ISTE's Top 3 Priorities for 2011

Here are ISTE's top three ed tech policy priorities for this year:

1. Dedicated funding for educational technology (support the continuation of EETT)
2. Technology must be included in every school improvement initiative (Race to the Top, etc.)
3. Broadband for all as a national priority

Having just come from the California Adult Education Administrators Association conference, it's hard not to feel that dedicated funding for every aspect of education is in jeopardy, but the focus on technology continues to be essential. The good news is that it's not debated much any more. There is general acceptance that students need digital literacy skills, and teachers need professional development in this area. The challenge now is shrinking federal, state and local budgets.

History of Educational Technology

Love this slide show from NYT. Sadly, I remember all of these from the chalk board, invented in 1890. But the most nostalgic is that rasty mimeograph machine. So glad those days are over!

What is your favorite?

Videos of Teachers using Facebook

Exploring fb for education - a wiki dedicated to this topic, with a page of videos of teachers talking about their fb projects. One popular use is having students create a fan page about a historical character, and take on that character's identity on fb.

There is also a group on fb for educators using fb.

PaintMap!

It's been a while since I've had time to follow a bunny trail. That is not good! We need time to let our curiosity take us down a path without any goal. This morning I followed a Facebook link by Ron Fujihara to an article on the blog Free Technology for Teachers about a tool for creating timelines of news story topics.

The blog is by Richard Byrne, who has published quite a few free books on technology for teachers. I took a look at Google for Teachers, published on ISSUU, which in itself is an interesting site if you ever want to publish a free book or explore beautiful books and magazines from around the world. But I digress from my digression. The new world elevates ADD to an art form, doesn't it?

Back to Google for Teachers. I'm going to embed the whole book here because you can see how ISSUU works, and you can also read the book!

Open publication - Free publishing

So I was flipping through the pages, thinking that this could be a great resource for OTAN's various Google webinars. I was also thinking that there wasn't much new for me here when I came across his description of PaintMap, which describes itself as "a geolocation-oriented painting sharing website." It's a site using Google Earth where artists can upload their paintings and tag the exact spot on earth where they were painted. As a visitor, you can click on a featured location or just explore the world on your own. I looked at Chicago and found this painting of one of the Art Institute lions, painted at night, with an interesting story about the painting.

It must be a fairly new site, as there are only 388 artists signed up so far, and no paintings of Sacramento, or Los Altos where I grew up. But I enjoyed looking at various artists visions of different locations around the world. It's quite different than looking at a map or a photograph. It would make a good addition to a report on a home town or country, or any location. I hope the site flourishes.

Karen Cator at Gov 2.0 Summit

The Department of Education releases the National Educational Technology Plan, and Karen Cator reviews it at this summit meeting. It still kind of boggles my mind to hear federal officials talking about the long tail, supporting personal passion and motivation in learning, universal design and getting every classroom in the country connected, and broadband everywhere, and even the next generation of assessment - beyond the bubble-in, yes!

I haven't reviewed the whole plan yet, but Ms.Cator did mention in her talk that this plan is for "cradle to career" and that we are all lifelong learners, so a glimmer of adult education is in there somewhere.

NIFL Social Media Discussion

The discussion of social media for teaching a professional development in adult education is going strong this week! (Thank you, Jackie Taylor and Nell Eckersly!) Despite being on vacation this week and taking care of two toddlers, I've managed to somewhat keep up with the conversation, and have already learned a lot! You can see everything I've bookmarked so far on my Delicious account. Here are some quick examples:

- If you only have time for one link, check out this one. It's a set of slides by Paul Adams who does user research for Google, and reports on what they've found out about how people really relate to their friends, and how they would like to relate to their online friends and acquaintances, and how companies like Google and Facebook could make it easier than they do now. Really interesting! For example, he says that most people have between 4 and 6 groups of friends that are not connected to each other, like friends from college, friends from early in career, friends from kids school, family, etc. Most groups have between 2 and 10 people in them. We don't just have one big group of 183 friends! Social networking sites need to allow us more flexibility, and more control over privacy.

- This article from Education Week describes the burgeoning use of a variety of social media in K12 education, including Twitter, MySpace, Facebook, Second Life, and others.

- The POST method of choosing the right tech tool for the teaching objective - People (i.e. audience), Objectives, Strategy, Technology. In other words, choose the right tool for the job, not just the coolest tool.

- Emerging Technologies Matrix for Adult Education - Nell put together this list of social media tools that teachers might want to check out.

If you want to see a synopsis of the discussion, Jackie is doing an outstanding job of summarizing it on the ALE Wiki.

Better yet, join the discussion.

Tech Workshop at CASAS Summer Institute

Just demonstrating to workshop participants how easy it is to upload a photo from phone to blog. We also talked about wikis, QR codes, mobile learning and Moodle. Slides and handouts are posted.

SixthSense Technology

Dennis Porter sent me this amazing video about work happening at MIT to merge computing with the physical world. It's quite mind boggling!

Twitter at COABE

I want to write about the COABE conference, (national adult education conference) but for now, I'm just going to comment that there was a lot of interest in Twitter. I think Ashton Kutscher and Larry King can be thanked for that! I twittered the conference, and encouraged others. So far I don't think anyone joined me, but I got a number of follows for OTAN.

In my workshop on Web 2.0 Tools for Administrators, the first thing they wanted to hear about was Twitter. Now that's different! I tried to explain how I use Twitter as a professional development tool. I follow links to what my fellow ed tech twitterers are reading, doing, thinking about, arguing about, and I've found lots of interesting material that I never would have seen on my own.

So I will just re-tweet here a post this morning from Ira Socol:

irasocol: Filosophical Friday- If our students could learn as much from a day in school as I do from a day on Twitter we'd be a really educated world.

21 Ways to Reach 21st Century Learners

This page lists 21 ways to use new technologies in the classroom to engage learners and make learning more interactive and self-directed. Each of the items is a link to examples. For example, the item "Make flash cards for phones and iPods" links to instructions for how to put slides on a iPod, and also to a gallery of educational slides sets that you or your students can download to an iPod. Sets include flashcards to practice identifying the states, or a quiz on US Government. There is also a set of response cards. If all your students have an iPod, and they all download these response cards, then when you ask a question they can hold up their iPod with their response on it, such as the green Yes card, giving you another way to check comprehension or poll students.

Here are the first ten items. Go to the Web site to see the rest.

1 Contribute to a wiki
2 Read and write to a live blog
3 Collaborate using a Google spreadsheet
4 Bring YouTube into the classroom
5 Assign roving reporters
6 Students create podcasts
7 Create interactive maps
8 Create online quizzes
9 Connect to the world through Skype
10 Make flash cards for phones and iPods

The Inauguration and Adult Education

Wow, what a momentous day that was! The photos posted by the Boston Globe are really wonderful, showing how people were engaged all over the earth.

Larry Ferlazzo collected some good sites about the inauguration to use with students.

Christina Nivens created some interesting ESL activities, including a venn diagram about Barack and Michelle.

At the Sacramento County Office of Education, which provides Internet service to the school districts in the county, we had the highest demand on our bandwidth ever, twice as high as normal. I think every school in the county was trying to stream the inauguration!

Learn to Change, Change to Learn

Saw this on Twitter, and it supports a conversation at the CAEAA conference this afternoon about what implications changing technology has for adult education.

We as a field are far from the world of education described in this video, but it's important for us to start thinking in this direction. And then, one step at a time...

How to Show YouTube Videos at School

I just read an article on Larry Ferlazzo's blog about how to get around your district's blocking of YouTube. This is a problem for many teachers. There are good reasons to keep YouTube blocked, but at the same time there is so much good content there. This was obvious during the election when Obama was posting videos on YouTube, and his transition team continues to do so.

Larry's article led me to a blog post by Joyce Valenza on the School Library Journal blog called When YouTube is Blocked (eight ways around). Larry suggests bookmarking this article, and I agree. There will be that time when the perfect video that you or one of your students needs for a presentation, and this article will help you download it and convert it to a format you can play from your laptop or from within a PowerPoint.

Joyce also suggests trying other video sites that may not be blocked. TeacherTube is one that many teachers know about, but Larry suggests EduBlogs TV, which is still in beta, but is hosting educational videos, and Larry says he has used it quite a bit in teaching American History. The list of videos on the home page looks intriguing, however, I can't get any of them to play from work. Maybe they are embedded videos from YouTube? In which case. this doesn't not solve the problem.

Other suggestions?

Wikis in ESL

I attended this event on Saturday purely as a participant, which was a nice change. I had time to listen and observe more than I have in the past. And things have definitely changed. There were two or three presentations on wikis. A year ago, most ESL teachers hadn't heard of wikis, so this was a welcome evolution. One of the most interesting was by Cassie Piotrowski, who teaches academic writing at San Jose State. It was interesting because she was not a high tech person herself, and struggled with some of the technology in her presentation, but nevertheless she was fearless in implementing a variety of Web 2.0 activities for her students.

In her Culture and Current Events class, she has her students divided into teams, and then from each team page she created a student page for each student where they post their slide show, video of their presentation, and other assignments. On her home page, she has all assignments with links to resources and documents.

On her Writing Class wiki, look at the links to the student pages and their assignments, which include Bubbleshare slideshows, Vokis, and Wordle assignments, in which students enter a list of significant words and Wordle creates a graphic of them.

Here is a Wordle of my delicious bookmarks.

Podcasts in Adult Education

My colleague Branka Marceta did a presentation to the staff of the Adult Education Office at the CA Dept of Ed the other day on podcasting in adult ed. We have a wiki page where we collect examples of adult ed podcasts. We have examples from ESL, VESL, EL Civics, and Citizenship. It would be great to have more program areas, but it looks like we aren't there yet.

Questions from the CDE Consultants:
* Are there any administrator podcasts? We haven't heard of any, although we've heard a few administrators who are thinking about it. I think people are a bit intimidated by the idea of doing a radio show kind of thing, unless they have experience in radio or theater. It isn't hard to produce a podcast, but producing an interesting one is a bit more challenging. The interview or conversation format works well, but I've listened to quite a few ed tech podcasts with teachers that have good content but are just boring to listen to because there is too much meandering, inside jokes, off-topic conversation or whatever. Maybe we need to put some resources into this.

* What are the issues of access for our students if these are all online? More and more adult learners every year have Internet access at home, but it is still not 100% and probably never will be. Teachers that are using podcasting extensively either teach in a lab or have access to a lab. But more and more learners, especially younger ones, have mp3 players, and would like to have some learning activities they could listen to outside of school. It's become free and easy to create these, so I predict we will see more and more of them.

Branka ended the presentation by having a couple of people call in to our Gabcast channel on their cell phones and moments later we listened to their podcasts online. This is a fun activity for a presentation because of the instant gratification. We've done it at conference workshops, but still haven't had anyone tell us they're using it in their teaching.

Got more adult ed podcasting ideas? Post a comment!

PollEverywhere

Just saw a reference to this Web site where you can poll your audience and they can text an answer from their phone, or send it online, and the results show up instantly on your slide or web page, like using clickers in the classroom, only free (for now)!

This would not be a classroom tool, but could be great for presentations.

Reflections on Losing a Mentor

Susan Gaer, a long time TIMAC mentor, sent me this article about her first mentor, who helped her get technology in her classroom and then find ways to use it. I post it here as a testament to the mentoring process (this one was spontaneous!) but more especially it's an example of using Internet to find just the right kind of professional development at the right time, and back in 1994!

Susan's Article

Most people think of me as super mentor. They believe that the "technology mentor" is a higher-level species who understands the technology they inevitably don't. That is not how I see the word mentor to mean. By dictionary definition it is "a trusted counselor or guide". To me my mentors and mentees always ended up being my good friends and trusted colleagues teaching me more than I could ever hope to teach them.

I found out on Monday, July 7, that my very first mentor, Leni Donlan died last year. I want to tell you about Leni so you can know her as I did. I met her in 1994 online with AOL's educational community. I was teaching a class of literacy lao/hmong and lahu refugees most with no writing system in their own language. Most of the people in the school at the time told me they had been in this class for a long time and expectations were low. It was a rural community in Central California and information and training was hard to come by. I found AOL's educational community and met Leni Donlan who showed me how to work the system to get what I wanted.

After I got what I wanted ( a modem, phone line and 386 computer) she helped me developed projects and chats with this particular group of students. The activities were great but the real learning took place as I watched students who were considered to be the most marginal in society start to make a difference. We participated in a post card project with a class in Ohio who we sent lemon grass to. They had never had lemon grass before so my students sent instructions to use
the lemongrass. Next we read an essay about how a blind and deaf girl( I think I remember her name as Christie)could hear popcorn pop by putting her hand over the corn to feel the vibration of the popping.

We made cookbooks which bought us a industrial level stove and the book was purchased by "Legal Foods' in Boston.This led to Kathleen Ferenz and I doing a project where ESL students tasted condiments and wrote down their thoughts. Mustard was not a winner. I moved on to the post card project and then took a step on the wild side. I had my ESL Laotian tribal groups take a trip on Westward HO. I never thought it would work. There was so much culture to learn that the other students were brought up with, but when we all started baking Indian bread and learning line dancing, I knew it was one of the most amazing projects I had every participated in.

Leni would come and chat with my class on a regular basis and she said they could always hold their own language wise. She moved on, I moved on and that could have been the end of the story. However, the lessons Leni taught me have been the base of everything I have done since that time in 1994. Leni was one of the most important influences in my instructional life and she was also a great friend. That is what a real mentor is. Leni encapsulated all that and more for me. My students and I will miss her influence in the coming years.

Video of Adult Ed Teachers at CUE

Adult Educators at CUE

Computer Using Educators (CUE) was founded in 1978 to support teachers in using technology effectively in the classroom. It has grown significantly over the years, and now has thousands of members, making it one of the largest organizations of its type in the country. Although membership is open to all educational professionals, the focus has been on K12.

CUE holds its annual conference every year in Palm Springs. Several years ago, there were only a small handful of adult educators attending the conference, even though it provides an excellent opportunity for educational technology people to network and to learn what’s new in the world of technology, but over the last few years this handful has grown to about 20. This year at CUE, Suzanne Ludlum of Oakland Adult School offered a 3-hour workshop on digital storytelling using Windows MovieMaker. Barry Bakin of LAUSD Division of Adult and Community Education presented on Internet Projects Students and Teachers Love. Elliot Jordan, formerly of Burbank Adult School, demonstrated to teachers the many possibilities of open source software. Susan Gaer, a Google-certified Educator and ESL Instructor at Santa Ana College Adult Education, partnered with Barry Bakin to show teachers how to adapt any lesson to include technology and the Internet. She also demonstrated her collaborative online student projects, and volunteered in the Second Life Sandbox, showing people how to use Second Life, a virtual environment. Branka Marceta and Penny Pearson interviewed some of the participating adult educators about their experiences at CUE.

Other hot topics at the conference included Open Source software, Moodle for hosting class Web sites, blogging (educators have their own category, “edublogger”), Google tools such as Google Earth, social networking. The conference also offers skill building classes on programs such as Flash, PhotoShop, and Excel. On Saturday, many student groups demonstrate their projects at the Student Technology Showcase. This would be an excellent opportunity for adult education students to showcase their work and get some recognition.

Adult education in California would never be able to host such a large and diverse technology conference, with over 200 vendors in the exhibit area, so it’s encouraging to see more adult educators participating in this conference and contributing their enthusiasm, experience and knowledge.

Moving and Saving Files Online

Just heard about drop.io (pronounced drop-ee-oo), and then started seeing more references to it. It's a Web site where you can create a drop box for yourself with nothing more than a user ID and password. So, if you need to share files with a dispersed workgroup, or if you want to share photos, word docs, or other files between two classes that are collaborating on a project, this would be a really good service. You get 100MB for free, or can upgrade to 1 Gig for a nominal fee. It gives you a URL, and you can upload files in a number of ways, including voice, fax, and email. This would be a great service for a workgroup that needed to share some docs. It can be password protected or not, and it can expire in a month or whatever timeframe you set, if there is an end date to the project.

I actually just had a programmer create something like this for a statewide group that needs to do some work together and share some spreadsheets. Kinda a like a V-8. Darn, I coulda used Dropio!