Christa McAuliffe TC Day 2

Many "good ones" today. Nicole went with me. She got some good ideas and we are going to collaborate on a webquest or mystery for French culture.

The keynote speaker was Annette Lamb who has a remarkable website that has all kinds of resources, ideas, lessons and examples. Several ideas she presented were especially good. She called them a "HOOK". In science she suggested going to the website called "The Annals of Improbable Research". There they have listed actual research that seems a little silly, i.e. "If you drop it, should you eat it?" Does the 5 second rule apply? Get kids to write the scientific experiment that could research this problem. I had students visit the twinkies website to see how a lab report should be written. This website conducts several different experiments on twinkies using the scientific method. Very funny and educational. She suggests going to the Pulitzer Prize photos site to get photos to show students. Ask them why do you think they won? What do we know about the picture? what don't we know? The CSI TV show is very popular with teens. Have them visit the CSI website and write a mystery using vocabulary from the show. Even have them produce a record of the scene with a camera. A website called "Documenting the American South" has many diaries online (Loreta Janeta Vasquez is a woman who fought in the Civil War). Also suggests FirstGov.gov as a great website for photos. You can look up photos of disasters or the Civil War.

Open Source Software: One of my goals for this conference was to find free software to do some of the things I want to do in the classroom. There are many open source programs available which are programs that people change and add to constantly. I attended a workshop on how to use GIMP a graphics program probably as good as PhotoShop but a little harder to use. It can be downloaded for free at gimp.org and there are some great tutorials at http://gimp.org/tutorials/. Another program is called Moodle. It is a program that will create online courses with activities, quizzes, a forum, chat and bulletin boards. It is server based and will have to be run by the CIC guys. There also is an open source program called Open Office that many people say is as good as Microsoft Office. It has a word processor, spreadsheet, presentation program and spreadsheet. All for free. You can read more about them at opensource.org.

My last workshop of the day was "Podcasting with a Purpose". I wanted to learn more about it and see a successful presentation of it in the classroom. Two teachers from Maine in a 3/4 classroom are doing a weekly podcast that has the students engaged. (Their website - is bobsprankle.com if you want to hear some of the students' podcasts). They make up the programs and write the reports. They have learned about plagiarism, rewriting and the global community. I'd like to try it with possibly a reading class or maybe with a homeroom/advisory group. It is not expensive. The recording device is $60-120 and the software needed is open source programs. There is even a website, music.podshow.com, that has free music that they allow you to use on podcasts as long as you give them credit. They mentionned a program called Audacity (open source) that allows you to edit the podcasts which are in mp3 format. And I found free, open source, program to do blogging - Word Press which allows the teacher to monitor all comments.

So a good day. I found a lot of free software and the Seacoast Professional Debelopment Center in Exeter is giving workshops on many of them. For information go to their website. Also try K12 Open Source site for some free software.

Christa McAuliffe 2005 Technology Conference

As a technology facilitator I splurged this year and am attending the conference for 2 days. Today, Tuesday, I attended presentations on: Primary Source Materials, Copyrights (and Wrongs) in a Digital Age, PDA's in the Classroom, "Engage Me or Enrage Me, Educating Today's Digital Native Learners", and Virtual Field Trips.

PDA's in the classroom was interesting and fun, we were given a loaner to try, but I don't see them as having much "depth" in the classroom. The kids would enjoy them but I don't think we could get that deep into a subject using them in the 8th grades. The presenter uses them in a 6th grade classroom on a daily basis.

Virtual Field Trips was very good. The presenter is a technology facilitator in Exeter and her website has several field trips she created(The American Colonial Experience and NH History and Ellis Island) and some sites for further ideas. One idea I liked is that she has several "stops" in her field trip. Teachers can have some students do all the stops and others only 2 or 3. Each trip ends with further study, such as a letter to their favorite historical person or an ad to get people to come to a new colony. I especially liked a website she links to by Jamie McKenzie, a renowed educator, that talks about "slam dunk lessons". These are lessons on the internet using 1 or 2 websites (pre-selected), that take 1 class period. The link is: http://www.fno.org/sum04/fivekinds.html. " How can teachers build brief lessons with digital resources that inspire a high level of engagement while challenging students to interpret, analyze, synthesize and evaluate?"

The Key note speaker was Marc Prensky who spoke on our students of today who are the "new Digital Natives". We, the teachers, are "Digital Immigrants". He says to engage kids with learning we have to make the like video games. Our lessons must: 1.) have frequent important decisions to be made. 2.) level up to clear goals. 3.) focus on engagement 4.) adapt to each players individuality. He is an educational game maker and has an Algebra game in the works and many others available. A game he recommends is called Food Force. You can link to it here and download the game. From the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP), the world’s largest humanitarian agency, Food Force is an educational video game telling the story of a hunger crisis on the fictitious island of Sheylan. The entire game consists of 6 mini-missions and could take 1/2 hour. "It's up to you to save and rebuild the island of Sheylan". Another game suggested is the ESP Game. In this game you must type in words that could be associated with an image. You have a partner who is doing the same. If you both type the same word you go to the next image. The whole game is timed.

Primary Source Materials presented by Kathy Schrock has a website with many sites to visit.