Annual Conference October 14

We hope you will all join us at the 21st annual NJAET Conference! Details are at www.njaet.org

21st NJAET Annual Conference
21 Years of Growing Up Digitally
Tuesday, October 14, 2008
Georgian Court University, Lakewood, NJ

Earn 5 Hours of Professional Development

There will be lots of great sessions and colleagues to meet - anew and again. You can register online today.

Extreme Classroom Makeover… Updating your Class for 21st Century.

The June/July issue of Learning & Leading with Technology had a fabulous article on ways you can give your classroom an extreme makeover. Here are some ideas from this article:

Utilize some collaborative writing tools for group projects. Such tools available are:
Zoho: http://www.zoho.com
Google Docs: http://docs.google.com
Whiteboard: http://www.whiteboard.com
Gliffy: http://www.gliffy.com
Letterpop: http://www.letterpop.com

Blogs can be used for reflective journals, student portfolios, integrated units and newsletters, for just a start. Here are some great blog tools:
WordPress: http://www.wordpress.com
21 Publish: http://www.21publish.com
Blogger: http://www.blogger.com
Edublogs: http://www.edublogs.org
Gaggle: http://www.gaggle.net
Think: http://www.think.com

There are many social bookmarking sites that could be used to simply list content resources. If you don’t have a place to store your favorite websites, utilizing any of these tools could be your solution:
Del.icio.us: http://del.icio.us
Diigo: http://www.diigocom
Ma.gnolia: http://www.ma.gnolia.com
Backflip: http://www.backflip.com
BlinkList: http://www.blinklist.com

Your classroom should be filled with the use of visuals, to include photos and pictures. Some of the tools below can be used to store photos taken in the classroom or for activities and even be used for story starters:
Fliction: http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/flicktion/
Creative Commons: http://www.fickr.com/creativecommons/
Third-party Flickr: http://www.quickonlinetips.com/archives/2005/03/great-flickr-tools-collection/

Want to build some reference resources? Some of these tools might be useful to you:
PBWiki: http://www.pbwiki.com
WikiSpaces: http://www.wikispaces.com
WetPaint: http://www.wetpaint.com

Yugma - Free Screen Sharing from anywhere

I've experimented with a web-based screen sharing option - http://www.yugma.com/ - with an account (free for now!), I can choose to let anyone on the web view my desktop. I can also give another person control over my desktop. This could be a powerful way to do training - to let someone else watch while you use a piece of software that they need to learn. Since your full screen is shared, they can watch you using any software program including custom databases or internal systems. They also don't need to install the software on their computer. I remember when labs did screen sharing with hardware connections. I think this could revolutionize how we do training and demos.

Overcoming the Fears of YouTube in the Classroom

Often times you'll see items in the news about the inappropriate videos posted on YouTube. One such example recently has been the numerous postings of fights between teenage girls. The immediate reaction is to ban students from YouTube. So how do you balance the positives/negatives of YouTube? As one presenter stated, at a recent conference I attended, (which really added clarity to my thinking) was we don't ban students from using paper and pencil if they use it to write a nasty note or derogatory comment. So why do we immediately place all of these restrictions on sites such as YouTube? Of course, a note doesn't go out to the internet for the world to see. However, if there are positives that can come from YouTube, why simply eliminate its use entirely?

One solution that has worked well is to embed specific YouTube videos directly into a web page or if you're using a Moodle directly into a Moodle page. By doing so you get all the benefits of YouTube and reducing the chances of students going to other inappropriate videos. This also eliminates all of the additional items listed on a YouTube page. All the students see is the video that you want them to see. Thereby, you eliminate the risk.

So before you simply dismiss the power of such sites as YouTube look at what benefits may be derived from utilizing videos to supplement your teaching. In one recent training I gave on the Moodle, a 5th grade math teachers was thrilled at finding videos on YouTube that explained math concepts that she was teaching her students. She now could add these videos to her Moodle and allow students to view them at any time to review concepts. By doing so, she is able to extend her teaching beyond the classroom!

Set to Screen Series!

Here is an opportunity for your high school and college students to learn about moviemaking from a pro. Baz Luhrmann, Oscar-nominated director of Moulin Rouge!, and William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet is producing another movie, Australia. Baz and Apple have teamed up to take your students on an adventure through the Set to Screen Series (http://www.apple.com/education/settoscreen/).

Every few weeks through October, a new podcast episode from Baz and his production team will introduce another aspect of moviemaking, starting with on-set still photography, then moving on to costume design, cinematography, scoring, and more. You’ll get insights from the artists at work on Australia, watch them in action, view footage the rest of the world hasn’t seen yet, and follow along as the movie comes together.

Five of the episodes arrive with something extra: a creative challenge for you. Each time one of these episodes is released, you’ll have three weeks to complete the challenge and post it to the Apple Student Gallery. If your project is one of the best (10 from high schoolers and 10 from college students), you’ll win an iPod shuffle, iPod nano, iPod touch, or a MacBook Pro. And if your work is chosen as the most creative of all, you’ll be going on yet another kind of adventure—a trip for two to Australia. Five challenges mean you’ve got five chances to win. Oh, and one more thing. Submit the top project for the final challenge, and Baz himself will plan your trip to Oz, meet you there, and take you along on the promotional tour for the film in the U.S. Your project will even be included on the DVD release of Australia.

If you subscribe to the Set to Screen Series, iTunes will automatically download each new episode that’s posted. Once you’ve watched an episode, come back to the website (above) check out the notes about the featured member of the production team, and—if there’s a challenge for that episode—get all the details you’ll need to participate.

So start exploring your creativity. You could wind up anywhere, even Down Under.

YouTube, TeacherTube, SchoolTube

A recent Washington Post article touted the value of using video-sharing sites in the classroom. Sounds simple: use some of the many free video-sharing sites that are on the internet today! But, it’s not so simple.

We definitely know one thing: video in the classroom has certainly evolved over the years! More teachers are using online video-sharing sites like YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/) to engage with students. And video is no longer a one-way channel of communication, either! Students are participating in the creation of videos, too, as they should! On TeacherTube (http://www.teachertube.com/), educators share material, such as instructional math videos, with classrooms around the world. Another site, SchoolTube (http://www.schooltube.com/), mainly hosts videos produced by students in class with the help of their teachers.

Many teachers who do use these sites often say that they value the opportunity to see what other educators are doing! It also gives students a great outlet to showcase their work! But while video-sharing sites can help capture students' attention, critics say such services will have difficulty gaining wide support from school administrators who often block access to Internet sites like YouTube. Much of the material on these sites isn't tied to curriculum or designed with educational standards in mind, and the videos vary widely in quality. In addition, teachers need to weed through clips to make sure they are relevant for class - a potentially time-consuming process.
These sites certainly do create potential controversies among teachers, administrators and parents concerning the use of these video-sharing sites. And to that end, hoping to make its site more user-friendly, TeacherTube is rolling out a pilot program called TeacherTube Onsite (http://www.teachertube.com/onsitepromo.php) that will give school districts software to manage videos on their own intranets.SchoolTube is planning a similar service that will enable teachers to design public web pages on SchoolTube's site, making it easier for schools to share videos, photos and documents.

So, what do you think? Do you use any video-sharing sites with your students in the classroom? If so, please share your ideas with us…

iTunes U for K-12

While Apple's iTunes U has a decidedly higher-ed slant, a number of participating universities provide content and other resources geared toward K-12 educators and students, including the New Jersey Institute of Technology and Arizona State University.
The "Beyond Campus" portion of iTunes U (bottom right on the main page) also provides free learning materials and research for K-12 from organizations like American Public Media, PBS, the Smithsonian Institution, and others.

http://www.apple.com/education/itunesu_mobilelearning/itunesu.html

http://deimos3.apple.com/indigo/main/main.html?v0=WWW-AMUS-ITUNESU070521-N48LX