This week’s featured website is United Streaming, now part of Discovery Education. If you haven’t previously set up your account and logged in, click New User Login to create your account (please see your friendly ITRT for the school’s passcode). After logging in, tons of videos are available under the DE Streaming tab. In addition, there are great new resources for you under the Educator Network tab, too!

United Streaming training is scheduled for Thursday, November 8, after school in the IT Lab.

What is a Digital Native? Marc Presky was the first to use the term in his 2001 article Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants. According to Presky, a Digital Native is someone who grew up in the digital world, surrounded by and immersed in technology. Alternatively, a Digital Immigrant is someone who came to computers later in life. Presky and many others in the educational community argue that because our students today grew up in the digital age they learn and process information differently and that it’s important for educators to understand and address those differences.

Here are some additional resources:

• The Digital Natives Research Project
• Portrait of a Digital Native - From TechLearning
• What Causes the Disconnect - From Apple Education

I have mixed feelings about this classification. What generation HASN’T argued that “adults just don’t understand” for one reason or another? I DO believe students today are able to multi-task much more efficiently than the students I had in class when I first started teaching 16 years ago, which is probably a product of their growing up in the digital age. Afterall, it takes skill to send a text message, change the MP3 on an iPod, read email, and work on homework all at the same time!

Where I question the Digital Native/Digital Immigrants argument is where it says that a Digital Immigrant will forever speak with an “accent” when in comes to technology. I have come across many “immigrants” who were very technologically proficient. Additionally, we should remember that it was Digital Immigrants who invented the technology to begin with!

Whatever your point of view on the subject, it’s a very interesting idea. If you find yourself wondering about and not understanding just what our students are thinking, maybe it IS because they think differently today.

Here’s a video on it. Thoughts?

Download Video: Posted by jsdt4 at TeacherTube.com.

Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock for the last few years, most of us have heard of Wikipedia. Feelings about Wikipedia among educators run the full spectrum, but that’s a topic for another blog….

Today’s Mini-Byte concerns the “wiki” in Wikipedia. To understand what a wiki is, check out this video, Wikis in Plain English from Commoncraft.

Download Video: Posted by leelefever at TeacherTube.com.

Is this a tool you and/or your students might find useful? Probably! If you’re interested, check out pbwikis. There are other wiki sites out there, but I like that pbwiki markets itself as safe and secure–allowing users to easily set their wikis to be private rather than public.

It is Friday! From Monday’s slippers to Wednesday’s wackiness to today’s Pep Rally, you have survived the excitement of another Homecoming week.

In the spirit of “Feel Good Friday”, here’s a little something that’s sure to make you smile (and maybe giggle a little bit, too)!

Download Video: Posted by tekkieteacher at TeacherTube.com.

Good luck to our Bulldawgs at tonight’s big game!

Addressing the needs of each individual student can be a daunting task for a teacher. For all of us, but especially if you are teaching with a co-teacher, T/TAC Online is a great resource to find tools that can help address our students diverse learning abilities and styles. Click the Resources tab to find lots of great information!

Do you want to save yourself the time of collecting all those papers during class time? How does the idea of saving trees sound to you? Would you like to be able to provide students feedback on their work without printing a THING?!?!

If these ideas sound attractive to you, you might want to try using SchoolFusion’s Digital Dropbox feature. When you create an assignment, simply check the box that says “Allow students to submit homework online”.  Back on your class webpage, beneath the assignment, a “submit your file link” will appear, allowing students to submit homework electronically.

To view the submitted assignments, just click “View the <#> file in the <Assignment Name> dropbox”. Additionally, everytime an assignment is “dropped off” electronically, you will receive an email notification.

Every year since 1984 leaders in their respective fields have met in Monterey, California, to present at the Technology, Entertainment, and Design (TED) Conference. Over 4 days, 50 speakers are each given 18 minutes to share their thoughts and ideas about yesterday, today, and tomorrow. From Al Gore to Bono to Bill Clinton to Jane Goodall, the list of speakers is truly impressive. Out of this event have come some very good (to put it mildly) video clips that TED has made available for viewing and download. Here is a complete list of all the presentations. Some of them would be great for class.

Interestingly, the most discussed presentation is where Ken Robinson presents his ideas about how schools are killing creativity. The video is almost 20 minutes long, but the topic is interesting and Robinson is pretty funny.

http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/66

Friday has arrived! We are returning to the dancing theme this week with one of YouTube’s most popular videos to date, the Evolution of Dance.  How many of you remember these songs? Do you recognize these dance moves?!?! And ‘fess up, now – how many of you have footage of you doing these dances on film?!?!? (Get out your wedding video - You KNOW the Chicken Dance is there!)

Enjoy and have a truly awesome weekend - you deserve it!

Download Video: Posted by tekkieteacher at TeacherTube.com.

This week’s featured website is our very own Instructional Technology website. There are tons of resources posted here that apply specifically to our school. Additionally, dates for all upcoming IT training are posted here (we’re doing photostory this Thursday!).

The site is easily accessed through Hylton’s website. After logging in to the website, all faculty have a direct link displayed on their navigation bar.

Looking for instructions on how to install IGPro at home? They are here!

Do you want access to Groupwise email at home? The information is here!

Need something and it’s not there? Just let your friendly ITRT know and it will be posted in a flash!

There’s an online conference that started today called the K12 Online Conference 2007. It’s peaked my interest so I thought I’d share.

I’m currently watching the pre-conference keynote presentation by David Warlick. Many of the other presenters author blogs you’ll find listed in my blogroll (at right).

The entire conference is totally free and totally online. So watch and read at your convenience!

You launch IGPro. You choose “Open a Gradebook on Your Computer”. You click OK and it sends you to…….where????

You EXPECT to be “pointing” to your teacher folder, but it’s not.

This happens most often with shared computers. If the teacher before you has backed up his/her gradebook to a location other than the network, then when you come along to open IGPro, it looks for YOUR gradebook where the last teacher backed up his/her gradebook.

Not to worry. You just have to “map” IGPro back to your gradebook. All gradebooks are located on the network at:

N:\sasixp\IGPRO\IGPData71

1. Click My Computer on the left of the Open window.
2. “Double-click” the N: Drive.
3. “Double-click” SASIxp folder.
4. “Double-click” IGPro folder.
5. “Double-click” IGPData folder.
6. “Double-click” 071 folder.
7. “Double-click” Your teacher folder.

After spending hours trying to upload a really cool video with no success…..Like any good educator I’m resorting to my “backup” Feel Good Friday plan.

Look for the video next week….I WILL get it uploaded!

When I was teaching social studies, I would sometimes have my students do political cartoons relating to the current subject. It was a great way to incorporate a student’s creativity with the topic. And they were a lot more fun to grade than essays!

With that in mind, I discovered this nice little online tool recently — ToonDoo.com. Using ToonDoo, students can create cartoons online. I’m still playing with it and learning all the features, but it looks pretty cool.

I was reading Karl Fisch’s post, Is It OK To Be A Technologically Illiterate Teacher? (caution - even he admits he was grumpy when he wrote it), when something he wrote in response to a comment by a Language Arts teacher really stood out to me. He wrote:

“You see, I don’t think it’s your job to teach literature, that not why you “exist” as a teacher. Literature is just a means to an end. We don’t teach Macbeth in order for kids to understand Macbeth, we use Macbeth so that kids can understand good and evil and trust and betrayal. Our goal is not for kids to be experts on Macbeth and know who Malcolm is, our goal is to explore some of the universal themes of humankind and help make those themes meaningful and relevant to our students’ lives. To help our students better understand those big ideas so that they can apply them to their own lives and to the lives of those around them. And it doesn’t matter whether we use Macbeth, or some other piece of literature, or no literature at all.”

He goes on to say:

“… it’s not about what you teach, it’s about what students learn. And what students need.”

This one was a tough one for me. When I was teaching Social Studies, it was the subject that I loved. I used to tell my students that history was filled with everything that you could find in the best movies–the difference was that movies weren’t real, but our history was.

I knew, though, that leading them to the mastery of the content was not enough. They had to be able to DO something with that knowledge. The greatest “highs” I had in the classroom were when the “lightbulbs” would go on and you could tangibly see when students made important connections, applied critical analysis, and truly understood the relevance of the content in relation to today’s world. Admittedly, those moments were few and far between for me.

David Warlick has written that in today’s changing world one of the most important things we need to teach our students is how to learn. If we concentrate primarily on the subjects that we teach, on the content, are we doing them a disservice? They will know enough to pass the SOLs, sure, but will they know enough to live in this digital age where what is true in one instant is no longer true in the next?  How do we teach them to adapt, to learn, to live in today’s world?

And with all of our other responsibilities, where on earth do we find the time to even try to do more?

Thoughts?

Sometimes our computers can be uncooperative. They send us cryptic error messages and even freeze up upon occasion.  A lot of you have found that the newer computers won’t even read your thumb drives!

Before filling in a Help Request, hunting down our T-Spec, or throwing the computer out the window, first try rebooting the computer. If it’s your thumb drive that is the problem, reboot the computer with the thumb drive plugged in.

This will solve a large percentage of the problems you encounter. If the problem persists, then please DO complete a Help Request or contact our T-Spec, Teresa (tossing the computer out the window, although it might make you feel better, is still not recommended).

So remember, when in doubt, reboot, reboot, reboot!

I know you’ve heard me talk about the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) program. The idea behind the program is to provide sturdy and inexpensive laptops to children in third-world countries. Well, the laptops will be in production and available starting in November! Check out the New York Times article on it!

Here’s something that will get your blood pumping! It’s a rant by poet and teacher, Taylor Mali, in response to the question, “What do teachers make?”

A word of caution — for those of you with delicate sensibilities – there are a few curse words in the video. When weighing the use of the curse-words against the overall message, the message won out. I sincerely hope I don’t offend anyone by sharing it.

Download Video: Posted by tekkieteacher at TeacherTube.com.

Here’s your chance to employ all your creativity brain cells and win a complete technology makeover for your classroom from Interwrite Learning and Teachertube!

http://www.teachertube.com/makeover.php

Submissions are due by October 21st!

Let’s face it. We live in a Microsoft-dominated world. Our computers use a Microsoft operating system(Windows) and most of us use Microsoft productivity tools (Office). But believe it or not, there was actually a world before Microsoft. More importantly, there will be a world AFTER Microsoft, too.

How do I know? Because everywhere we turn innovative new companies and individuals are coming up with truly wonderful (and much less expensive) alternatives to Microsoft products. An example is this week’s website of the week, Google Docs. With this free service, you can create documents, spreadsheets, and presentations. AND it allows you to easily share files and collaborate with others. Everything is then stored online - no thumb drives or floppies needed!

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t really have anything against Microsoft. However, I do think competition is a good thing!

For more information and ideas on how you might use Google Docs with your students, contact your friendly ITRT!

Here’s a tutorial from Teachertube on using the Google Presentations tool in Google Docs.

Download Video: Posted by sgerard1 at TeacherTube.com.

The other day I was asked the question, “How do students download Word documents from SchoolFusion if they don’t have MS Word installed on their home computer?”

What a great question! A lot of our students are using other, less expensive, word processing alternatives.

To help these kids out, you can save your Word documents as “rich text format”, or .rtf. That will retain most of the formatting and is recognized by most word processing applications.