We are getting there...

Years ago in a former district I remember planning a staff development day where we had identified 6 categories or tracks to plan for; Math, English, Science, Social Studies, Technology and Special Areas. As we worked toward an agenda with lead teachers of those subject areas and the Curriculum Director, in my role of Instructional Technology Coordinator, I also attended these planning meetings. This particular time I sat quietly listening to all that they were saying. After about 45 minutes of listening to ideas they asked what my thoughts were (now this is going back at least 6 years ~ 2002) and I said "I'm sad to see that we have technology as it's own strand instead of embedded into each of the other strands."

The room was quiet and no one knew quiet what to say...they couldn't really conceptualize that even though our teachers had laptops for 4 years already...

Fast forward to today...I am following "spillarke's" comments on twitter about the keynote that she is listening to by Marc Prensky at the National Conference of English Teachers (NCTE)...when you google NCTE...you can find their ning...http://ncte2008.ning.com/ with the heading of...NCTE Annual Conference, Because Shift Happens, Teaching in the 21st Century. We are getting there!

Building Virtual Global Communities

US-China Virtual Symposium Presentation

Online Enhanced Podcast
http://blog.netbriefings.com/virtualconference/2008/11/07/dr-kristen-kozloski-dr-megan-fritz/

Archived Panel Discussion - Best Practices in Technology Use
http://144.118.68.54:8888/moodle20/mod/resource/view.php?id=34
(if prompted first, login as guest)
I was 1 of 5 panelists of the evening.

Emerging Interactive Media and Neomillenial Learning Styles

Chris Dede
Harvard University
www.gsd.harvard.edu/~dedech/

Authentic Learning and Scaffolding

This past week in my Drexel class we had many challenges with the podcast upload. Hopefully we will all get the kinks worked out and shortly you will be able to see my students' podcasts on iTunes U!! : ) For them, this process was a very good example of authentic learning and also of some additional scaffolding that we should have provided to make the upload process a bit easier.

As teachers, and technologists, when we design a learning environment that incorporates technology, we must think about our student audience and where they are with their level of technology use. It is clear to me today that my students needed a bit more scaffolding as to what a VPN was and WHY on earth they would connect to it and HOW from that connection they could upload their files. That information (along with some not so complete directions) was not provided so the students had some challenges in understanding the context for what they were doing and then completing the task.

We will discuss this in our live classroom. They all persevered very well in the process and are finding success in uploading their podcasts. They will be discussing the science of learning and how this can be applied to instructional desgin. Podcasts certainly worth checking out under Drexel's iTunes University!

Self-Engagement at 8 Years Old

This morning I watched my 8 year old son show his morning sitter how to enter the world of Alice. Being a retired teacher, she was amazed at what he was doing.

He and I had dabbled in this 3D programming world when he had said to me, mom, I want to create a web-page...like Webkins....you can teach me that, right? Well, how could I say no?

I downloaded Alice and went through the tutorial on my own and then showed it to him. He learned how to load a world and start to manipulate objects in that world.

We need to find ways to harness this self-engagement for the 21st Century Learner so that all of our learners get this excited about learning on their own.

Web 3.0

Some new blogs I'll be following...

http://web3next.blogspot.com/

Tim Burners-Lee

Learning about these projects...

The Tabulator project is a generic Semantic Web data browser. Using outline and table modes, it provides a way to browse RDF data.

Policy Aware Web, funded by NSF, a collaboration between MINDSWAP and DIG to work toward creating discretionary, rules-based access for the World Wide Web.

The Transparent Accountable Datamining Initiative (TAMI) Project, funded by NSF, is creating technical, legal, and policy foundations for transparency and accountability in large-scale aggregation and inferencing across heterogeneous information systems.

http://dig.csail.mit.edu/

I also added some other Web 3.0 resources to my wiki.

Wednesday Sessions - NECC 2008

What an amazing day already!!

Saw Mitchell Resnick from MIT first thing this morning. Really great stuff about the Scratch software and community, creativity and learning. Will post my notes later as I couldn't get on the Internet during his session. I am now waiting for Bernie Dodge to get started. Will post on that later as well, have a few things to finish up for our 12 pm presentation.

Here are the details....

University 2.0: Digital Innovations in the University Classroom

12pm Texas (CST) time; 1 pm Pennsylvania (EST) time:

Website: http://university20necc2008.googlepages.com/home
Ustream: http://www.ustream.tv/channel/university-2.0-necc-2008

Hope you can join us!!
~Kristen and Megan : )