What is Truth? Determining Web Accuracy

How do you determine the accuracy of a particular website? Which sites are reliable and which ones not? Do you know how to validate the authenticity of the information on a site? If not, spend time learning this vital skill, part of digital literacy.
This is the changing face of literacy and requires us as educators to include digital literacy in our curriculum. We must be able to inform our students how to determine accuracy as they turn to the Internet to obtain information.
Karl Fisch points us toward Alan November's resource, Information Literacy, which details how to validate digital information, includes two information literacy quizzes and reveals how to determine the publisher of a site and read the URL for meaning.
These are crucial skills to teach our digital learners. Add this link to your Delicious account!

RSS 101, low tech version

How valuable is your time?
As a time saver, RSS is one tool that you must start using if you read blogs or news online or listen to podcasts. If you still are confused about RSS feeds, this video will show you what you need to know. Thanks to Lee Lefever at commoncraft.com.
This is one of those tools, like Del.icio.us, that is invaluable for educators.
(For additional info, refer to my previous post RSS for Educators: 101.)

Click To Play

There are two types of Internet users, those that use RSS and those that don't. This video is for the people who could save time using RSS, but don't know where to start.

Deconstructing Word Problems

Spent some time over at Teacher Tube and discovered this video about a "New Approach to Word Problems." Well, that was an intriguing title. Reading further, I noticed that this was a free resource which further picqued my interest. Free is always good and worth exploring!


Thinking Blocks is a creative, interactive math resource to help students understand how to solve word problems. It is designed for second through sixth graders and is a very cool math resource. The video helps to explain how it works. Then, explore the website to try it out with your students.

Many students can benefit from this type of interactive, engaging approach. Add it to your math toolbox!

Accessibility in Second Life

As numerous edubloggers have been exploring and even singing the praises of Second Life, I wonder about accessibility issues for individuals with disabilities. Then I noticed a link in Lucy Gray's blog, A Teacher's Life to the article Technology News: Consumer: Soaring Beyond Physical Challenges in Virtual Worlds.

Second Life is the most popular 3-D multi-user virtual environment (MUVE) with over 3.3 million registered avatars. How accessible is this environment for our students? The article states:

For the subpopulation with mobility and dexterity challenges, "Second Life" is a very interesting world indeed. There is a group of people in "Second Life," for example, who have experienced strokes in real life. While in their "first life" they often experience mobility challenges, in "Second Life" their avatars can fly, walk, jump and communicate via facial expressions with ease.

And, summarizes:

MUVEs as they currently exist and are experienced are a boon to two of the three main subpopulations (i.e., the hearing and mobility challenged), but they are still a bust to blind and visually impaired users.

One of the creators of SL was quoted in the article as saying they are working to make the virtual world accessible to users with visual impairments. It is a visually driven world and requires a great deal of tagging and it will take a committed effort on the part of many individuals.

It's interesting to note that ISTE has created a virtual educational environment within Second Life where professional development and networking occurs. I haven't explored it yet but I'm almost ready to take the plunge. The article didn't address learning disability issues. I may need to write about that once I feel proficient in SL.

Have you entered the virtual world of SL? Share your experiences with the rest of us.

Not my Diagnosis - Ability Awareness

Thanks to Jim Gates for this link to a wonderful movie about Tyler. He is an excellent spokesman for ability awareness. Add this to your units on understanding disabilities!

(Of course, I have to wonder what technology the educational staff makes available to Tyler to remove the obstacles to learning that may be present and help him to independently demonstrate what he knows.)

Transforming Classrooms into Global Communication Centers - Alan November's Keynote Address

This is an attempt to blog Alan's Keynote at a conference called, Teaching With New and Emerging Technologies: Frameworks, Strategies and Examples at Noble and Greenough School.

Started off posing a question about searching for specific information - Turkey's reaction to the Pope's visit there. Our traditional google search would bring up information from United States media sources. There is a grammar and syntax to the Internet. Has its own architecture for information.

Need to teach critical thinking!

Very hard to find a school or university that is teaching critical thinking. In his world, you wouldn't be able to teach with PowerPoint, SmartBoards until you learned how to teach critical thinking. We don't know, what we don't know and a study reported by the BBC showed that SmartBoard use actually led to lowered standards.

Think comprehensively.

Define the problem. Adding technology to our schools is not the problem. The problem is - Are we preparing our kids to compete that have a global work ethic? What does a global work ethic look like?

The irony, the unintended consequence of the development of the Internet is that every country now gets the Internet and can get a job without coming to the United States. The Internet is revolutionizing that you can live anywhere.

Go to the MIT Media Lab, how many Americans are there? We have a brain drain. Tells his daughter at Northeastern - get out and see the world, spend six months in London, Bangalore, Beijing. Understand the world.

Every classroom should be a global communication center.
Every day that children come to school, they have to communicate with people around the world. Overseas, this is the reality but our size and power are preventing us from seeing what we need to do.
Stressed use of SKYPE. Download Skype. Play with it. He uses it every day, avoids paying the phone company. Demos Skype.

He believes its presumptuous to have one teacher in a classroom. Model collaboration, develop your own world wide web. Invite other resources into your classrooms.

Skype is free. SmartBoards are very expensive. Put Skype in the classrooms and collaborate/communicate world wide. Record the conversation. Create Podcasts. Develop audio books read by grandmothers throughout the world. (Gave an example of a kindergarten student originally from India who was crying, missing her grandmother. Teacher used Skype to communicate with grandmother. GM read a story using Skype. Teacher recorded it and now it was always available.

If he was preparing students today for the AP history exam, he would give them the British view of the American Revolution. Kids have a great deal of difficulty understanding difference between fact and opinion.

The real revolution is not technology but information. So, you have to understand the grammar and syntax of the Internet. (160,000 facebook entries yesterday in Virginia. Our kids are going to the internet to make sense of the tragedy.)

He talked about the experience of finding British historians to engage in debate through Skype, podcast it - it's available for everyone.

Every classroom becomes a global communication system. Gave an example of reading The Great Gatsby. Find teachers in other countries who are reading it. Get their handouts. Find out the impact of that book and engage in global conversation.

No more tech - it's just a tool. It's really information and global communication. Teaching is an isolated business culturally. They just close the door. Some teachers don't even have a telephone in their classroom in this country. Have to go to a third world country to find that.

Question from audience - how do we offer individual evaluation of students? We have to got to ramp up on assessment. Every teacher should have an iPod. But will they use it? Gave an example of student's poetry recorded. Immediate review is essential. The fact that it would be on the Internet caused the student to choose to improve his work. A paper and pencil task would have slowed down the opportunity for feedback and the student probably would not have corrected/improved/edited his work.

We have to teach students to have a global voice. Do the free stuff first. Every teacher should have a blog. You get so much more from your students.

Showed Darren's Pre-cal blog. And showed the ClustR Map - they have a global audience. Kids love an audience.

Showed Delicious - the work of the individuals is for the benefit of the whole. Social bookmarking should be in every classroom for the benefit of the students. (Get rid of ranking. Can't rank. It's a disincentive for the organization to succeed.)

Question from audience about teaching common language for searching the Internet. Takes about five hours to learn how search engines really work.

He's in love with GrammarGirl - iTunes Podcast. iTunes store>podcast>education>grammargirl.

Question - How to tie in these tools to foreign language instruction? He would have students evaluate the podcasts in the languages they learn. Require students to subscribe to three different podcasts and then evaluate the quality. Another idea - get music kids love and make recordings of classroom instruction. Kids will listen. Encourage students to listen to the most popular podcasts in the subject you teach.

Gave an example of foreign language class of authentic conversation. Each student would find a partner in another country and engage in conversation three times a week for about 20 minutes using Skype. Record the conversation. Rest of class would listen and review. Teacher doesn't have time to listen to every conversation. one student a day would share their conversation. Find classroom through ePals - the yellow pages for educators. Use Skype.

Showed video from Marco Torres' students who graduated. "Digital Blueprints."

Every school should have a podcasting team. Write job descriptions for kids. Teams of kids who have the technology skills. We have underutilized our students.

Showed his blog - Seton Hall Blog. "I will never teach again without blogs." Every student has a blog - blogging is about community. Created a group feed with RSS feeds from all student blogs. So each student has read each others' blogs prior to class and left comments.
It''s remarkably dangerous to ignore the ethics of technology, teaching the ethics of technology. Too much fear in this country.

Three things we have to teach -

1. Globalization - embedded
2. Critical Thinking
3. Self-direction - global work ethic, empowered Schools are designed to disempower students. We are blocking sites in a misguided attempt to control.
   

CAST UDL Book Builder

Recently had the opportunity to play with this new free resource, Book Builder. CAST has created an online tool that allows you to create your own digital books for your students on any topic.

Welcome to the CAST Universal Design for Learning (UDL) Book Builder! Use this site to create engaging digital books that build reading skills for children, ages 3–10. Your universally designed books will engage and support diverse learners according to their individual needs, interests, and skills.

They've taken digital book creation to the next level by providing "coaches" of embedded prompts as part of the reading process. For example, Pedro prompts kids to think (such as, "make a prediction, what do you think this book is about?") Hali gives them hints (such as, "we can make predictions based upon the pictures and the title"), and Monty shares model responses (such as, "Based upon this picture, I predict...").

Way cool!

There are three models to read and I created one about Spring. You can create your own books and retrieve them from any computer. Customize them to the interests of your students. Have them create their own books about preferred topics, current curriculum units or themselves.

But wait, there's more!

Download Click,Speak through your Firefox Browser and now your students can listen to the book read to them. Click,Speak highlights each sentence as it is read. (I recommend installing better quality voices on your computer other than just Microsoft Mark, Mike or Sam as they are too robotic. You can check out and buy voices at NEXTUP.)

I got my photos from the Creative Commons section of Flickr.

AND, all of this is FREE!

(Two suggestions to CAST - 1. If possible, make this switch-accessible and 2. allow the ability to customize the size of the picture on each page.)

Empowerment

An elementary school student felt empowered this week and his excitement was contagious. Let me tell you about it.

I was asked to assess a fifth grade student with cognitive disabilities who is currently unable to read beyond a few sight words and therefore unable to write as well. In the course of our assessment, I showed him how he could type his initials and then press the space bar and his whole name would appear in Word (using the autocorrect feature). He loved it!

I then showed him how he could hear his name read outloud by clicking on the WordTalk Toolbar right in Word. The enormous smile on his face spoke volumes. He typed his initials again, and clicked the WordTalk icon again. Then he asked me to type a sentence about a preferred subject which I did. He listened to all the text several times. I showed him how to do it just once and he had control over what he listened to. That's all it took.

Then, we walked to where his teacher was working with other students in his group and he demonstrated what he learned to them. His excitement was contagious! He had never had this opportunity before and he couldn't wait to share what he could do.

This was a beginning - this student learned that although he is essentially a non-reader and non-writer, there are tools that will help him to overcome those difficulties and empower him in ways that his teachers did not realize was possible. The power of voice through text-to-speech combined with assistive technology software will remove the obstacles to learning that this student has encountered up until now. And because every word is highlighted as it is read and because he likes to hear the sentences repeatedly, it will be interesting to see what effect this has on increasing his sight word vocabulary.

Empowering students. Seeing the outcomes. Sharing the excitement. Isn't this what teaching is all about?

So, who have you empowered this week?

RSS for Educators:101

New to RSS? Still confused about what it is? I don't like to reinvent the wheel, so when I come across great information that must be shared, I have to share it. Why should you care about RSS? It allows you to subscribe to information and connect to the link only when new information is posted. This saves a great deal of time as the updates come to you through your RSS aggregator. You don't have to search out every website yourself.

Here are some great resources to help you understand how Really Simple Syndication works for you as an educator.

It Really Is Really Simple: RSS for Educators posted by Mark Wagner on the Infinite Thinking Machine blog sponsored by Google.

RSS: A Quick Guide for Educators by Will Richardson. This is an eleven page pdf document that explains all you will need to know about RSS.

Makes my life much easier. And you will be amazed how really simple it is!

Are You Evolving?

It's incredibly difficult for me to (want to) remember life pre-Web2.0. Life was stagnant, static, passionless. Web 2.0 has changed everything for me as a educator. How can we ever go back to our old methods? Now, life is enriched, dynamic, passionate, evolving, collaborative.

Watch this example of all that is good about social networking. This resource will challenge you. Thanks to Wes Fryer for mentioning the video from the Jordan School District Technology Curriculum Specialists from Sandy, UTAH. These are their words:

Since most of today's students can appropriately be labeled as "Digital Learners", why do so many teachers refuse to enter the digital age with their teaching practices?

This presentation was created in an effort to motivate teachers to more effectively use technology in their teaching.

Please see http://t4.jordandistrict.org/payatten... to learn how you can become a better teacher.

And this is their video:

Tech Advocacy

There is a segment of our student population that is too frequently overlooked when it comes to the use of assistive and educational technology. That segment is our students with cognitive disabilities.

That's my experience. Is it yours as well?

Why are these kids denied the opportunity to access these tools which can support their learning styles and promote success? I challenge you to think outside the box, today, and learn more about possible solutions.

There are so many excellent options that are typically never considered. Start with STAGES Assessment Software to determine what stage of cognitive development they are at. Then explore.

Clicker 5. Cloze Pro. IntelliTools Classroom Suite. Balanced Literacy. Start-to-Finish Books. Writing with Symbols. PixWriter. Text-to-speech in any program to accommodate for reading issues. The use of the microphone to input ideas and accommodate for written language issues, including the mechanics of writing. The autosummarize feature in Word to provide cognitive rescaling.

Teach yourself something new today. Your students will thank you for it.

Political Office

I took a short break from blogging in an attempt to win a local election. The timing seemed right to run for school committee to effect change in my town. (Check out my campaign statement and bio here if you are so inclined.)

The election was yesterday and unfortunately, I wasn't elected. My slogans were, "An Educator for Education, " and "Preparing our Students for THEIR World."

I don't really want to say much about the election other than it really is disappointing to believe that you are the most qualified candidate and to still lose. (Some of my own insecurities resurfaced but I quickly dealt with them.) I tried to stay away from my friends, because, really, what do you say to someone who loses an election?

Nevertheless, my passion for academic success for ALL learners remains as strong as ever. My passion for innovation, creativity and a commitment to asking questions and challenging assumptions remains as well. It was my hope to impact change in my town but it wasn't meant to be this year.

I will stay on the sidelines and share my expertise as situations arise.

Many people have encouraged me to run again next year. Who knows? There's plenty of time to make that decision. I think I'll sleep on it.... for a few months!