Oregon Educational Technology Standards

One thing that I noticed right away when I was looking at the new Oregon Diploma: 2012 Essential Skills, is that many of the items (1-5, 7-9) could actually incorporate the technological aspect (#6), as well. If you look at it this way, then meeting this vast array of technology standards seems considerably more doable. We must find ways to integrate technology into more activities at the various grade levels. I am exploring technological applications from a wide scope: Middle school English, Social Studies, & Theater, as well as elementary grades 3-6.

1. Communication & Collaboration/Creativity & Innovation: Students at the middle school level studying population trends might work collaboratively to create graphs based on the population trends for specific countries/continents. They could then compare the graphs and make predictions about the challenges that each of these countries might face in the coming years.

2. Research & Information Fluency: We are so lucky to live in a time when such a wide variety of information is right at our fingertips (my husband has actually become a bit of an information junkie-clicking on link after link of Wikipedia connections.) It would be exciting the have students write research papers about obscure topics. Have them pick from a list of topics that would be difficult to find information on in a typical library (the New Zealand endangered bird the Takahe.) In this way you could teach them methods for web research while also hitting the middle school research paper head on.

3. Students could also use one of the various Web 2.0 recording tools to make videos of themselves giving speeches or reciting monologues. Speeches could be written about relevant issues and then e-mailed to state congress-people ... thus incorporating civic and community engagement.

In my observations I have noticed that some students actually take the initiative for themselves to incorporate their knowledge of technology into projects and assignments. As long as we are open and not closed to the idea of technology in the classroom, these standards will probably be easier to meet than we think.

Oregon Writing Project - Workshop

Yesterday I attended a fantastic workshop at the Willamette University School of Education! The workshop was called "Old Dogs, New Tricks" and highlighted some new and interesting, as well as best practice methods for teaching writing to a variety of students. Some of the ideas highlighted included:

-using interesting visual or textual writing prompts to get your students excited about language
-the importance of getting students to both understand the necessity for and the art of writing a successful summary
-encouraging students to expand their vocabulary by giving them limits in the # of words that they can use (thus enlisting them to choose their words very carefully)

Topics of discussion ranged from writing practices that would be especially applicable to ELL students to inspirational ideas that would work for most students... Not only did I learn a lot, but it was also a nice time for me, as busy as I have been, to have for my own personal enrichment... Not required, but desirable and fun. In one of the exercises that I did with Steve Jones, we wrote "cumulative sentences" or one-sentence stories (from a simple prompt "The wolf ate...") this is what I came up with:

A scraggly, tired-looking creature, (which may have once been a healthy wolf, though it was now hard to see past the patchy fur stretched over bones), sat hunched over his prey in the dusky forest clearing; he chewed with apprehension as his eyes moved frantically from his meager meal to the dark spaces between the trees that surrounded him.

I left the workshop with renewed inspiration.

DOMAINS OF LEARNING

Student Data Sheets

I thought that everything in the Google Sheets program was pretty easy and user friendly except the charting application. I'm sure that I am not alone when I say that the limited versatility of the chart and the way that it links with the data in Google Sheets was a bit disappointing.

However, I think that it is really interesting to be able to present information in this format and, obviously, as a teacher, the applications for using this type of tool are abundant. This would be excellent information for a teacher to have for looking at their own teaching methods, selected curriculum, and student engagement. "Katherine's" scores are the most vexing... though she did seem to have an upward spike at the same time as many of the other students... teachers should certainly be looking at students who have any kind of dramatic spikes in their grades, at all.

http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=pJ1iHtS3c8Lyhb92GrbIJYw&hl=en

4Shared 4 U - Multimedia Presentation

This whole experience made us a little bit crazy. I think Teresa would agree with me when I say that our work on this project went anything but smoothly.
Our work with 4Shared seemed straightforward and simple enough until we started trying to figure out how best to do a brief demonstration of this particular tool's nuances. Also, it felt like we were really only scratching the surface of its capabilities and struggled to find an educational situation where this would be EASIER than other options that are available.
That said, the most difficult part of this process was definitely the video process. Screentoaster is a really neat tool, but it's almost pointless if you can't get the audio part of it to work - which we couldn't... despite the fact that we tried approximately 4 different computers! Ugh. This is a bug that the Screentoaster people really need to work out.
We explored several options for adding audio to our existing Screentoaster videos and finally settled on a very interesting format. We used Tokbox on Teresa's laptop to record Screentoaster running on another computer monitor and then talked through the demonstration!
The upshot of this whole experience was that through all the frustration and insanity we had a really good time and laughed (several times) until tears were popping out of our eyes.