Educational Technology Weblog

5th grader, Dalton Sherman, was the keynote speaker for the Dallas Independent School District Convocation for the school year 2008-2009. His motivational speech is incredible.

Do you believe in your students? If you can spare 8 minutes and 55 seconds, I urge you to watch this and show your students that you believe in them.

If you are watching this from school, the video below will not play because YouTube is blocked. Instead, please click here. The full text of his speech is available here.

[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/HAMLOnSNwzA" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]

(crossposted from here)

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!

One of the most thought-provoking resources that educators can visit online is the terrific web site from the George Lucas Foundation–Edutopia.

Currently Edutopia is running a special edition called: What’s Next 2008: Ten Predictions for the Future of Public Education.

You’ll find lots of articles about this topic and some information from the country’s leading experts, including a provocative video from a professor at Arizona State University who discusses the need for collaborative problem solving curriculum, and how it might be solved using an unexpected tool–video games!

Definitely worth your time!

The photo is a screenshot of the Adobe Connect session we used to bring in a team member for the meeting. Steve and Ben, from VoiceThread, are the two men in the top-left corner. I don’t know why I didn’t think to take a picture with a real camera or even my cellphone, but anyway, this is the best I could do. (Sorry, Ben and Steve… you deserve a better picture for sure!)

This week our department had the pleasure of meeting with the gentlemen who developed EdVoiceThread. They are geniuses (and extremely personable – go figure) and have absolutely thought of everything when it comes to developing a product for K-12 and higher education, that is safe, secure, reasonably priced and has the potential for huge impact on learning and global collaboration. How nice it would be to bring something so powerful and easy to our school district!

If YOU haven’t heard of Ed VoiceThread, you are missing one of the most remarkable FREE 21st Century online learning applications that you can be using today! You must check out these examples !

Anyone can create a VoiceThread by adding a piece of media ( JPEG, GIF, BMP, PNG, PPT, PPS, PDF, DOC, XLS and a variety of video types) and then allow others to make comments in any of 5 different ways – using voice (with a microphone or telephone), text, audio file, or video (with a webcam) – and share them with anyone they wish. Allowing group conversations to be collected and shared in one place, from anywhere in the world.

The beauty of VoiceThread is that it’s simple and safe! Here is one I created that I use as a demo. You’ll see a DE Streaming video segment and some video, audio and text comments. You can let it play or click on the avatars to activate the demo student comments. There are also some other comments that have been added by real teachers as I’ve used this to demonstrate this in workshops.

I’ve since learned however, that the way I’ve been recommending that teachers use it is not a best practice at all. In the recording below, you’ll hear me tell you that I set up one account and let my students create their own profiles under my account. Then they sit at a computer in my classroom and contribute to the VoiceThread. Although this would certainly work, especially in a K or 1st grade classroom with supervision, the problem would be that in an instant a student could accidentally delete the entire VoiceThread.

and……….that……….can’t………..be…………undone!

They also mentioned a feature that is coming soon is the ability to CLONE a VoiceThread. Once you’ve spent time creating a VoiceThread that might be complex, it would be pretty nice to be able to clone it to customize it for another use later on.

Please leave a comment about how you might use VoiceThread in your classroom or any barriers you foresee to a successful implementation. I hope you’ll also leave a voice comment on the VoiceThread here.

Thanks for your comments!

 Our team just saw a preview of a new technology tool that is hosted online and has saw awesome capabilities that could easily be used in a classroom environment. (More on this later.)

During these discussions we always bump up against practical concerns that our district has to face. But as we discussed these today some questions arose that seem appropriate for us to ask to a larger audience. (That would be you. See that comment link?)

Here’s the big question though: Is there a fundamental difference between a technology-based tool, particularly those that we label as “Web 2.0″, and more traditional instructional resources like those you’d find in one like the book pictured here? And a few more questions

1. If a teacher or a school wants to spend money on an online service is that different than buying a resource or activity books?
2. Do light-weight technology tools serve the same function as reproducibles and other traditional activities a teacher might want to use?
3. Beyond the barrier of access to a computer are there other questions that arise in the classroom when teachers are thinking about using technology tools to enrich their curriculum?

Those are just a few thoughts that came up in our team discussion. Do you have more of your own? We’d love to hear from you!

(The pictured activity book is from Teacher Created Materials. A great web site for finding these kinds of traditional activities and much more.)

The International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) has released the first of their policy briefings on the role that technology plays in student achievement. This is another peer-reviewed longitudinal study based on the results achieved in state-wide programs in Michigan, Texas, and Iowa. You can download the PDF file of their article–Technology and Student Achievement— The Indelible Link–directly from this link, or visit ISTE’s Support EdTech site.

There’s a lot of interesting conclusions in this article, including ones that track closely the results we received in our own internal survey of teacher attitudes towards technology. You can see the results of that survey at this spiffy little page with pie charts and all, but the real keys to both the ISTE study and our own results can be seen in the statistics. In Palm Beach County schools our teachers have this to say about the use of technology in their classroom.

• An astounding 97% of teachers agree or strontly agree with this statement: My students show increased interest and attention in class when I incorporate technology into my lessons.
• Nearly the same number of teachers agreed with this statement: The use of technology in my lessons allows my students to see real world connections to the subject they are learning.
• 84% of our teachers agreed with that The use of technology in my classroom has a profound impact on student motivation and classroom behavior.

Does this provide definitive proof that technololgy has a major impact on learning? Between the ISTE study of the work done in other states and the same results from our own teachers it certainly appears evident that the debate about the efficacy of educatational technology has been settled in many ways. Is there “bad” uses of instructional technology out there?

Do we need to do a better job of training our teachers and choosing the best technologies for use in our classrooms? You betcha. But the question on whether there is value in educational technology is continuing to be settled in study after study.