Sunday morning, I received an email via the NWP Tech Liaison’s listserv from Scott Floyd. It was an invitation to check out a post in his A Piece of Mind blog about the recent violence in Kenya:

I was fortunate enough recently to be in contact with someone who lived the Kenya unrest firsthand. She (Ellen) and her twelve year old son were in Kenya volunteering at an orphanage when the presidential race unfolded and the violence began. She shared her story of escape in a blog post on Guy Kawasaki’s blog. I contacted her, and we worked together via the Internet to create several versions of her story using various Web 2.0 tools. I used it this past week while training school staff on integrating more technology, and we are going to use it with our high school world history students where Ellen will video conference with them via Skype after they view her story and send her questions about the events. The feedback I received from the teachers showed just how powerful digital storytelling can be regardless of the subject being taught.”

Scott has shared not only an amazing story but also another take on the possibilities for telling stories – even a current event – in a digital age.

It just gets better…Scott will be joining tonight’s Teachers Teaching Teachers session to share more about the project. And Scott will be joined by David Karp, 21-year old founder of tumblr, and Felicia George, who will share highlights from EduCon 2.0. Many thanks to Paul Allison for his organizing time and efforts! I already have the headset out, ready to logon at 6:00 pst.

I am very glad that I traveled down Highway 50 yesterday to join 300 other educators for the CTAP3 Ed Tech Conference held at Granite Bay High School. CTAP3 Director and conference organizer Ben Anderson opened the day with the statement that we would “have a great day and find this conference a valuable learning experience for your own professional development.” Here are my top three reasons for enjoying the event:

1. Learning about Granite Bay High School’s “World Class Tech Support” - Three impressive, engaging seniors kicked off the conference with an introduction to their highly successful GBiT program. This program (and class) provides students with the opportunity to engage in real-world technology support, web development, and management. GBit students maintain all technology on campus, including updates and upgrades, build and maintain the school’s web site and websites for outside customers, and provide faculty with technical training. GBit faculty coordinator Mike Fisher has built the program around a strong college-to-career path. (Note to self: Get the word out to high schools in my district about the GBit program and model!)

2. Listening to Hall Davidson’s “Revenge of the Digital Immigrant: Teaching wit Media Technology” presentation – Hall reminded us of the brain-based research that supports media in the classroom. What I took away from this session was the power of short – 10-second, maybe 20-second, no more than 30-second – videos in the classroom. By projecting an image of Warren G. Harding and then flashing several times the phrase “29th president, ” followed by “handsome” flashed a few times, followed by “worst president ever,” I am pretty sure it will be a long time before I forget the gist of Hall’s mini lesson on the president who was elected more on looks than on ability to lead. (Note to self: contact Hall or Discovery folks to find link to Hall’s PowerPoint.)

3. Meeting and co-presenting with Alice Mercer – I met Alice about a year ago in the chat room of a Teachers Teaching Teachers Skypecast. From there I started connecting with her in the blogosphere, first through her classroom blog, which was often the model that made visible to teachers in my Web 2.0 workshops the power and possibilities of blogging with students. As a regular reader of the Blog of Mz. Mercer, I feel that I know Alice pretty well…yet…(and here comes the blogosphere connection)…Alice I had had never met face-to-face until walking into the auditorium at Granite Bay High School yesterday morning. Thanks to Skype, Edublogs, and Wikispaces, we did our pre-planning online and were ready to jump in and – together – lead two workshops: Blogging for Absolute Beginners and Going Live with Edublogs. If I do say so myself, I think we did a great job:-) .

One of the favorite things I learned from teaming with Alice was a nifty trick for commenting back to students in Edublogs. Since Edublogs does not have an option for threaded discussions, Alice’s tip will come in handy for teachers wanting to respond directly to a student’s comment (or a fellow blogger’s comment):

• From your Dashboard, click on the Comment tab, locate the comment you want to respond to and click on the Edit link.

• When your code view opens, select italic and/or bold so that your comment will be noticeably different from your student’s comment, and add your comment. When you’ve finished, select italic and/or bold to close your comment, and click on the Edit Comment button.

For an overview of our workshop, checkout our workshop blog: Bringing Educators to Edublogs. (Note to self: update Edublogs Manual to include commenting on comments tutorial.)

I’m already looking forward to next year’s CTAP3 conference – but immediately to next week’s Web 2.0 Conference in San Francisco!

It’s that time of year when high school seniors in many districts are buckling down to complete their senior research projects. I’ve been listening in at every opportunity to teachers sharing their thoughts, their questions, their cautions, and their policies concerning student use of Wikipedia as a resource.

My favorite discussion so far has been one led by CyberEnglish teacher Ted Nellen during November’s NCTE ACE workshop in NYC. One of the teachers in the session cited Wikipedia as being only 40% accurate. Ted responded by asking the accuracy rate of, for example, the average history textbook (which by the way, continue to be less than engaging for our students). And the conversation opened up…and continued on into the NCTE Talkies listserv…and on into Ted’s blog post Yes, Use Wikipedia. I’m taking the liberty of copying from the heart of the post:

“wikipedia is merely the next iteration in information sharing. following the evolution of information sharing, we had oral, then written and now digital. all information was controlled by an elder, perhaps, and shared orally. the information shared was of course edited by the giver. churches evolved as the main information sharer. then with gutenberg, the information sharer was passed onto publishers. they, too, edited and selected what was shared. today we have the internet and information is shared in a more democratic manner and perhaps chaotic manner. yet the information gets batted about and sifted through so that we should arrive at pure information, unedited and free. this of course scares lots of people who are used to getting information from print sources or from people who own these print sources. so it makes sense that something like wikipedia scares people cause they have been told to fear it or fear it cause it is wresting the distribution of information from them and giving it to the people.

of course we should use wikipedia as a resource. i’m not quite sure why we would not.
why not?

it is democratic. it is created by the people who do know more about the topic than others. it is public, it is peer reviewed, and it is edited constantly. sure it goes through weird times but it is fixed very quickly. “

From the NCTE Talkies, Carla Beard, who gave several highly entertaining NCTE workshop presentations on student use of wikis, shared that, of course there is a need to teach students to question Wikipedia entries and to corroborate sources – but then, I think we need to teach students to question and corroborate any resource! Carla likes “to pull up articles where Wikipedia itself asks for citation of information.” Great way to model information literacy strategies!

Another NCTE colleague (and mentor), Nancy Patterson shared in the Talkies discussion that she directs her graduate students to Wikipedia because it is “often a great place to start, especially if they don’t know anything about a topic or person.”

After reading an article in the Wall Street Journal by Lee Gomes – Forget the Articles, Best Wikipedia Read Is Its Discussions – I now check on the Discussion tab too and can see why he finds this feature of Wikipedia so fascinating. Just reading through the discussions for the Potato entry was engaging and informative – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Potato. Maybe we should encourage students to start with Wikipedia discussions before venturing on to read the articles.

For those students who are truly passionate about the topic they’ve chosen for their senior project, the possibility of themselves becoming a “wikipedian” on their topic might encourage more scholarly research and thoughtful writing. I’m thinking about a senior at Florin High School who shared with me that her topic – and passion – was floral design. Out of curiosity, I searched “floral design” and found that Wikipedia is asking for contributions – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floral_design. Sounds like a great opportunity for students to go public with their research!

And my favorite resource for introducing teachers and students to the whole concept of a wiki is still Lee Lefever’s Common Craft video Wikis in Plain English .

If YouTube required a written script, explanation, or augmentation to accompany each video, then for Cisco’s Human Network…

…I would recommend David Warlick’s post Is Pedogogy Getting in the Way of Learning?, which starts with a description of his morning’s conversation with colleagues across the nation and world as they use different technologies to connect and share. David also references a May 2006 post in which he sums up limited vs. unlimited education:

“…the point is this. Education, defined by it limits, required a curriculum that was packaged into products that could be easily used in the classroom. We used textbooks with scope and sequence, pacing guides, and a teacher’s guide with the answers.

Education, defined by it’s lack of limits, requires no such packaging. It’s based on experiences, tied to real-world, real-time information that spans the entire spectrum of media — crafted and facilitated by skilled teachers, who become more like tour guides than assembly-line workers.”

The good news is that almost two years later, I can scroll through my blogroll and Bloglines to find a growing number of classrooms in which

“the platform is a node on the global network; with text, audio, and video links to other uncountable nodes on the network; and the connections are real time and clickable, and tools are available to work and employ the content that flows through those connections; then the learning happens because learners have experienced personal connections — and they want to maintain those connections by feeding back their own value.”

David’s post also included a link to a great Skype conversation between Clay Burrell and Chris Craft that further complements the video and helps to make Web 2.0 potential more visible. So I’ve added a new category – Unlimited education – and a new lense for viewing 21st (or 20th) century curriculum.

Andy Carvin posted today about an amazing digital storytelling project/collection:One Story, 50 Tools, Infinite Possibilities. One of the challenges of working with emerging writers is getting them to buy into the need for revision. But, oh my, a visit to educator Alan Levine’s treasure trove of Dominoe the Dog stories introduces not only multiple tools for digital storytelling but also presents a beautiful model of the unlimited possibilities for constructing a storyline when storytellers embrace revision. If you listen to the story below, you will definitely want to visit the Levine’s CogDog wiki and check out the next 49 versions (and tools)!

I spent the weekend revisiting some of my favorite mentors on the art of teaching writing: Nanci Atwell, Donald Graves, Lucy Calkins and Ralph Fletcher. Thank goodness the many, many post-it notes are still in place; so it did not take me long to find the gems that made for the perfect writers’ workshop while I was still in the classroom. A post earlier this week by Miguel at Around the Corner was a the impetus for revisiting my collection:

“In fact, blogging isn’t a medium for sharing what you’ve learned, but writing your way into understanding, or as Toby Fulwiler (Teaching with Writing) writes, a way of bringing order to chaos. To deny students the opportunity, and what Nanci Atwell refers to as the TIME and OWNERSHIP of their ideas, is incredibly problematic.”

This morning I read through Carolyn Foote’s Desparately Seeking Engagement post in which she mentions another hero from my past, Ken Macrorie, whose iSearch approach to research-based writing is structured to help emerging writers find a life’s passion to research and write about. Since this is the time of year many seniors in my district are expected to crank out a “senior project,” I want to thank Carolyn for her insightful list:

1. Give students time to consider their interests. How many of us could “generate” a topic when approaching it completely cold. The bells rings–okay, pick your topic.

2. Consider having students, as I mentioned above, write about things that interest them or collect information for weeks or months prior to the assignment.

3. As you move through your curriculum, have students keep a “research idea” log as things in the curriculum pique their interest.

4. Consider conducting research across an entire semester or year. Two of our teachers are trying this this year–having students gradually collect articles of interest, compare Wikipedia with other sources, use delicious or furl to bookmark items, keep their eyes out for news stories on their topics and so on. (Interestingly, this was partially driven by the fact that our main library will be closed in the spring when they will be writing their paper, but it’s been very very effective educationally.)

5. Consider completely rethinking the “research project.” Tell students they will write a research paper sometime during the year when it feels right to them. Scaffold everyone at the beginning with assistance on logistics, but let students “strike when the iron is hot.” (I know we are dealing with high school students, but….they might enjoy having this flexibility and spontaneity).

6. Have students establish a blog or use a class bulletin board online as a way to explore topics, ask others for help and work collaboratively. (What would have happened for the student above if the teacher had said–well, if you want to do this topic, and if you and the other student agree, how about the two of you working collaboratively on your research and your paper? And then supported that with sharing web 2.0 tools that would have assisted them?)

7. Consider how writing a blog entry or several blog entries is like writing a research paper–where you explore, document and share your investigations and passions. Could a “blog” be a research paper and be even more meaningful because it’s published?

8. Consider making the process more open-ended for students. Every researcher does not end up with the same product in “real life.” Why can’t the product grow organically out of the topic and student’s process? Some students may want to create a video to inform others, while others may want to write a blog, and yet others may want to create a slide show and present their information to their peers. Empower students to make those choices.

9. If you are a classroom teacher, then realize that your librarian is and wants to be a real partner with you in research(and your tech coordinator may as well!) Most school librarians have teaching degrees(in some states, this is required) and most have taught. (and many were English teachers!) Your librarian sees research in action every day, sees the problems students are having, sees where help is needed and wants to collaborate with you and plan with you. Seek them out and don’t feel like you are bothering them or inconveniencing them. (And librarians, don’t ever make teachers feel like they are inconveniencing you!)

But whatever you do–think about how to engage your students passionately in their research. Think about how to make it authentic for students. Rethink how you were taught the “research paper” and rethink how you teach it. Throw out the old “box” and see what happens, because your students will benefit tremendously in the end. And imagine “grading” research papers where every student was so engaged and passionate about their writing and their topic that they transcended the form. Wouldn’t that make the process worth it for everyone? It could even become the spark that leads a student on a life-changing path as they learn to shape their own learning.”

And my last resource and inspiration for writing comes from 9 year old Adora Svitak on Teacher Tube.

Thanks to Kevin H for posting about Mathew Needleman’s re-launching of his Video in the Classroom site. I am always in search of good models of filmmaking in the classroom to share with elementary teachers and their students. I also want to recognize Mathew for his Open Court Resources.com site, “which aligns units of the basal reading series, Open Court Reading, with integrating technology activities and is visited by thousands of teachers across the country daily.”

I also like many of the video tips for students posted by the Sacramento Educational Cable Consortium website on their Student DV page. The SECC team members are local heroes in supporting teachers’ efforts and journeys into filmmaking in the classroom, starting with DV Loaner Starter Kits and culminating every spring with the SEVAs (another great site for finding great K-12 video projects!).

Since lighting can enhance or hinder a quality project, I especially like Center High School’s Vernon Bisho’s Outdoor Lighting Tips:

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