Footprints in the Digital Realm: A journey of becoming a 21st century teacher

MassCue Session 7 – 2:00 – 2:50
Footprints in the Digital Realm: A journey of becoming a 21st century teacher
Fred Haas, English Teacher, Hopkinton HS

Blog:
haaslearning.wordpress.com
akh003@Twitter & Slideshare

21st Century Skills? Tech is ubiquitous, and this is te change. Kids have more time to spend on learning apps.
Catching up or Leading the Way - This remarkable book will forever change the debate about what's wrong and what's right with American education and where it should be going. Based on his own experience as a student in China and as a parent of children attending school in the United States, Zhao skewers conventional wisdom while setting straight the recent history and current state of US schools.

3Cs - communication, collaboration, cultural understanding - always the business of education, but today these are premium skills for global success.
Flattened social hierarchy - people more accessible.
The smartest person in the room is the room.
Adaptability
Complex does not have to be complicated. Goal is complex thinking, complex application of skills.

Expand notion of what you call a text. Graphic images - need skills to decode multiple visual formats: spreadsheets, image, data sources, graphic sources etc.

Convergence is already here delivering multiple formats > evolution

Live> print > analog > digital > media evolution
Core literacy > expanded literacy
text is anything that is "readable" - from which you can extract information

Good resources:
Confronting the challenges of participatory culture, Henry Jenkins. Seminal work on 21st century skills.

College Board AP Central - English & History

Moving at the Speed of Creativity, Wes Fryer.

Empowering Students Through Multimedia, Marco Torres.

It's not about technology as much as it is about how technology impacts the way we think.

Personal Learning Environment - bigger than a community, a range of skills, knowledge and people. Have to take the time to play with these new tools. Application of these tools is a creative enterprise. You control the speed - go slow, go fast, just GO!

Big Tools:

• RSS feed - required (really simple syndication) (1999)
  
• Pageflakes
  
• podcast - iTunes, Odeo, Podomatic (2000)
  
• Ning - Classrom 2.0, James Burke - English Companion, MIT - Project New Media Literacies, Connie Weber - Fireside Learning (small, intimate) (2004)
  
• YouTube (2005)
  
• Twitter (2006)
  

Tools: YouTube - good stuff, keeps getting better all the time.

• channels
• Michael Wesch: GREAT VIDEO The Machine is Using Us
  
• Stephen Heppell
• Google Talks
• Universities

Tools: Twitter
You can follow an event from a distance and get great information.

• real-time short messaging
• following - establishes network and value of network
  
• being followed
• 3rd party extensions

Everything is changing so fast, it is all new, we are all novices.

Age of Meta Data

FlatClassroom Project
Classrooms from around the world participating.
2 big componenet:
kids develop collaborative wiki space - inspired by Friedman and Daniel Pink's A Whole New Mind - collectively collect and edit about these topics.
Kids make video related to their topic, POV

Wiki:
FlatClassroom.org

"The thing about working on the bleeding edge is sometimes you bleed." - V. Davis

Classroom Twittering

MassCue Session 5 – 10:00 – 10:55
Classroom Twittering
Michael Purdy, Director of Technology, Hanover Public Schools
(also good resource to discuss Google Apps for Schools)

Twitter creator on Iran: "I never intended for Twitter to be useful." Jack Dorsey - The Onion (6.24.09)

25-40 year olds are most active on Twitter.

Twitter is micro-blogging (140 characters).

Lifeblogging: Is a virtual brain good for the real one?

Proof! Mobile microbloggers are boring...

Lifebloggers track their every move, every word, every document with computers to create a personalized and machine-readable memory archive. Skeptics argue that no one wants to remember this much.

Why tweet?

• instantaneous
• direct
• feels personal
• searchable
• available and flexible

Terminology / How-to:

• delete your account (it is a consumable product, can delete easily)
  
• direct message (D)
  
• @message
• Retweet (RT)
• Hashtag (#)
• URL shorteners

Block unwanted followers - porn trawlers will follow you.

Issues:

• email addresses: get a gmail acccount and use "aliases" to have more than one account to mail to
• student email - huge issue in Web 2.0 world

Hanover PS uses Twitter for:

• job postings
• each school has an account for easy notification of parents who follow the school

(note to self: set up Twitter acct for library)

Teacher as Professional Learner

• self-reflection on teaching process
• member of prof learning community

General Education

• student poses question regarding class
  
• students consult one another about homework or other issues (student experts)
• create a review space for quizzes, tests that can accumulate as students head towards midterms or finals

Precis Writing
Condense "Self-Reliance" by Ralph Waldo Emerson into 140 characters - good use of Twitter. Teaches incisive writing and thinking, main idea, key points, sentence combining.

Grammar / Vocabulary

• have students punctuate a paragraph that has punctuation removed
• have students write a sentence that properly illustrates the meaning of a vocabulary words

Literature

• students microblog as characters from within a literary work; they must reveal the motivation of character as it relates to plot
• students create online lexicon of literary terms covered in class with examples from the reading
• Twitter book club
• rewrite a play capturing its essence

Newsroom

• follow tweets of historical occurrences
• journalism classes can report on school-based news events as they happen
• journalism report events outside school

Debate

• debate assigned topics within twitter forum

Social Studies

• explain main point of great speeches
• create a study site of these speeches with interpretation
• students microblog in real time from an historical event ex the Kennedy assassination or Gettysburg, or Normandy

Science

• report science experiments

Math

• first student to solve problem
• students challenge each other
• daily math fluency

Foreign Language

• discussions in foreign language
• teach phrases
• outreach to ELL

Film/TV Study

• Students watch films/programs looking for specific instances of ex irony, symblism etc. they can tweet as the recognize occurences inwhat they watch

Sports

• tweet during sports event - reporting
• pictures can be included in tweets
• create a sports network within school

Lots of ideas!

Photo Credit:
"Meet Mr. Twitters"
Roz Chast
The New Yorker, 8.31.09
The CartoonBank

Classroom Learning 2.0 - Thanks, California!

Created by the California School Library Association, Classroom Learning 2.0 is a great resource for tutorials on 23 Web 2.0 "things".

This is a crash course on a range of things including blogs, wikis, podcasts, Flickr, RSS feeds, tagging and much more. Anyone interested in crash course should play with this site.

Thanks to Peter Badalement, Principal of Concord-Carlisle High School, for sending out the link to CCHS faculty.

Why you should tweet

This is a terrific article courtesy of ReadWriteWeb:

Evolution of a Revolution: Visualizing Millions of Iran Tweets

During the height of the political protests in Iran it was possible to follow an amazing stream of tweets, and witness history. Twitter was the main conduit for getting news and images out of the country, and for protest coordination within. Iranians outside the borders worked feverishly to unblock government filters to protect Twitter access.

Tracking the "computational history" of the event gives real insight into the evolution of social clusters, and the organic nature of these platforms. Analysis like this provide compelling evidence that digital tools like Twitter are vital for students to use and understand if they are to have a true global understanding. We need to change how we teach to include these new literacies.

Twhirling Tweets on Twitter

Twitter has been a challenge for me, but I am finally starting to see the value. Using Twhirl, I now have an open window to Twitter on my desktop, and can watch tweets from my network in real time. A few weeks ago I monitored a conference I was unable to attend, while minding the circulation desk after school.

Today there was a tweet about using wikis for open textbooks. With budgets under such pressure, the benefits and economies of social media are looking better and better. When I clicked the link and saw the list, my eyes lit up! I could also see a number of names I recognized from Twitter had also clicked and saved the list within minutes of me; Twitter makes this kind of sharing incredibly dynamic.

Open Textbooks - List | Diigo

I have a long way to go, but thanks to Twhirl I just took a leap in my understanding of Twitter, and the benefits of using it as a personal learning network. Of course, I also follow Ryan Seacrest. Can't say I have really learned anything from Ryan yet, but I am hoping he might tweet the winner of Idol before next week.

When did you join Twitter?

515 days ago. I am "following" 28 people, and am "followed" by 23. Let me point out that the Dalai Lama is one of my followers - yeah, that's right. The Dalai Lama! Of course, he follows everyone.

When did you join Twitter is a little app that, as far as I am concerned, has exactly two purposes.

1. To validate you as a success in social media.
2. To highlight your - um, deficits in utilizing social media.

I am feeling my deficits. EVERYONE seems to be twittering and tweeting except me. People in the field of school librarianship (talking about the big conference presenting Kahunas, here) rave about it, and wax on about how it feeds their professional growth. I'm working at it. Maybe I have to work harder.

Tell you what. I'll follow you if you'll follow me.