Educational Technology Weblog

Why would you want to reinvent the wheel when you can access resources already created by teachers like you? With Discovery MediaShare, you can find all types of resources (lesson plans, videos, spreadsheets, tutorials, podcasts, images, and more) by searching by keywords, file type, subject, grade level, even standards! Best of all you can share your resources too! Teachers in our district already have accounts. Watch this 10 minute segment to learn all you need to know about sharing resources on DE MediaShare.

3rd grader, Jordan D. attended work with her father on Take Your Child to Work Day. Since part of Dad’s job is blogging on behalf of our team, we asked Jordan and her sister to write their own blogposts. This is Jordan’s first blogpost ever. We hope to see many more from here on.

Today I went to work with my father. Today we fixed a computer. My sister came with us. We had so much fun. We went to lunch with my mother. We came back. My father had to help Mark and friends put boxes in a truck. Me and Kaleigh got stuck in an elevator. We came back up and we found our father looking for us. The End.

Today is take your kid work day and I am at work with my dad.  He works at the School District Office in the Educational Technology Department.

So while I am here I am going to blog about Brainpop. Brainpop is an informational website.

This website has two characters–one is a guy named Tim the other is a robot named Moby. They are the ones that teach you the information.

Brainpop can help you to study for a test.  Brainpop has all kinds of ways to study.  They have videos, games with information in them.  It has quizzes that help a lot too.

I think Tim and Moby make things easy to understand.  But some times Moby’s beeps are hard to make out.  You can learn about Science, Math, Art, Music, Social Studies, English, Health, and Technology.  You can basically type in anything you want to search for and it will give you a list of videos and resources about your topic.

Brainpop is good for grades 4th and up.  There is another website called Brainpop Jr.  That website is for grades 1st and up to 3rd grade.

I wish all my classes had me go on Brainpop all the time.  When a big test comes around now you know where to go.

I’m a serious softball player so I liked this picture of Moby talking about baseball. But they really should have a movie about girls playing softball, don’t you think? After all, girls rule!

This is one of those “two-fer” postings where you get two news items for the price of one. Cool huh?

First off, we’re compiling information right now about our own Palm Beach Technology Conference and we’d love to hear from you! In fact, we’re so anxious to get your feedback that we’re giving away an iPod Nano to an individual who completes our survey and provides us with their contact information. We’ll be using this information to plan next year’s conference and we can use all the feedback we can get. So, if you haven’t done so already, run, don’t walk, to the Particpant Survey for the 2009 Technology Conference and let us know what you loved, and maybe didn’t love so much, about this year’s show.

Next up is news from the Florida Educational Technology Conference, otherwise known as FETC.

FETC is launching its first-ever virtual technology conference to be held this Thursday, April 23rd with a keynote presentation kicking things off at 11:00 am, followed by some interesting presentations from a wide range of speakers. I’m curious about the panel discussion that will take place in the afternoon, titled “Impact of the Federal Stimulus Package on Districts and Schools”. Other topics may speak to you, so be sure to check it out and visit the schedule of events and list of speakers that you’ll find on their web site.

Registration is required, but the virtual conference is free, so head on over and sign up here!

As always, this year’s Educational Technology Conference was a blast and a lot of work for members of our team. When you’re buried in the details of the day it’s easy for us to get lost as the conference organizers, and not get the opportunity to be teachers. That’s why I always make it a point to give at least one presentation at the conference so I get the opportunity to engage with our teachers and talk about some of the big ideas that we see shaping the use of technology in the classroom.

This year the title of my talk was “Digital Literacy in the 21st Century”, but the more I prepared for my session the more drawn I was to having an interactive experience with my group. As a result, I decided to just open with some broad ideas, including the main idea that even in 2009 we still have trouble defining just what 21st century skills our kids really need. We talk about it a lot, but in the rapidly changing landscape of technology and education it’s mighty hard to pin down what the critical skills are. 

Still, we thought we had a pretty smart group of teachers in our session, so using a free application that allows you to create mind (concept) maps on the fly from Bubbl.us, we set about mapping what we thought were the critical skills our students need. You can view the online version of the concept map we created here at Bubbl.us, or check out the image below that is a screen capture of our ideas.

It was a great session with some awesome teachers. If you’d like to add to our ideas please submit your comments from the link just below the article title. We’d love to hear what you think are the required skills our students should have as we continue forward into the 21st Century.

There are 11 days left to our annual Technology Conference and things are really shaping up! We’ve had more folks pre-register than ever before and we’re expecting to have well over 2,000 teachers, media specialists, and school administrators in attendance. As always, it’s been an awful lot of work getting to this point but it will all be worth it come March 27th when people start to stream into the conference site. (Even though pre-registration is over you can still attend the conference. Just show up on the day of the show and look for the “On-Site Registration” signs.)

Now that the heavy lifting is over the conference web site has been updated with lots of information for those of you who plan to attend. Look for the Plan Your Day link on the right side of the page and you’ll find lots of files to download, including the Sessions at a Glance, conference map, and more.

And if you’ve never been to one of our conferences you can get some flavor of the show by watching the video slide show below. You’ll see lots of happy, engaged teachers in these photos. Just what we’re after every year and what we expect to see on March 27th of this year!

Be a part of something huge! Unite with students and schools from around the world to set a new world record! The challenge is to correctly answer more than 182,445,169 questions in 48 hours. Students play against each other in mental arithmetic games. Students are captivated by the fact that they are playing in real time. Each game lasts for 60 seconds, and students can play as many games as they wish. The questions are appropriately leveled for different ages and abilities.

Watch Jamie explain how it all works on this segment from PalmBreezeCAFE:

A cross-state collaborative event occurred between one of our teachers here at Waters Edge ES (Mr. Fisher) and a teacher in Chicago (Mrs. Broos) to celebrate Lincoln’s 200^th birthday.

5^th grade students completed a KWL on VoiceThread and were then grouped in 2’s from partnering classes to conduct research together. They collaborated by creating their own VoiceThreads, adding their documents and leaving each other comments. Classes communicated using Adobe Connect and the links were shared on Edline. In addition, this has all been uploaded to MediaShare (search “lincoln”) for the ultimate sharing experience for all teachers to be able to replicate. As if that isn’t enough, Mrs. Weinroth  and Emilie from WOWL and one of the anchors from PalmBreezeCAFE were on the scene to capture it all!

On this final day (shown in the video) the Mrs. Broos’ class in Chicago had an assembly and put on a show while the class here watched and participated.

I hope you will take just a few minutes to watch the video and check out their VoiceThread.

Skills:

American History

Government

Research Skills

Effective use of technology

A great way to help students understand character analysis is to have them create a family tree. This can be done with historical characters (King Henry VIII) or fictional characters (Harry Potter). Family-Mingle is an app for creating family trees. It’s a great (free, of course) app, and the educational value is when you bring it into the classroom and have students contribute and build the same tree. In this segment from PalmBreezeCAFE, I show you how I would use it to teach Romeo and Juliet where each student would contribute to the family tree as a different character.

What do you think?

Click here to subscribe to all the PalmBreezeCAFE segments in iTunes.

If you’re looking for some great ideas for celebrating Lincoln’s 200th, look no further! Check out the great ideas here:

To access Jennifer Wagner’s site (referred to in this video), go to www.lincoln200.notlong.com