“A Vision of K-12 Students Today” was created to inspire teachers to begin using technology in engaging ways in order to promote the development of higher level thinking skills in their students. Equally important, it serves to motivate district level leaders to provide teachers with the technology tools and professional development training to accomplish this goal.

“A Vision of K-12 Students Today” as featured on TeacherTube

Source: http://www.teachertube.com/view_video.php?viewkey=d1296214afd7cc367045

“Digital World… Today’s Teachers’ is about how today’s teachers are changing the culture of education in the 21st century through the use of technology and web 2.0 tools and resources. This incredibly inspiring and thought-provoking video is a highlight of the 21st century teacher working in a digital world. I invite you to watch the video and then ask yourself, “Am I a teacher of today?”

“Digital World… Today’s Teachers” as featured on TeacherTube

Source: http://www.teachertube.com/view_video.php?viewkey=9fae5dab3de636b8f130

As always, your comments and reactions are welcome.

I think back to the impact Karl Fisch’s video had last November, when I first viewed it, to what it has become today. It was incredibly powerful in it’s original format due to the underlying reason and motivation that Karl had for creating this presentation (noted in his blog post) – he wanted professional development to have an impact prior to the school year, to not do the same familiar training that led to nothing changing. Now, the new version of the video is even more powerful! It is no longer enough to view the video and be complacent; one must react in a constructive way.

“Did You Know? 2.0″ presents fascinating data and thought-provoking questions. It provides inspiration to make you think about globalization and the information age, it is an evolutionary presentation. Indicative of the “shifts” that are occurring, all the facts and statistics lead to one overwhelming conclusion: We’re connected, so we should be taking advantage of that both inside and outside of the classroom environment!

“Did You Know? 2.0″ as featured on TeacherTube

Source: http://www.teachertube.com/view_video.php?viewkey=6f2c2eba77f39993d118

You can find more information on the latest presentation, including suggestions for usage, a link to the various versions of the video, and other relevant resources, at http://shifthappens.wikispaces.com.

As always, your comments and reactions are welcome.

The K-12 Online Conference 2008 officially starts today. It is two-week conference that hosts four sessions per day. It features remarkable presenters with a wide variety of stimulating topics. And the best part… It is totally FREE!

You can access the sessions according to your own time schedule. Presentations will remain available for at least a year, so if you don’t have time now in the midst of Progress Reports , you can watch them later this year.

K-12 Online Conference 2008

Conference Website: http://k12onlineconference.org/

Full Conference Schedule: http://k12onlineconference.org/docs/k12online2008schedule.html

I’ve highlighted a few of the sessions being featured throughout the conference below: (All sessions can be accessed after the date/time listed for your viewing & learning pleasure.)

Never Too Young
Presenter: Sharon Betts
Date/Time: Wednesday, October 22 @ 8:00 AM EST (12:00 PM GMT)

We Like Our Blogging Buddies: The Write Stuff with Blogging Mentors
Presenters: Kathy Cassidy and Patrick Lewis
Date/Time: Thursday, October 23 @ 8:00 AM EST (12:00 PM GMT)

Web 2.0 Tools to Amplify Elementary Students’ Creativity and Initiative
Presenter: Jackie Gerstein
Date/Time: Friday, October 24 @ 8:00 AM EST (12:00 PM GMT)

Games in Education
Presenter: Sylvia Martinez
Date/Time: Monday, October 27 @ 8:00 AM EST (12:00 PM GMT)

Pushing the Limits: Web 2.0 and 21st Century Learning
Presenter: Aimee Stoffel
Date/Time: Wednesday, October 29 @ 8:00 AM EST (12:00 PM GMT)

Connecting Classrooms Across Continents: Planning and Implementing Globally Collaborative ProjectsPresenters: Kim Cofino and Jen Wagner
Date/Time: Wednesday, October 29 @ 8:00 AM EST (12:00 PM GMT)

Parental Engagement in the 21st Century – Leveraging web 2.0 tools to engage parents in non-traditional ways
Presenters: Lorna Costantini and Matt Montagne
Date/Time: Friday, October 31 @ 8:00 AM EST (12:00 PM GMT)

With the upcoming Presidential Election, below you will find some featured websites that can help you and your students get up to speed on the candidates and the election process before the big election day in November.

BrainPOP Spotlight: Election ‘08

URL: http://www.brainpop.com/election/

Description:

BrainPOP! instructional video with links to the following related resources: a quiz, experiment, printable activities, graphic organizer, timeline, and FYI area.

BrainPOP Election Topics:

* Presidential Election – How does America choose its leader?

http://www.brainpop.com/socialstudies/usgovernmentandlaw/presidentialelection

* Voting – Stand And Be Counted!

http://www.brainpop.com/socialstudies/usgovernmentandlaw/voting/

* Primaries & Caucuses – Choosing a Presidential Nominee

http://www.brainpop.com/socialstudies/usgovernmentandlaw/primariesandcaucuses/

* Presidential Power – What does the U.S. President do?

http://www.brainpop.com/socialstudies/usgovernmentandlaw/presidentialpower/

* Political Beliefs – Where do you stand on the issues?

http://www.brainpop.com/socialstudies/usgovernmentandlaw/politicalbeliefs/

* Political Parties – Learn the differences between democrats and republicans!

http://www.brainpop.com/socialstudies/usgovernmentandlaw/politicalparties/

BrainPOP jr.: Election ’08 – K-3 Election Resources

URL: http://www.brainpopjr.com/socialstudies/government/
Description:

BrainPOP jr. instructional video with links to the following related resources: game, printable activity, Belly Up comic, Pop-a-Joke, word wall, hard quiz, easy quiz, draw about it, write about it, read about it, talk about it, and ideas for grown-ups – teacher resources.

BrainPOP jr. Election Topics:

* President

http://www.brainpopjr.com/socialstudies/government/president/

* Rights and Responsibilities

http://www.brainpopjr.com/socialstudies/government/rightsandresponsibilities/

* U.S. Symbols

http://www.brainpopjr.com/socialstudies/government/ussymbols/

* Local and State Governments

http://www.brainpopjr.com/socialstudies/government/localandstategovernments/

Nickelodeon: Kids Pick the President

URL: http://www.nick.com/kpp/

Description:

Interactive website for kids to explore the 2008 US Presidential Elections. This site is hosted by the journalist, Linda Elerbee. It includes: polls, meet the candidates, how we eect a President, a message board and much more!

Related Information:

* For full details on the Kids Pick the President campaign and to view Nick News with Linda Ellerbee: Election Issues 08 visit www.nick.com/kpp! Click here for the Election Issues 08 lesson plan!

* Go to TurboNick.com to view Nick News with Linda Ellerbee: The Kids’ Primary. Click here for the Kids’ Primary lesson plan!

* Cable in the Classroom’s eLECTIONS game: Inspired by the classic board game The Game of Life, players will role-play their own virtual candidates running for President. The one or two-player game is both genuinely entertaining and genuinely educational-with emphasis on delivering a fun learning experience. Play here à Cable in the Classrooms eLECTIONS game!

Scholastic News Countdown to Election 2008

URL: http://teacher.scholastic.com/scholasticnews/indepth/election2008.htm

Description:

Loads of information and activities, including: lesson plans, web hunts, meet the candidates, news boards, blogs by Scholastic Kid Reporters, podcasts, games and quizzes.

Games & Quizzes:

* Create a Campaign Poster – How would you get your message to the voters? Design (and then print) your ideas here.

* You’re the Candidate – You’re running for President. Do you have what it takes to win? Find out!

* You’re the President – You make the decisions and talk to the press. Print out the resulting news story to see how you fared as President of the United States.

* Guess Where the Candidates Stand – Can you guess who the candidate is based on where they stand on important issues?

Time Magazine for Kids: Election Connection 2008

Kid’s Site URL: http://www.timeforkids.com/TFK/election08/

Teacher’s Site URL: http://www.timeforkids.com/TFK/teachers

Description:

Kids Site Activities:

* Path to the Presidency – This short activities shows the 8 steps to the presidency in a nice graphical timeline.

* Electionary – A great dictionary of election and political terms that they can reference and learn.

* Campaign Games – This section of Time for Kids offers to games for students to explore the presidential election. The first game is called

* “Be the Nominee” – Students answer presidential trivia questions on their way to the White House.

* “Electoral College Craze” – Students can use the interactive whiteboard and roll over the map of the US to see which states have how many electoral college votes. Then if they select that state, they must answer a question correctly to win that state.

* Meet the Candidates – See who’s who in the race for President!

* Inside the Issues – Where do the candidates stand on the issues? Find out here!

* Kid Reporters – What did our Kid Reporters observe at the conventions? Read about it here.

* Congress Connection – Find and contact your representative in Washington, D.C.!

The Teacher’s Site provides worksheets, mini-lessons and graphic organizers for Kindergarten through sixth grades.

Ben’s Guide to the US Government: Election Process

URL: http://bensguide.gpo.gov/3-5/election/index.html

Description:

These pages explain the election process for Federal officials. Information about specific candidates and their campaigns, party or party platforms, or political races will not be found here.

PBS Kids: The Democracy Project

URL: http://pbskids.org/democracy/

Description:

The online activities are designed for students in grades three to six, with accompanying lesson plans for language arts (LA), social studies (SS), and math (M) teachers.

Online Activities:

* How Does Government Affect Me?: A virtual tour of a town’s buildings, roads, and parks teaches kids how federal, state, and local government decisions directly impact their community. This activity also provides a basic understanding of the branches of the federal government and balance of power.

* President For A Day: This activity provides a job description for the presidency, so students understand what kinds of skills and competencies are necessary in that office. Students have the opportunity to role play the president for a day, making decisions about different events that a president might actually experience (meetings with Cabinet members, speeches to the public, bowling in the White House).

* Inside The Voting Booth: This activity introduces students to the history of suffrage in America, through the “Voting Time Machine,” which presents case studies from different decades. Students also anticipate the time when they will be able to vote, through a customized, printable voter registration card, which also asks them to identify the issues they think are most important today.

Find more information about the educational goals for each online activity; lesson plans for each activity; curriculum standards related to this content; and the teachers who wrote the lesson plans at: http://pbskids.org/democracy/educators/index.html

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Nothing like finishing at the last possible second! Shelley has without a doubt created an exceptional and powerful course for educators. My goal is to encourage every single faculty, staff and administrative member of our school community to complete this course at some point. I would try to have them all complete it at one time, but that would be suicide – Death by Mentoring Overload! LOL… just teasing… sort of. I am looking forward to just focusing on mentoring during the Summer 2008 course though, rather than mentoring as well as participating simultaneously. I often fell behind on my own course work because I was focusing on helping my fellow Trinity teachers (participants) to succeed, develop and learn throughout the course. It became an psychological strain on me to know how far behind I was while all of my “mentees” were succeeding and keeping up so well! I am however extremely proud of each and every one of them. They all worked incredibly hard and were genuinely excited about everything they were learning throughout the past twelve weeks. It’s amazing to see the excitement spread and watch them as they try to engage other teachers around them in to taking in the new knowledge they now have to offer one another. Participating in this course online has helped to develop new bonds and professional relationships among our school participants.  Whenever, participants pass each other in the hallway they will often excitedly ask “What thing are you on?” or shout “Thing 17, baby!” as they slap each other high-fives. It’s so much fun! I hope that excitement continues as more and more teachers participate in this incredible program.

Two of my favorite new tools that I am excited to be taking from this course are ed.VoiceThread and PageFlakes. I have already convinced the Instructional Technology team to purchase a subscription for an ed.VoiceThread community. I introduced it during a faculty meeting a couple months ago and it has taken off! The teachers are totally psyched about the tool and have been creating projects with their students left and right. It’s incredible! PageFlakes is going to be an incredible tool for me to be able to develop technology integration resources that I can share amongst the teachers. I can only hope that it takes off as well as Trinity’s ed.voicethread community.

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The world is rapidly changing and advancing all around us. I can envision a time when we will no longer be able to determine a clear divide between the ‘world of education’ and the ‘world of technology’. We are living in an era where new technologies are emerging, and old technologies are improving, on a minute by minute basis. Today’s children and students have never known a time when they were without technology in their daily lives. Therefore, I feel it is our duty as educators to teach these digital natives, our students of today, and our leaders of tomorrow, in the modality of learning that is most conducive to their technology-enriched learning styles.

As an educator, I want to empower students to learn through the use of technology. I want them to view school as a place where they can explore their curiosities and expand their knowledge, not only through books, but through the use of technology tools that enable them to grow, share and learn with the global classroom, the global community. I strive to instill in my students a life-time love of learning. I believe the only way to accomplish this goal is to show them that education and technology are intertwined; they are not separate entities and to do that we must learn, use and model the appropriate and beneficial uses of technology tools for our students. My goal as an Instructional Technology Specialist is to empower educators to do just that, to implement and integrate the use of emerging technology and web 2.0 tools in their classrooms and with their students.

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I’ve been a member of a few social networking sites (MySpace/Facebook) for many years now but purely for the social fun of it. I also belong to Linkedin which is a professional networking for career growth and development. My first experience with a Professional Learning Community (PLC), which also marks my introduction to NING, was via the professional development program entitled Powerful Learning Practices (PLP). Sheryl Nausbaum-Beach set up a NING social network for the participants of the program to connect us with each other in the 20 participating private schools as well as with “expert voices” from across the world. It has been a great way to connect with people worldwide who are integrating technology and web 2.0 tools in the educational environment. NING communities, as well as other social networks, serve as a common place for members who share common interests and goals to exchange resources, host discussions, collaborate on projects and trade ideas.

I now belong to several NING social networks that focus on integrating technology in education, including:

Visit iPod Educators

Visit Classroom 2.0

Visit Ning in Education

Visit Laptop Learning Community

Visit IND-PLP

Visit Trinity 2.0

As a culminating project for the PLP program, I set up a virtual NING community for our school faculty and staff called “Trinity 2.0″. The Trinity PLP Team’s hope is that Trinity 2.0 will serve as a way to connect our community of educators and personnel together on a more personal and social level in the beginning. In order to lure the teachers into using the virtual PLC we have set up groups with social-sharing themes like “Recipe Exchange”, “For Sale” and “Restaurant Reviews”, as well as many more. After we have thoroughly “hooked” our teachers and staff into using the Trinity 2.0 network, we will begin to phase in professional development modules and cross-department collaboration groups. To begin this “phasing in” process I came up with the idea of having a group where teachers could share the various projects they are creating with their students using technology and web 2.0 tools. Another one of my teammates suggested calling this group “My Successes.”

I am keeping my fingers crossed that Trinity 2.0 catches on like wildfire at the beginning the next school year when we officially launch it to the faculty and staff of Trinity.

As a former classroom teacher, this really makes me wonder…

• How many teachers are currently using PageFlakes with their classes?
• In what ways are teachers implementing the various PageFlakes features with their classes?
• Do they have a general class homepage pagecast that includes such ‘flakes’ as notes from them to the students, homework assignments, links to class related documents or websites, research areas, a built in dictionary or thesaurus, podcasts created by their students or even pictures of their various classroom projects or events?
• Have any teachers created a page focused on a curriculum unit or topic, where they place relevant ‘flakes’ pertaining to what they are currently studying? For example, a page all about the Greek Olympics, with links to Flickr photos, blogs, news feeds, podcasts, videos, etc… each pertaining to information about the Greek Olympics.

In my current role as an Instructional Technology Specialist, I am going to work on creating technology integration resource PageFlakes Pagecasts that I can then share with the teachers at my school. I have already created a Promethean Activclassroom pagecast. I’ve included a RSS Feed flake for the Promethean Planet – Activtips video podcast series; a RSS Feed flake for the ActivEducator Blog from Promethean; Web Site Clipper flakes that target the three main areas of the Promethean Planet Forum; and a Bookmarks flake that features links to Promethean’s multiple resource sites for educators. I also created a del.icio.us account with the username: Activeducator so that I could pull in sites tagged with various terms synonymous with not only Promethean but also interactive whiteboards and their use in the classroom. Then, I added a del.icio.us feed flake that features a tag cloud for the user “Activeducator”; additionally, I added another del.icio.us feed flake that uses the tag: activclassroom. I’ve also included a Flickr Photostream flake targeting the tag: activclassroom; as well as the Universal Video Search flake and the YouTube flake to feed in videos tagged: Promethean, Activclassroom. I plan to create two more Promethean pagecasts that will target their two incredibly powerful software programs: ActivStudio and ActivPrimary. These Pagecasts will focus on resources and lesson plans that can be used by or within the Activ software programs.

Over the summer, I am psyched to be able to work on creating more and more pages that pertain to various educational technology integration ideas or tools that are already available to the teachers at our school, but are sorely underutilized. To begin with I plan to create PageFlakes Pagecasts for software programs like Kidspiration, Google Earth, SketchUp and even Scratch, as well as, web 2.0 tools such as ed.Voicethread and Google Docs. Although I think I might begin my PageFlakes Pagecasts creation excursion with creating pages that focus on resources for creating and using podcasting, wikis and blogs in the classroom. I also aim to create a page that focuses on technology tutorials and how-to resources, this will definitely include links to (hopefully feeds if I can find a way to make it work) Atomic Learning where we recently bought a subscription to for our school community.