An Interactive Learning Design Blog

An Interactive Learning Design Blog

Jul 25, 2007

Toyota Math Science Podcasts went live this week



During week two of the Toyota Math Science Experience at Mills College(map here), the girls finished the first rough drafts of their podcasts.


Margo put a website up using .mac for The Toyota Math Math Science Experience showing the girls podcasts. Check out the TMSE Website Margo set up. Click on the podcast button to see the first podcasts produced by the amazing middle school girls who participated in this two week residential math and science camp.

Jul 23, 2007

Margo and I try podcasting with 30 girls

Last Thursday, we had the great fortune to work with 26 girls in the Toyota Math Science Experience at Mills College. We had a beautiful lab to work with: Thirty Intel IMacs with the most recent software loaded. I was the remote desktop Administrator; Margo taught the podcasting class. In less than 4 hours, we had 26 mac novices producing 13 podcasts.
Here's Margos-we"ll publish the girls podcasts in a few days when they've polished them up a bit. Check it out -When the new page opens, click on the play button on the top left side of the page to see Margo's first podcast...

Jul 17, 2007

Picasa experiment

I'm experimenting with Picasa

angus's birthday 2005


Margo's been helping out at the Toyota Math Science Experience going on at Mills College right now. Here are some slides.....

Jul 14, 2007

Search skills

I've noticed that most kids, when searching for information for a school assignment, all seem to search the same way. They put the name of their subject(Jackie Robinson. for example) in Google and hit return. The Wikipedia article is usually in the top ten; and because they have seen wikipedia before, it's the first link they click on. How can we get them to more fully explore the rich resources on the net?
The first thing to do is to increase their google search skills. Google Guides is a good place to start understanding how to help them craft better queries. I also like to read John Battelle's Searchblog to see if any new, great websearch sites have been announced.
Another thing you can do is show them where to fin annotated lists of websites. One of my favorites is the Librarians Internet Index(Lii).It is my personal favorite. Calisphere is getting a lot of play these days, although it seems to load slowly on my machine. The Library of Congress' American Memory is truly amazing in the depth of material it holds. Another annotated list of sites(although not as comprehensive as Lii) is the American Library Associations Great Web Sites for kids.Another annotated search engine is called Awesome Library.
Finally, the grandmomma of annotated sites is Kathy Schrocks Guide for Educators.Its size is daunting, but there is nothing that you can't eventually find here(forgive the double negative).

Intentional Learning Communities are not always

Communities, that is. Inspiration Software launched their Inspired Learning Community site at NECC.
A month later, there are over 144 lessons posted on the site, which is impressive. What intrigues me is that there are exactly two posts on the bulletin board.
I see this juxtaposition of success and failure time after time in the community building efforts of educational software companies.
The stated goal is usually to build a community of teachers who share a common passion in the software the company sells. In the Eschool article that accompanied its roll out, we read that Mona Westhaver, Inspiration's president and co-founder said "Now, with our new online community, we are offering educators a community where they can inspire one another."
But the framework of the site makes it clear to users that the primary objective is to encourage them to create free content for your site. It's easy to do . You can post all by yourself, in the privacy of your home.
But how do you start a dialogue when there's no one there? That's not so easy to do.
And teachers, being smart, get the message on what's important. And so 144 uploads, 2 posts.
I wonder how many posts there will be at the end of August?

Jul 12, 2007

More on Hyperstudio 5

Dr. Z has more here. I'm sure there's a lot more on other blogs. I'm seen posts about this every time I read some one's blog about what was most important at NECC.

Jul 11, 2007

Journaling with blogs-

One of the things we talked about in school last year was how important it was to keep parents current on what we're doing in the classroom, and how much seeing visuals of what's happening is important to keeping parents enthusiasm high.
This blog that I'm linking to here has a list of all the tools the school community needs to learn to be able to do weekly posts from each class from third through fifth grade.

Jul 8, 2007

What kindergarteners need to know about 1st grade.

Here's a video from out of my past: My wife, Margo Nanny, and I helped shoot this video when our son was in 1st grade. It was written, scripted, and shot by the kids. Our son's teacher, a truly wonderful teacher, created the space in time for us to do this project with the kids. Margo and I facilitated the process, but stayed out of the way as much as possible. I'm still amazed by what these kids could do.(Full disclosure: Margo did the the final edit.)
What kindergarteners need to know about 1st grade is still as true as the day these kids shot this footage, but the technology has greatly improved. I wish I could redo it again today...but my kid's in middle school now, and barely remembers this video..

Roger Wagner's Back!

Probably the biggest news for me so far out of this years NECC at Atlanta was the return of Roger Wagner, and his rejuvenation of Hyperstudio. You can read about it here, here, and here.
I can remember when every tech savy teacher I knew was teaching kids how to compose in Hyperstudio....