Educational Technology Weblog

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

It’s pretty exciting when the world’s third largest software company decides to produce a video case study that shows how our District, teachers, and students are using their software products for career preparation, for classroom learning, and for professional development for our teachers. So when Adobe Systems (makers of Photoshop, Acrobat, Dreamweaver, Flash, Connect Professional, and a host of others) asked to film our students, teachers, and staff we jumped at the opportunity to show off the great things that our District is doing with technology. 

The end result is a terrific video that is featured on Adobe’s website and can be seen right here in the video below. Thanks to South Tech Academy, Dreyfoos School of the Arts, and Emerald Cove Middle School for participating!

Back in August, Kim posted here about word clouds, specifically using Wordle to build them. I found this extremely timely interactive website while reading Larry Ferlazzo’s blog. The New York Times has created an interactive look at the language of presidential inaugural addresses. The most-used words in each address appear in the interactive chart, sized by number of uses. Words highlighted in yellow were used significantly more in each inaugural address than average. Included is the full text of each address as well.

After listening to President Obama’s, can your students (or perhaps as a whole class) use Wordle to create their own?

It’s always awesome to see our students doing amazing work, and we’re happy to share the good news–especially when it’s in the creative field. In the video below, you’ll see Brittany Bennett, a student at Dreyfoos School of the Arts, describing the work she did for the City of West Palm Beach in designing the poster to be used in next week’s local inauguration activities.

You can view a short video on the Palm Beach Post website where Brittany describes the process she went through in designing the poster here.

More here in this article from the Palm Beach Post.

Finally, for a better look at Brittany’s poster, visit the City of West Palm Beach Inauguration Events page.

Way to go Brittany! (And your teachers too of course.)

As many of you may remember, Lee Kolbert wrote an entry on September 2nd about a very rousing and motivational speech given by Dalto Sheman, an amazing student in Texas.   At the time the post provided a link to the video that was not viewable within our district’s network.  Someone recently reminded me of this young man so I thought I would re-post with a version than can be viewed from school!  Well worth sharing with your students!

ENJOY