One of the most powerful classroom activities I have recently rediscovered is the jigsaw. Here is an example of where technology can make something better than it was in the past. As my students are able to view each others' work -- in progress -- the overall quality of the final product (as a sum of the individual parts) inevitably increases.

For example, I recently had my Modern World History students redesign an old PowerPoint (link to assignment) I made using VoiceThread as the collaboration tool. Here's what the old PowerPoint presentation looked like:



Using the "Lessig Method" of design (minimal text, symbolic images), students were responsible for redesigning a portion of the PPT (PowerPoint), and then annotating (either with speech balloons or their actual voices) the new slides with the words used by the speaker. Although my students were frustrated with the lack of design control in VoiceThread, I believe the project was an overall success. My students better absorbed the content, but also learned how to clearly communicate in the visual realm. Here's what the revised presentation looks like, collaboratively designed by 26 sophomores:


In the future, I would have the students first design their slides using Google Presentations, then upload the completed PPT into VoiceThread for annotation purposes. Having now used both tools, my students preferred the design flexibility of the former.

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We have all seen cartograms in the past: the last election showed us the true voting power of each state relative to its respective electoral college representation.

But the web has opened access to even more of these distorted maps, as more and more reliable statistics have informed their creations. Take for example the cartogram of nuclear power plants in the USA (click on the "Resize" arrow above).

There are so many other choices from around the world and more are added on a regular basis. From the poignant ("Iraq War Deaths") to the absurd ("Bigfoot Sightings"), each cartogram can be shared as an animation (see above) or a static image (see right). All of the featured maps are taken from SHOW: A New Way to Look at the World.

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danah boyd (yes, there are legally no caps in her name), social media researcher, is coming to speak to parents and the rest of the community at Wilmette Junior High School on Wednesday, October 7th at 7pm. See http://fan-ntts.ntnow.org/

I've used her work in my own teaching and as a way to engage students at the intersection of their lives and course content. For example, in my Integrated Psychology/Sociology course, we embarked upon an entire unit focused around social class in America. Reading about boyd's research on class differences between MySpace and Facebook users proved to be a fascinating way to start the often difficult conversation.

Inspired by this, my students, who were also tasked with learning the required but rather dry social science research terminology, accomplished this by designing their own Facebook research project. Students "played the whole game" by choosing random/representative samples, and discussing the generalizability of their findings.

Finally, my Modern World History students are bucking what boyd identified as the teen trend of avoiding Twitter by experimenting with this social media application each and every Friday of class. We'll see if the students can translate this tool from a purely social/community-building application to something more research-based.

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Image by In Veritas Lux via Flickr

This summer, spending more time at home with my teenage daughter, I had to confront my ambivalence about how we use cell phones in our society. On the one hand, I've been intrigued by the possibility of liberating the cell phone in the classroom, which would entail a fundamental shift in how many of us teach students -- a switch from a teacher-centered classroom to a project-based learning (PBL) environment. Here are some possibilities others are exploring:

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Mixing things up at NECC, I decided to attend the presentation of two research papers regarding technology integration. Although the schools described below differ significantly from New Trier (eg., mandating attendance), I still wonder what lessons our institution can take from these successful programs?

Evaluating a K-12 Technology Integration program: IMPACTing Students and Teachers
The IMPACT model includes tech integration, professional development, and "differentiated support" for teachers.

• Professional development had to be exciting, dynamic, "differentiated", and not structured as a "sit-n-get". It also needed to be up front, meaning that it would be provided during the summer. This North Carolina school district trained 215 during the summer.
  
• Vanguard Team: a reliance on teacher-leaders who could help out during the regular school year
• "Naysayers" buy-in: these teachers, often respected but reluctant to use technology, were given advance training so that they could legitimize the program for their respective departments.
• Strong Leadership: all administrators attended a 3-day workshop on how to lead people in a movement for change
• Clear expectations: the technology in the classroom WILL be used, even if it was for 5 minutes a day in order to build confidence.
• A conversation between teachers and administrators regarding what student engagement looks like?
  

The Effectiveness of Technology Integration Professional Development: A Meta-Analysis

Lawless and Pelligrino (2007) reviewed the literature on how effective technology staff development has been, and this paper focused on doing a meta-analysis of these studies. Unfortunately, the number of studies studied ended up at 10 total. And the presenter had little to share in terms of a definitive conclusion. A bit of a waste of time, though I learned what "effect size" means for statisticians.

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While attending NECC, it's easy to be overwhelmed by all of the vendors trying to sell you their latest wares. Last night, I wandered aimlessly through the din of this corporate carnival.

That's what so refreshing about the World Digital Library (WDL), relatively new site, sponsored by both the Library of Congress and UNESCO, and various private contributors. The WDL is a collection of primary sources, curated by professional scholars and translated into six languages (Arabic, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Russian, Chinese), which might be perfect for the cultural units of foreign language teachers. You can browse these items by place, time, topic, type of item (books, journals, manuscripts, maps, motion pictures, photos, sounds), or hosting institution.

Though currently there are no prepackaged teacher resources as you might see at the Library of Congress, the website curators instead want to establish a social network for educators to create and share lesson plans across the globe. Lastly, all of the resources are freely downloadable in high resolution formats to allow for closer analysis.

Related articles by Zemanta

• World Digital Library to launch (guardian.co.uk)
• UN puts global treasures online (news.bbc.co.uk)

Image via Wikipedia

Malcolm Gladwell, author of such books as The Tipping Point, Blink, and, most recently, Outliers, gave the keynote speech at the opening of NECC (National Education Computing Conference). I always enjoy these speakers because they don't tout the latest tools we all hear so much about already.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Book Review: Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell (basilandspice.com)
• Spotlight (brilliantmagazine.com)

Recently, it seems that quite a few teachers want to have their students use popular music for class assignments. In the past, students would create a "mixtape" on an analog cassette (back in the day) or, more recently, they would burn a CD of songs, which would leave the teacher with a stack of media that might never be used again. What a waste.

More recently, the challenge that teachers and tech staff encounter is that either students want to take tracks from their iPods or CDs and put them on the Web. Obviously, this is fraught with all kinds of technological and copyright-related issues. Well, here's a possible solution, as described in depth by Wired magazine.

MixTape.me is a website that acts like an online version of iTunes, without the need to purchase anything. Students (and teachers) can search for many popular songs and then create their own playlist(s) to share with others. Below is an example, which I was able to create and embed in this blog in under 5 minutes. Think then of the possibilities: students could create a custom playlist and then add their own comments, as well as pictures to the "jukebox". HINT: just double-click on a song title to play the music!

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For those of you who attended my talk on designing more effective PowerPoint presentations, here is a copy of the slides, recently featured on the homepage of SlideShare.net:

"You are a Presentation SuperStar on SlideShare!

Your presentation is currently being featured on the SlideShare homepage by our editorial team.

We thank you for this terrific presentation, that has been chosen from amongst the thousands that are uploaded to SlideShare everday."

I've also included (below) many links to the sites mentioned during the session:

If you happened to attend the ICE (Illinois Computing Educators) Conference on Thursday, or could not attend, here is an online version of my presentation on educational blogging:

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Image via Wikipedia

For those of you that attended my recent session on "Copyright and Fair Use for Educators and their Students", the appeal to the Librarian of Congress is due on Monday, February 2nd at 5 pm EST. Remember, if successful, it will create an exemption to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act for educators using "ripped" DVD clips to teach media literacy.

• Concrete examples from your own work showing how the inability to lawfully circumvent the technological access controls on DVDs has created educational hardships or interfered with your teaching goals,
• Explanation of how the proposed exemption would help you and your students
• Information about school and other institutional policies that prohibit the circumvention of DVD copy-protection technology; and
• Your own beliefs about why media literacy and digital media in education is such an essential part of our students’ future.

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