Shutters Unshuttered

I wanted to let you know about a fantastic opportunity coming up next week.  The Global Education Conference is a free, online event that goes from Monday 11/14 through Friday 11/18.  It is NOT a technology conference, rather a place where educators from around the world present ideas to one another in an online format.  The goal of the conference is to present ideas about cultural awareness and global education.  Here is a quote from their press release:

The Global Education Conference is a collaborative, world-wide community initiative involving students, educators, and organizations at all levels. It is designed to significantly increase opportunities for building education-related connections around the globe while supporting cultural awareness and recognition of diversity.  The conference seeks to present ideas, examples, and projects related to connecting educators and classrooms with a strong emphasis on promoting global awareness, fostering global competency, and inspiring action towards solving real–world problems.  Through this event, it is our hope that attendees will challenge themselves and others to become more active citizens of the world. Let us learn, question, create, and engage in meaningful, authentic opportunities within a global context!

The main page for the conference is here.  To participate, all you have to do is click Sign Up and provide an email address.  If you think you might attend a session or two, try to sign up beforehand.  It’s also a good idea to test out your computer.  You can do that by clicking here.  I am more than willing to help you get started and/or troubleshoot any issues you may have when connecting to a session.

Keynote speakers include Howard Gardner, Chris Dede, Robert Fogarty, Ewan McIntosh, Fernando Reimers, Alan November, and several others.  Here’s a list of the keynote speakers.

In addition to the keynotes, there are hundreds of other sessions to choose from.  You can see the complete list of presentations here.  Click on individual presentations to see descriptions.  During the conference, links to live sessions will also be on this page.  Since the sheer amount of sessions might be overwhelming, you can also follow just one strand (such as the Teacher or Curriculum strand).  There’s even a strand for students!

Sessions go all week, almost 24 hours a day – since presenters are all over the world – but they will also be archived for future listening.  Listening live includes the option for participating in Q&A sessions, however.  I listened to several sessions last year and had no problems hearing the speakers despite our poor internet connection.  If you want to listen to a session at school, I am happy to get you set up – I even have headphones you can borrow!

I know we are all super busy, but if you can listen in on just 1-2 sessions (perhaps while you’re grading papers during a free period? during lunch? after school?), I think it would be very worth it.  In fact, if you don’t do anything else I suggest this school year, I ask that you check out this conference – it’s that good!

In case you don’t work with me, or otherwise didn’t know, my school is moving to a new building in about one month! In the new building, we will have lots of updated technology and space to grow. Yesterday I took a break from discussing wiring, servers, and projectors with my administrators and instead started talking about furniture. I was asked to come up with a layout and furniture suggestions for the computer lab in the new building ASAP. Since I have been using Google Sketchup quite often lately, I thought it would be fun to create a model of the future computer lab. Since I had 14 kids in our existing computer lab yesterday afternoon for computer club (grades 1-4), I thought it would also be fun to ask them to help me with some ideas. Here’s what they came up with:

All but one of the club kids had never used Sketchup before. The models pictured above were made in about 35 minutes, with very little instruction on the program. To get them started, I created an outline with the correct dimensions of the room, and orbited around to a birds-eye view. This allowed the students to work in somewhat of a 2D mode at first:

I saved a copy of my template in a group folder that everyone could open. I gave a very quick explanation of the rectangle, circle, and line tools, and the most important tool of all: UNDO! Then we got to work. (By the way, I also gave the option of drawing their interpretation of the new computer lab using Pixie, which one student did choose to do.) All of the students quickly caught on to the way Sketchup works. For students who finished the “2D” layout early, I introduced them to the orbit, push/pull, and paint bucket tools, in that order. You can tell that some got further along than others, but all were engaged and working hard the whole time.

I am very impressed with what the computer club kids did in such a short amount of time with Sketchup. I’m also impressed and encouraged by the way they were so engaged and eager to help one another with the program. I am anxious to try it again someday soon!

Here is an image of the model I created of the new computer lab. This is probably the layout we will use:

For me, this took… a little longer than the 35 minutes I allowed the Lower School club kids. But it really helped me learn the program a lot better. If you’d like to download the model for yourself, you can click here. It should open in Sketchup.

How I got the images above: I zoomed, orbited, and adjusted each student’s model until it was centered on the screen and showed the best view of their work. Then I went to File –> Export –> 2D Graphic. I saved all the images to a folder and uploaded them here. You can also export Sketchup models to other 3D modeling programs, but the image export feature is useful for many reasons as well!

I recently had the privilege of attending the Google GeoTeachers Institute in Washington, DC.  I met fantastic educators from all over the US.  We learned about ways to integrate Google Maps, Google Earth, and Google Sketchup into our classrooms.  The Institute was held at the National Geographic headquarters, and in addition to checking out the great resources they offer, we took field trips to the Library of Congress and the National Archives.  At the Library of Congress, we got a behind-the-scenes look at the map and geography stacks.  We saw several historical maps, including a few drawn by George Washington and a facsimile of the Waldseemuller map from 1507!

The entire conference was very exciting, and I learned so much, I’ll have to write a few blog posts to cover it.  For this first one, I’ll share a few things I learned about Google Earth.

If all you’ve ever done on Google Earth is look up your house and fly around the globe, you’re missing out!  It offers many other features that can be used across all grade levels and subject areas.  Here are just a few:

• There is a timeline button located along the top of the screen.  If satellite imagery exists for past years in any given location (which it does for many places), you can slide the timeline to show what an area looked like in the past.  A good example of how this works: look up Sendai, Japan, and scroll back to before March, 2011. Find a neighborhood close to the shoreline. Then scroll forward again. Chilling, right? But what a great way to make a natural disaster or current event more realistic for kids.
• You can overlay any existing image or map on top of the earth in Google Earth.  Here’s a screen shot of the 1507 Waldseemuller map overlaid on the globe.
  
• To add an image overlay, you can go to the Add menu, or use this button:  .  Then you can add a photo from your own computer by clicking Browse… or copy and paste a link to an online photo.  It’s a little tricky to get maps lined up with the Google Earth interface, but use the Transparency slider to make it a little better.  Click here or here for some great tutorials on adding image overlays.  And these websites offer some great maps you can use as overlays:
• Topographic Maps
• USGS Topographic Map Overlay
• Library of Congress Map Collections (for historical maps)
• Google Lit Trips: I can’t say enough how cool these are!  And I can’t believe I didn’t know about them before this Institute!  At this site, you can download free KML files (those are files that open in Google Earth) to follow the journeys of characters from famous literature.  There are “stops” along the journeys with images and other media, discussion questions, and internet links related to different parts of the book. Click “About GLT” for more on what Google Lit Trips are, and then be sure to try out some of the files!
• You can find countless overlays, animations, and other  tools in the Google Earth Gallery.  You can also get to the gallery by clicking the “Earth Gallery” button next to Layers within Google Earth.  Try looking for topographic maps, an animation of where US Presidents are from, or a 3D version of Ancient Rome!
• One more link: another GeoTeacher’s Institute attendee’s blog post from the conference, with great screen shots and instructions.

Well, a new school year started over a month ago, and I’m only now realizing I haven’t blogged since the end of last year. Part of the reason is that I was gone for a few weeks over the summer on a trip to Niger, Africa.  I set up a computer lab and conducted training sessions for teachers from 3 schools.  It was a great experience, and I’m glad I went.  If you are interested in reading about and seeing more pictures from that trip, check out my trip blog.

I have also been busy getting ready for my school’s move to a new building later this fall.  I now know that will be over winter break in December, and there will be lots to do before then!

Some of my colleagues have asked what I’ll be up to over the summer.  For starters, I hope to increase how often I do things I should be doing throughout the year: reading, exercising, cleaning my house, flossing…  And there are some things I do every year, like run updates and maintain the network, but I won’t bore you with those details.  Here’s a list of some of the other items I will be working on, in no particular order.  Hey, now that they’re written here, I have to do them, right?

• I will continue to learn from and connect with educators and innovators around the globe by expanding my personal learning network (PLN).  I’ll read blogs, continue using Twitter, and participate in teacher networking sites like edWeb.
• In an effort to help my colleagues start or continue developing their own PLN’s, I will facilitate this 23 Things course.  Many have expressed interest already, and I’m excited to have time to help others learn how to use Web 2.0 tools!
• My school’s AUP (acceptable use policy) has been around for quite awhile, and I hope to start the process of updating it.  It will be important to include policies for kids who bring their own mobile devices to school.
• Along those same lines, I’d like to plan an internet safety parent workshop to take place sometime next year.  There are some great resources from Common Sense Media I’d like to take a closer look at.
• Teachers in grades K-4 wrote technology expectations for their students earlier this year.  I still need to mesh them together in a brilliant overall plan of what we want our kids to know and when.  I like to call this project “texpectations.”
• Posterous is one of the easiest ways to write blog posts and share photos that I think is out there; you just send an email.  My school also uses Google Docs.  I’m going to be thinking about how to harness the ease of these tools for some of the communications we regularly send out to parents and other constituents.
• My school is moving to a new building next year.  I will be looking and applying for grants that we can use to enhance the technology program.  I don’t know when I’ll be able to start setting up equipment for the move, but hopefully some parts of that process can start over the summer.
• I want to play Minecraft!  And find out what makes those middle schoolers so obsessed with it.
• I’m interested in an inexpensive student information system, and I’ve recently found out about an open source one called Novachi.  I plan to look into this system.  I also plan to look at how we might be able to use Google Apps in this area.
• Perhaps the most important thing I’ll be doing this summer is going to Africa!  I’ll be spending two weeks in early August setting up a computer lab and training teachers in Niger.  I am doing a 50-mile bike-a-thon in June to raise money for this trip.  I have a separate blog for this trip, and you can donate to the cause here if you like!

Last but not least, I plan to blog more!  So stay tuned…

Lots of exciting things were announced during Apple’s WWDC keynote address.  I was very distracted from grading my final exam and all the other work I had to do.  What do the announcements mean for educators?  Here’s a great post that answers that question, and sums up some of the announcements, by Jonathan Nalder:

http://jnxyz.posterous.com/what-does-the-new-ios5-mean-for-educators-the

Recently, we’ve been experiencing trouble with Adobe Reader on some Mac computers.  I don’t know if it’s due to the age of the computers, differences in operating systems, or something else.  When you try to open a PDF – whether downloaded from the internet or emailed to you – it opens in Adobe Reader, which then immediately crashes.  I am working on fixing the crashing part, but in the meantime, you can use Preview to open PDF documents.  Here’s a how-to:

Once the document is downloaded or somehow saved to your computer, find it in the Finder.  Most downloads go to the “Downloads” folder, which you can usually get to by clicking the blue happy face (“Finder”) and double-clicking Downloads.  You might also find the document you need to open by searching – click on the magnifying glass icon in the upper right corner of the screen.

Once you find the document, right-click on it.  What, don’t have a 2-button mouse?  Just Control-Click then! Choose “Open With,” then “Preview.”  The document should open in a perfectly functional PDF reader that won’t crash.

If you would like Preview to open all your downloaded PDF’s in the future, you can change the settings on your web browser.  On Firefox, click the “Firefox” menu at the top left of the screen, then choose “Preferences…”  Click “Applications.”  Scroll down to find “Portable Document Format.”  Click where it says “Use Adobe Reader” and choose Preview instead.  If Preview isn’t listed, click “Use Other…” and find Preview in the Applications folder.  Close the Preferences window.

You can also change the default PDF reader for your whole computer.  When you right-click (or control-click) a file and choose “Open With” (see first screen shot above), select the “Other…” option.  Find Preview in the Applications folder, and check the box that says “Always Open With…”

I’m trying to make these instructions detailed, so it seems more complicated than it is!  Let me know if you have any questions!

I have been “flipping” my math class for several weeks now.  What is a flipped class, you ask?  A flipped class simply reverses the traditional concept of lecture during class/assign problems as homework.  In a flipped classroom, content is delivered as homework, usually via online videos.  Then problems and projects are worked on during class, when students benefit from the teacher’s help and explanations.  Check out this video, from a science teacher who flips his classroom.  Or just Google “flipped classroom” and be surprised by the many, many teachers who are not only flipping their classrooms, but are also sharing their experiences via blogs, videos, and conferences.

Before flipping my Algebra 1 class, I often heard students complain that though they understood what I had said in class, they didn’t know how to start the homework problems by the time they got home.  The examples in the textbook didn’t help either.  About a year ago, I found out about the Khan Academy, a website with over 2,000 free videos explaining concepts from algebra to US history (and consequently, a big proponent of the flipped classroom concept).

While reviewing for our first semester final, I decided to pick out a few videos students could watch to help them study.  One student reported that she had watched the videos and that “that guy explains things WAY better than you do!”  It only bothered me a little, since, as I tell my students, hearing someone else explain a concept in another way is always helpful.  We all learn differently.  I think this is a valuable concept for them to learn.

The students who watched the videos in preparation for the final exam seemed to find them helpful.  So, I decided I would try flipping some of my lessons during the second semester.  On flipped days, I assign at least one Khan Academy algebra video for students to watch as homework.  Then we do problems together in class.  When students are able to listen to explanations at home, they can stop, start, and repeat areas they didn’t understand.  They can watch it in their own time, which is hopefully when they are most motivated to listen – not just when we force them to sit in a classroom.

I don’t flip my class every day.  I have simply incorporated it as one teaching method among many.  I assign video lectures from the Khan Academy about twice a week.  Other days, I suggest a video only for those who need extra help on homework.  For students who don’t have access to the videos at home for some reason, I load them onto a few iPod Touches, which kids can borrow from me during their free period.  This also helps with the problem of not having enough bandwidth to stream a video in our school building.  I use Zamzar to convert the videos.  Let me know if you’d like instructions on doing this yourself!

I thought it would be useful to keep track of my students’ quiz and test scores before and after I started flipping.  Here’s a summary of their scores:

As you can see, the average quiz/test score went up more than 10 percentage points!  It’s a very small sample size (I only have 14 students), but still – I find this very encouraging.  I don’t believe I changed anything other than the flipping.  I know any student can benefit from one-on-one attention, especially in math.  Flipping some of my lessons allows me to dole out that attention more often, and I think these results show why that’s a good thing.

Recently, students have caught on to my flipped approach and said things like, “We don’t think we should have to watch videos of things YOU should be teaching us. Isn’t that your job?”  Kids will complain about anything, I know, but this bothers me.  I’m pretty sure the kids who are saying this are the ones who don’t do much homework anyway, and who don’t watch the videos I assign.  The ones who do watch aren’t complaining.  They’re passing.

But I’d still like to answer this question.  I need to work on changing the students’ idea of what “teaching” actually IS.  Is it lecturing at them until they get it?  Is it assigning drill and kill problems?  Or is it working with them in whatever way is best for them, to facilitate their learning?  I have a long way to go with helping kids think this way (and, ahem, sometimes also administrators and parents…).

I think flipping my classroom is a start in the right direction.

I wanted to let you know about two important and exciting adventures I’ll be taking this summer.  In June, I’m doing a 50 mile Bike-A-Thon.  A few weeks later, I am going on a trip to Africa!

For about two weeks in early August, I will have the privilege of taking a trip to the country of Niger in western Africa.  I will be part of a team of six people from the Remember Niger Coalition (RNC).  The mission of RNC is to expand quality educational opportunities in Niger, which ranks as the least developed country in the world.  RNC is an organization started by my friend Kara, who I taught with in Chicago 9 years ago.  If you want to know more about the organization, check out the website.

During the August trip, we will visit some of the schools that RNC helps.  We will set up a laptop computer lab and conduct computer training sessions for teachers.  Twenty-five teachers from three different schools will receive computer training.  The lab will be the first of its kind in the region.  Many of the teachers have little to no experience with computers.

Setting up technology and training teachers is a big part of what I do for a living, so I’m really looking forward to joining Kara and the team on this trip.  I am passionate about bringing quality, “21st Century” learning tools and skills to teachers and students everywhere.  Granted, I am used to doing this in English, and the training sessions will be conducted in French (the language spoken in Niger), but luckily three of the team members speak French.  Having a more global view is something else I’m passionate about, and I’m sure the Nigerien teachers will be teaching me just as much as I teach them – perhaps starting with some French!  You can read more about the computer lab project here.

In order for the trip to be a success, my team needs your help!  We are conducting a 50-mile Bike-A-Thon on June 25.  As a team, our goal is to raise $20,000 to provide the computers and teacher training, as well as software, French keyboards, mice, electricity, and volunteer assistance.

Since the team going to Niger is spread out across the Midwest, the Bike-A-Thon will be a multi-state event, with rides taking place in Michigan, Illinois, Wisconsin, and Minnesota, all on the same day: June 25.  I am excited to be in charge of the Illinois ride.  It seems I’ve recruited my husband to go along, but we would love more company.  If you are interested in riding along and helping us find sponsors for this great cause, please let me know.  For me, it will be the longest ride I’ve ever done – just as traveling to Africa will be the longest trip I’ve ever taken.

If you aren’t able to ride in the Bike-A-Thon with us, would you consider sponsoring me?  If you would like to make a credit card donation, you can go to http://www.rememberniger.net/bikeathon.html.  All donations are tax deductible.  I’m happy to provide more details if you need them – just let me know!

Last but not least, please check out our group blog.  This is where the team and I will be sharing about both of these summer adventures.  We will use the blog to share our updates and news leading to the day of the big bike ride.  In August, we will use the blog to share about our time in Niger.

Thank you for supporting my summer adventures, and for helping me help these schools that need it so much!

- Beth