Why We Love Apps
I found an app the other day that does one thing and it does it well. I like to listen to a particular podcast but the process to subscribe and then move it to my phone was very tedious. The app has a single purpose and it delivers my favorite podcast, no other, to my phone. Fabulous.
Yes I'm an AppAholic. (here's the link to a UK blog) It is important to me to understand my addiction and determine what caused this craving for specialty programming. I am of a generation that has lived through all of the transformations. The operating systems with the green text where we as consumers had to learn long strings of commands to create a process that only did a portion of what we really wanted. I've also been privileged to teach the Microsoft Office Suite - going on 8 years now. If anyone has ever opened MS Office with a group of 1st graders you will immediately have that recognition reflex. It is like sticking a 1 pound steak in front of a kitten. They poke at it but don't have any idea how to attack it. MS Office is a behemoth. It does far more than any of us will ever need to do. In fact, most of the software of today is the same way. All of the big companies want to be everything to everyone and we are overwhelmed.
Let's talk about education as well. I am heading to a curriculum development meeting to develop lessons that go with the new online textbook. Another behemoth is the textbook. Every teacher knows they rarely use a tenth of what is available to them as resources and finding what they really want to use takes years. At that point a new text is out and the process starts over. This online text is the same way. Luckily, I've taught with it and can bring some insight. So I am the guide through the forest. Just as I was when teaching MS Office.
Back to our apps now. As educators, we are desperate for lessons that are on target for what we need to teach. We love the online flashcards that we can easily program for chapter 10's list. That is why iPad/Android apps are so appealing. Do one thing and do it well. Don't give us a timeline maker. Give us a timeline maker for the Depression that only leads students to age appropriate materials with a simple interface. Web 2.0 has been a great start, but we want these activities to be student driven. Hence the apps rule.  

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I am an avid Voicethread fan. Even though I only used it for one year in my history class, I found it engaging to students and really made me think where my lessons were going. So I'll outline below how I used it and how I should have used Voicethread which I just found out at ISTE yesterday.

My students were taught to work in 3's. Not just in groups, but in Voicethread, they were asked to comment 3 times, on 3 slides, and to collaborate by combining three separate concepts into 1. I'll elaborate. I created something called a PSI or Primary Source Investigation. The students were asked to figure out how the three primary sources related to each other. The whole concept was to take them to a higher level of thinking. So we did several things like the American Indians, Wild Bill Hickock and the Carlyle Scholl in Pennsylvania to help them figure out how assimilation worked or didn't. We tried the 3 dictators from WWII in order to find similarities and differences. I monitored the comments and had just one rule: every comment needed to add something new to the discussion. If it did not, it would not be accepted. Moderation helped with that rule.

Now with the new iPad app and the html management available to teachers, I can image a teacher visiting a museum and creating the tour in Voicethread. Using just an iPhone, a teacher could walk around the museum and comment on how what he/she was seeing relates to the curriculum. Once at school, students can experience the field trip through the teacher's eyes, answer probing questions and interact with the teachers footsteps through the museum rather than a canned virtual tour.

Today I learned how one school district is using Voicethread as a student portfolio system. If you have never worked with Voicethread before, it is a beautiful archival option as well because it accepts MS Word Documents as well as Excel Spreadsheets and of course PowerPoint. You can also upload movies. Any photo, including screen shots works too. The ability of the teacher to leave Voicecomments is tremendous. And now when uploading student accounts, a Graduation Date option is available for easy tracking of school year and their progress. Each year, students can upload their best work with included teacher comments

If you teach foreign language you've already heard of the magic of Rosetta Stone. I've envisioned Voicethread as a custom Rosetta Stone - like environment for students if a teacher is willing to put in the time to create the exercises. Rosetta Stone harnesses it's power through visuals and voice, I think Voicethread has that down pat.

If you have any interesting uses for Voicethread in the classroom, leave me a comment.

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We have the capability to instantaneously acquire a student's understanding of nearly anything taught. Here at ISTE 2011, vendors abound with clickers, forms, surveys, exit tickets, computer graded writing, peer assessment, class exchanges and so many other options to grade on the spot. I was particularly fascinated by the Virginia SOL tests this year. Being computerized, these high stakes tests are administered en masse and results delivered within days. The flurry of teachers who flocked to get their results surprised me. I always understood assessment to be what the student had achieved. But teachers see these tests as a measure of what they achieved. The results are not provided to the individual students until much later and have very little meaning to them except a pass/no pass message.

Ok, I may have my formative and summative assessments confused you say? I'm not the only one. Teachers are frequently calling their end of the week quizzes as formative and the on-going project as summative. And they love the instantaneous gradebook fillers that come from the computerized world. Spreadsheets are easy to import. In our district we use these online tests as formative sometimes and summative other times. Not only are students confused as to why they are assessed every step of the way, but there is no rhyme or reason for the assessment in their eyes. Based on observations, students see these online tests as a collaborative game to beat a score. Teachers do use them occasionally to pad the gradebook too. Either way, I think as adults we would resent our employers evaluating us on 5 or more skill areas every 15 minutes, especially on a Monday. There are a lot of student response systems here at ISTE. I personally think they are wonderful uses of technology. I see them as a method to deliver and focus instruction, not really an assessment device. So with that perspective, they are excellent advances in the classroom. But technology doesn't always have to be instantaneous to be an advancement. We should look at the other alternatives available to us in a digital world. I like to think of it in medieval terms as the "masterpiece." Remember that in order to learn a trade in the middle ages there were steps along the way such as apprentice, journeyman and then master. In order to obtain master status, a final culminating project defined their very best efforts. How does technology aid in this type of assessment. Students can produce many masterpieces over the period of their school career. These are collected digitally and represent the student's attained level of mastery. I'm advocating cloud based digital portfolios but with more student control. It is only fair to notify students when they will be assessed and to give them the best optimum chance to succeed in that assessment. Students should be the owners of their portfolio, given lessons on good portfolio presentations and rubrics for what to include. As they progress and move from school to school, the portfolio should follow and evolve as technology changes. Let them put their best foot forward and take the time to show us something outstanding.

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Everyone of my generation (and that means old), in the techy world (and that means geeks) is on Twitter. I've tried to feel apart of the community but I'm still an outsider. So today I took the leap and joined Twitter Feed to move this blog onto the yuppie social network. Yes, you folks on Twitter are suppose to be the more elite class, educated and thoughtful bunch. However, what I can't understand is why everyone simply copies other people's ideas. The retweet is more popular than the original. And most of what is tweeted is a link to someone else's web content. That is great if you want some person to aggregate content for you. However, Google feeds, customize searches and Google Alerts will do nicely without judgement or political agendas.

Therefore, I feel this will be a refreshing take on that copy other people's ideas theme. I will tweet what is written on my own blog. Of course, what is written on my blog is usually a collection of other people's ideas and content. So much for the intellectual side at 10 o'clock on a Sunday. 

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Trying to bundle these ideas is a bit of a challenge for me. Yes, I like to read a bit about upcoming theories of education. Yet, how can we discuss good ole fashioned research at the same time. They do go hand in hand, just infuse a bit a technology and it all flows smoothly.

Social Studies: SweetSearch has been around awhile and a student search engine and I may have even mentioned it here, but sometimes if another person pulls together the topic, it is a bit easier for students (and teachers) to get started. So pull together a directory of class resources, a bunch of how to articles for lessons and tons of fun tidbits and that is what you'll find at the SweetSearch Social Studies site. I loved the article called, "10 Reasons Students Shouldn't Cite Wikipedia." The left is a column of more list type sites and the right is the Today in History items so the page itself is dynamic. You could spend most of the summer getting great anecdotal material here.

Science, Civics, Math, and Economics: Any time you have data you have a graph. That is the way of the internet but I'll bet you never saw such a collection of different types of graphs as at Many Eyes. This visualization website hosts over 188,000 data sets on all topics from sports, energy, government, internet, and so much more. Graphs include basic bar, pie, and line and also histograms, treemaps, tag clouds, matrix charts and others.

Searching for Students: In general, most students pull up Google and away they go. That is fine for a savvy searcher, yet Google is overwhelming and only good if you want "popular" information. It also won't tell you what answer the teacher is looking for. SchoolWax is a homework help site that pulls in all the searches most students will need: Dictionary.com, Answer.com, Google Translate, Quizlet, Essay Topics, Citation Builder... However, if the student gets bored during their homework, there is SchoolWaxTV with loads of videos on academic topics. Educators can find videos on their curriculum topics too.

Videos: I'm lost when it comes to YouTube because there are too many videos when I search. Today I stumbled across Classroom Clips and low and behold they are categorized by SOL standard. That is time saving!

Teaching: The Marzano Research Labs are always working on collecting data on the latest trends in education. They study the effectiveness of everything from interactive white boards to providing feedback to students. The latest study at their site shows the gain achieved by using a variety of teaching strategies. Ever wonder if incorporating more cooperative learning techniques is worthwhile? Or what would happen if you focused more on vocabulary? The stats are revealing and worth a look.

Tools to Whittle Away: Richard Byrne is one of the best bloggers for educators because all his ideas are FREE. No one can surf the web anymore, it's just too big. The best way is to learn more about online Social Bookmarking and RSS. This blog entry titled, "Keeping Track of the Good Stuff" explains, using video, the two concepts and why they make learning more a bit easier to manage. And how to avoid waisting time watching those cat videos too.

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What Did a Hard Drive Look Like in 1956?

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They are great tools and obviously, I'm an advocate, but what in the world would you do with one or many in the classroom? This list will grow with time and I would love to hear more ideas through the comment section.

1. Book Blogs – students give synopsis, comment and rate their favorite books and/or characters.
2. “Who am I?” or “Where am I?” or “What am I?”Activity – teacher provides clues and students can guess or students can group and provide clues to the class.
3. Multiple Answers – teacher asks open-ended questions that have multiple answers, and students provide their answers on the blog.
4. Cartoon Critique – political cartoons are analyzed.
5. Add an Idea – begin with a big picture concept, such as “Capitalism,” and require each student blog something new about the concept.
6. Peer Assessment – provide a rubric for comments and use groups or partnered students to assess each others’ work
7. Sequence – any process or list where the student must blog “what comes next.”
8. Mind mapping - students add drawings, PowerPoint Smartart, Webspiration, Bubbl.us, or any online mind map and then explain the flow.
9. SMART Notebook- teacher posts a notebook for student use and questions to view (students will need SMART Express to do this). Students can ask questions through the comment option.
10. Homework Help - open the blog as a homework help forum where students and teachers help each other.
11. Create an Ending - teacher provides writing prompt and assigns students to create their own ending.
12. Graph and Explain - using Excel or Create-a-Graph or any online graphing tool; students create a graph based on figures, an experiment, or survey and post it with an explanation.
13.  Survey - teacher or student led. The topic can be an interest inventory, can examine learning styles, or gather information about a topic for which you need data or a decision.
14. Current Events – students blog about a current event topic or choose their own.
15. Podcasting – students create an audio (with Audacity) or video podcast program and deliver/publicize by uploading/embedding it to the blog.
16. Categorize – using the table feature and ask students to categorize words or pictures.
17. Digital Dropbox – use blogs as a method to turn in homework.
18. Delivering a Presentation – rather than using class time to present, students post/embed their PowerPoints in the blog so peers can view and assess the project.
19. Collaboration – create groups for a project so they can post group planning, design, and share files. (better suited to a wiki but this works too!)
20. Exit Ticket – students must write a personal reflection on the lesson before or after leaving class.  This activity can be provided as an open topic or can be used with a more focused approach
21. Embed Anything – teacher or student can embed code for interactive website, links, YouTube video, flash files, photos, etc.  This allows for the user to easily share resources with the class.

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