Monthly Archives: October 2009

Oct 22 2009

links for 2009-10-21

Oct 21 2009

24 Hours of Communication and Learning

As I was getting ready for another exciting day today, I started to reflect on yesterday and how communication and modern communication tools had made it such a great day.

I started out as I do most mornings and checked on Facebook to see what’s up with my friends and family.  With The Boy being out of town this is a great communication vehicle.  He works on the show Survivorman and they were up for a Gemini Award Monday night in Toronto.  I was hoping to see pictures of Les Stroud accepting for the cast.  Unfortunately, that wasn’t to be.  “The winner is … not us.”

Then, time to finish off the blog post about story telling about an idea that had come to me in the middle of a presentation Monday night.  I wanted to see if it would actualy work.  Absolutely.  It works very nicely.  I’ll get some mileage with that.

Then it was out to pick up some snacks for an afternoon workshop.  I ended up at a grocery store I’d never been in before and then realized that I better get in gear to get to Lakeshore Discovery School for a scheduled meeting.  Thankfully, my Dad had given me a Mio GPS for Christmas a couple of years ago.  It took me through the maze of streets that is East Windsor and out to the school as quickly as possible.  The school is new and so not in the GPS but downtown Emeryville is.  You can see the school from there.

We had a good meeting.  It dealt with trying to make all users of the internet comfortable with a content filter that both enables teachers and students while at the same time keeping everyone, including the network, safe.  It was an interesting challenge to chair, be the recorder, and also put in my two cents worth.  Right at the end, I received a call from @MindShareLearn who was coming for a visit and wanted a recommendation for a restaurant in Belle River.  Naples is always a good choice!

Within the hour, he arrived and we took a tour of Lakeshore Discovery School.  Robert and I have done a lot of talking in the past as to what the perfect school should look like.  I had talked to him about our LDS and our board’s approach with building themed schools so he wanted to see it first hand.  I was able to nab a superintendent and the first principal of the school to lead the tour.  It’s an impressive place with things to discover around every bend – just like you would see in an active museum.  Throughout the tour, Robert would stop to take a picture with either his iPhone or take a movie clip with his digital movie camera.  The “short little tour” took over two hours with all the questions and interactions.

The neat thing was going into a Grade Two class that was working with the life cycle on their SMART Board.  But, this was a French Immersion class.  It’s not SMART Board or le SMART Board – it was a tableau tactile.

At the conclusion, Robert wanted a short interview with the superintendent for the Mind Share Report and we went back to the Carolinian Forest and I recorded the interview with Robert’s camera.  Hope it turns out OK.  When I do a handheld recording, I’m very sensitive to the fact that I’m breathing.  Does the camera jiggle?  As we’re walking down the hall, I got a chance to flip on my iPod and noticed that I had a mention on Twitter.  This lady had read my blog and was going to use the idea in her own professional learning community.  Cool.  Someone actually reads my ramblings.

Next up was Essex for an afterschool workshop using Comic Life and BitstripsForSchools.  Getting there was easy; it’s a due South shot from Emeryville and I get there and, with the help of Net Support School, the computers are fired up and ready and I distribute some sample images to the desktops.  My friend Karen showed up early and we were talking about engaging students and getting them to write.  We both reflected back to our elementary school days where we just wrote because we were supposed to.  It was an expectation from the teacher and our parents supported the teacher.  There was no question about it – we just did it.  It was a great setup for the workshop.

We worked through many of the ideas that I’ve blogged about on here before.  It went well and the consensus of the group was that, if this doesn’t motivate kids to plan and write, what will?  Everyone left promising to give it a shot in the near future.  I can’t wait to hear their successes.  They all have Bitstrips for Schools accounts now and know that Comic Life is on their network.

The day ends in Windsor, straight up Highway 3.  There was to be an informal gathering of the participants of the Ontario Powerful Learning Practice group.  We’re got two incredible groups of educators who are taking part and I’m a fellow!  I get there and am actually the first in the room so I take a few moments to catch up on email.  We still have a couple of problems in the system like the spell checker not working in French but the Help Desk will make it happen once they know that it’s an issue.

This meeting was neat.  It was a chance to catch up with @markcarbone where we always promise to solve the ills of our respective worlds and end up realizing there are more sides to any issue.  Mark’s three barrels aren’t enough at times.  @sadone was the host and had the munchies all set up in a short period of time.  I finally got a chance to meet @msjweir face to face rather than on Twitter.  Most of our teachers that are participating in the project showed up and we had a great time catching up with Charlotte’s bus and Debbie’s prep time and laptop batteries and …

All good things come to an end and it was time to head home.  There were just a few things to take care of before sitting down to enjoy “Law and Order” with the family.  I took at look at the minutes and, yeah, it looks like I really enjoyed the discussion to the detriment of some of the details.  No problem.   I post the recording to Google Docs and invite the group to review and revise my recording.  I flip over to Facebook to see what’s up with The Boy and he’s already moved on to the next important issue of the day.  Great.  My daughter will be training a new person in her department shortly.  Great as well.

I flip over to Seesmic Desktop and @msjweir notes that we didn’t decide on a hashtag for the PLP Ontario group.  I’m sure that will be addressed as part of our PD today.

Time for one last check of email – I’ve got one principal who wants to use Google Wave for a collaborative environment for his hub.  I had to break the sad news that there may come a time when it’s the perfect tool but as a limited beta, it’s not ready for prime time yet. I’ve got another teacher who’s interested in embedding a blog into the middle of her page. What a great way to keep the content fresh.

Whew!  It was a big day in a number of different communities and with diverse groups of people.  The key to staying on top of it all for me was having access to the proper tools, whether in my hand or on the web.  Upon further reflection, it goes deeper than just the tools – they’re just “stuff” in one of Mark’s barrels – the real key is that there are incredible people trying to do incredible things for the benefit of the students that we serve.  We can never miss sight of the fact that that is why we’re doing all this to begin with.

When I woke up, I never dreamt that I would use “tableau tactile” in a sentence twice.

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Oct 21 2009

links for 2009-10-20

Oct 20 2009

Sequencing and Storytelling

One of the marvelous things about having a SMART Board and the Notebook software at your beck and call is the ability to just do so much more creative things.  As we work with stories, graphic novels, comics, etc., the concept of sequencing, prediction, and inference are incredibly important and powerful skills for students.

So, why not marry the two?

One of the things that the SMART Notebook software does so nicely is play .FLV (Flash Video) files.  These are the media of the web and the Notebook software plays them with ease.  Just go to the Insert Menu and select Flash Video File.

Sit back and very passively you can watch a movie, just like at a Drive-In theater.

But, there’s so much more that you can do.

At the bottom of the movie, you have a scrubber bar that lets you move to any point within your movie.  That’s kind of neat.  Sort of like having a Tivo and skipping commercials.  BUT as you’re creating this lesson, while you’re on that image, click the pause button.  Movie pauses.  Next step?

Click on the camera to bring up the screen capture tool, and while you have that image on the screen, use the tool to capture the frame.  If you have the “Capture to new page” option checked, you’ll get the image that you just captured on a new page in your notebook.  Repeat the process as you go through and grab key and memorable moments from your movie.

What to do now?

You’re now only limited by your imagination.

Here are some suggestion…

  1. Play the movie in its entirety and then use the images that you captured on separate pages to go through and summarize the movie by using the images as discussion starters;
  2. Play the movie up to your capture point and then pause the movie.  Skip to your capture images and predict what will happen next and record the ideas.  Return to the movie and see what really happens;
  3. Drag all of the screen captures to a single slide and then mix them up.  Can the students drag the images to the proper order in order to retell the story?

With such imagery and a good educational video, you’re only restricted by your ability to generate new ideas.  Can you add to the list?

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Oct 20 2009

links for 2009-10-19

Oct 19 2009

Building Knowledge and Trust

I had a great weekend.  Actually, I always have great weekends but this was was extra special for me.  With my Google Wave account now created, I had made it a personal goal to learn as much as I could about this new offering.  I learn new things all the time and in different ways but this was unique.

Normally, when I learn something, it’s as a result of a requirement to do so and I have enforced timelines and expectations for when the learning is to occur.  Given that, I’ll hunker down and do the deed.  Usually, things are intuitive or there’s a good manual or good tutorials on the web or, at the bare minimum, I have a general idea about what needs to be done.

This was different.

Here, you truly are jumping into the deep end without a life saver.  There are no experts, there are some videos including Google’s long video about what’s possible, but even the help/support online is a work in process.  People who are blogging about it are highlighting the shortcomings (did they not read the warning when they got their invite?).


Image by liako via Flickr

I started with a goofy little wave and very quickly realized that this wasn’t the place for a person to be alone so decided to expand the contacts and started a wave about support for the newly licensed Bitstrips for Schools.  That spiked some interested and soon we had 20 or so people added as collaborators and we’re off learning.

What impressed me the most was not the product – Google Wave is still under development – but the process.  The moment that you add collaborators to the process, it’s like the blinders have been removed.  I’m pretty good at knowing what my computer can and cannot do.  I’m equally as aware of the shortcomings that I have with my computer abilities.  It’s somewhat comforting to look around and see others trying to tread water as well.

What was unique about the group of people that I’m swimming with is that, in general, none feel the need to be the lifeguard.  Everyone is quick to respond and comment but always in a constructive manner.  It’s this manner that makes the learning so good.  We all acknowledge that’s there’s lots to learn and there’s no keeper of central or hidden knowledge among our group.

It isn’t the first time that some of the members of this group have worked together.  I know who I can call upon for story telling expertise; Macintosh expertise; Cross-Over Expertise; Grade 7 Expertise; Grade 10 English Expertise; and so on.  Because of these past relationships, I know that I can trust these folks to be honest and to throw in their perspective.  I also know that they won’t betray that trust by taking content or knowledge and calling it their own or maliciously criticize.  They understand the group dynamic and make it better by their actions and their reactions.

There are also new people to the group.  They’ve fit right in and are now valuable members.  I’m sure that they watched us in action mucking about but have since dove right in and are valuable contributors to the learning.

With all of this falling into place, we all learned and explored together.  We’re generating ideas where we might be able to use this; we’re generating ideas about where we wouldn’t use it.  Together we’re building the knowledge and trust that will help us fully understand the implications.  Who could ask for more?

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Oct 19 2009

links for 2009-10-18

Oct 18 2009

Learning about Wave

I had indicated that this was my weekend to dig into Google Wave and see if I could understand a little more about it.  Like most people, I started out with a Wave account with myself and the person who invited me.  Together, we did a couple of goofy things to try it out.  The good folks at Google had provided a few extensions to give you a start.  So, we had done a few trivial things and you could get a sense of where this might go, but that was about it.

I decided to go a little further and create a Wave that might actually have some value.  The content would have to be worthwhile enough to make the learning worthwhile but not so involved that you could get hung up on both the content and the learning of Google Wave at the same time.  So, I put together a starting point for a Wave to create a resource for the use of the Ministry of Education licensed Bitstrips For Schools product.  As the OSAPAC Repository Manager, I’m hoping that we might be able to add this Wave to the OSAPAC Learning Objects Repository at some point.  Wouldn’t that be cool?

So, I created a simple page and then posted a message to Twitter letting people know what I was doing and invited any Ontario teacher to jump in and add to the content.  The responses ranged from an enthusiastic yes from some of the people I had given Wave invites to, to some non-Ontario educators who wanted in as well, to people lamenting that they didn’t have a Wave account.  Fair enough.  There will come a time.

As I write this entry this morning, the Wave looks like this.

There are a few more things that continue off the bottom, but you get the picture.  If you’re reading about this for the first time and would like to hop in and join the construction of this Wave, go for it.  Wave at me and I’ll get you added.  For me, this was a learning experience to dig into Google Wave.  Here’s what I learning yesterday.  Hopefully, some of it might be useful in your own learning of the new environment.  It’s very powerful but also challenges some of what I thought I knew about computing.  My observations are mine and may be completely wrong but are written from my experiences yesterday.  As the product is under construction, things will undoubtedly change.

  • Waves are not private.  I invited a person who then invited a person that I didn’t know.  That will be something that needs to be monitored if you’re going to use this environment for private development;
  • This new invite did give me a chance to add another person to my list of contacts.  All contacts have the @googlewave.com address;
  • Playback is incredibly cool.  It lets you track the development and edits of the Wave which was valuable so that I could see not only what I had done, but what others had done while I was out cutting the lawn;
  • Having the extensions on the tool bar is really convenient.  In order to put the poll shown above into my Wave, I just clicked on the poll icon.  Just need to remember to add a question to vote on before entering it to make its placement easy;
  • After voting, clicking on “Set my status” let me explain my vote of “Yes” to the question;
  • The “Google Search” Extension lets you search Google from inside the wave.  When you get the results, an “Add to Wave” link appears beside each result which puts the link directly in the wave.  This is very convenient;
  • Highlighting text and clicking the “Link” button lets you link directly to a web resource as you would expect.  But, even typing return and adding more content continues the linked text.  I had to go back and remove or change the link in a list of links with comments.  Not a big deal, but different;
  • Correcting spelling mistakes is actually fun!  Going to the mispelled words gives you a pull down list of suggestions;
  • Adding images in Windows was easy.  Just locate the image and drag it into an area of the Wave that you’re editing.  It didn’t work on the Macintosh, but clicking the paper clip and navigating to the image on the hard drive worked.  Probably easier to use that route for both platforms;
  • Not everyone has the Wave layout correct the first time.  Once of my collaborators had nothing in the middle and right columns.  After trouble shooting using Twitter and Twitpic, we were still banging our heads.  He finally switched to Windows and it was all there.  This morning, he claims that it’s there on his Macintosh now.  No idea what happened but at least the story has a happy ending;
  • You really need to maximize your window to see all of the buttons.  When you shrink the window, the buttons just disappear rather than move to a pull down menu like in other applications.  This came about when I suggested clicking on a certain button for one of my collaborators and she couldn’t see it;
  • You can resize the columns by clicking and dragging the space between the columns;
  • If you’re watching a baseball game and NASCAR while engaging in a three way chat, it’s important to continue to chat at the bottom of the window!  If you chat in the middle of the conversation, scrolling to find what’s new is time consuming and there’s a real chance of missing parts of the conversation;
  • The scroll bar still makes me feel like I’m browsing with mittens on!  I’ve given up trying to scroll up and down by pulling it and have gone to using the arrows and navigation is smoother.  I’m just not used to a window where the scroll bar doesn’t always go to the bottom;
  • You can highlight and change the background of your text inside a text window for effect;
  • You can insert comments in the middle of a conversation – just double click where you’d like to insert and choose edit.  This is very cool but it’s conceivable that you could miss things.  Thankfully, there’s playback;
  • Replies are indented and if you make enough of them, you run out of space in the column;
  • There doesn’t appear to be a simple way of doing backups;
  • New Waves appear as collapsed windows at the top of the screen;
  • Google Wave seems to take a lot of processor resources from my computer.  Closing off other applications made it much more responsive, particularly after a chat/debug session that lasted close to an hour.

Most of all, I learned that there are a lot of really good people working to learn how to use this tool for collaboration.  That’s so exciting as we embark on new learnings.  A tip of my Tigers’ hat to those who took the time to learn with me yesterday.  The Wave is far from completed and so if you’re interested in having a kick at it, please do.

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Oct 18 2009

links for 2009-10-17

Oct 17 2009

Getting Listed


Image by mary hodder via Flickr

In the beginning, there was Twitter.  Twitter was good, and we used it.  However, you had to manually refresh it for the latest updates and once you hit 100 people to follow.  It quickly was becoming unmanageable.

Into the scene comes Twitter clients.  There are applications that reside on your computer that go out automatically and poll Twitter for the latest updates and then displays them on your computer.  The search became one of searching for the best client.  I toyed with Spaz, Twhirl, and a number of plug-ins for Firefox.  All of them were very good, and did the trick for polling Twitter for updates.  However, user management still was an issue.

Then, I played around with Tweetdeck.  This was a new experience.  Instead of a single stream of messages, you could have multiple columns to follow different conversations or people.  This expanded the functionality of Twitter enormously.  About the same time, Twitter added search to its functionality so that you could do a search for a topic of interest or one that was trending.  Into the fray, came Seesmic Desktop which is my current favourite.  Like Tweetdeck, it has multiple columns to track various conversations or topics.  It also has a really useful ability to create a list of people that you follow.  If you see my #FollowFriday posts, you’ll notice that I have a post that I send out called “Active Ontario Educators”.   As I start to follow a new Ontario person, I’ll add them to this group.  It’s a nice way to manage the messages from within our provincial borders.

That doesn’t mean that I ignore the rest of my followers.  They’re still in my home list for following.  I actually now have a couple of lists to follow educators from outside the province, and another for people who are just really interesting and worthy of following.

Of course, most contemporary clients have that built into them.  Hootsuite, Seesmic Web, and Brizzly are a new breed of Twitter browser.  While they have the ability to include search and list, they are web services.  So, you don’t need to download a special client to do the deed.  It happens right in your browser.  No need to stay up to day with the latest for Adobe Air which is typically the platform for the clients.  It adds more functionality to Twitter since you have all of the search functionality without the need of an extra installation.  You can now stay in touch wherever you happen to be and with whatever computer is at your finger tips.

Now, Twitter has included its own way to create lists.  While watching the baseball game last night, I decided to re-create my list of Ontario Educators there.  It took a while as I scrolled through my list of friends and added those that I recognize as meeting this criteria.  It was kind of frustrating at times as you get a new appreciation for the client doing the work.  I had a couple of Fail Whales indicating that the success of this social media site is so popular that it’s overloaded!  I’m assuming that the spinning throbber and then nothing experiences that I had assigning people to the list was another indication that things were busy.  Sometimes, it took 3-4 attempts to get a user checked and then added to the list.

Eventually, I was done.  In my Twitter home page, I now have a new list that I called Ontario Educators and there are 54 people assigned to that group.  Like the client, a click lets me filter to find out what’s happening with just these people.  But, there’s more functionality that I’m liking.  I can create multiple lists for various areas of interests.  This is very good.  I can also see the lists that I’m a part of!  This is a very nice extension of the social networking concepts.  Since the idea of lists is new, I had to make sure that I included myself in my list so that I’m listed at least once!

It’s great to see this service evolving and becoming more powerful and functional over time.  I would encourage everyone to explore the listing feature of whatever means you access Twitter.  It makes the great service even better.

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