Roar into National Wildlife Week with Thinkfinity! 

Just in time for the National Wildlife Week, Verizon Thinkfinity has launched a new feature highlighting free educational resources to bring the excitement of the animal kingdom to the classroom.  

Students will love learning about animals as they turn investigator and conduct animal research in Animal Inquiry and Observation. In this resource students observe the habits and habitats of animals using webcams broadcasting from zoos and aquariums across the country.  

In all, more than a dozen educational resources including lesson plans, podcasts and student interactives available in the National Wildlife Week Feature at http://www.thinkfinity.org/National_Wildlife_Week.aspx 
 

Suggested tweets 

Visit a zoo without leaving the classroom. This & many more resources for National Wildlife Week at Thinkfinity http://bit.ly/a4DDXi 

Thinkfinity launches new feature for National Wildlife Week. http://bit.ly/a4DDXi

Susan Sparks has been a great facilitator thus far for our Creating Collaborative Teams seminar. Today our goals were focus, structure and relationships.
Focus for team meetings, team expectations and team goals.
Structure: Identifying the differences between a group and a team from the start today. Many times in schools we look at teams and groups in the same manner but the semantics are important to realize that a team follows these steps:
1. Focuses on Learning
2. Establish Norms
3. Schedules a time to Collaborate
4. Focuses on Critical Questions
5. Makes Products
6. Pursues Team Goals
7. Have Frequent Access to Relevant Information
We also had the chance to watch a collaborative team in action to see what all collaborative teams should do. There is definitely no better way to learn than seeing a great example!
Relationships: Trust is the most important aspect of every team and without it no team can move forward. To understand trust and true team function one must look at the 5 dysfunctions that teams encounter:
1. Absence of Trust
2. Fear of Conflict
3. Lack of Commitment
4. Avoidance of Accountability
5. Inattention to Results
Building trust and then working towards the other four will help any team become more collaborative. Once trust is present collaboration can be followed with these seven norms.
1. Pausing
2. Paraphrasing
3. Putting Inquiry at the Center
4. Probing for Specificity
5. Placing Ideas on the Table
6. Paying Attention to Self and Others
7. Presuming Positive Intention
There may have been 12 points to remember but putting remembering they are tied to 3 big ideas of Focus, Structure and Relationships make the 12 more doable. A definite framework for collaborative teams has been laid and day 2 looks exiting.

Tyler Krehbiel – Technology Coordinator; SW/WC Service Cooperative team shared a number of great resources that are available online for free.  Let the kids figure out the tech–you can focus on the teaching.  But where to find opensource software?  Beyond the usual search engines, or his excellent suggestions below, try osalt.com, sourceforge.net, or codeplex.com.

• Audacity–excellent and easy to use sound recorder and editor
• Scribus–great desktop publishing application
• OpenOffice.org–features basic suite of applications for word processing, presentations, spreadsheets, graphics, and database
• GIMP–basic replacement for image editing programs (like Photoshop)
• InkScape–vector imaging program, great for making logos, uses mathematical equations to generate images

Network administrators and computer teachers might especially be interested in the following:

• FOG–a free computer cloning solution (requires a separate server or virtual machine to set up) 
• Google Docs–collaborative, available anywhere
• Apache Web Server–runs more than half of the websites in the world
• MailArchiva–mail archiving system supports most email servers (including Exchange)
• Spiceworks–features for IT management like helpdesk, inventory, monitoring, etc.  will create tickets from email uses a web interface

And a few other treats:

• Firefox–web browser
• Thunderbird–email client
• Evernote–remember everything
• Chrome–Google’s web browser
• GnuCash–accounting software

Jen Hegna from Byron School District (MN) gave a great overview at the SW/WC Tech Conference today of what Google Apps can provide to students and schools–you can view her presentation here.  Implementing in January 2010, they started with staff first and will roll out to students in May.  Some reasons they moved to Apps were:

• Server problems–$$$! And too much time supporting persistent issues, need for offsite backup, etc.
• Centralized control and administration of content–can determine access levels by groups
• Security–uses TLS/SSL (works with newer mobiles), spam and virus protection, data storage redundancy
• Infrastructure–supports open industry standards, 99,9% uptime, great tech support 24/7
• Focus on innovation–constantly developing new tools accessible from any computer, including mobiles
• Enhanced productivity!  Shared calendar for substitutes, computer labs, meetings, etc.  Forms can provide a helpdesk ticketing system, and Talk will email a transcript of your chat convo to you.
• Increase morale!

Other considerations:  They did need to increase their bandwidth to support this.  Apps open by domain–so will there be a separate domain for students and teachers?  If you decide to Google App, do your homework–assemble your team–develop a timeline–get training and support.

A colleague shared this information with me and I can’t help but pass it on to you. Lewis and Clark Were Here is the title of an expedition by Maureen Oliver and Tony Fernandez in which they will be following the Lewis and Clark trail from the Pacific Northwest to St. Louis. They anticipate that their foot journey slated to begin in May will be completed in November. Thus I would estimate the South Dakota Portion of their trek to be in the fall. They will be documenting their trip with video, via facebook, their website (linked above) and twitter.  This may be a great way for students to remain engaged with learning over the summer and perhaps a great field trip for those of you close to the Missouri River. I would bet Maureen and Tony would be more than willing to chat with students for a little while about their expedition and the similarities and differences between them and the Lewis and Clark expedition.

Do you feel connected to the students you work with, your teenagers or any millennial that you come in contact with? The Pew Research Center has developed a How Millennial Are You quiz, the 14 question quiz is simple but quickly shows you a difference in generations. Looking at the questions parallels how the world is flat and how technology invades the lives of millennials. Take two minutes, check it out and see how your millennial results compare to your coworkers, students and teenagers!

• Educational Leadership:Multiple Measures:Teaching with Interactive Whiteboards

  tags: digitalwhiteboard, Marzano, studentachievement

  • Using interactive whiteboards was associated with a 16 percentile point gain in student achievement.

  • statistically significant relationship with student achievement.

    • The first is the learner-response device

    • the second feature is the use of graphics and other visuals to represent information

    • and the third feature is the interactive whiteboard reinforcer—applications that teachers can use to signal that an answer is correct or to present information in an unusual context

  • Teachers should think through how they intend to organize information

    • Digital flipcharts should contain visuals, but those visuals should clearly focus on the important information.

    • Teachers should discuss the correct answer along with the incorrect answers, making sure to elicit opinions from as many students as possible.

  • Interactive whiteboards have great potential as a tool to enhance pedagogical practices in the classroom and ultimately improve student achievement. However, simply assuming that using this or any other technological tool can automatically enhance student achievement would be a mistake. As is the case with all powerful tools, teachers must use interactive whiteboards thoughtfully, in accordance with what we know about good classroom practice.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Our director gave a speech recently that reminded me of one critical quality today’s learners appear to be missing that the learners of not so long ago mostly shared–a willingness to jump through the hoops. 

When I was in school, and even while I was teaching, most students had figured out that to succeed you would have to sit through some boring lectures, fill out some mundane worksheets, color in the countries on the blank geography map, etc.  A few rebellious ones would refuse or check out or eventually drop out, but most of us just took it as the only way to graduate and get a decent job.

Today’s kids have access to a plethora of information and spend most of their time engaged–whether through video games or online activities or through after school sports or dance or music.  All of this meaningful, connected activity translates into less willingness to put up with non-engaging classroom activities.  And as a colleague pointed out, they’re not refusing out of spite, or to be disrepectful, or even to rebel…they just don’t see why they should, and they are more likely to ask the age old question, “Why do we have to do this?” 

If we don’t have a solid reason that will result in deeper understanding for learners, maybe the new answer is “You shouldn’t.  Let’s do something else.”  This blog entry from Glenn Wiebe sums it up.  As educators, let’s do everything we can to prevent the twinge he feels from happening to other parents…or from becoming a long term heartache.

While reading another blog this morning I came across a great post from a teacher who is using Wikipedia in the classroom. Oh no we may say, “Wikipedia isn’t a reliable source “and trust me I was that teacher especially after some students told me that Greek Orthodoxy was based off the ancient Greek gods at least according to Wikipedia. But the assignment I found is a great source of comparing sources and can be a first step into a research paper.

Mr. Byrne’s students were asked to compare a Wikipedia articles to three different topics discussed in their textbook, The Sand Creek Massacre, The Battle of Little Big Horn and The Fort Laramie Treaties. Then they were to find primary resources to go along with the articles. For a full briefing of what Mr. Byrne was having his students complete check out his blog complete with the outline he used for his class and encourages others to use.

This is a great assignment because Mr. Byrne moves his students from the Knowledge and Comprehension of the revised Bloom’s Taxonomy Model and pushes them to Analysis and Synthesis. Truly a 21st century lesson.

If you haven’t been to www.thinkfinity.org recently, you might want to check out one of its content partner sites. ReadWriteThink has gone through a site redesign and I think you will love it. If you search the lessons, you will notice a new little feature where you can now select the state standards for that lesson!! So now each lesson in ReadWriteThink can be quickly aligned to SD Standards. They have a lot of other new features as well, so please visit the website and check it out. I would love to hear your comments about the features you find exciting and useful. Please comment.