Academic Musings & Tech for e-Learning

Labels: animals, eric carle, instructional technology, interactive activity, kindergarten, primary grades, stem grant

From the NECC network comes word about free online technology assessments for students.. here's the post. For more details to to www.simpleassessment.com. There are 60 questions, aligned to the
NETS-S 1998, with both Mac and PC versions, and immediate reporting.

From their website, "Why SimpleAssessment?
...because NCLB Part D, Section 2402 states that all school districts must assess the technology proficiency of their students by the eighth grade." So here's a chance to do it with a free service.

Lynne
www.lynnembailey.com

Labels: free technology assessment, NETS standards

It is with a certain sense of nostalgia that I read the introduction I wrote for my teaching website almost two years ago. I have since completed 33 credits of graduate school, learned much, and have two more years' life experience including working for NYIT to coach teachers directly in a Title IIB STEM Grant, Phase II of the Digital Immigration Project.

This has been an exciting time and I have had such great experiences and successes doing this teacher training. I've met dozens of new people, been in numerous schools in the Bronx, created and delivered science and technology workshops, taught kindergarten and 4th grade classes, and had class discussions with students in grades K - 5 as I worked with their teachers on integrating science and technology throughout the curriculum.
This time has been very rewarding and satisfying. I was warmly received and appreciated by many - both teachers and students - and shared some of the joys of teaching and learning that are so dear to education professionals.

In some kindergarten classes, I worked with teachers to deliver a wheel-and-axle experience by building wooden models of cars, covered wagons, bulldozers and bi-planes with the students. In another kindergarten class, we got out the laptops and went online to hear the sounds of animals and label the parts of animals. The kids dragged and dropped boxes and jumped with delight when they got them all in place. 4th grade students "oohed" and "aahed" watching a video of a butterfly emerging from its cocoon in a lesson about life cycles, or as they found the iron in their ground-up cereal.

Teachers of all grades and subjects participated in science workshops, and brought some of those resources into their classrooms. It was wonderful to hear of their successes. And to think I hadn’t taken a science class in over 20 years - I presented earthquakes and plate tectonics, hurricanes, simple machines, Newton's laws, the scientific method, and our planetary neighborhood, with videos, podcasts, online interactives, hands-on experiments and added some computer software training. My ratings were excellent and I am very pleased with these accomplishments.

I now live in Rutherford, New Jersey in a house I purchased with two of my friends. I still do the budgeting, coordinating and business work of the FunMasters entertainment company, and occasionally get to perform myself, face painting or doing temporary air brush tattoos. As I near completion of my degree, and have been immersed in elementary school environments and a couple of middle schools as well, I am a better-rounded educator, more seasoned and even more prepared to tackle new challenges.

To teach again would be great, as a cluster teacher in elementary school, even a science cluster teacher, seems a reasonable aspiration, or to get back into a high school and facilitate learning about, and how to use technology to bring new life to students projects. But beyond that, I strive to have a greater influence on bringing technology to a learning community, to collaborate with other educators on making their classrooms more in-tune to the 21st century.

Who knows what challenges await our students? This increasingly complex world needs well-educated students who can think critically, use technology without a second thought as part of their toolbox, collaborate well with others, and navigate a world whose resources are being stretched and whose boundaries are being constantly challenged.

With world population approaching 7 billion people, it is, as Aldous Huxley penned, A Brave New World. Educating our children is an urgent endeavor, and I am anxious to continue my part in it.

I'll be cross-posting to http://bronxdip.edublogs.org/

to all you other educators out there.. keep faith ...
all the best,
Lynne

Labels: aspirations, education, educational technology, instructional technology, stem grant, teacher pd, teacher training, teaching

Back in January I started working for NYIT as a trainer for the STEM (science, technology, engineering & math) grant in CSD 9 of the Bronx. Today marked my first full-day science workshop for teachers in the grant, and the topic was Earthquakes .

I started another blog just for the grant. You can find it at bronxdip.edublogs.org. Please click on that link to go over there and find a copy of the resource list and to add your comments.

Free application to capture and record stuff on your desktop - absolutely fabulous for quick how-to's and sharing .. Jing at http://www.jingproject.com/ . There an intro and video on how to use Jing at http://blog.jingproject.com/2007/07/how_do_i_use_this_thing_called.html. There are MAC and PC versions. TechSmith makes Camtasia, and Snagit. Jing is akin to Camtasia "light" and may be a great solution in lieu of the more pricey Camtasia or Captivate.

I made this quick tutorial using Jing to show how to edit the slide master in my Jeopardy game.

It very simply captures screenshots and sends them to your flickr account .. or gives you a link to share it or embed it .. but much more than that, you can record a voice narrated tutorial as well and annotate the screenshot. Check it out.

Labels: create tutorial, free software, instructional technology, jing, jing project, screen capture, web2.0

Labels: education, jeopardy, powerpoint game

I was just browsing through the NY Times online and came across this article about Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering. The school opened in 2002 and it teaches Engineering in a non-traditional way: they used Project Based Learning and an interdisciplinary approach to learning. The small, tuition-free college is attracting a lot of buzz and making a mark as a new "Ivy" league school. Under the direction of Lawrence W. Milas, the president of the foundation, college President Richard K. Miller created a school that seeks to educate a different breed of engineer - entreprenuerial, ethically minded and collaboratively trained in he humanities as well as technology- to think critically, and boldly. Miller, on his President's Message web page puts it this way, : "Olin will always be bold, innovative, flexible, and creative -- just like the students we have attracted. Our curriculum emphasizes an interdisciplinary approach, teamwork, hands-on design, business, creativity and communication."

The article also noted that 40% of its student are GIRLS, a high percentage for an engineering school. The Class of 2011 consists of 79 new students (34 women and 45 men). So yes, this is a very small school, but it has some very BIG ideas. Perhaps if more universities adopted such an approach, they would attract increasing numbers of engineering students, and a greater number of women to a male-dominated profession.

Re-engineering Engineering
The Hands-On Approach: Building a different breed of engineer at Olin College. 'In an era when software matters more than steel, Olin College wants to produce technologists with soul.'

By JOHN SCHWARTZ
Published: September 30, 2007 NY Times Magazine Section

"WHEN NONENGINEERS THINK ABOUT ENGINEERING, it's usually because something has gone wrong: collapsing levees in New Orleans, the loss of the space shuttle Columbia in 2003. In the follow-up investigations, it comes out that some of the engineers involved knew something was wrong. But too few spoke up or pushed back - and those who did were ignored. This professional deficiency is something the new, tuition-free Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering wants to fix. At its tiny campus in Needham, Mass., outside Boston, Olin is trying to design a new kind of engineer."

Read the entire article at http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/30/magazine/30OLIN-t.html?ex=1348891200&en=6c28466b3eb78d2f&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

Labels: education, engineering school, Olin College, project based learning, Richard K. Miller, undergraduate curriculum design

Last week I had the pleasure and honor to conduct a guest math lesson at the Arturo Schomberg Bronx facility of Satellite Academy High School. [You can also read more about the Satellite Academies here. Shawn Welcome is the Principal.] The lesson I created is called "Dining Out" and this idea can work well particularly well with older students in a consumer math, personal finance, and/or basic algebra review class. The primary activity involves ordering dinner from a menu and getting as close to $50, without going over, including sales tax & gratuities.

Some envision a curriculum around the topic of EveryDay Math. With my personal experience and background in finance (I worked on Wall Street for a number of years, as a Mortgage Office after that and for a financial planning firm), I really know a lot about this and it is one of those things I really like teaching. Too often our students graduate high school knowing nothing about credit cards, bank accounts or budgeting. There are all kinds of financial decisions we make - from picking a cell phone plan to furnishing an apartment - and a class like this can give students a real jump on dealing successfully with these situations.

At The Young Women's Leadership School in East Harlem, NY I taught a similar class, and I really enjoyed the students and their engagement with the subject matter. There were equations, too, of course, but it all fit into Math in Every Day life. The school has a computer lab & mobile laptop carts that can be used, too. Students can learn to use a spreadsheet program, research investments, and tap into an online Mathematical Skills plan to practice and create their portfolios. Dan Stein, college professor and consultant, has developed a spreadsheet that students can use to track their progress and link directly to AAAMath.com for topic reviews and practice.

I published the lesson on the web using google pages and used a calculator widget from Lab Pixies. Widgets are great... and this one cames in handy! Lab Pixies has something new call "moodgets".... I'm sure you'll be seeing this one on myspace ... and it could be great to use with little kids when learning about expressions and feelings..


For more teaching ideas, lesson plans and articles, see my Portfolio page at LynneMBailey.com.

Labels: consumer math, instructional technology, lab pixies, lynne bailey, math lesson plan, numeracy, Prof. Dan Stein, sany hs, satellite hs, teaching, widgets

On Thursday, October 25, 2007 there will be another blog workshop on designing and implementing a blog. You can register for the workshop here. Consider joining Webgrrls while you're at it. Webgrrls is a great resource for anyone interested in tech-related issues and meeting interesting people with very diverse backgrounds in many fields. There are monthly meetings and lots of opportunities for networking.

Blogging can be a bit confusing for the uninitiated. I wrote a paper, A Look at Blogging in December, 2006 about blogging with ideas for using it in the classroom. You can download it here (it's a PDF file for Adobe Acrobat) and check it out. Using blogs for students to post and comment can be very beneficial for learning, and teachers and administrators find them to be a great communications tool.

For more teaching ideas, lesson plans and articles, see my Portfolio page at LynneMBailey.com.

Labels: blog workshop, blogs, education blog, instructional technology, lynne bailey, lynne m. bailey, nelly yusupova, teaching with blogs, webgrrls

In one of my clases this summer at NYIT, the professor Susan Silverman created a group at www.flickr.com. You can find our group at this link. This past week we have been using Flickr and some Internet applications. There are a wealth of tools available to use in conjunction with Flickr (or other images), and these little apps are called 'toys."

In my lesson plan I used Trading Card Maker from http://www.bighugelabs.com/ for depicting and describing a character from Animal Farm.

It's pretty easy to use most of these tools, and a lot of them can easily be used in the classroom at almost any grade level. Stop on over and check out the lesson plans we've developed!

Lynne M Bailey
teaching portfolio: http://www.lynnembailey.com/
studio portfolio: http://www.presentsbydesign.com/
http://www.funmasters.biz/ for face painting and body art

Labels: animal farm, ELA lesson plan, teaching with flickr

Earlier this week, while doing some reading for class, I thought to myself, who cares what the difference is between Constructivist and Constructionism theories of education? 'Tis far more important to simply engage in it in a real sort of way, than to banter about distinctions between the theory of it, and the application of it. But labels are indeed important, and in the info world, it's called tagging. Tags are just labels to make it easier to find data.

This week I had a look at another TED presentation, which shows an application prototype using Seadragon and Photosynth. Seadragon is a computing environment that lets you interact with a vast amount of visual data in a multi-resolution experience - An amazing tool to work with visual data, it allows for a multi-resolution experience (like zooming in and out effortlessly). Photosynth marries the capabilities of Seadragon and computer vision research by Noas Navely (sp?) In this extraordinary application, images gathered from multiple sources are arranged spatially and converted to panoramic views and much more.

"Using photos of oft-snapped subjects (like Notre Dame) scraped from around the Web, Photosynth creates breathtaking multidimensional spaces with zoom and navigation features that outstrip all expectation. Its architect, Blaise Aguera y Arcas, shows it off in this standing-ovation demo."

Watching this demo, which used images gathered from http://www.flickr.com/, drove home an important point about the importance of metadata and tagging, or labelling data, that we publish to the web. It just makes it so much easier to share data if you make it searchable, and tagging is one way to assure that. He does talk about the tapping into the social web universe, using data from users worldwide, creating a "cross-user social experience". It creates hyperlinks between image collections from all users, linking to the information about each image, thereby making for a richer experience.So don't forget to tag those pictures you upload to flickr!

And just think about how you can use this technology in the classroom. Linking images and text, to make a visual potpourri of available resources, can provide a much richer database of related information, for any topic. In order for such a collaborative learning atmosphere to flourish, data of all kinds has to have an efficient way of being found. By tagging our posts, files, images, audio, etc., to the main idea, we are helping to build a world wide index that can add to the human experience and knowledge base.

Lynne M Bailey
teaching portfolio: http://www.lynnembailey.com/
studio portfolio: http://www.presentsbydesign.com/
http://www.funmasters.biz/

Labels: importance of labels, metadata, photosynth, seadragon, tagging, tags, TED

# posted by Lynne Bailey @ 2:15 AM 0 comments links to this post