The Creative Classroom

We’re very excited that one of our own, Mrs. Lee Kolbert of Water’s Edge Elementary has been nominated for, not one, not two, but THREE awards for the annual Edublogs Award.

The Edublog Awards is a community based incentive started in 2005 in response to community concerns relating to how schools, districts and educational institutions were blocking access of learner and teacher blog sites for educational purposes.

The purpose of the Edublog awards is to promote and demonstrate the educational values of these social media. The best aspects include that it creates a fabulous resource for educators to use for ideas on how social media is used in different contexts, with a range of different learners. It introduces us all to new sites that we might not have found if not for the awards process.

Lee has been incredibly influential, not only here in Palm Beach County where we point to her blog as an exemplary model for our teachers to follow, but also internationally, as she has gained a world-wide audience through her excellent writing and willingness to try new things with her students.

Please take a minute or two and vote for one of our own in one (or all!) of the three categories in which she is nominated:

• Best Class Blog:
  http://edublogawards.com/2010awards/best-class-edublog-2010/
• Best Teacher Blog:
  http://edublogawards.com/2010awards/best-teacher-edublog-2010/
• Most Influential Blog Post for this post,
  “I’m Not Who You Think I Am:”
  http://edublogawards.com/2010awards/most-influential-blog-post-2010/

The selection of the Dimensional Harmony choral group from Boynton Beach High School is a terrific accomplishment for the teacher in the program and all the dedicated students who practice, practice, and practice some more to get their performance just right.

If you weren’t able to catch them on the Today Show a week or so ago here’s a video clip of the kids in action! Click on the video for a larger version and enjoy some great singing!

Don’t you just love those “ah-hah!” moments, when you stumble across something you didn’t know while learning a new computer program? It might just be the geek in me, but I know I really love coming across new stuff that makes things more interesting and engaging, especially when it’s easy to do and easily translated into the classroom.

Such was the case recently where I was teaching a class on Photoshop Elements to teachers from around our district and we took a harder look at how albums can be used in Photoshop Elements to create coolio little Flash-based animations for uploading to the web or just watching in class. In this short episode from Palm Breeze Cafe I get to show the technique we used and walk through the process of making an interactive album. It’s great fun and an easy win for both teacher and student as it doesn’t require a great deal of technical skill to get awesome results.

One of my favorite education thinkers, speakers, and experts on the development of human capacity is Sir Ken Robinson. If you haven’t caught his presentations on TED or other locations you’re missing out on hearing some things that all professional educators ought to consider.

Recently I also came across the very cool RSS Animate series where popular speeches are illustrated with hand-drawn graphics. In the embedded video below you’ll hear another one of Sir Ken’s talks and see it come to life as the artists at RS Animate make his talk come alive. Worth every second of the 11 minutes it takes to view the entire presentation.

Thanks for the link goes to Karen Seldon. If you don’t subscribe to her weekly newsletter on educational technology–Tuesdays with Karen– you really ought to sign up!

One of my favorite web sites for finding out more information about the craft of teaching in a creative classroom is the site that the George Lucas Foundation has supported for many years–Edutopia.

Whether your are doing Project Based Learning, Science Inquiry, digital design, or video editing there are always great resources available for teachers at the site.

Now comes another great resource from Edutopia. A PDF guide called Top Ten Tips for Teaching With New Media. This is a free download and doesn’t even require the submission of an e-mail. Just click the link and go!

And what are those tips? Glad you asked. In a nutshell here are the things that readers of Edutopia recommend.

1. Break the Digital Ice: Get your students started with fun, engaging, and relatively easy-to-use tools such as VoiceThread.

2. FInd Your Classroom Experts: Don’t forget to enlist the help of your students!

3. Get Off to a Good Start: Be sure your students know where to find information for your class and how to access it. Edline is a big help for this in Palm Beach County Schools as you can create folders for assignments and much more. But start early and get your students used to visit for the best chance of succes.

4. Think Globally: Online lessons and resources make it easier than ever to get information about other places and makes it possible to collaborate with classrooms around the world.

5. Find What You Need: Need materials or other items for your classroom? Websites like DonorsChoose.org can be a powerful tool for getting micro-grants.

6. Make Meaning from Word (Clouds): World clouds like those you can make at Wordle.net are a great way to see the connections between ideas and much more.

7. Work Better, Together: Collaborative projects can be more work to manage for the teacher, but they provide tremendous opportunities to reach those students who don’t always contribute to your classroom the way you would like.

8. Open a Back Channel: Twitter and Facebook allow you to build your own Personal Learning Network, but don’t forget other groups like Discovery Education Network and the Adobe Education Exchange. You can customize your classroom needs and stand on the shoulders of giants by learning from those how have blazed trails ahead of you.

9. Make It Visual: It’s easier than ever to use images and video to inspire your student’s curiosity, generate brainstorming, and engage diverse learners.

10. Use the Buddy System: Students aren’t the only ones who benefit from collaboration and shared problem solving. Teachers can take advantage of a variety of communication tools to share ideas and strategies with colleagues.

This is a great resource with some tremendous tips and valuable lessons learned. Don’t miss Top Ten Tips for Teaching With New Media from Edutopia!

I’ve been privileged to participate in the Adobe Education Leaders for a number of years, and through that group have met some great teachers from around the world. One of my good long distance friends is Colin Maxwell, who teaches interactive game design, animation, and photography at Carnegie College in Scotland.

So when one of our teachers and I recently discussed his struggles in getting his students started on doing game design and programming using Adobe Flash I tucked away the need, waiting for the opportunity to provide more help than I was during our conversation. Enter Colin and his site where I stumbled across a bunch of resources he uses in his classes. It’s been a long while since I actively taught Flash gaming, so I was happy to come across these up-to-date materials. Keeping up with the ever-changing world of Flash programming can be a real challenge, but there are far more places to find good material than when I was teaching 8th-graders to make side-scrolling games in Flash way back in 2005. Here are some of the best of the bunch with a tip of the hat to Colin for his assistance.

Colin Maxwell’s Games Development Blog: A treasure-trove of links to lessons, ideas, libraries, and more

Colin’s Flash Basics Tutorials: Animation and programming fundamentals

Flash Platform Gaming Center: Adobe’s own tutorials, resources, and more for those getting into Flash gaming

Flash Game U: Lots of free video tutorials here, especially of you are working in Actionscript 3.0

There are far more resources available, but those should get you off to a good start if you’re considering teaching gaming principles using Adobe Flash. Thanks again to Colin!

(The image above comes from Pogo.com, a great choice for seeing the kinds of games that can be made in Flash, particularly board games.)

Palm Beach County Schools will be switching to a new e-mail system in the near future, moving away from Outlook and into a new web-based service powered by Google.  In this episode from Palm Breeze Cafe, Lee Keller and I take an informal look at what Gmail looks like, how you’ll do likely do some things differently with your e-mail, and some of the nice new features that Gmail brings.

In this episode from Palm Breeze Cafe I get the chance to show Lee Keller and Lee Kolbert methods for creating those quick projects that can be done even in a one computer classroom. Using Photoshop Elements and the Elements Organizer students can take that fourth or fifth step in the project process, combing their writing and research to demonstrate their understanding of an assigned topic by creating digital slideshow.

Projects like this can be done across the curriculum with careful foresight and planning and an eye on the learning objectives you’ve established for your students. Of course those components are required in any project-based learning experiences, but the value here is that the finished product provides that extra dose of motivation for your students as they create miniature videos that can be shared in multiple locations.

I’ve been reflecting on how to help guide our teachers in developing creative classroom projects with digital tools–regardless of what subject they teach–and how to tell the message of how to connect deeper, more profound learning through the use of these kinds of experiences. And let’s be honest, it’s not a simple undertaking, particularly when you have to consider standardized curriculums and testing schedules that drive much of what happens in our classrooms today.

But hey, those are just excuses. If you’re really dedicated to reaching students on multiple levels with varied learning modalities and provide them with the kind of creative learning experiences that are proven to motivate and engage students, then you have to start the process by asking yourself some solid questions about what you want to achieve.

That’s why I found this presentation from Adobe Education Leader Dena Moss Wilson so fascinating. Dena is a graphics arts teacher and has a tremendous eye for style, but as you can tell from her presentation she’s also a caring and crafty teacher with high standards.

Have a look, particularly at the beginning of this video for some ideas on how to plan for a creative project, then stay for examples of how Dena works with her students.

This video comes by way of the Adobe Education Leaders channel on Adobe TV, where you can find some great tips and tutorials for using all sorts of different software from Adobe. Here’s the recap of the session from their site and the video follows:

Learn how Dena Moss Wilson uses creative ideas for projects that help the student build character by exploring their core beliefs, getting a deeper sense of self, and promoting insightfulness. All are done in a safe and encouraging environment which brings out true reflections of the students’ self esteem or lack thereof.

How Do I Get a Classroom Blog?

If you’re reading this you already know about the classroom blogs that we offer to Palm Beach County teachers. This blog itself is published on our own WordPress MultiUser system, entirely hosted within the safe confines of our District web server system. Maybe you saw the postings from your fellow teachers in Learning Tools (this link is the feed for all of the blogs published through our system), or maybe you’ve heard about some of the great classroom blogs already underway in Palm Beach County Schools. (See the links below). Or maybe you’ve read some of the articles and research done on blogging with students and were curious about what our District offers. Articles like this one, Blogging with Middle Schoolers: Frontloading and First Steps and wanted to know how you could work these kinds of interactive digital systems into reading and writing activities. (Thanks to Roy for the link!)

No matter how you got interested in blogging, we’re ready for you to get started! In order to get your own classroom blog you’ll need to head over to the Palm Beach County Schools online training system and sign up for the course on blogging that we provide: Introduction to Classroom Blogging with Weblogs.PBSpaces. (Login with the same username and password you use to logon to your computer.)

This is a self-directed online course that has video presentations on the policies for using the District WordPress blogging system, as well as how to write your postings, insert links and images,manage comments, and how to customize your blog. If you complete the two quizzes and begin using your blog you can earn up to 30 in-service points!

This is a great opportunity to try out blogging with your students and see if it’s a good fit for your classroom. Lots of your fellow teachers have already been blogging with their students including:

Lee Kolbert

Michael Woods

Andy Goldstein

Roosevelt Middle School Student Newspaper: The New Devil Press

And lots more!