Have You Explored Voicethread.com??

This looks like a very interesting tool for all disciplines. Have any of you had direct experience/success with it? :

http://voicethread.com/#home.b409.i848804

Being a neophyte with so many new tools at my disposal, I am trying to focus on those that best can serve my foreign language teaching purpose .

On-Line School Advantageous for Girls? One School Thinks So…

I just came across the following post on isenet.ning.com, posted by collaborator, Paul Miller:

From the Tennessean 6/29

Harpeth Hall staffers design Online School for Girls

Girls learn differently.

At least that’s the philosophy behind the new Online School for Girls, a virtual school developed by employees of Nashville’s Harpeth Hall.

The Green Hills private school has been educating girls in a traditional setting for nearly 60 years, but next year will expand course offerings into cyberspace. To pull it off, staff members connected with three other girls schools in Ohio and Connecticut to build a program that will eventually be open to girls across the world.

But is there really a benefit to offering same-sex classes online?

The folks at Harpeth Hall think so.

Girls like to collaborate and connect with each other, said Molly Rumsey, who sits on the online school’s board and is a member of the technology department at Harpeth Hall. That’s why the online courses will use a social media model that allows students to post questions and have a digital dialogue with classmates.

Lessons will reward creativity and show students how what they’re studying is applicable in the real world — two principles research shows help girls learn. The online school will also allow students to take challenging courses that may not be offered at their school.
6 pilot courses planned

Next year, Harpeth Hall girls will pilot six courses so employees can work out all the kinks and tweak the courses as necessary. Eventually, any girl will be able to enroll in the courses, whether she is in public school or home school.

“They will be able to connect with girls all over the world,” Rumsey said. “It’s really unique.”

Organizers don’t know yet how much the courses will cost or what subjects will be offered. The pilot courses include genetics, multivariable calculus and differential equations.

States across the country, including Tennessee, have or are developing online courses for students, but this would be the first set of courses geared toward girls, according to the National Coalition of Girls’ Schools.

Conversations about creating online programs for girls began last year, and Harpeth Hall moved rapidly to get the courses ready to launch.

“We recognized the importance of online education,” said Karen Douse, director of library and information services at Harpeth Hall. “And we knew it would be a great opportunity for our girls and girls around the world.”

Chloe Lainhart, 17, will be a senior this fall at Harpeth Hall, but before enrolling in the all-girls school, she attended classes on a coed campus. Based on her experience, she agrees genders learn differently and sees the value in the Online School for Girls.

“I am actually really excited about it,” she said. “There are so many opportunities at Harpeth Hall, and this is one more we can learn from.”

What do you all think??

Report: Socializing online is…educational

A MacArthur funded study was just released regarding the activities kids are involved in online.  It’s an interesting read for all educators and parents.  They conclude that the “hanging out”, “messing around”, and “geeking out” that kids do online helps students gain media literacies and skills they will need to fully participate in the 21st Century society.  Here’s a quote from the summary of the report:

New media allow for a degree of freedom and autonomy for youth that is less apparent in a classroom setting. Youth respect one another’s authority online, and they are often more motivated to learn from peers than from adults. Their efforts are also largely self-directed, and the outcome emerges through exploration, in contrast to classroom learning that is oriented by set, predefined goals.

In the conclusion, the report goes on to say, that schools (and parents) should not see social networking as a waste of time:

Rather than seeing socializing and play as hostile to learning, educational programs could be positioned to step in and support moments when youth are motivated to move from friendship-driven to more interest-driven forms of new media use.

Another point made in the conclusion is that kids find learning from their peers highly motivating:

Peer-based learning is characterized by a context of reciprocity, where participants feel they can both produce and evaluate knowledge and culture. Whether it is comments on MySpace or on a fan fiction forum, participants both contribute their own content and comment on the content of others. More expert participants provide models and leadership but do not have authority over fellow participants.

And finally, the report concludes with this (among other) question:

what would it mean to think of education as a process of guiding kids’ participation in public life more generally, a public life that includes social, recreational, and civic engagement?

You can access the summary “white paper” or the entire report here.

Multi-Taking and Executive Function

A movie of a multi-tasker at work and the accompanying NPR story on multi-tasking and executive function: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=95256794

“You Must Remember This…As Time Goes By?”

would like to explore and discuss how kids RECEIVE and RETAIN what they hear.

I recently came across a book by James Zull, a Biology professor at Case Western, called  The Art of Changing the Brain – Enriching Teaching by Exploring the Biology of Learning. I have only read excerpts from the book, which considers the positive and negative role of emotions, motivation (both extrinsic and intrinsic), and  feelings in the learning process. He points to the importance of “changing data into knowing” and how it can be transformative in three important ways:

“• by using past experience we determine and carry out plans for the future

• rather than remain a passive “receiver” of information, we become a “producer” of knowledge

• we take control of our learning by figuring out what we need to know and actively pursue finding it out”

He then goes on to lay out three factors necessary for effective learning that ultimately can affect what students retain in long-term memory versus what gets lost/discarded in the very short term. –

a.  the student having some sense of control

b.  his/her understanding of the reason for learning

c.  recognition of the student’s affective approach to the task

I often wonder how much the lack of control that many of our juniors and seniors experience in their lives runs counter to the ideals that Zull articulates.  I am certainly seeing students struggle more with retention and portability of knowledge and skills. As kids apparently see the college process becoming ever more competitive, is extrinsic motivation threatening to overwhelm intrinsic, and is the ‘passive’ receiver of information eclipsing the ‘producer’ of knowledge?   How can we best figure out if all our talents and tools will have a deep and lasting impact in our students’ knowledge and skill development?

Is he talking about us?

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/clay_shirky_on_institutions_versus_collaboration.html

the facebook dilemma

As with other technology, I didn’t get introduced to using Facebook until I had a compelling reason to explore it.  I was invited to Facebook by a friend with kids in Africa who wanted to show me pictures and snippets of her AIDS prevention campaign work.  Within a month, I was being “friended” by old classmates, friends, and colleagues around the globe.  There is a nuance to social networking that is different than simply reconnecting by email.  And I doubt I would have looked up many of the folks who have friended me though it is meaningful to know what where they are now.  The questions raised in previous posts about whose “domain” the online networking world are important.   As far as students go, they may still harbor a mentality that it is a peer- exclusive domain.  I’m not sure they will think to filter/ adjust their content until they have a compelling reason themselves; knowing that faculty, professors, adults, parents are using Facebook for their own legitimate reasons (and many more are) is a compelling reason to edit content appropriately.  Other questions to consider:  If students knowingly post content (however questionable) that will be seen by the world, should we avoid it, respond to it if concern is raised, discount it?   If we avoid “friending” students as a rule, what is the rationale?   Is there an easy way to divide the domain between students and teachers, adults and adolescents, or is that a false divide in the online universe.   The reality is, the online world does overlap and intersect all ages and will continue to do so.  A broader question is how to be acutely aware of personal boundaries and privacy needs in an era of cookies, data-mining, online-fraud, and expansive licensure rights (as with Facebook) and to teach students (and ourselves) the best way to proceed with thoughtfulness and care.

Teaching as a conversation.

I have been trying to think about how I interact with students in the classroom and how that interaction can sometimes work and sometimes go awry.

While I believe that there is value to basic discussion that doesn’t involve any media or other tools, I also recognize that there are many other ways to connect to a students passion than there were when I was in school.

I can remember a number of times as a student when I wished that there were some visuals to go along with what the teacher was saying.  The mimeographed handouts were helpful, but they held in them that elusive quality of being “teacher made.”  When I was asked to work with another student to give a presentation on King Lear, I proposed making a video that showed two “experts” giving a lengthy analysis of the major themes in the play while standing in a cow pasture.  While it was definitely fun and somewhat ridiculous, I actually read over the play more carefully than I had even for the paper.  The fact was that I felt more engaged in the material because I was excited about the idea of making this film.  In fact, the video camera helped to tap into a creativity that I felt was stifled during class discussions.  It was a seminal moment in my time as a student of English literature.

I am realizing more and more that students benefit from having multiple ways of entering into the discussion about a book or an idea.  I have not found one way that is universal for all kids, although I have found that there are certain ways that make me feel more comfortable.  The hard part is to find the energy and the willingness to practice those other ways (perhaps through technology) of entering into the conversation with the students.  I am trying to encourage myself to seek new ways of expanding my horizons in this regard.  Please let me know if you have ideas or suggestions.  It is helpful if you can include a sense of the time frame that it might take to learn the new skill.

Web 2.0 reshapes our world. How about our school?

What YouTube’s ‘Charlie bit my finger’ tells us about Web 2.0

Our hunger to create, share, and talk is fueling a media revolution.

By Cole Camplese

from the September 30, 2008 edition

State College, Pa. – Have you seen “Charlie bit my finger – again!”? Well, about 53 million people have, and it hasn’t been on a big screen anywhere.

This movie has had no marketing, no trailer, no production expenses, and certainly no highly paid actors. Instead it followed a simple formula: Toddlers + Laughter + YouTube = Huge Traffic.

But here’s the really interesting part: Tens of thousands of people who saw this clip did more than just smile and surf on.

They “mashed” it up with other media (”Charlie Bit Sarah Palin”), created a song about it (”Charlie bit my finger – The Musical”), created their own versions (”Shoshi bit my finger … again!”), posted their own comments, shared it with friends, or otherwise interacted with the original clip.

This is the world of Web 2.0. It is the evolution of Web platforms that are supporting millions of simultaneously connected global conversations. And it promotes the idea that a community is more powerful than an individual.

The point of this new media landscape is to create something and share it with the world. When we post anything to the Web, we are begging for a conversation. We want to be ridiculed, called out, accepted, talked about, linked to, and, most important, not ignored.

It’s easy to criticize the rise of participatory social media as a giant waste of time. And it’s true that a fair amount of what’s being created is adolescent. But that criticism misses the point: This trend is setting the stage for greater long-term engagement. It’s an indicator that people are working to find new ways to collaborate and to be part of something larger than they are individually. The sheer immensity of the participation is the story.

Think about where the Internet was just a decade ago. Getting online was a chore. News sites were updated just once or twice a day. That was the static world of Web 1.0. Ironically, that platform emerged from the government’s desire to promote collaboration among researchers and scientists, yet at the outset, it seemed best suited for e-commerce.

Today the Web landscape is dominated by blogs, wikis, and social networks. It is finally fulfilling its original promise of interaction, engagement, collaboration, and conversation. We are living through a media revolution that is set to explode this political season.

And who is driving this revolution? Teens. For them, this isn’t “technology,” it’s just the way things are.

They have grown up in a media ecology that pushes them to manage time, identity, privacy, and persona in ways that we have never been asked. They time-shift television to watch it on their mobile devices. They create and share audio, video, and pictures at an amazing pace. They spend as much time honing their Facebook profiles as they do working on schoolwork. Here at Penn State, about one-third of our 90,000 students created at least one form of digital media last year.

They are smart and very talented individuals coping in a new social, political, and media landscape that is driving radically different kinds of behaviors. Many describe these teens as digital natives. So guess what that makes the rest of us? Digital immigrants.

In many ways, the rebirth of the Web as a collaborative platform is because of them. Their intense expectations for connections, regardless of our understanding of them, are driving new business models and shifting the way people connect, share, and collaborate across every node of the Web. They intuitively understand that participation requires promotion. When they post content, they market it aggressively via word of mouth, Twitter, Facebook, etc.

Again, this isn’t just narcissism writ large. When teens and young adults do this, they report that their motivation is to have their friends reflect on what they have created, comment on it, and move the conversation forward.

In the next few weeks, pay attention as the big media personalities do the “real” reporting. And then watch how many iReports are cited, how many Twitter streams are mentioned, and how many YouTube videos turn into real campaign commercials. You’ll be stunned.

In a Web 1.0 world, you would have needed real skills and access to a distribution network to do any of it. Those days are over. Charlie says so.

Agree? Disagree? Join the conversation at http://camplesegroup.com/blog.

• Cole Camplese is the director of Education Technology Services at Penn State.

Creative Disruption

Teaching To The New Test
Clayton Christensen, Michael Horn and Curtis Johnson 08.21.08, 6:00 PM ET
Forbes Magazine dated September 15, 2008

The art and science of testing children to see what they have learned can and should change. Here’s how.

All Americans want to educate our children so they have a fair shot at realizing their dreams. But we have very different ideas about how to accomplish that. In our book, Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns, we map out a way to use innovation to disrupt the broken and monolithic U.S. public-classroom model and move toward one that puts the needs of each student at its center.

A powerful tool to help reach this goal is online learning technology, which offers students the ability to learn in ways that match their intelligence types in the places and at the pace they prefer. But with the shift to student-centric learning, assessment–the art and science of testing children to determine what they have learned–can and should change, as well.

In the past, testing has been used to do two jobs. The first has been to determine the extent to which students have mastered a body of material and are ready to progress. The second job is to compare students with one another. Student-centric technology, if it becomes truly personalized, should over time get rid of the need for examinations as we have known them.

The conventional teacher-administered exam can handle the second job, but the first one is more important, and it doesn’t do that job well at all. Regardless of whether students have mastered the material in a unit, they all move on. Teachers don’t find out what students have learned until an exam is graded, which tends to be some time after the unit or class is already complete. If students haven’t mastered all the material but know it well enough to get a passing grade, they still must move on. Even if they fail an exam, the students typically must move on, because moving on is inherent in the model of monolithic instruction. The exam tells teachers and administrators only what percentage of the students has demonstrated mastery of what percentage of the material. The amount of time in which to learn the material is fixed, but the amount of learning varies significantly.

In his upcoming book, Chasing the Rabbit, Steven Spear, a senior lecturer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, recounts an experience that helped us frame the trap of monolithic instruction that we’ve gotten ourselves into in public education. While doing research in 1996 as a doctoral student studying Toyota (nyse: TM – news – people )’s famed production system, Steve temporarily took jobs installing passenger-side front seats on an assembly line at one of Detroit’s Big Three and later at Toyota.

In the Big Three factory, the worker doing the training essentially told Steve, “The cars come down this line every 58 seconds, so that’s how long you have to install this seat. Now I’m going to show you how to do it. First, you do this. Then do that, then click this in here just like this, then tighten this, then do that,” and so on, until the seat was completely installed. “Do you get how to do it, Steve?”

Steve was quite certain he could do each of those things in the allotted time, given that he had earned a master’s degree in mechanical engineering from mit. So when the next car came down the line, he confidently set about doing each of the steps. But the installation was trickier than he had expected. He couldn’t finish the installation within the 58 seconds. His trainer had to stop the assembly line to fix the problem. He again showed Steve how to do it. When the next car arrived, Steve tried again but didn’t get it right. In an hour he installed only four seats correctly. One reason why it’s so important to test every product after it comes off the production line is that there are typically hundreds of steps involved in making the product, and a company can’t be sure that each step is done correctly. In business we call that end-of-the-line activity “inspection.” In education, we call it “assessment” or “testing.”

But when Steve went to work at the same station in Toyota’s plant, he had a different experience. First he went to a training station, where he was told, “These are the seven steps required to install this seat. You don’t have the privilege of learning step two until you’ve demonstrated mastery of step one. If you master step one in a minute, you can begin learning step two a minute from now. If step one takes you an hour, then you can learn step two in an hour. If it takes you a day, then you can learn step two tomorrow. It makes no sense for us to teach you subsequent steps if you can’t do the prior ones correctly.” Testing and assessment were an integral part of the instruction process. As a result, when he took his spot on Toyota’s production line, Steve was able to do his job right the first time and every time. In fact, Toyota had built into its production process a mechanism to verify immediately that each step had been done correctly, so that no time or money would be wasted fixing a defective product. As a result it did not have to test its products at the end of the assembly line.

What a contrast between the two methods for training Steve Spear. At the Big Three factory the time was fixed, but the result of training was variable and unpredictable, just as it is in the public schools’ assessment systems. The “exam,” checking up on the installed seat, came at the end of Steve’s training. At Toyota the training time was variable, but assessment was woven into the work, and the result was fixed; every person who went through the training could predictably do what he had been taught to do. Toyota follows that principle in all its training, for every activity in the company.

When K–12 education in the U.S. was done in one-room schoolhouses, most instruction occurred at individualized rates. Then an explosion in the student population in the early 20th century forced schools to adopt one-size-fits-all instruction. They borrowed from factories the concept of batch processing, with a fixed time spent in each stage of the process of assembling an educated person. Repair, rework and reject became a costly element of the system, just as it did in assembly plants.

We estimate that at least 80% of a typical teacher’s time is now spent in monolithic activity: preparing to teach, teaching and then testing an entire class. Less than 20% of that time is available to help students one-on-one. A profession whose work primarily was in tutoring students individually became one in which some of the most important skills are keeping order and commanding attention.

When students learn through student-centered online technology, assessment and individualized assistance can be interactive and woven into the instruction rather than tacked on at the end of the process. Software makers can also use the feedback loop to learn how to improve their products for different kinds of learners.

Lexia Learning Systems, a reading-software company in Concord, Mass., provides an example of the power of this approach. The company’s product, Lexia Reading, assesses a student’s understanding constantly. If the student demonstrates mastery, he moves forward. If he has not understood a lesson, the software harks back. Some students just need more opportunities to understand and practice the lesson in different ways.

This approach has proved valuable in districts such as Hall County, Ga. that use Lexia Reading. This district uses the constant assessments to provide teachers feedback so they can hone and target instruction, according to Aaron Turpin, the executive director of information technology and assessment for the county’s schools, and David Moody, the county’s director of elementary education. They say Lexia Reading not only helps students who are struggling to read but also allows students who are way above the minimum competency to soar.

Hall County principals use the quick feedback to monitor the progress of individual students and to be sure that students who are behind not only are making progress but also are making extra progress so they can catch up. This allows officials at all levels to do something they never could before: to see how all its students stand at any point in time, a true revolution in school management.

The Booming U.S. Assessment Market

Sales of testing products and services to K–12 schools and school districts.

2003/2004 $1.42 billion

2004/2005 $1.57 billion

2005/2006 $2.18 billion

2006/2007 $2.3 billion

2007/2008 $2.5 billion

Sales figures are in 2008 dollars. Source: Outsell Inc.

Clayton M. Christensen is a professor of business administration at the Harvard Business School. Michael B. Horn is the executive director of education at Innosight Institute. Curtis W. Johnson is the president of Citistates Group. They are coauthors of Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns. Go to forbes.com/leadership for more of Christensen’s thoughts on innovation.

http://www.forbes.com/claytonchristensen/forbes/2008/0915/081.html