Thanks to the generous support of the California K12HSN, I attended – and blogged – NECC 2007. Due to Edublogs updates, I borrowed space from my dog Nola’s Blogger site (hey, she’s a Katrina survivor, but not an educator, so therefore Blogger instead of Edublogs). The links below are posts of the highlights from noteworthy sessions I blogged live from Atlanta.

• Empowering Practice – Will Richardson
• Read Around the Planet – Janine Lim
• Grossology – Distance “Edutainment” – Professor Poopsalot
• Advanced Blogging – Dealing with Sidebar Envy – Chris Lehmann
• Dealing with Sidebar Envy – David Warlick
• Dealing with Sidebar Envy (Continued) – Dave Warlick

As soon as I shake a case of jetlag, I’ll be posting some NECC 2007 afterthoughts, tips, and resources. 20,000 attendees – whew …

Technorati Tags: k12hsn JanineLim DavidWarlick WillRichardon NECC07 blogwalker

Edublogs is still terribly sluggish and buggish this morning, so I’m moving over to my dog Nola’s Blogger site to blog the NECC sessions.

This post is in response to David Warlick’s What Will You Be Drinking in Atlanta?, a suggestion that people share what they’ll be attending and what they hope to take away from the NECC 2007 Conference. I hope to increase my Web 2.0 toolbox, particularly with all aspects of podcasting, digital storytelling, and videoconferencing – and the research and rationale for including these tools in K-12 curriculum. I am also looking for powerful examples to bring administrators on board with the Read/Write web – sort of a Marzano Does Web 2.0 approach.

Here’s my schedule:

• Saturday – Arrive in time to catch the afternoon session of the EdBlogCon.
• Sunday – I’ll be with David Warlick, attending his Advanced Blogging, or Dealing with Sidebar Envy (SUF262) full-day workshop.
• Monday – I’m looking forward to staring the morning with PhotoStory: Documenting Historical Perspectives through Multimedia half-day workshop. I’ll be focusing on videoconferencing in the afternoon as I join Janine Lim for her “Distance Edutainment” is Here… and Some of It Is Gross and Read Around the Planet via Videoconference [AND] MysteryQuest: An Interactive Videoconference Project sessions.
• Tuesday – My morning starts with Will Richardson’s Empowering Practice: Leveraging the Read/Write Web for Professional Growth. For the afternoon, I planning to drop in on New Tools, New Schools: Starting the Conversation about Web 2.0; Podcasting for Professional Development: Innovative Strategies for Syndicated Success: Starting From Scratch: Building School 2.0; and The REAL Work of 21st-Century Skills
• Wednesday – I’m hoping to move beyond my very beginning Photoshop level by attending Advanced Digital Image Editing for Teachers with PhotoShop Elements in the morning, and then head off to my last conference session, Expanding Boundaries of Learning: Designing Rigorous and Globally Connected Assignments.

Technorati Tags: NECC, NECC07, NECC2007

It was my good fortune eight summers ago to travel to Washington DC for a week-long American Memory Project Summer Teacher Institute at the Library of Congress. What an amazing week and experience to tour first-hand our nation’s library! Eight years later, the LOC has continued to digitize hundreds and hundreds of primary source documents in their huge effort to make these resources accessible to the public – especially to teachers and their students.

I love being on their listserv. What I’ve pasted below is from today’s email, and is representative of the information, resources, and services – FREE – they offer:

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SPECIFICALLY FOR TEACHERS…
* Asian Pacific Americans Community Center http://memory.loc.gov/learn/community/cc_asian-pacific.php Help your students understand Asian Pacific Heritage through the resources of the Asian Pacific Americans Community Center. Don’t miss the Primary Source Set on Japanese American internment during WW II.* New RSS Feed – Poetry 180
http://www.loc.gov/poetry/180/
Did you know that a poem is available for each weekday of the school year from the Library’s Poetry 180 project? Now these poems can be delivered right to your computer desktop through an RSS feed. Teachers and poetry lovers: sign up today! http://www.loc.gov/rss/poetry/180.xmlOF INTEREST TO ALL
* The Battle of the Bulge – Interactive Essay http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/collections/maps/wwii/essay1.html This unique presentation uses U.S. Army situation maps to illustrate this famous WWII battle. Your students will enjoy the interactivity and the historical expertise shared by Library of Congress experts.* Amazing Grace http://memory.loc.gov/cocoon/ihas/html/grace/grace-home.html This new Web site explores the history of “Amazing Grace,” one of the best-known hymns in America, through items from the earliest printing of the song to various performances of it on sound recordings. Don’t miss the illustrated timeline, the essays on the history of “Amazing Grace,” a discography, and a selected bibliography.* Pictorial Americana http://www.loc.gov/rr/print/list/picamer/toc.html
Are you looking for a primary source image to use as a lesson starter or to support a teaching objective? Browse the table of contents of Pictorial Americana for a list of topical sets of images about American life and history. Several new sections have been added.

* The Civil Rights Era in the U.S. News & World Report Photographs Collection – http://www.loc.gov/rr/print/list/084_civil.html
U.S. News & World Report photographers took these sixteen images during the struggle for African American civil rights. Use the images to help your students understand both the violence and hope of this pivotal time in American history.

* A Century of Creativity – The MacDowell Colony http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/macdowell/
As students move into summer leisure, encourage them to celebrate their creativity. They may be inspired by a visit to the online version of this Library of Congress exhibition. Students will learn about famous works that trace their origin to the MacDowell Colony, such as Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town,” Aaron Copland’s ballet “Billy the Kid,” and Dorothy and DuBose Heyward’s play “Porgy.” Students will enjoy hearing insider knowledge shared by Library of Congress curators.

* World War I: The Great War http://www.loc.gov/vets/stories/ex-war-wwi.html
This new presentation from the Veterans History Project offers the experience of World War I through the voices, images, and personal effects of those who were there. Students can examine written accounts (letters, diaries, and memoirs) and photographs that will breathe life into a study of this long-ago event.

* Science Tracer Bullets Online – Global Warming & Climate Change http://www.loc.gov/rr/scitech/tracer-bullets/globalwarmingtb.html Are hurricanes, melting glaciers, rising ocean levels, eroding coastlines, crop damage, food shortages, absence of rainfall, shrinking aquifers, wildfires, and lowered water tables signs of worldwide global warming? If your students are grappling with how to understand this topic, introduce them to this listing of vetted print and Internet resources from the Science Reference Section, Library of Congress.

**HAVE YOU USED THE LIBRARY’S TOPICAL PORTALS?
The content celebrates nationally observed heritage months, but many teach these topics year-round.

NEW:
* Asian/Pacific American Heritage Month http://www.loc.gov/topics/asianpacific/ This Library-wide Web portal offers links to video selections, sound files, Library collections, and teaching materials pertaining to Asian/Pacific American Heritage Month.

* Jewish American Heritage Month http://www.jewishheritagemonth.gov/ This Web site, created collaboratively by the Library of Congress, National Archives and Records Administration, National Endowment for the Humanities, National Gallery of Art, National Park Service, Smithsonian Institution, and United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, offers students a glimpse into the life experiences of the generations of Jewish Americans who contribute to the fabric of American history, culture, and society.

**PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT OPPORTUNITIES
*The first of four Library of Congress Summer Institutes for Educators are almost upon us. We look forward to making new friends as well as seeing some old friends this summer!

*If you plan to visit the National Educational Computing Conference (NECC) in Atlanta, consider registering for a half-day, hands-on workshop – The Library of Congress: The Crash Course (Tuesday, June 26, 1-4 p.m.)

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But the most exciting part of the email was the mention that the LOC now has a blog – http://www.loc.gov/blog. As soon as I finish this post, I’ll be adding the URL to my Bloglines account!

In the past few weeks, I’ve been following a discussion on the NWP Tech Liaison’s listserv about comic book software. From the Oregon Writing Project, TL Glen Bledsoe recently shared a project he and his students created using Comic Life software. And from the Western Mass. Writing Project, Kevin Hodgson has created a digital storytelling site where he posts inspiring projects and wonderful resources – among them Bubbleply, a free download that lets you add dialog bubbles to images and even video. So for the teacher who would love to make the genre of political cartoons accessible and engaging for students, I can envision introducing students to LOC image collections and then turning them loose with free software such as Movie Maker 2, Comic Life or Bubbleply to add a new layer of possibilities for student analysis of primary sources. Who needs a costly textbook (or scripted lessons) when our nation’s library has opened its doors 24/7!?!
Technorati Tags: Library_of_Congress, primary_sources

Tuesday night I co-facilitated an event I will not forget for a long time to come, Elk Grove Unified School District’s First Annual Document Your Local History and Culture Film Festival. The evening was the culminating event for a collaborative project and journey I started about six month’s ago with David Byrd, a very gifted history teacher (and A3WP Teacher Consultant) who currently directs our district’s Teaching American History Grant.

A year ago, David and I had the good fortune to attend a workshop one county over (Placer County) on filmmaking in the classroom. We met via an interactive videoconference with an independent filmmaker from Canada Nikos Theodosakis. Nikos is passionate about the need for young people to have opportunities for learning and thinking and creating and growing. He sees filmmaking as a great avenue for students to realize their highest potential. By the end of the workshop, David and I made a commitment to bring filmmaking into our classrooms, in whatever format would work best for teachers willing to work with us. We headed back to our district with little more than a vision, but no real idea of how to make it happen or how it would all turn out. David pointed out that if we spent too long just thinking and talking and planning, instead of just jumping in and trying to muddle our way through it, the idea would die and be thrown on that great heap of other ideas in education call “Great Ideas That could Have Made a Difference…But No One Had the Courage to Try.”

Thanks to David, we could tap into a couple of funding sources: Our district’s Cal Serve Grant, which supports service learning for students, funded 12 digital history kits, including a digital camera, microphone and audio equipment and an external hard drive. Our district’s Teaching American History Grant, which supports professional learning for Humanities teachers, brought Nicko Theodosakis in live from Canada, via videoconference, for two all-day sessions. I knew I could count on support from my department, EGUSD Tech Services. We were ready.

In January we launched the project: “Documenting Your Local History and Culture.” Twelve teachers volunteered to pilot the project. Representing classrooms from grades 4 -12, we had a great group, ready to experiment and learn with us. We starting thinking about the possibility of having a spring film festival. The teachers would have less than four months to guide their student filmmakers through the process of creating documentaries. Many teachers started with one idea or concept of how this would work…and they finished with quite another. There were a lot of frustration along the way, mostly of a technical nature.

But the teachers persevered and their students persevered. And on the evening of May 29, over 100 teacher, students, and guests assembled in the Little Theater of Florin High School for our first-ever film festival, in which 30 films produced by teams of 2 – 20 students were previewed and showcased. It was an amazing event!

As the teachers stepped into the limelight along side their students to share something about the learning experience and to accept accolades and awards, David and I stood back in awe of all that this group had accomplished and in recognition of the power of filmmaking to take students beyond the four walls of the classroom.

This post is in response to two separate but related conversations shared with me on the heels of the highly successful film festival:

1. From Florin High School teacher Bob LeVin: Florin HS will possibly become a remediation high school in the fall, which basically means no electives, just remedial classes. Having spent time in his wonderful English classes, where students are given opportunities to move beyond paper and #2 pencil tasks and are encouraged to work in teams to solve problems in order to produce multimedia projects, I am hoping that come fall, FHS will remain a traditional high school. But, not to worry, Bob has assured me that filmmaking will continue in his classes. All students should have access to a curriculum that prepares them to live in a rapidly changing world.
2. From NWP colleague Glen Bledsoe: Glen’s superintendent has informed him that in the next school year, the district will embrace scripted lessons, with all teachers expected to be on the same page. Fortunately, for the students who enter Glen’s classroom in the fall, Glen plans “to continue to be innovative and creative–administrative micro-management be damned.”

I realize that administrators are under great pressure to raise test scores. I am also pretty sure that regular attendance helps students succeed and that students are more likely to attend classes if they find them interesting. So I am wondering how the “one size fits all” approach impacts attendance stats? I am also doubtful that following a set of scripted lesson will foster the kind of process and product found in the comic book style piece Glen shared via the NWP Tech Liaison listserv or the animation piece Kevin Hodgson posted to the Using Technology to Tell Stories site.

Next week, David and I start planning for the Second Annual EGUSD Student Film Festival. “Scripts” not “scripted”!

Technorati Tags: digital_storytelling, filmmaking, scripted_lessons, NWP, EGUSD