The conversation was rich, it was real and it was authentic.  There were lots of questions, lots of discussion, not lots of answers.

Is it making the task authentic?  Is it making the teaching and learning transparent?  Is it building relationships? Is it collaboration?  Is it using the right tool for the job?  Is it establishing the climate?  Is it transferring knowledge?  Is it accepting the differences?  Are you applying technology in the right way?

It doesn’t matter how you engage the kids – the key thing is that you are actually engaging the kids.  But is there a danger that it’s easy thinking?  Thinking of the guy that just lectures and the kids dig it!  I bet he’s passionate!

Teachers telling teachers what they are doing?  Find out what others are doing – are we overburdening our students?

If we make a list will that lock down what best practise is?  Is this dangerous?  Isn’t best practise really about meeting the child where they are at and moving the child on?

A conversation participant mentioned location – what was best practise in a classroom in Africa where she was teaching before is certainly not best practise in the International School classroom she is in now in.

We looked at Darren Kuropatwa’s blog to see the practise that he has going on in his class through technology. Building a community.  Megacognition – Scribepost – I want to look at that.  The blog has feed windows brings in classrooms from around the world.  His kids can virtually visit other classes.  All of Darren’s classes are podcasted – whiteboard work has been uploaded up to slideshare.  He has 4 of his own children, so this is not a man that spends all his time on the computer! It obviously has to be dead-easy system- apparently he has it set up so that this takes about an extra 10 minutes of his day.  All the work of the class is on the web.  Accessed and re-accessed anytime, anywhere.

So is best practise about offering the tools that are right for each student’s learning?  What does this mean for the teacher that is not comfortable with all this technology?  What if you think these are really great ideas and you strive to be the best teacher you can be and you just don’t know how to do this stuff?  I really admire the work of Darren Kuropatwa – but I don’t know how to begin with half of the stuff he’s doing?  I know that I have the resources at my fingertips and the personal learning network to learn how though – and is that really what best practise is all about?

So is best practise whatever engenders our students to learn whatever it is that they need to learn both within their own communities, and outside those communities?

At the end of the day does best practise mean it’s all about the relationships we build both inside and outside the classroom?

Unedited notes from actual session:-  reflection post to come later.  Posted through Posterous.  Will tag and edit later when edublogs can be accessed.

http://jakes.editme.com contains all of the information from this session

Make it personal, publishable and make it transportable.

Digital Storytelling, it’s participatory – as we move towards the saturation of this kind of content uploading to the web.  Video will be the standard way to communicate.  I need to check out the Last World – Obituary

Did you know ……….
78.3 million videos uploaded
152 thousand videos uploaded every day
aver. length 2.45 mins
aver age  26.5 years old
USA 34.5%
412 years to watch

What are we doing in schools to ensure that our students can build content and get across their message in a clear and concise way? http://ourstories.org see the stories from the Nijerian 1 to 1 schools

We would be remiss if we don’t teach kids about good content.  Dylan’s couch -  on YouTube (has had 1.8million views)
There’s an audience for the students we need to help kids craft their messages for the audience.

New Media
Creative Commons
Licence Attribution:  anytime someone wants to use the image they just have to attribute it back to the owner . Rights and responsibilities – using images appropriately and legally

Flickrstorm – you can search flickr very effectively
ccmixter.org take audio download it add to it and re upload it

New Tools
jamstudio.com (online garageband)

jumpcut – (imovie or photostory but online) no longer have to have software on your machines
mycadillacstory.com encourages you to write a story about your car

Teach kids to create content that is in a format for cellphones and iphones

You can put the embed code of voicethread in Google Earth
Flypaper – make a story that sticks
Dandelife – create a life cast.  Online timeline of your life.  Upload diff. kinds of media to add to it.

box.net – need to look at that.

New Composition Strategies
Crafting stories in the right way – Can we translate written grammar into visual literacy

There are samples online – on the wiki there’s a lot of these examples:
Here’s a few:-

Slow zoom in gently focuses the viewer
Quick xoom in intensifies drama
Panning adds animation ?????? best to do it slow
In most cases pan left to right
If you want the view to feel uncomfortable – pan right to left

New Message
Be careful – meaningful messages to be crafted

Provide kids with an entry point in their stories
Celebrate Pangea Day – show kids the content of this site
storymapping.org
Fox news – be creators of content – this is not going to stop it’s
going to continue, we need to teach kids because this is a life time of
contribution

New Networks
Stories for Change.net  – join this community  teach kids to be members of communities
YouTube – moderate the comments for your kids
AFI screen nation – provides students with a safe place to host their content

Digital Storytelling Process
It’s about writing – personal narrative.  Lead kids into getting their stories.  Digital Diplomacy (what’s it like to be an american, canadian etc)
Extract the essence – the script.  3 pages to 1 page double spaced.  Then highlight the parts that they have to say.  Originates form the spoken work 2nd meaning is Visual

Don’t illustrate their story – have their story be illustrated.
Storyboard
Put emotional terms into your visual search

Share
within your classroom first, then out in the community

Digital Storytelling Skills

Writing
Visual Literacy
Project Management
Intellectual Property
Network Literacy

Learned a lot from this session – definitely things to take back to the classroom and apply straight away.  Will definitely help with Lucy Caulkin’s Writer’s Workshop I think.

Posted by email from teachingsagittarian’s posterous

Clarence Fisher:  Click: Classroom Life in the Fast Lane

Has a combined class of 23 Grade 7 and Grade 8 in a small town.  Sees connections as important.  His classroom looks like a coffee-shop.  Classrooms need to be different spaces.  Simple things like setup have an impact on learning – it allows a certain type of learning to happen.  It’s a signal that there’s a different kind of learning able to happen in the classroom.

Teacher is the network administrator (not the guy that fix the computers)  His job is to hook kids up into a learning network – you need to do that for them in the beginning.  Asks his students what are you learning from the people you are reading.  If they aren’t learning anything he says well why are you reading them?  And also what are you contributing.

Classroom is studio.  Think about occupations that have studios.  Redefines your classroom – it’s ok if people are doing different things at different times – it’s ok if there is choice.  Starts off as simple choice but as the year goes on the choice becomes more.  Eg. blog a post, record a podcast, paint a picture.
58 different ways to show your learning – how cool is that?

Once you start connecting your kids to the world you are no longer the smartest person in the room.  It’s not about you giving the information out – it’s about you helping it happen.  Fishing the Web.  The content at any one point is not important – it’s the portal that gets you there.

How it works in Clarence’s Classroom

Has iGoogle page.  On it, it has 5 blogs.  It’s the required reading.  I guess these were carefully chosen to ensure that the students had a real, authentic and interesting perspective to read.

Uses Global Voices online – it’s an aggregator – you can pick a country and a topic and will pull it all together.   This is the “Social Studies” text book – he doesn’t have an actual textbook in the class!  This is information IN  (through RSS)

Information OUT is a blog called Upload and a Wiki http://studyingsocieties.wikispaces.com
The students write their own textbook for Social Studies.
When the information goes up, the wiki starts to self-edit.  The kids correct each other, readers correct the information, you can hear kids talking in the hallways about the information – that’s when you know the kids have got it.

Branding – gives the kids something to belong to.  Wordle – makes a tag cloud!!  A couple of times a year he gets them to copy and paste their blog posts into wordle and they make a tag cloud to see what they are blogging about.   It’s a visual way to see what they are writing about.  They can see what they are feeling the most or least strongly about.    They can see the data – and do some reflection.

There’s so much free stuff out there – Clarence pays $25 out of his own pocket on technology.  That’s it.
When you can place assignments online they become alive – if it goes into the teacher’s inbox at the back of the classroom – that’s it – it’s over.  But put it on line – it comes alive, it’s at their finger tips.  It’s more complex literacy – just look at @manyvoices that happened in twitter.  They used Lulu.com and published little books with the story in!  It was a literacy success that meant something to the students. They wrote it with 12 other schools!  It came alive.

Phun and Scratch – both free.  Draw stuff, then it moves.  It teaches students that technology is for them but they have to control it.  ( I need to look at Phun and Scratch for my Grade 5 students)
Kids learn so much more when you allow kids to put their heads together and show their learning, be creative and innovative and THINK.  Make something with their learning.

Assessment:  Rubrics and conferences – the studio model – does lots of thinking, have questions, discussions.  Takes a lot of different forms.  Give the kids the rules up front.  If you want them to hit a target – tell them what the target is.  Give them checklists that they can tell where they should be at this point.  Where are you on this?  What do you need to improve?  What do you need to do?  You need built in stops – it’s not good to go 4 weeks without checking in.

There’s five or six things going on in Clarence’s classroom – it’s chaos, it’s noisy but it is productive.  He stops kids often.  What do you see, what do you hear?  (Ask the kids to do those things and it becomes second nature).

Our five years is up – the traditional classroom and traditional way of learning is no longer good enough.  If you can give kids thinking, choice and give them the time.

All the slides will be on slideshare and up on the ning.

Posted by email from teachingsagittarian’s posterous