In the midst of all this discussion, an example of the proper attitude and use of technology appears.  Enter, Canby School District in Oregon. Canby has been using iPod Touches to engage students in the areas of reading and math with great success, including documented academic achievement.  For reading, the program utilizes audio recording to help students record reading aloud and then play it back so they can assess their fluency. This approach has engaged students to work hard and has resulted in better reading test scores on standardized tests. This is an example of a simple concept:  teachers use technology creatively to help deliver the curriculum in a way that students enjoy and relate to.

It is a beautiful example that illustrates something I’ve been saying to anyone who fears technology as an education killer: “Technology is just a tool. Effective use of technology requires creative educators to use it to deliver the curriculum through the tool. “ Creative use of technology enables more individualized instruction than ever before. Now slower learners can go through the lessons as many times as it takes for them to understand the content. Auditory learners can use audio apps and recording to access and assimilate information like never before. Visual learners can learn the same lessons through visual learning apps. Educators are becoming directors of curriculum through technology rather than just teaching via a podium at the head of the class.

From a technology perspective, the Canby folks were smart with their choices. The iPods are a cost effective alternative to more costly laptops. Truth be told, they are cooler than laptops. Laptops don’t excite or interest kids the way iPods do. That’s why Apple has sold millions of them. They are more economical and portable than laptops. Even the iPad which Canby is now integrating into the process is more engaging and economical than its laptop cousins.

The Canby staff  was not only creative in the classroom but also made sure to create a collaborative wiki and blog so that other teachers could share successes and experiences. This is the definition of social media. Wikis and blogs are at the core of social media collaboration. It helps optimize educator efforts and reduces duplication of effort.

I highly encourage our readers to check out the Canby Wiki and Blog. There are some great lessons and direction for educators looking to implement technology for academic achievement. Be sure also to check out the data on the achievement. It is truly amazing.

Congrats to the creative educators and supports at Canby. Well done! Your work is an outstanding example of technology in the classroom. Everyone should take notice.

Everloop is very much like Facebook in that it has virtual currency, photo albums and games. It does however require verified parental permission to join the network. It has some very cool features that will help with the ever-present fear of cyber bullying. Parents can select which of their child’s actions on the site they would like to be notified about. They also have the option to restrict features like private messaging and friend suggestions. All activity on the site is monitored by the company to prevent inappropriate behavior thus providing even more roadblocks to inappropriate behavior.

“These key features make Everloop compatible with The Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), which prohibits websites from collecting information from children under the age of 13 without parental consent. Most tweens bypass this law on other social networks by simply lying about their birthdays. Schools, on the other hand, generally block social networks like Facebook and Twitter for the same reasons that unsupervised public platforms make some parents of tweens nervous.

Because it is COPPA-compliant, Everloop can be used in schools. In April, a partnership with Internet safety education program i-Safe will bring the platform into about 56,000 schools. I-Safe will incorporate a white-label version of the network into its curriculum in order to demonstrate social media skills (and get parents to sign over permission to use Everloop sites in the process).” *

We think this is a great step toward a safe and healthy social network for young people. It has features to enhance and protect the users’ experience while keeping parents in the loop.

* We heard about this on Mashable. You should check the whole article out! Thanks to Mashable for keeping us in the “ever” loop.

I sat, as I often do, at my cozy table watching the stream of bike riders flying by in their neon yellow and blinking headwear. The fact that it’s barely above freezing and is raining cats and dogs never seems to deter them. I sit, sip my coffee, and am thankful I am not out in that rain. I read my paper, going through my steadfast the routine of local, National, crossword, front page. I skip sports and business altogether. I use those sections for specific chores;  hamster cages, wrapping up Christmas ornaments, lining drawers in the garage.  Although newspapers are becoming passe’, their print stories hours behind our RSS feeds, there is something about them I just can’t give up.

As I flip to the front page, I notice the familiar headline, “Top Stories Of Our Year”. I live in Oregon. Our top story is a heartbreaking one. The disappearance of little Kyron Horman, a bespectacled, rusty haired little boy who was last seen at his school’s Science Fair in early June. He has been gone more than 6 months now, and no clear leads have been brought to the forefront. The whispers are that his step mother killed him, that she sold him to a pedophile, that she lost him somewhere in a remote corner of Sauvie’s Island. She’s not talking, and neither are the police.

When Kyron was first reported missing, all fingers were pointing at his school. He had been at the school in the morning, before the tardy bell, and was not reported missing until his afternoon bus did not drop him at home. Folks rushed to judgment – the school hadn’t been watching him, someone had snuck in and taken him, the grounds were unsafe, the staff negligent, the district uncaring and cheap. Why were there no security cameras? Why no campus police? Why did the Principal not have four sets of eyes and the skills of a psychic?

Much was made about the 7 hour lag time between the first morning bell and the afternoon bus drop off, and reasonably so. Had it really been that no one noticed  the absence of this little guy on his special Science Fair day? Who should have reported him absent? The secretary? The Principal?  The classroom teacher?  Is it the school’s responsibility to notify parents that students are absent, or is it the parent’s responsibility to notify the school that their children are absent?

Many of our schools have a service known in our district as ‘the auto-dialer’. This is a recorded message service that calls and reports “Your student is absent today, Monday, June 11.” The recorded voice is low and monotone. It does not differentiate between a real person and a voice-mail,  It cannot answer questions. On busy days, it may not reach a parent until 6 pm or later, and will only call if the absent child’s name has been punched into the system  before noon.  Sometimes it glitches and doesn’t call at all.

Most of us were horrified by Kyron’s disappearance, and we sat glued to the TV news. We updated each other, sent texts, searched our neighborhoods, posted for help on Facebook. People magazine picked up the story, as did other media sources. It haunted us all summer. By now we know that Kyron never made it to his morning class and was last seen leaving the cafeteria with his step mother. This changes the finger-pointing, and the caring school staff are no longer being tried in the media. However, it doesn’t change the bright light glaring on our very faulty system.

I started thinking ~ how do I track down my own kiddos when I need them? Like all my 21st Century mom friends, I text them. Kids might not answer if you call, but they never miss a text. Adults don’t seem to ignore texts either. Could we use this to make our schools safer? I picked the brain of  my technology guru, Karl Meinhardt, and sat down with my mommy friends. There didn’t seem to be a good system in place for texting parents or kids, but there was no reason there wasn’t one. The tools to send either individual or mass texts are free, and most parents have cell phones. Could we just simply ask them to let us have their cell number so that if their child was not present we could let them know? Sounded too easy to work.

On our first day of school, we handed out little half sheets of paper asking for a parent/guardian/emergency cell phone number. We had a brief few lines explaining that we could use these numbers to text in case of emergency. Parents loved it. No one said ‘No’, no one felt their privacy was being invaded. Most prefer the idea of a personal cell text over a call at the office.

Entering the data was a bore. I admit it. I spent a good portion of a teacher work day typing in numbers. Some of my wonderful colleagues felt sorry for me and helped. My fabulous intern picked up the slack when classes started, and made sure everything was up and running. We now have an Edmodo group with close to 400 numbers entered. All I have to do is click ‘alert’, type in a quick message, pick the name(s) out of a drop down bar and click send. It couldn’t be easier, and it costs exactly nothing.  It has freed up our attendance monitor and front office secretary from tedious calling and message-leaving. It has given our parents a sense of security and our students a sense of responsibility. It has taken a little bit off the edge off the nasty winter term. Now if I could just figure out how to get the program to monitor inside recess, it would feel like spring.

For additional and updated information about Kyron Hormom, click  here.

Now, if that doesn’t bum out a teacher, I don’t know what would. I decided it was time for some recognition for my hard working, creative 11 year olds. We hosted and “Open House” and invited staff and students to come view our work in the computer lab. We posted our blogs on edmodo and shared and commented. We high fived each other and shared a bag of Oreos. (Not in the lab of course, no one needs creamy filling on their keyboard!) The kids loved it, but I didn’t really feel it was enough. I wanted them to feel really special.

As luck would have it, I received an email from Edublogs. They were touting their upcoming Awards Program. My class learned to blog on Edublogs, and have just recently worked up to the more complicated WordPress blog format.  I shared the nomination information, and encouraged them to think about submitting their blogs for consideration. Since one cannot nominate his/her own blog, the kids decided they wanted me to do the honors. Although all 29 blogs are incredible, creative, exciting and fun, they wanted to vote on the nominees as a class. After much discussion, they chose the following submissions to represent their class.

Best use of facts:  http://sedgecarver.wordpress.com/  by Sedge Carver

Best use of RSS feeds:  http://africancountries.wordpress.com/  by Toni Fleming

Creating a “good” blog should be the goal. What do I mean by a “good” blog? I mean a blog that has information or opinions that are well founded, researched, validated and appropriate to the blog’s subject. With this goal in mind young people can learn a variety of important activities and values that will help them as they move toward the professional world of business.

Among some of these are:

1. Learning how to utilize web search and news feeds to find information on their blog topic. Knowing how to research information on the web is an important skill. Many people to this day do not know how to use Google, Bing or Yahoo search effectively.
2. Vetting information found on the web to validate its correctness or authenticity. In business we all know that “we better have our facts straight” before we present them to upper management. Learning how to vet information is crucial to creating factual research and presentations
3. Understanding and respecting copyright laws. The openness of the web lends itself to the inappropriate and often times illegal reproduction of articles, images and other media. Teaching young people about the proper way to credit sources, reproduce or use media and information not only teaches the legal aspects of reuse, it also instills the value of respect for others work.
4. Learning how to write creatively. Being able to write in a compelling, story-telling way creates interest from the reader. Interested readers will hear and listen to a writer’s message. Being a great writer is just one aspect of being a good communicator. Great communicators are always in demand. You can verify this by looking at almost any job description in the knowledge based economy.
5. Learning the power of illustration. I don’t mean the ability to draw here. I mean the ability to include appropriate and eye catching images and video to illustrate a blog post’s message. When young people learn how to find and embed media to illustrate and add meaning to their message, they learn how to use pictures to convey their message. This is a critical skill in business as people respond to pictures more than printed words.

Along with all these great lessons, young people will start to understand that blogs are messages that need maintenance and care. They will understand the dedication and commitment to keeping the blog updated and moving. So they can even obtain some rudimentary project management skills. Blogs are an all-around great creating project to help young people find their voice and assemble their view of the world.

Resources for Student Blogs

There are several great resources for setting up blogs for students. You can use these to create a fully functioning blog. Among the top two are:

• Edublogs – www.edublogs.org
• Kidblog – www.kidblog.org

These sites are great because they don’t require that the student have an email address to create an account or blog. Most “production” blogging tools require an email for validation of the person’s identity that is creating the blog. But these two sites waive that requirement which is nice since many young people don’t have email accounts with a web service yet.

Probably the best blog tool on the internet today is WordPress. It can be found at wordpress.org and it does require an email address for account creation and verification. Edublogs is built on a sub-set of WordPress functionality. If parents want their child to have an email address and learn the account verification process as part of the educational process then WordPress is the way to go.

Best of all, all the above sites are free. There are no signup or usage fees.

Recommendations

I believe it is important for parents to subscribe to their child’s blog to provide some oversight in the blogging process. Parents will be critical in helping young people understand what is appropriate as a post, and what to look for in post comments.

Many spammers and advertisers comment on blog posts as a way to advertise their products. With any good blogging tool comes the ability to approve the comment for visibility on the blog or to trash the comment. Young people may need help in learning how to decipher what is spam and is a valid comment. This is a great way to start and continue a learning experience on identifying inappropriate or inauthentic behavior in cyber space. These bogus comments are mostly just harmless, but they represent a bigger problem on the net and young people should become aware of that fact early on so they can start to identify risky messages, approaches and behaviors.

Parents should subscribe to their child’s blog. This will give parents visibility into every post their child makes on their blog. In fact, parents should set the stage for their child’s blog as more of a group project than a solo project. In a group blog project parents could act as the editor-in-chief or even better, act as the “customer” of the blog and respond and react to the content, approach and tone of each post. This will help both parent and student learn the tool and the blogging paradigm. It will also help the parent stay more visible in the process.

Some Great Examples of Student Blogs

Elizabeth and I included blogging as a baseline requirement for the “technology” instruction in the middle school that implemented The Portland Project social media pilot program. Elizabeth has done amazing work developing creative assignments focused on blogging.

“Working with students creating blogs and online journals has been a wonderful activity to connect and collaborate with students,” Elizabeth tells me. “It has allowed me insight into my student’s lives. We have been able to participate in group discussions based on their writings, and utilize collaborative and peer teaching methods.”

Here are a couple links to blogs done in her classes. We believe that as a result of learning and using blogs in school, several students in her classes have found their lives’ passions. To be a part of that event is an honor of which every teacher dreams.

The topics have ranged from school news blogs, to skateboard park review blog, to preventing animal cruelty blogs. Remember these are middle school students ages 11-3.

Oceanography Blog – Includes a presentation Prezi created by the student to educate regarding oil spills and their effect on the environment. Grade level: 6th Grade, 11 years old. Blogging tool: WordPress. URL: http://carversedge.wordpress.com

“Personal Narrative” blog projects. Writing a personal narrative is a benchmark goal for 6th grade writing. Grade level: 6th Grade, 11 years old. Blogging tool: WordPress

•    http://babiigurl20.wordpress.com -  Includes a media slideshow created by the student.

•    http://timefortoni.wordpress.com -  Includes video of creator singing with friend and posted to youTube.

Group blog project. Students had to meet some cooperative goals in writing, editing and production. Grade level: 7th Grade, 12-13 years old. Blogging tool: WordPress. URL: http://top5dancecrews.webs.com/apps/blog

In Summary

Simply put, blogs are an excellent vehicle to teach and reinforce so many things including technology, values, and creative publishing. Parents should participate with their children in the blogging process and stress that it should be utilized in the school system as well. Blogs started the social media, Web 2.0 revolution and can continue to foster changes in the way we teach and learn. In short, use them!

The best teachers and leaders I have known are those that are comfortable with being both a teacher and a learner.  They easily accept the fact that the younger people will many times learn it quicker or will already know it better. If parents and teachers can “let go” of the need to be the expert, they can engage their child’s digital native behaviors in the learning process.

Elizabeth Delmatoff, my partner and technology teacher at George Middle School in Portland, Oregon , has taken this approach in her classroom. She has found it engages the students to learn the technology to expert levels and then demonstrate and instruct class members on how the new technology works. She gets the added benefit of learning right along with others in the class.  Her focus is on spent pushing the subject matter through the new technology as the class and teacher learn the techniques together.

Take the case of “Prezi”. Prezi is a non-linear presentation tool; a sort of really cool slide show builder. I introduced Elizabeth to Prezi earlier this year. Her approach to teaching Prezi was to assign learning the tool as a group project. The objective of the activity was to create a finished Prezi. Each student had to learn one aspect of how to make a Prezi and demonstrate it to the group, in order. At the end of one session, the entire class had a good handle on how the tool worked and what they could do with it. Their next step was to build one individually. Here’s an example of a great Prezi that came from one of the 6th grade students in that class.

The upside of learning new technology in a cooperative learning format is that the tool will be usable in short order. It creates a sense of wonder and excitement to be allowed to ‘play’ with the tools immediately. Students love the opportunity to learn the tool in depth and demonstrate their knowledge to their class and teacher. It may seem an “upside-down” approach to many, but often times it is the more productive way. Parents and teachers can focus on the depth and understanding of the subject matter rather than the delivery of technical instructions.

As a final note, I strongly recommend teachers  teach and use Prezi in the classroom. It’s non-linear approach to presentations is a great option for young minds. It mimics the way children see order, as their imagination is rarely linear. Fostering the imagination is how innovation and creative thinking starts.

Yesterday The Portland Project was covered in an article by Mashable entitled, The Case for Social Media in Schools. The conversation that is ensuing because of that article is really quite amazing. Whether you are for or against, conversing and sharing about the issue is the first step in understanding the appropriate use of social media in education.

The highlights of the article state six great reasons why social media is a great tool for use in education.

1. Social Media is Not Going Away – Almost three-fourths of 7th through 12th graders have at least one social media profile, according to a recent survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation. The survey group used social sites more than they played games or watched videos online.
2. When Kids Are Engaged, They Learn Better – Delmatoff says that at first her students were worried they would get in trouble for playing because they actually enjoyed doing activities like writing a blog.
3. Safe Social Media Tools Are Available — And They’re Free – Kidblog.org is one of many free tools that allow teachers to control an online environment while still benefiting from social media. Delmatoff managed her social media class without a budget by using free tools like Edmodo and Edublogs.
4. Replace Online Procrastination with Social Education – Between 2004 and 2009, the amount of time that kids between the ages of 2 and 11 spent online increased by 63%, according to a Nielson study. And there’s no reason, Meinhardt argues, that schools shouldn’t compete with other social media sites for part of this time.
5. Social Media Encourages Collaboration Instead of Cliques – Social media as a teaching tool has a natural collaborative element. Students critique and comment on each other’s assignments, work in teams to create content, and can easily access each other and the teacher with questions or to start a discussion.
6. Cell Phones Aren’t the Enemy – “The cell phone is a parent-sponsored, parent-funded communication channel, and schools need to wrap their mind around it to reach and engage the kids,” Meinhardt says.

To read the full article click here: Mashable – The Case for Social Media in Schools

These are all great points with great substantiation for the argument they propose. If you haven’t seen the article, please check it out and then…comment! Get in the conversation. It’s the only way we learn and collaborate.

I’d like to thank Sarah Kessler from Mashable for her time, attention and passion. Without her interest and questions this article would obviously have never  happened.

A shout of thanks out to Dr. Patricia Fioriello whose article on edsome.com connected us to Mashable after joining in the conversation. Thank you Patricia!!!

Request your Twitter followers to tweet their locations.  Students use atlases or world maps to find their location and measure and convert the distance mathematically.  Students can then use Google Earth to find the actual distance.

Objective:

• Familiarize students with social media and online technology;
• Broaden students’ scope of geography;
• Improve student map reading skills;
• Use math skills (measurement and proportions) to find distances.

Resources:

Computers with internet access, world maps/atlasses, rulers, pushpins, string.

Activity:

• Ask your Twitter network to tweet their locations.
• Students will mark locations on a posted world map with pushpins.  Also mark the location of the school with a pushpin.
• Tie a string from the school’s pushpin to the Tweet’s location.
• Measure the distance and convert to miles using the map’s scale.
• Find the actual distance using Google Earth.

Wrap up:

• Students can utilize the measures of central tendency to compute distances from school (average distance, median, range).

In this lesson, students will research daily life, industries, and the political situation along the United States/Mexico border. They will conduct Internet research to learn more about what it might be like to live at the border and the controversies surrounding U.S. government policies along the border.   Students can also communicate with students in border schools via Skype or blogs in order to get firsthand knowledge of the issues faced by border  states.  Students will conclude by creating visual presentations showcasing the things they have learned about the border.

Objective:

Students will

• discuss their impressions of the United States/Mexico border;
• use the Internet to research the border, and answer questions about their findings;
• discuss their research findings as a class; and
• create collages, posters, or multimedia presentations showcasing the United States/Mexico border.

Activity:

• Ask students what their impressions are of the United States/Mexico border. What types of things do they hear on the news about this region? Have there been any recent events in the news that relate to this border?
• Have students learn more about the U.S./Mexico border at the following Web sites and at others they can find in their searches:

a)  National Geographic: The Mexican Border
b)  Bordering the Future
c)  PBS: The Border
d)  University of Texas at El Paso: The Borderlands Encyclopedia

As they go through the sites, ask them to take notes to answer these questions:

• What would it be like to live along the United States/Mexico border, both in the U.S. and in Mexico?
• What types of industries are common along the border?
• What are the arguments both for and against the current policies of the U.S. government at the Mexico/United States border?
• What are the major problems and controversies associated with the Mexico/United States border?
• What are some possible solutions to these problems?

Students are also encouraged to communicate with students who go to school near the border.  The teacher will need to do a little reaching out to do some collaborative work.  Students could ask some of the above questions to the students they are interviewing either by Skype or classroom blog.

Wrap up:

Have students creates collages, posters, or multimedia presentations showcasing the U.S./Mexico border. The presentations could be divided into the following sections: people and daily life; industry and jobs; and current issues of concern. The presentations should describe these factors for both the U.S. and the Mexican sides of the border. In other words, they will discuss life on the U.S. side of the border as well as in Mexico.

Overview: The source for this lesson is  Teach-nology.com

Oil spills have devastating consequences, both for the environment and for communities. In this lesson, students compare the Exxon Valdez spill with the BP spill in the Gulf of Mexico. They look at similarities and differences in the way it happened, how it was contained, and how long it took (or will take) to repair the damage.

Objective: The student will be able to compare and contrast similarities and differences between the BP oil spill in the Gulf and the Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska.

Resources:

1)      Computer with internet access.

2)      Maps of Alaska and Gulf of Mexico.  Students can find these online.

3)      Presentation software (optional).

Activity:

Start the lesson by asking students to name as many facts about the Gulf coast oil spill as they can. Ask who has heard the of the Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska. If anyone has ask them what they know. Give the students a brief history of the Valdez spill. If possible show some news clips from that time.

Have students work in pairs (or alone) to investigate any similarities between both spills. Ask them to look at amount of oil spilled, effect on the ecosystems, cost of clean-up, media coverage, and public outcry.

They can organize their data in any of several ways. They can create a PowerPoint presentation or a poster size chart, write a report or give one orally.

Wrap up:

On Edmodo or a class blog, students can respond to any number of  prompts:

• What  lessons were learned from the Valdez spill that helped contain the devastation of the spill in the Gulf?
• How can oil spills be prevented in the future?

Students should respond to at least two of their classmate’s posts for participation.