Tuesday, December 11, 2007

Jennifer Oxenford & Kathy Kraemer: Community of Interest Discussion: International Applications of Internet2 - notes


https://wiki.ties.k12.mn.us/Kathy+Kraemer
https://wiki.ties.k12.mn.us/Jennifer+Oxenford

Muse
CILC
TWICE
informs.k12.mn.us
CAPS

Before using Internet2 you should do a test.

In April there will be a back to back presentation day for MN students.
Megaconference JR on February 21st

Organizations who are offering things for muse:
International Wolf Center
Science Museum
Minnesota Zoo
Guthrie
Cleveland Museum of Art
(there are many others, these are just the ones they rattled off)

Various Authors have also done things with muse (book readings, discusssions, etc.).

Artists have also done some work with muse.

You can also host events and offer them to schools in other states too.

You usually have to make arrangements to participate in events.

Often content is recorded and made available as a streaming video.

Collaborations Around the Planet looks very promising not only for finding other classrooms to videoconference with but also a possible launching point for collaborative blogs, wikis, podcasts, videocasts, etc.

I would like to find a school in South or Central America that has Spanish speaking students who are just learning English partnering with our High School Spanish class. Each teacher could have their students interact. The instructional activity that comes to mind now is having each group give directions to the other class in the language being learned. Assessment can be done by comparing how well the other group followed the instructions. A game of 20 questions would work well for this too.

PGAP - Polycom's grant assistance program

Other possibilities at internet2.edu

TIES 2007 - Kristin Straumann: Using Scratch in the Science Classroom - notes


Kristin Straumann
Science Instructor
ACGC Public Schools

How I use ScratchScience Explanation Stories
- Naming Compounds
- Balancing Chemical Equations
- Element Stories
- Earthquakes
- Collisions

This session is basically an introduction to Scratch. A lot of time was spent demonstrating how to do simple things in Scratch. I am not blogging about it because I already have used Scratch and all this information can be fund on Kristin's presenter handout page.

One thing she showed us that I did not know was that you can download Scratch programs that are published and see how they were programmed or even edit them.

Monday, December 10, 2007

TIES 2007 - Brock Dubbels: Teaching Literacy and Composition Using Video Games, Six Traits and Collins Writing - notes


Brock Dubbels website
https://wiki.ties.k12.mn.us/Brock+Dubbels
Brock's Slideshare
Video Games as Learning Tools Ning
Video Games as Learning Tools Wiki

Started with yoga exercises. -followed complex instructions

game theory comes out of a combination of literary theory and math

use machinima to tell stories

Worksheet culture - teacher gives students a worksheet, students know they will have 15 minutes to do whatever they want because there are 4 students in the room who will do it and let them copy while the teacher surfs the web, possibly for their nest job.

Established reading Friday - one day a week devoted to reading whatever they want.
-assessment -10 pts if you bring a book, 5 pts if you read one of mine, points for other things as well
-walked around the room and discussed the books with students giving students a rating on a fluency scale (not for a grade, students know this is about identifying performance, scale could be different for different books for different students, a ph.d. could get a low score depending on what they are reading).

Comprehension can be achieved even by those with low fluency depending on their prior experience. Inversely, a high fluency student can have poor comprehension.

Many of the same literary elements are present in games that are present in literature and film.

Structural organization and format - micro level: decoding text, translating, etc macro level: genre, themes, ideas, communication

Games have storyboards

comprehension comes from making sense of the world, talking about it with others...reading is not just decoding

Games are built upon the idea of assessment because each move is evaluated.

A game offers a complexity that a novel cant.

You know playing a game that it is built so that you can win it.

Replicate
You are a virus and your job is to go into the body and replicate. To do so you have to learn about the human body.

Global Conflicts Pallestine
You are a journalist in the mideast.

"You don't understand. It's just like the Odyssey. Sonic has to find his way home just like Odysseus."

Chris Dede - Community of Interest Discussion: Role-Playing Games and Simulations in K-12 Classrooms - notes


https://wiki.ties.k12.mn.us/Chris+Dede

What if we did this without the media?

-the control in the River City experiment used a traditional lab instruction
-these paper based control curriculum, they believe, are better than average instruction
-Kids liked the technology/media complimented approach better

Are we doing kids a disservice by banning cell phones?


-At Harvard they have invested a lot of $ in making each seat tech ready with power outlets, Internet access, etc.
-Instructors are saying, "put the cell phone away, turn off the laptop"
-We are not going to integrate these things fully in the short term
-We can find activities for students to use cell phones sometimes.

How are you assessing that learning is taking place? (with the augmented reality project)

-have pre and post measures that measure the high stakes tests
-have diagnostic information from the handhelds to show what functions the kids are using
-include things like attendance records
-look for things beyond the test that show evidence of real learning

Jigsaw pedagogy - collaborative learning where each student must find and contribute a piece to the problem for the success of the entire group.

What professional development?

-smallest part is how to use the technology (kid can learn in 5 min, adult in 15 min.)
-Rivercity - 8 hours of professional development
-biggest part of 8 hours is how to have a collaborative discussion
-Rivercity already takes care of classroom management and engagement and allows teachers to dive right in to a collaborative discussion. (I suspect this is true of nearly all virtual world based instruction)

It looks like you have applied a progressive movement of education to technology. How does this stem from prior educational movements like progressive education movement?

-it stems from progressive education, Montessori, and Dewey
-technology making three things possible
1. society is valuing higher order skills that cannot be taught through traditional instruciton
2. technology helps standardize the learning process
3.

How does something like this scale?

-There are a couple things that will happen over time that will help
-we have a bad sense of first generation curriculum and assessments
-hope the next group of stakeholders takes a look at second generation curriculum and assessments
-argues with colleagues that say school is too hard to change and that we need to focus on informal learning

How do you see a students day evolving to blend the old and new?

-I would be horrified by a school that uses only immersive technologies for instruction
-I would like to see these immersive technologies three times in a course. First in the beginning and students would be lost and see the relevance of the learning. Second, midway as a diagnostic tool. Finally in the end as a summative experience.
-This is a nice blend of the old and the new.
-We must be much more nible in learning how to use web 2.0

What can we expect the web 3.0 to look like?

-unresolved contradiction between 1.0 and 2.0
-Web 1.0 gives you a way to listen to an expert at any time
-Web 2.0 is bottom up giving users the ability to tell us what they want
-Web 3.0 recognizes that both sides have merit
-building a social tagging project with students -www.edtags.org- looks like other social tagging systems - goes beyond by giving a concept map that shows how other people's tags are related- ranks users from top to bottom showing users whose tags are most like yours to those whose tags are least like yours

How might this stuff migrate down to the primary grades?

-would rather see students in the elementary schools learning the classic literacies
-we know that kids need real world sensory stimuli when kids are young - we don't want students to learn how to look up and down by having their avatar look up and down

How does ESL apply to your work with Rivercity?

My hypothesis with River city was students who were dyslexic and ESL would not do as well.
-All studies prove this wrong
-All students with these disabilities do as well because students collaborate as a team.

What about chronic behavior problems?

-We see increases in attendance.
-Teachers report that behavior issues go way down.
-Problem is kids who are engaged but not learning, kids are fooling around but not learning.

TIES 2007 Chris Dede: Immersive, Collaborative Simulations and Neomillennial Learning Styles: Implications for Education - notes


https://wiki.ties.k12.mn.us/Chris+Dede

Today's information is to vast and coming at us too fast for anyone to keep up with alone.

Rapid advances in information Technologies

Worries about whether our children are being prepared for the new information environment.

Division of Labor - which jobs are done by machines, which jobs are done by people

2 skills people are better at than machines
1. Expert Decision Making
2. Complex communication

Why teach something you can look up on Google in 15 seconds or less?

Learning Styles
-Sensory-based
-Personality-based
-Attitude-based
-Media-based

It is the media you use today that shapes your learning styles.
Some kids today do not act or learn like "digital natives" because of how they use digital media.

Juggling between digital media devices is not necessarily good or bad but it is characteristic of 21st century work.

Thinking has become distributed.

Cognition is distributed across human minds.

Showed video illustrating how necessary it is to be connected and be fluent with new communication technologies (cell phone, text messaging, IM, videoconferencing, etc).

New literacies are evolving as technology evolves.

The challenge is not to solve the problem but to understand the problem.

Multi-user Virtual Environments and wearable devices are next generation tools.

Most people see Muve's through the lens of video games.

Content in most online games are garbage.

We want to build things that are game-like because we want to harness the engagement of games.

Rivercity.

Fire is a wonderful technology because just by being near it you get a benefit from it.

Computers unfortunately you have to use to benefit from it.

The pedagogy is important.

Situated Learning - powerful in life but classrooms are removed from the real world
-can we have situated learning with muve's?

Ubiquitous Computing
-Augmented Reality
-Today no one really knows how many motors or microprocessors they own.
-Not necessarily good - Minority Report
-We now have the ability to create intelligent objects
-Handheld Augmented Reality - Alien Contact -Aliens landed outside of school and students work in teams to figure out why the aliens are there and what they should do about it. They have to work in teams to connect the information to get a clear picture.

Students are inside some sort of collaborative simulation and are using it to develop some sort of 21st century skill.

Soon cell phones will be capable of doing augmented reality.

Your students are struggling...lets give them something harder.

Neomillennial Learning Styles-Learning based on experience
-Students in the web 2.0 environment like to co-design their learning experience. They like to co-teach.
-They like to work together to construct knowledge

Unlearning is much harder than to learn

Changing adult behavior patterns is emotional - exactly the single biggest challenge in my role as technology curriculum integration specialist

media shape their messages
media shape their participants
infrastructures shape civilization

Solution to dark future is education

We need to avoid a world where an avatar world thrives while the real world rots away.