Musings - Just Learning

Last year, the moodle was my fave online technology tool/environment. I hosted a moodle on my own server and enjoyed exploring some of the nifty modules that made the environment so flexible. It was a little slow, at times, but it provided a great environment for our students involved in international projects to communicate and collaborate. I am using a moodle again this year, but I haven’t given it as much thought or attention as this time last year.

Two other tools, this year, have surprised me this year with their power and potential.

I had tried using wikis last year, and clearly was just fumbling around without seeing how it could be used effectively. We had also been using it within the moodle, so there were limitations to its usefulness.

This year, I had a few good models of how to use wikis. Vicki Davis is a master of educational uses for wikis and I was fortunate enough to catch on to her school’s wiki very early in the school year.

First, I had my students explore Vicki’s students’ wiki work. This provided them with good modelling of how to communicate information on a wiki.

The novel we were studying in gr. 9 English was A Tourist’s Guide to Glengarry - a novel set in Edmonton, Alberta in 1971 by Canadian novelist Ian McGillis. Within the novel, there are many cultural and historical references that could have been difficult for a 14 year old student to understand. The students were asked to use a wiki to create encyclopedia-type references for one chapter of the novel.

The resulting Glengarrypedia exceeded my own expectations of my students. The author himself was impressed with what the students had accomplished!

I am very proud of my students!

Next term (next week!), we begin two international collaborative literature projects using the moodle and the wiki with a class in Israel and a class in Russia. The students have been communicating for the past two months or so in the moodle forums. During our next stage we begin handling short stories and poetry that have our home cities as a central theme.

For an example of another very excellent cross-cultural wiki project, check out the Flat Classroom Project between Vicki Davis’s students at Westwood High School in Camilla Georgia, and Julie Lindsay’s students at International School Dhaka in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Very, very impressive stuff! I can’t wait to see who wins the awards!

And it was actually Julie Lindsay who inspired me to explore that next tool. I attended her presentation at NECC 2006 and “reported” it to eschool news.

Now on to the second unexpected tool - the podcast. Actually, I want to broaden that a bit more and say audio recordings in general. Yes, I have certainly downloaded and listened to a number of very good podcasts. But I wanted to put the power of creating content into the hands of my own students. So I bought a few recorders (Olympus model - at Julie’s recommendation), and had my students do a few projects with them. Because we have many laptops in our school, as well as some spiffy computer labs, editing is not that difficult.

One thing I discovered was that my younger students appreciated my audio recordings of dramatic readings of the literature we were studying. I would read the novel out loud to the recorder in front of the class, then upload the file to FirstClass so the students could listen again at home. Cool application!

I have been fascinated with how engaged the students have been with using the audio recorders and editing software. They like this stuff and they like listening to themselves afterwards!

I have a long way to go polishing my podcasting skills, but it is one of my new year’s resolutions and ongoing self-training projects.

Next week, the day before our students return to classes, I will be making brief presentations on what I know about wikis and podcasting to some of my colleagues. Let’s see if I can pass on some of the vision!

technorati tags:

moodle, Vicki Davis, Julie Lindsay, Flat Classroom Project, wikis, wikispaces, Glengarrypedia, NECC 2006

At last I have a chance to catch my breath here at the GaETC conference in Atlanta. After a relaxing weekend at a ski lodge up at Mt. Tremblant north of Montréal, I flew to Georgia on Monday for a week of intense tech teacher geekiness. Ah…. To be with my people!

Jen Wagner (technospud) and I have been hanging out since Monday. Yesterday, we were joined by Vicki Davis. Jen and Vicki were both workshop presenters at the conference while I was a blissful participant.

I attended two workshops yesterday and learned a good deal about the art of presentation from both. The training for using the eportfolio module for moodle was well done and I learned a few tricks with moodle that I had not known before. While I think that moodle would make an excellent repository for eportfolios, it occurs to me again that a one-enterprise solution for all online environments would be so nice. With so many online environments currently available, their uses and purposes seem to be overlapping.

The other workshop I attended was Vicki Davis’ workshop on wikis and I really appreciated the way she divided the participants into teams and put us to work on collaborative wiki-building to get our feet wet. Wikis are just so great for organizing content and displaying information without having to know a thing about html coding. Such a relief!

Last night, the women of web 2.0 had our second skypecast with EdTechTalk. The topic was why we blog and what it brings to our teaching. It will be available online soon. The turnout was surprisingly good and I have become so impressed with Cheryl’s audiocasting skills.

I also had the great pleasure of going to Patrick Crispen’s session on what’s new and what’s next – sort of Patrick Crispen 2.0. He was using PPT 2007 to make his presentation. After Feb. 19 2009, we will no longer have broadcast television. He highlights IPTV – on-demand television which is a combo of youtube, ipod video, and tivo over the telephone lines. This is important for schools so that schools can have closed circuit television with streaming data between classrooms.

He also discusses the differences between standard definition and high definition television. One should be looking for 1080p if one is buying new equipment in order to prepare for the progressive scan that will be broadcast soon. When buying cables to prepare for the new technology (which is digital), buy very good cables that can convert from analog to digital. High definition multimedia interface (one simple cable) will convert the signals. Eventually we will moving to just one cable. It is okay to buy the cheapest for HDMI. He warns to know about High Definition Content Protection which might prevent these devices from working altogether. One should look for 1080p with multiple HDMI 1.3/HDCP connections.

The notes to his presentation can be found here.
technorati tags:

GaETC Conference, women of web 2.0, Technospud,
Vicki Davis, Patrick Crispen

I had a terrific first day of school! Boy, do I love my job! It has to be the best….

Today I had the first opportunity to use my new moodle area for my students. Last year I had used it almost exclusively for the international collaborative projects with other schools so that our students had a common “walled garden” meeting place. At the end of the year, I realized how short-sighted I had been in not taking more advantage of the moodle environment and using it more for in-class assignments, reflection, and exchange.

So this year, I am resolved to take on a more of a dedicated blended learning approach to my classroom practices. We started off with a bang today right in the moodle. However, it is still running ridiculously slowly and any tips or advice from any of you in the edublogosphere would be greatly appreciated.
I am also once again trying to install elgg on my server and again running into difficulties. The error codes on the page have been addressed and it is still not working. It sounds as if this is the program I want for a safe, sheltered blogging environment that offers podcasting and FOAF capabilities. But why, oh why, does it have to be so frigging hard to install on my server? I know I am missing some critical step and I have gone over and over it trying to figger it all out. Makes me feel once again like just a wannabe geek who is a failure at coding….

On the brighter side, today my IT admin told me explicitly that he wanted to help me with any app that I needed for my projects this year (wowsa) and the headmaster agreed to read my students’ blogs and respond to their posts about his weekly presentations at our assemblies. Very validating stuff!

Now I just have to get elgg to work on my server this could all come together….

If you have any expertise or advice on how to successfully install elgg, I would greatly appreciate hearing from you!

technorati tags: k12education, elgg, moodle

Tomorrow morning I head off to California, first to The SF Bay area to visit relatives, then on to San Diego on Monday to attend the NECC 2006.

My blog is listed, along with a number of others, on the Blogging NECC page. If you are going to be there or are interested in the conference, please do visit the other blogs as well. I have visited a number of them and have been impressed with what I have seen. As Kevin Clark points out on his blog, only 22 bloggers covering 300 concurrent sessions by about 13,000 participants is not enough blog coverage! If you are blogging NECC, please let us know by leaving a comment so others can find you too.

In order to give you an idea of what I am planning to cover, I posted my NECC schedule. I will also be covering a few of the sessions as an eSchool News Conference correspondent - a new experience for me. Please look me up if you are attending the same session!

One of my goals at the conference is to find other teachers from around the world willing to participate in online collaborative literature exchanges in the coming academic year. I will be teaching English to grades 7 and 9 next year. In particular, I want to do at least one project from issues and topics related to the book by Jeanette Walls, The Glass Castle. Our school has chosen it as our “LCC Reads” book choice of the year for 2006-07 and all staff and students will be reading it. If you are interested in participating with your class, please let me know. I have a moodle set up for students’ discussion and participation.

Hope to meet a lot of you at the conference!

It’s been a busy week! On top of my regular teaching responsibilities I have been spending a lot of time fielding emails from around the world, engaging in audio meetings with teachers in Israel and trying to keep on top of the blogs and forums where the students have been very active.

So here’s the update. On Saturday, I spent several hours in two meetings with two sets of teachers from Israel. It was a pedagogically intense afternoon. In my first meeting, Nelly Deutsch, from Rabin High School in Israel, and I made contact for the first time and had a wonderful conversation about our shared love of using technology within our teaching practices. We decided we would use a webquest of the novel The Giver, by Lois Lowry as our collaborative project. Nelly had created this webquest for another class last year and as her Master’s thesis project. We are taking a different approach in this project than what I have done before. The students of both schools will be divided into teams to complete the webquest so it will be a real cross-cultural collaborative experience. I have taught the novel for a number of years at my previous school, so I am really happy to be using this wonderful book!

Today, the students from the class that will be participating in this project had a lively discussion on cultural rituals and identity based on the article “Nacirema” – which is an article which appeared in The American Anthropologist in 1958. It took them a while to pick up the satirical references. Fun stuff!

My second meeting on Saturday involved a meeting with the two teachers from Neveh Channah School in Israel, Leorah Addi and Reuven Werber (a very good friend from previous projects) for the other project. They needed a tutorial in the moodle environment I had created and I spent nearly two hours providing instruction for that in quite an unusual manner. We went into Talking Communities – an environment that not only allows us to have an audio conversation and instant text chat, but also has a webpage interface that permits one of the users to force a webpage into the browsers of the other users. So I was able to provide a tutorial with audio, text, and visuals! It has to be the most unique experience I have had in instruction. We are each providing two short stories from our cultures as the literature for our collaborative projects.

Today, the students from that class went into the shared forum area of the Learning Management system I had created with moodle and made their introductions. We kicked off the unit with a discussion about culture and trying to avoid superficial introductions. On Monday, the students in Israel will be going into the forum area during their lab time to make their own introductions and respond to ours.

I may have mentioned to you that a teacher from New Zealand has approached me through a mutual contact to investigate the possibility of a possible communication experience between our gr. 7 students. We are just in the initial email stages, but I hope we can meet soon for an audio meeting to create the lesson plan and goals for this project. Karen Fahy is from Cashmere School in Christchurch on the South Island. I will continue to keep you updated on progress with that situation.

For the Global Virtual Classroom Web Design Contest, we have been allowed this year to choose one of our two partners with whom we may have worked in the past or whom we have met in the “Teacher’s Lounge” in the Nicenet forum area. My two former partners from Israel and Michigan wanted to team up again, but the ages of their students are much higher than mine, so I stepped back from those partnerships. Instead, I approached a teacher of 12-13 year old students at the Kuwait English School who wanted a group who was interested in working on literature and reading as a theme/topic for the website we will create. David Kellam has agreed to be one of our partners and I am thoroughly delighted because he has had considerable experience in web design for educational purposes. The overseers of the contest will pick our third school member to the team – probably next week.

I was also approached by a school in Siberia to team up with for the contest, but I had already committed to Kuwait. We have sent several emails back and forth about our GVC experiences and Milana Zubritskaya, (from Lyceum NSTU, Novosibirsk, Russia) asked if I would permit one of her students to interview me for a website they are making about educational practices around the world, which I was happy to do. I told her to send along the website address when they have finished that project.

The grade 7 students have been very excited about their blogs on Blog Meister and it was fun this week to take some time in class to read some of the blogs from the Smart Board. I have recently heard from a teacher at another school who would like to share our class blogs with each other, so that may be happening soon.

The larger projects of GVC and the collaborative lit. projects do not get underway in a serious manner until mid-October which is great because I need some breathing space to correct my stacks of marking!!

Blended Projecting…. I love that label! Reuven Werber just created it on the fly after we had a very successful audio conference (with a webcam too - though using two different apps) to plan our next collaborative literature project between our two schools - LCC, here in Montreal, and Neveh Channah in Etzion Bloc, Israel.

Reuven has passed along some websites about blended learning to me recently. Here is a wiki dedicated to blended learning, which also points to the wikipedia article on the same. Also, Reuven passed along this article by Diane Oblinger from Educause about the future of e-learning and our need for a better definition of the concept. There are many different flavours of e-learning these days and we must be careful to choose the best approach for our learners as we go along.

We had a terrific meeting and I met both Phylis, English dept. head at N.C. and Leora, the teacher I will be collaborating with. It was great to see Reuven too. For this year’s lit project, we have decided to do short stories. The teachers have selected 3 Israel short stories, which will be translated into English - so two different subject areas will be involved as they hope they can get the Hebrew teacher to teach the stories in that course as well. I will choose a similar amount of Canadian short stories for my students. We created a timeline for the project during the meeting. Then we took a look at the moodle learning management system that I had created and played around in it to explore its features. We decided we would use it as the place the students will communicate with each other, but will take it for a test drive for the rest of the summer to make sure it is stable. It has a nifty instant messaging feature (a true plus!) plus the ability to create quizzes and even wikis.

I am quite excited about our project this year!

True confesson time - I’ve been busy not with my thesis (bad me!) and not with updating this blog, that’s for sure! No, I’ve been busy finding an alternative to the forum we used last year for the International Collab. Lit. Project. Reuven had found a new possibility, but when we tried it out, it proved to be very unsecure. I recalled hearing about moodle, open source software for course management systems.

So I downloaded it the other day, unzipped it and then tried to upload it to my server space. Right in the middle of the interminable upload, the ftp just stopped and would not work again. I spent all the next day trying everything to get those files to the server. I must have tried at least 4 other ftp utilities…. no go. My webspace provider insisted all was well on their side. When I finally got them to take me seriously, they had me do a trace route on their server…. and all was not well.

Finally my ftp worked today. Then I spent uncountable hours installing and configuring moodle. Really, it is easy if you know what you are doing. My big problem was that my upload overlooked some files and of course it messed things up a bit.

But now it’s up and working! And it looks great! See for yourself

I think it will be an ideal spot for the forum area for the next collaborative literature project - with Reuven’s approval, of course. We will have to take it for a test drive for the next few weeks and see how things go.

The great part of hanging out so much in the moodle forum as I looked for answers to my difficulties was discovering how many enthusiastic users of moodle there were - and how they were using it. Moodle was developed specifically for educationalists. What was particularly exciting for me was how many secondary school teachers had posted on their use of moodle.

With all this thought given to creating a space for students to collaborate online - who says I wasn’t investing in my thesis?