Educational Technology Weblog

I had the chance to speak with Allisyn Levy who runs the BrainPOP Educators blog at a conference recently, and they’ve got some great things going on over there! We’ve always been impressed with the terrific content that we receive from BrainPOP and BrainPOP Junior here in our school district, and the company is now reaching out to educators through an online community.

If you don’t know about this community of BrainPOP-loving teachers then you’re missing out on some great ideas for integrating BrainPOP into your classroom. It’s definintely worth your time to sign up (free of course) and join in. Whether you’re using BrainPOP, BrainPOP Junior, or BrainPOP en Espanol–which we make available at school and at home in our school district–you’ll find that this is another example of how your personal learning community can be expanded by becoming involved in discussions with like-minded educators.

One of the added benefits of joining BrainPOP Educators is it gives you the ability to embed the featured movie of the month in your own web site. That’s right! All you need to do is copy and paste the code provided to you after you request the snippet from BrainPOP and away you go. Try it! It’s easy! Palm Beach County teachers can even do this in their Edline sites, providing their students and parents with a fun lesson from BrainPOP that changes frequently.

So, without further ado, here’s what you’ll see when you get your own BrainPOP code. I’m not even sure what movie will appear when you read this, but you can be certain that the content will be like the rest of the material we get from BrainPOP–fun, fast-paced, vocabulary-rich, and chock full of add-on activities that you can do with your students!

Here’s a great way for elementary teachers or parents to help your students practice for those weekly spelling tests that we all know and love!  Also, you can search for a huge number of provided lists that cover a large range of age appropriateness, and content specific subjects.

As a teacher or parent, you can very easily create a “weekly spelling list” that can be accessed at home with a username and password of your choice. You have the choice of making your list public and searchable, or keep it private so only your students will know how to find it.  No email or identification is required of the student, and when they log in, they will be presented with several very interactive ways to learn their words. They can hear their words, take practice tests or play one of several games.
Jump in and give it a try!  I am using it with my children and they really seem to enjoy it.  I am sure you’ll find the same results with your students.  Let us know how it goes, and if you’ve shared any great new lists!

The election season is in full swing and there’s little doubt that teachers all over the country are using the teachable moments that this year brings to add all sorts of engaging content into their lessons. After all, one of the primary tasks of public education is the preparation of good citizens, so we certainly can’t pass up an opportunity like this now can we?

There are all sorts of great lesson plans floating around on the Web, but I thought I’d highlight two of my favorite sources this time around.

First, the good folks at Education World have quite a few great offerings. For a complete listing of all their lesson plans visit The Election: Classroom Activities for lesson plans, webquests, and links to sites where students can find information about the election coming up in little over a month.

Also not to be missed are all the election and government resources compiled by PBS Teacher’s Source at their Access, Analyze, Act site where you’ll find even more lessons, activities, and links. Be sure to visit the Resources page where you’ll find links to great activities like:

National Mock Election

Get My Vote from NPR

American Experience: The Presidents

So let’s get out there, but be careful! There’s a lot at stake this time around and an educated electorate is one of the keys to our democracy. Are you doing your part to help your students understand what the issues are and which candidates really represent them?

I often come across a link that I will share with a particular department, or group of teachers. I think this would be an example of one that may be of interest to many elementary, and select secondary teachers.

 http://www.sheppardsoftware.com/ is a site that has many fun and free educational games that cover many different subjects. This site was highlighted by CNN as a “Fun Site of the Week”, and I can see why.

If you take a few minutes to explore this fabulous resource, you will find everything from Astronomy to Zoology, from basic math operations to pre-algebra, from history to health, and even SAT vocabulary builders.

Whether you’d like to use this during your scheduled lab or computer time (although there are a few blocked advertisement banners, yes this site is currently available inside our firewall!) or by providing links to specific games as supplemental resources on your Edline pages, I can’t think of anyone I know who would not see true value in providing these fun and effective options for their students!

bubbl.us is a free online brainstorming and mind mapping tool that lets you easily create a graphic organizer, concept map, mind map or organizational chart and then share your ideas with colleagues or classmates. The Flash & AJAX based interface make it really simple to use with only a browser - no downloads and all you need to create an account is an email address! You can save your sheets, print them as images or save them to your computer.

The Web 2.0 features provide you with either a link or the html embed code so you can post your work on a web page (Edline) or email a link. In the embedded example shown here, you can pan and zoom using the controls or the scroll wheel on your mouse.

There are many obvious uses in the classroom:

• Identify existing knowledge
• Identify relationships between concepts
• Record facts & details as a pre-writing strategy
• Brainstorming - collecting and connecting ideas
• Timelines
• Student collaboration
• Sharing ideas with communities of users

Check it out and look for me on bubbl.us

In this time of elections and monumental decisions you might find yourself evaluating your stances on any number of topics. If you would like to revisit some of the things that may have crossed your mind in the past, you might want to check out the poll archive at www.teachermagazine.org. This archive encompasses many subjects of interest to teachers and dates back to June 2006. Please comment on any of the results that you find intersting, or suggest other topics that we might want to explore ourselves!

As you strive to educate today’s students in a way that will prepare them for an unknown future, it might be clear to you that the responsible and effective use of technology should be of utmost importance. Nearly every facet of our student’s lives has been affected by technology. I hope in mostly positive ways. So it should follow that their educations should also be positively impacted.

To those of us active in understanding the trends of education in the 21^st century, the use of new tools and media afforded by new technology is a forgone conclusion. Also, it seems very clear to me that we want our teachers and students to become familiar with the technologies faced and embraced in today’s society. But how do we stress the importance, and model these behaviors so that others might share in this vision.

I recently sent an open ended email to some of my colleagues with a question about a recurring theme I keep running into.  I often see it stated that: “Technology is most effective when it is transparent”.  To me this is both obvious and perplexing at the same time.  As we look to engage our students and bring the content they need in the formats they desire, how do we make the need for new skill sets and tools obvious if they are “supposed” to be unseen?

Many of the responses I received recommended video or other similar examples of “best practice” and peer or community development. I quickly realized we wouldn’t have to look very far to find these things. Luckily, we have many dedicated and forward thinking educators right here that have been doing just this for a long time, and getting results that validate their efforts. Many teachers have been leading the way for years by exploring new delivery methods and developing strategies that encourage collaboration and produce amazing results.

I invite your comments to discuss some of our successes and the challenges that have been laid out in front of us as we move further into this unknown future.

At the close of the last school year we conducted a poll of our teachers asking them about their general attitude about the use of technology in their classroom, as well as the impact that certain specific programs and services have on instruction and learning. Nearly 1,000 teachers responded to our survey and the feedback was terrific!

Personally, the chart below is my favorite of all of them as it demonstrates just how critical our teachers find technology to be.

 We asked other questions too of course, including this one that asked teachers how technology impacts student interest and attention.

You can see the full results of the survey at the two links below. While these results are specific to Palm Beach County Schools they are well inline with the results that other surveys produce.

The Impact of Technology in the Classroom

The Impact of Specific Programs and Services in the Classroom

Have a comment about these results? We’d love to hear from you!

Scholarly Research on Student Blogging

We have our share of skeptics around here when it comes to Web 2.0 tools and their value in the classroom. Believe if or not, I’m one of them! There has been an ongoing conversation for a few years now about how these simple publishing and collaboration tools might be used to impact instruction. From the “This is amazing!” to the “This is bunk!”, there has been a healthy mix of agreements and disagreements about how a teacher might use Web 2.0 tools in their classrooms.

Now comes a new study from Jeff Felix, Superintendent of Bonsall Union School District in Bonsall, CA. Mr. Felix’s scholarly, peer-reviewed article can be found here as a direct download of a PDF file, or you can visit Classroom 2.0 where he discusses his findings a bit.

Some of the conclusions from the article are interesting on their face and worth a little more study and reflection. In no order of importance here are a few statements that jumped out at me:

• There were four communication patterns teachers perceived as a result of blogging: (a) increased peer interaction among students, (b) increased teacher interaction with the students, (c) students exhibiting more positive emotions about learning, and (d) an increased sharing of ideas among students and with the teacher.
• The data from responding edubloggers describe student learners who have been a part of a blogging classroom as engaged in four types of learning: (a) students increasing their understanding of topics, making sense of what they learn, and developing their own understanding of the subject matter, (b) students cultivating deeper thought processes; creating meaning and new ideas from the subject, (c) students exploring the subject beyond the immediate requirements, and (d) students connecting with previous experiences learned in or out of the classroom.
• Blogging by its very nature gives students a vehicle for sharing their ideas with one another, a contemporary way to gain additional knowledge or understanding that resonates with students being raised in the digital age.

In the immortal(?) words of wikipedia:

“Educational technology is most simply and comfortably defined as an array of tools that might prove helpful in advancing student learning.”

Thankfully, students have been “learning” for far longer than we have even recorded history. SO…. some things have been working, and undoubtedtly there have been tools employed to aid in the process! So in some sense, working in Educational Technology may well be as longstanding a tradition as some other “oldest professions”. As educators it is imperative that we understand, appreciate, and build on the ideas and strategies that have come before. I think that any discussion of the status of Educational Technology in the classrooms of today and tomorrow must reflect on the successes and failures of the past. To illustrate, I will use examples of much more recent happenings. I ask the following:

Aside from computers and the Internet in general, of the following: what has been the most important technological classroom advance in the past 20 years?

Please select 1 answer:

Document Cameras/Projectors

Blogs/Wiki’s

Cellular Phones

School computer networks

Interactive Clicker Systems/interactive whiteboards

Regardless of what you might choose, I would say that each of these tools is ultimately just an extension of the succeessful practices that have been going on in effective classrooms for years. The recent (past hundred years or so) acceleration of technological tools and the ability to collect, store and distribute information have only made the need for efficiency and technology literacy all that more crucial. I look forward to building on the experiences of the past and collaborating with the great minds of today to provide a wider base of knowledge for those yet to come.