Monthly Archives: October 2009

Oct 12 2009

links for 2009-10-11

Oct 11 2009

The #BFS Tag

Yesterday, @aforgrave and I were tossing around some comments about BitstripsforSchools product, licensed for all educators in the Province of Ontario.  In the middle of one of the responses from Andy, he used the tag #BFS.  In Twitter, if you include that tag, it directs you to all messages tagged similarly.   It’s a great way to continue the conversation even with those who aren’t friends or followers at the moment.

So, let’s do it.  If you’re posting an image or making a comment about the Bitstrips for Schools software, include it.

Later yesterday, @shannoninottawa jumped in with support for the concept.  In a post to her blog, she share with us the fact that 8C was working with the product and finally had their class picture together and ready for display.


Class picture of 8C via Bitstrips
What a great looking class!  The only conservative looking person is the teacher!

Yesterday, as well, @zbpipe was asking about embedding images.  It’s probably not going to be immediately possible as images are stored in class accounts which require a login.  However, as Shannon has demonstrated in her post, there are a variety of ways that you can capture the image once you’re logged in and share them in a blog post.

Once they’re in a blog post, it’s very simple to repurpose them as done here.  Great job, 8C!

So, it’s important that we all know what’s going on as we roll out this product.  The concept of the BFS tag is powerful.  Let’s get everyone on board.  Tag your great content so that we can all enjoy it!

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Oct 11 2009

links for 2009-10-10

Oct 10 2009

A Bitstrips Activity

There is so much functionality built into Bitstrips for Schools that it has the possibility to be used in so many places and in so many ways.  Prediction and inference are two activities that can be used for all learners to really think about a story, story boarding, timelines, characters, settings, relationships, etc.

Education World has a great lesson plan for prediction here.  It’s very easy to see how it can be modified to include a comic from Bitstrips for Schools.  As an example, I have created this strip.

Finish

I have shared the activity with others on the system.  As I think about it, I can think of all kinds of possibilites.

  • retelling of a story studied in class;
  • exploring alternative endings for a story;
  • explaining a physical education activity;
  • documenting a science experiment;
  • and the list goes on and on…

If you’re an Ontario educator with your Ministry licensed account or another other educator who has purchased an account for your students, why not create your own ideas and share them with everyone else?

This could grow exponentially as we have some of the best educational minds taking a shared lead in the implementation of this powerful program.

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Oct 9 2009

Follow Friday

This is a special event day on Twitter.  On Follow Friday, you get a chance to shout to the world those folks that you follow regularly and contribute to your well being on Twitter.  For me, that’s three fold.

First, there are a number of Ontario Educators that I follow who help me so much.  They’re always sharing, probing, challenging, commenting, commiserating, or do something that keeps me in touch with other’s reality.  In this group, I would include @thecleversheep, @jkdham, @aforgrave, @rdelorenzo, @redfearn, @kentmanning, @benhazzard, @barbaram, @msjweir, @MindShareLearn, @zbpipe, @fryed, @baded, @danikabarker, @cowpernicus, and @windsordi.  I know that there are others – but I refer to these folks as “active”.  In my Seesmic Desktop, I have a group entitled Ontario Educators and they’ve appeared lately in that column.

Secondly, there are a number of people that I have a list entitled “Daily Folk”.  This is an interesting collection of people that just live large in the Social Network world.  They remind me that there’s more to life than mine.  Vicariously, I follow their adventures and listen to their advice. These would include @kimberanna_com, @TheSCICoach, @jeffpulver, @pcornqueen, @paulina1, @georgiawonder, and @PRsarahevans.  Such a diverse group of people.


Image by luc legay via Flickr

The third group could be “everyone else”.  But, it’s not.  I actually have a third column that I call “Non-Ontario Educators”.  Surely, they enrich my life by providing insights and inspiration from literally the four corners.  I was fortunate enough to meet many of these folks last year at NECC.  Others, I just live the life online.  In this group, I would include @ErnieEaster, @mpesce, @LParisi, @mcarls, @unklar, @Lilylauren, @paulrwood, @skipz, @kjarrett, @alfredtwo, @mfh, @rmbyrne, @principalspage, @AngelaMaiers, @AngelaStockman, @glo, @teach42, @mrlosik, and @dwarlick.

The fourth group is everybody else and they’re awesome.  I’ll call them @*.*

Kudos to all of the above.  These lists are not inclusive; they’ve just been active in the past day or so and so have made my lists and I declare them officially active!  I also include them among some of the greatest teachers I’ve ever had.  @thecleversheep pushes me into corners for thinking that I’d never imagined.  @danikabarker taught me what a Yurt was.  @unklar is like my own personalized science teacher.  Even though he’s in Texas and I’m in Ontario, he’s helped me identify things in the night sky.  In the spirit of Follow Friday, check them all out.  You can’t go wrong if you’re looking for folks to learn from.

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Oct 9 2009

links for 2009-10-08

Oct 8 2009

Professional Development Versus Training

Yippee.  I’m going to be trained today.

You can probably see the enthusiasm with which I’ve got my mind set.  In my mind, there’s nothing worse than being trained.  As I point out to folks, you train a dog to go outside.  You professionally develop teachers.  There’s a huge difference.

I think back to my university days and psychology classes about learning and, of course, we have the works of Ivan Pavlov.  He’s famous for a number of things but the one that still resonates with me is his work with classical conditioning and dogs.  In exchange for goodies, the stimulus, the dogs exhibit a trained behaviour, the response.  It works well and certainly that’s the way that I’ve always trained my pets to do tricks.  At least to the best of their ability and attitude on any given day.

Beauregard doing his trick for food
In computer “training”, you have much the same type of experience.  “Click here” and “this will happen”.  Classical.  And, if I ever get the opportunity with the same dummy scenario and situation, I’m able to repeat it.

But, I don’t want to be trained.  I want to be professionally developed.  I want the experience and knowledge of the presenter, to be sure.  But, I want that presenter to make the connections for me.  I want to show how I can use it in my practice.  I want to know what it looks like for a primary class, a junior class, an intermediate class, a senior class or in my professional capacity.  I want to know what learning I’m enabling.  I want to know why, in a fully crowded curriculum with competing priorities, that it’s worth my time to learn this and to make it part of what I do.

I want to know where to turn when I get stumped.  I want to know who else is using the successfully.  I want to know where to look for additional resources.  I want to know how to customise it for my particular reality.  I want to know who I can collaborate with to get the most from whatever it is that we’re doing.

Unfortunately, much “training” doesn’t address it.  Often, it’s a matter of expediently getting through all of the buttons and the options so that the material has been “covered”.  Yes, I want it “covered” but I also want to dig deeper.  I want to know the hows and wheres and whys and whynots that are more integral to the actual use of the content after the day of training has passed.

When learning is constructed in this fashion, it becomes far more valuable and I’m more likely to be in a position of using my new skills immediately.

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Oct 8 2009

links for 2009-10-07

Oct 7 2009

Next up on the web

Normally, I blog in the morning.  However, what I wanted to blog about was something that I wanted to spend some time with before I put my thoughts together.

SMART Technologies, the folks who have given us the SMART Boards and SMART Ideas, have a new version of the SMART Notebook software.  If you’re accustomed to using the regular Notebook software, you know that it’s a BIG download from their website.  Then, if you want to use the gallery, there’s an even bigger download.  It’s worth the wait though because it brings huge functionality to working with and developing content for the SMART Interactive White Board.

Over the past while, we’ve seen productivity suites go to the web.  Google Docs and Zoho, to name a couple, give you an entirely different view towards the concept of what a word processor or a survey tool might be.

Into the Interactive Whiteboard market, comes SMART’s recent entry.  The Notebook software goes to the web.

How?

Well, you’re not going to confuse the web application with the real one.  It’s designed to run on the web, load quickly, and give you some basic SMART Board functionality.  You’re not going to have access to a gallery or the Lesson Activity Toolkit for creating a presentation from scratch.  What you will get though is a Notebook player that lets you upload and use a Notebook document on any computer that’s connected to the web.  Just upload a Notebook file and you’ve got the functionality to interact with it.  You’ve got access to some of the more used tools.  The drawing tool and the text tool let you draw and markup existing Notebook documents.

I suspect that it’s early in the development game.  It took a while for me to find a Notebook file on my computer that would work.  I kept getting invalid data when I tried uploading some of my tried and true local applications.  I got a message for some of the really big ones that they were too big in size.  Fair enough.

But, I persisted and found one that did work.  And, it worked very nicely.  It had all of the functionality that I would expect from the subset of tools that are provided and they worked nicely.

I was very impressed that the developers were able to take this product to the web. Kudos to them.  There is nothing to have preloaded – just have the Adobe Flash player installed and you’re good to go.

You can try out the application online by clicking here.

Disclaimer:  I’m not receiving any compensation for this posting but I am a SMART Certified Trainer and I work with a SMART Board, SMART Notebook software and SMART Ideas software daily.

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Oct 7 2009

links for 2009-10-06