Twitter Etiquette
5. The First Tweet
6. What is a Quality Tweet?
7. Logistics
8. Twitter Vocabulary
9. Tweeting Classrooms

Please leave a comment below with your username if you are tweeting with your K-8 classroom. Also add other ideas on how you have successfully used Twitter as a class.

Twitter in K-8 Classroom- Globally Connected Learning

Teaching ourselves, our students and other educators how to use screenshooting (images) and screencasting (video) tools is a relevant skill to have that integrates in so many areas. Think Tutorial Designers (A role from the Digital Learning Farm) or the Flipped Classroom model. Being able to create, share and take advantage of readily available screencasts touch upon so many of the skills (create, communicate) and literacies (network, media, information literacy).

Maybe you have never heard about screencasting, have not paid much attention to it and/or have never tried to create one of your own. Or maybe you have plenty of experience in creating  your own screencasts and incorporated screencasting into your lessons or assessments before. Maybe you feel screencasting to be a basic, one of the most important or an essential teaching and learning skill for you as an educator or for your students to have.

I agree with many others who say that:

• “The ability to effectively create and share a screencast is one of the most important skills of teachers in the 21st century.” Powerful Ingredients for Blended Learning,
• “The ability to create and share a screencast with others about a topic is a basic skill for 21st century teachers” Wes Fryer
• Screencasting is a New Form of Communication
• “Screencasting for an audience of one is a skill every frontline library employee, from circulation to reference, should learn and use.”LibraryJournal.com
• “Screencasting: Essential Teacher Knowledge” Western Carolina University

Screencasting also has taken on an important role in the area of an emerging trend which is the Flipped Classroom Model.  You can read more about it here and here.

Screencasting software ranges from basic to elaborate, from free to expensive. Alan November mentioned in one of his presentations about the Digital Learning Farm this summer that he would recommend Jing Project (free) and make it the FIRST software to teach to EVERY students. (Take a look at his Screencasting handout)

My favorite Screenshooting software for the mac is Skitch and SnagIt (which is also available for the PC). Now that I am using my iPad more and more, I am eager to transfer the screenshooting and screencasting abilities to my mobile device. It seems that I am not the only one, since over the last few months three apps for the iPad have emerged. Rumor has it that Skitch is coming out with their own app for the iPad soon.

The first one, I tried out was Show Me App (free). You can read my review on my post titled ShowMe App for the iPad- Good Tutorial Designer App?. The developers are really listening to their users and are constantly updating and upgrading the app. Features that I felt were missing when I beta tested the app, have been included in their updates. I still am missing options of being able to export my final movie anywhere else, but upload them to the ShowMe site.

The next one to appear in the iTunes store was ScreenChomp (free) by TechSmith (Same company than Jing and SnagIt)

Just as with the ShowMe app, this one allows you to import images from your Photo library and use them as the background to your screencast. You can choose from an array of colored markers (just hold down your finger on one of the markers to choose a different color)

The app automatically uploads the video file to the screenchomp.com site and gives you a link that you can share, email or tweet. There is no need to create an account to be able to upload (as opposed to the ShowMe app), but there is also no (easy) way of deleting a video that was created and uploaded. There is an option to contact the company and request to have inappropriate or offensive content deleted.

The third app that I have tested out is Explain Everything. This one comes at a cost of $2.99, but also gives me more options.

The first options that I immediately liked was

• The button to choose arrows, shapes, and lines to include in the screencast (Customize with colors, thickness and border)
• The ability to type (not just use handwriting)
• Have  the build-in ability to crop (design your own crop by drawing the lines around the area, instead of a traditional rectangular cropping area)
• Importing images do NOT have to solely come from the iPad Photo roll, but can also be imported from the camera, Dropbox and Evernote.
• The different pieces you draw, type or import become objects that can individually be manipulated (resized, deleted and are treated to be a on a layer that can be send to back, front, etc)
• The app is set up to create different slides (just as PowerPoint or Keynote), move the order of the slides and give me the opportunity to use it in presentation mode.

• Import ability of images, PowerPoint and Keynote files that can be opened via your email, through Dropbox and Evernote.
• Export features: I am not forced to upload the video file to the company’s site. I have CHOICES! I can export a screenshot of the slide I created to my Photo Roll (this feature is huge for me, since I can now import the movie file directly from here into iMovie on the iPad and make the screencast part of a larger movie), via e-mail, to Dropbox or Evernote.
  

ExplainEverything uses the word “workflow” on their support site, but it is what I called “iPad Fluency“, the ability to easily move between apps, bring in files and send them on to other apps that I might be working with or have access to on my other devices.

I am willing to pay for an app, if it supports my fluency!

A feature that is still missing from all three apps, is the ability to record my screen as I am using the browser or other apps on the iPad. I know I am able to take individual screenshots of what I am doing, then import them into the app to create the screencast, BUT that hinders my fluency. It adds an additional step, that I am accustomed to not having to take on my laptop.

I am thrilled that screencasting apps are becoming available for the iPad and can’t wait to be able to use them with students AND teachers to work on 21st century skills and help empower learners.

Here is my first attempt of a screencast with the Explain Everything app : Upgrade to the 21st Century Skills/Literacies/Digital Learning Farm template. (Download the templates as a PDF)

Globally Connected Learning Consulting offers a variety of Professional Development learning opportunities:

• Presentations (1-2 hours) for small or large groups
• Workshops (1/2 and full days)
• Conference sessions
• Keynote presentations
• Video conferencing
• 1:1 consulting
• Classroom observations
• Coaching

The potential audience is:

• Classroom Teachers
• Heads of School
• Staff Developers
• Curriculum Coordinators & Coaches
• Technology Coordinators
• University Professors of Education
• University Students in Teacher Education Programs

 
Globally Connected Learning PD Workshop

21st Century Schools PD Workshops

Globally Connected Learning Consulting- PD Sample Topics

iPad Workshop- Globally Connected Learning Consulting

Questions, questions, questions are  popping up around me everywhere. No, not specific questions, but the the idea of questions, the process, importance, awareness of questioning in teaching and learning.

Below is a bullet list of what and where “Questions” have come up in the last months…

• When I read Curriculum21 by Heidi Hayes Jacobs (ASCD 2010), Bill Sheskey’s quote “It is not the answer anymore, it is the question.” caught my attention right away. How can I turn this quote into action in the classroom?

• Bill Beasley, “just” a teacher from Calgary, Canada ( wink to Bill)  shared with me  how he features and celebrates “good” (higher level thinking) questions with his 5th graders

Our initiative is called “That’s a Good Question!”

The idea is both simple and powerful. My students and I use Skype to connect with and ask questions of experts around the world who can help my students and I with our learning on a wide variety of topics.

Each student is asked to prepare three questions. We share them with one another in the class to provide feedback as to which questions we think will be most helpful to our learning. I then ask the students to prioritize their questions so that they will all have the chance to at least ask their “best’ questions first and the others if time permits.

We don’t tell our interviewees that we have a “secret” agenda, that is, to try and get our guest to respond with “That’s a good question!” If they do respond in this way, we all cheer as a team, for I set this activity up as a team goal and achievement.

The kids love this as it spurs them on to write better and better questions each time we do an interview. It also encourages them to do excellent research on our guests beforehand. It also adds some suspense and excitement to the event and of course we learn so much from some of the world’s great experts.

Real, authentic “21st Century Learning” I believe.

• A few weeks ago, I upgraded the traditional KWL chart to the 21st Century to include “Q” (Questioning) to bring questioning to the forefront of the minds of teachers and students as they are planning, teaching and learning.

• During the Building Learning Communities Conference 2011 last month in Boston, questions in teaching and learning kept coming up in many of the sessions I attended:

Brad Ovenell-Carter  wanted to know:

What kind of questions do you want your students to ask? How can we connect these dots?… vs. Factual recall questions ?

Marco Torres stated that:

It’s not about the tool you select, it’s the questions you are trying to answer

Let’s not try to keep finding the solution…but let’s stay in the question longer. Staying in the question is essential.

Ewan McIntosh

We need epic questions for students to solve!

How have you/ are you / will you bring questions into your teaching and students’ learning?

A few months ago, I wrote a blog post titled: “Enhancement-Automating-Transforming-Informating“, where I fused two models, the SARM model by Ruben Puentedura and Alan November’s Automating vs Informating model.

It made sense to me that Puentedura’s Substitution and Augmentation stage was part of November’s Automating phase and that the Modification and Redefinition belonged to the Informating phase.

But, I feel that there is a third phase beyond the Transformative phase, that I am calling “Amplification”. Now, one can argue that the opportunity to “amplify is part of the “Redefinition” stage, since as it is defined by Puentedura (…to be able to create a task, that was not possible before, without technology), but I am arguing that goes further and deserves to be it’s own phase.

The Free Dictionary defines the verb “amplify” as:

1. To make larger or more powerful; increase.

2. To add to, as by illustrations; make complete.

3. To exaggerate.

4. To produce amplification of…

Let’s take the example of a book report, that students have been asked to produce around the world in most school systems, at many different grade levels.

The classical book report/review  (before technology) asked students to read the book and then write a review, a factual summary, interpretation or recommendation about that book. Traditionally, students used a pencil, pen or fountain pen (as I did growing up in Germany) and handed it in to the teacher, who would read it, mark mistakes (spelling/grammar), point out possible omissions, grade it and then hand it back.

Let’s enter the Substitution Stage (part of the Automating phase):

Instead of having to handwrite the report, teachers are “allowing” the report to be typed up and printed out before “handing” in the assignment. The teacher will then read it, mark mistakes (spelling/grammar), point out possible omissions, grade it and then hand it back to the students.

Using the computer to type substituted (automated) the task of writing the report by hand. There was no functional change (as Puentedura defines the stage).  Students went through the same cognitive process as they were producing the report.

Moving on to the Augmentation Stage (still part of the Automating phase), when technology substitutes a traditional task, but adds functional improvement.

The student types the assigned book report and instead of printing it out and handing it in to the teacher the following school day, the student uses Google Docs to “share” the file with her teacher. The teacher then makes suggestions via comments on the file. The student goes over teacher’s suggestions and edits the same document before a given deadline, when teacher looks at the final edit before grading the report.

In this scenario, the process of thinking as the student was producing the book report did not change. Technology allowed to share the assignment vs. handing it it, which added functionality to the process.

Now we are heading into the Informating phase by entering the Modification stage. During the Modification stage, the task itself gets redesigned. By “elevating” a task to the Informating phase, according to Alan November, we need to “think about information systems, whole systems of the flow of information and communication”.

The teacher modifies the original task of writing about a book to go beyond paraphrasing and expanding the summary of the book sleeve. She asks her students to include for example research about the author, historic events during the authors writing of the book, timelines, connections to other author’s of the same genre or same topic. The teacher encourages students to go beyond the traditional “research” sources, such as other books, newspaper articles or journals and venture into sources such as Twitter, YouTube, Delicious, blogs, Shelfari, etc. Students create a book report comparing and contrasting multiple points of view of the book.

This example shows how the task evolved from purely automating to informating. From using technology to purely doing the same thing that was previously done with a paper and a pen. The teacher is teaching her students to take advantage of the tools in the information age, helping and guiding them to develop skills and information literacy.

The next stage, Redefintion,  is also part of the Informating phase. During the Redefinition phase, technology allows for the creation of a new task, previously inconceivable.

The teacher decides that students should not be confined to produce a book report/review in one media (text) only. She chooses to give students the freedom to use different media to create a summary of their chosen book, express their own interpretation and possibly add a recommendation why or why not to read the book for a specific audience (ex. classmates).  Students could create PowerPoints, podcasts, video trailers, multimedia posters, etc. Students prepare their “report” by researching, storyboarding and searching for or producing their own media to create the final product.

In the above scenario, students are learning to express themselves and to communicate through different media. The task of thinking about a book and writing (in text) about the author, setting, characters, plot, etc., has been redesigned to include different media with its different forms of expressions and different audiences. Without the use of technology, this task wold not have been possible.

This brings us to the Amplification stage.

The book report has been created, it is in some shape or form in a digital format. So far the audience for the student’s work is an audience of one (the teacher), possibly the audience grows after the completion of the assignment to include the student’s parents or if the teacher chooses to have students present their report in front of the class.

What if the teacher specifically chooses to amplify her students work even further?  What are the implication of this choice? Last year, I wrote a post about  A Wordwide Audience for  Six Year Olds?, contemplating these questions. Does an audience for their work matter to students? How can a teacher deliberately integrate “amplification” into her teaching? Also, take a look at one of my previous posts “Framing a Skype Learning Experience“or “CSI-Twitter” where an amplification played a significant role in the learning outcome for students.

I believe that there are different degrees of amplification and that ALL teachers can amplify in some shape or form. It does not need to be on a massive scale, nor global scale… (yet…).  Teachers need to be aware that through technology it is possible though to amplify their students’ work and learning experience and create learning opportunities that without these amplifications would not have been possible before.

Amplification Degrees:

1. Share student work with the entire class
2. Connect and share your student work with other classes in your grade level/building/school
3. Place your student work on a classroom website (not password protected)
4. Tweet the link to your students’ work out to your PLN to increase traffic to thee site
5. Connect to peers, experts and eye witnesses from around the world
6. Become a curator by organizing, tagging, categorizing your students’ work to share online

As we are amplifying our students’ work, we are exposing to and modeling for our students new literacies, such as network and global literacy. They are learning and creating (highest level of Bloom’s Taxonomy’s Thinking) with an authentic, global audience in mind.

As you look at the various Amplification Degrees above, what could you add/insert/delete? Help me amplify my learning, by adding your thoughts, resources, and experiences to my own work.

As an extension to my first blog post “Add a Global Perspective to your Google Search“, I wanted to add a video that was inspired by last week’s keynote presentation by Alan November at CMI 2011.

If we want web literate students, we need to be web literate educators. Please share how you add global perspective to a Google Search? What are some tips and tricks of the trade to support your students in becoming web literate?

When you are multilingual, you are used to the fact that news is being reported differently (from another point of view/perspective) in different countries. Before the Internet, you only knew this, when you were traveling between countries, spoke to friends or relatives on the phone, or were able to get you hands on old media (newspapers or magazines). Since the advent of the Internet and World Wide Web, we are finally able to connect to information and web sites without having to cross any geographic borders or time zones.

When news happens or when I am researching a specific topic, I always like to get more than one perspective. I make sure that I search for the topic in Google, Google.de (Google Germany) and Google.com.ar (Google Argentina).

Even if you are not a speaker of German or Spanish, you could use Google Translate to translate your keywords, search  and then return to translate the search result links back into your language. If you are using Google Chrome, the translator can be directly activated within the browser.

Another way of finding sites about a topic, but filter out the results to come only from one specific country, is to search  within that country’s domain extension.

Every country has it’s own domain extension. For example, sites from Germany have the “.de” extension. Sites from Mexico use the “.mx” extension. (List of country domain extension)

If you would like to search for keywords and only receive results that originate from that specific country (in English), then go to Google Advanced Search.

Enter the keywords (Ex. “Christopher Columbus”) and then enter the domain name extension in the “Search within a site or domain”. (Ex. “.mx”). The search results will be in English, but will only come from domain names originating in Mexico. How is that for different points of view compared to sites that might originate from “.es” (Spain)?

Give it a try. Give your Google searches a global perspective. Teach your students how to search with a global mind.