Tomorrow I will be presenting the findings of my master’s thesis at the TLt Summit 2008: Learning in a Digital World. Below is my presentation for anyone interested in revisiting it.  If you have any questions or would like to discuss the findings of my research, please do not hesitate to contact me.

I gave a presentation today for pre-service teachers on Classroom Websites and Blogging.  I have included my favorite software for creating websites and blog, but obviously there are many others that I have not included in the presentation.  I have embedded the presentation below.  In the session, participants had the opportunity to explore the Web 2.0 software of their choice with the following Screencasts to help them along the way:

WordPress
Setting up a WordPress Account
Changing your Page Template, Writing a Post and Writing a Page
Difference between Writing Posts/Pages & Managing Posts and Pages
Embed a video
Getting help

Wikispaces
The creators of wikispaces have created their own screencasts to give you a tour and a “how to” for wikispaces.
Get an ad-free wiki:  Free for educators! 

Class Blogmeister
Setting up an Account
 
Ning
Tour of Ning
Free Ning Accounts for Grades 7-12 Educators

21classes 

Here’s my PowerPoint presentation.  Note that all links in this presentation are live so you can go look at the examples I supply for classroom websites.

Preparing pre-service teachers to be able to effectively use technology in the teaching and learning process is very important.  Information and communication technologies (ICTs)are becoming increasingly available in schools, but often teachers in schools are not aware of all the possibilities for how it can be used in their classrooms. Therefore, as a university instructor, I am working to incorporate these technologies into my classrooms to help familiarize students with Web 2.0 software that can be used to enhance the learning process.

This semester, I am teaching two undergraduate classes in the Faculty of Education and am trying to infuse technology into my classes.   One of the classes is a Writing Methodology class for English majors in the Secondary Education program.  We spent a significant amount of time discussing the idea of multiliteracies.  We discussed the various ways people may be literate (cultural literacy, functional literacy, technological literacy, critical literacy), who is privileged in the ways we teach in schools, and what implications this has for our professional practice.  In discussing multiliteracies, we also talked about the various ways people can represent their knowledge and how “new literacies” sparked by technology may impact our classrooms.  My students seemed to enthusiastically embrace these ideas, but were apprehensive about the technological skill base they will need to incorporate technologies into their classrooms.  To help my students become more comfortable with ICTs, I have developed a social network through Ning where we discuss the readings and extend our class discussion.  I chose Ning because I believe it is important to model the use of technologies that students could actually use in their classrooms.  Ning offers a free ad-free social network for the use in Grades 7-12 classrooms.  As well, my class is sharing their writing and lesson plans on a wiki through wikispaces, another Web 2.0 that offers free wikis for use in K-12 education.

In the other class I am teaching, I am using technology in a very basic way–to post homework and class announcements.  However, as a firm believer in the use of multiliteracies in the classroom, I am trying to provide homework assignments that allow students to do things beyond reading journal articles and chapters from books.  With the website, I have been able to link podcasts and videos to our site and have students “read” these forms of media for homework as well.  While a class website is nothing complex, having a place to link these forms of media makes it easy to give such assignments. If I were to teach this class again, I would likely try to design the course so students are not simply consumers of media, but also producers of media, using various applications available through Web 2.0. 

I hope that with the use of ICTs modelled in their univeristy classes, my students will have some ideas of how they might use such technologies in their classrooms once they start teaching.

In recent years, school boards have been urging teachers to integrate technology into the teaching and learning process.  However, there are still many teachers who have limited technologocial skills which means they don’t feel comfortable implementing it into their classrooms. I can understand this.  Teachers have very busy lives between their jobs, extra-curricular activities, families, etc, etc, etc. Taking an hour to sit in front of a computer a few times a week does not seem feasible to many teachers.  And even if they have the time, many teachers (I’ve been one of them) say, “I don’t know what I’m looking for.”

However, if we want to meet student needs, teacher training and support needs to be a priority for school boards.  From my experience working on the Digital Internship Project (a project where pre-service teachers volunteer to focus on the integration of technology in their classrooms in their internship), I’ve been tossing some ideas around in my head.  One method that I think could be extremely effective is to model the process we have taken with the Digital Internship Project with practicing teachers.  This is how it could work.  Teachers volunteer to become “Digital Teachers” for a semester.  They are each given a laptop and are invited to attend 4 one day workshops throughout the semester.  At these workshops teachers would be introduced to various Web 2.0 applications such as blogging, wikis, podcasting, digital video editing, and so on. Then they could go back to their classrooms and try some of the stuff out.  The teachers could also be part of a social network like the Digital Internship Project social network to share ideas and troubleshoot between workshop.  If the teachers approached this project with half the enthusiasm as we saw in the intern teachers, great things would happen in classrooms! And then, of course, these teachers would become leaders in their own schools!

Another model was one I heard about from a cooperating teacher who attended the Digital Internship Project. This teacher teaches in the classrom 60% of the time and then the other 40% of the time, she is a teacher-mentor for the staff in her school.  Her colleagues invite her to their classrooms so she can help them learn how to integrate technology into their classroom and she can offer support when the students are there.  The great thing about this model is that the technology mentor is a member of specific school community.  They can ask her questions as they pass her in the hall or have lunch with her in the staff room.  Teachers do not have to play email-tag with someone at the other end of the city to get support. I love this model as well. A combination of these two ideas might work well too!

I’d love to hear other people’s ideas as well as what’s going on at their schools! 

Yesterday, I came across a TED Talk video delivered by Sir Ken Robinson where he challenges our current education system, proposing that we are killing students’ creativity. This video is about 20 minutes in length but is very funny. He offers an interesting perspective of our current education system.

One of his points is that schools systems are focused around what we call “academics.” Math, Science, Language Arts and Social studies are percieved as the “core” subjects and then other subjects like visual art, music, drama, physical education are tacked on as extras, but are not seen as being essential to students’ education. The way I see this model continuing is because the decision-makers in the eduation system are the people who succeeded within the present system and therefore it is in their best interest to allow this system to continue. It privileges the privledged and marginalizes Others.

Furthermore, in continuing this model of education and by privileging these “core” subjects, Robinson points out that we are sucking the creativity out of students. The world is changing so quickly that the world that we are preparing our students for is completely unknown to us. We have no idea what the world will look like in 20 years, and yet we are trying to prepare students to be citizens of that world. We are preparing students to do jobs that don’t even exist right now! I think that we are doing an injustice for students unless we are teaching them critical and creative thinking skills. Students need to think for themselves and be problem solvers. The only way that we can do this is by fostering creativity in children from a very young age.

A huge barrier that I have seen among teachers trying to start their classes blogging is gathering and then entering student email addresses.  For example, when I taught grade 8 language arts at the American Schools of Kuwait, I had about 120 students blogging using Blogger.com.  In order to have them join my blog, I had to gather all 120 students email addresses, type them all into Blogger, and then invite all my students to join.  This was a pain. At least I had my students blogging all year so the work I did at the beginning of the year paid off. However, one of my friends recently told me about a site that does not require teachers to know students’ email addresses for them to join the blog, but the teacher can still make the blog a closed community.  This site is www.21classes.com. It is possible that Class Blogmeister or others allow teachers to do this as well, but my friend, Brenda, who is using this site with her high school students found it to be very easy to set up. Check it out.

The following ads have recently been put out by the Ad Council in an attempt to prevent cyberbullying and give children and adolescents a different view on what they are doing when they insult someone online. These ads are definitely attention-grabbers and they may make some students think twice about what they are doing when they cyberbullying.  It seems that through these types of ads, advistisers are trying to teach students empathy as a means to prevent cyberbullying.  However, in the research I have done for my master’s thesis, I have come to see that such interventions are circumventing the root of the problem.  Participants in my study were cyberbullied through the use of social markers such as race, gender, and sexual orientation.  To me, this indicates that teaching students empathy is not enough.  Discussions need to be taking place in classrooms about systems of power and privilege.  As an educator, I realize that this seems like a daunting task.  It is not a “quick fix” by any stretch of the imagination.  But I think if teacher education programs, school administrators, teachers, and counselors start viewing bullying, cyberbullying, and other types of violence from this perspective, we may be able to begin to address the inequities in our world from which such violence stems.

Check out the videos and see what you think.

This is a presentation that I gave at the Saskatchewan Teachers of English Language Arts conference in March 2007.  This powerpoint presentations outlines various ways that teachers can integrate technology into the secondary English Language Arts classroom. Click on the links within the presentation to visit the examples.

This is an exciting new program online that allows people to capture images or video on your screen and add a voiceover through simply speaking into your microphone.  This is useful in the K-12 classroom because it could allow you to quickly give instructions to students.  Watch this Jing video (which took approximately 5 minutes to create) to find out more:
Watch Jing Project video now!

Check out this video tool at www.flixn.com.  Here is a demonstration where I explain how it could be used in the classroom.  Click here to see my flixn video.  As well, here is an example of a grade 1/2 class’s flixn video on Thankfulness.