Math Videos and Math Cast Innovation in Sixth grade

A big hat tip to Eric Marcos, sixth grade math teacher at Lincoln Middle School in California.

His video overview of the work of his students is inspiring



He and his students have co created the Math Train Podcast and Math Train TV.

Mathtrain TV is a "free educational kids teaching kids project" created by he and his kids.

I love these videos like this area of a target circle problem.



I have so many questions that I want to ask Eric! How did he set up the site? How did he do it? What does he do to record video? (There is no ambient noise in the background!) Eric also has a great website with an overview of information about him and he will be presenting at Alan November's BLC conference this summer. (I tried to link to Alan's blog -- does he not blog any more?)

I'm going to profile as many TEACHERS as I can find over the next 3 weeks of total craziness.

education
Alan November
Eric Marcos
Google Teacher Academy
math
screencasting
Turbo Tagger

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To those who want to block because of bandwidth: Get a Packet Shaper

Doug Johnson's recent post is too important to pass up. Countless times, people have told me that itunes, youtube, google video are being blocked solely for bandwidth reasons. Not any more.

According to Doug Johnson, packet shaping has become quite robust! (In fact, I want to get one and am calling my vendor next week.)

Here is what Doug says:

"We installed a packet shaper on our network last year. What our packet shaper (or traffic shaper or layer seven switch) allows us to do is prioritize traffic on our network."

But it was a recent release to the software that made the greatest difference:

But the degree to which we can specify what traffic has priority became more granular with a recent software release. We can now give YouTube (not all Flash) a "Priority 0" rating. The yearbook people can use Flash to do their pages unimpeded; middle school kids can look for videos of fart lighting on YouTube with what bandwidth is left over. (Click on the small image at the left to see a larger version of the control module screen shot.) This has made a big difference.

So, if your district is blocking valuable educational resources because of bandwidth limitations think about using a packet shaper. (Since people will ask, we paid about $15K for ours in a consortium purchase.)

It seems pricy, but I wonder if there are other options. I'm going to look in my SonicWall and see.

I will say that I do not advocate middle schoolers looking for "fart lightning" on youtube and believe that if you have youtube at your school that every computer is directly supervised. I redesigned my classroom so every computer screen is facing my desk. I can see them all (I even put in a "rear view mirror" to see the screens of those behind me.)

Supervision is always paramount when you allow access, however, access is very important for some valid pedagogical reasons.

Go get those packets in shape!

tag: packet shaper, Doug Johnson, education, teaching, bandwidth

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Disruptive Innovators Course for Librarians in Saskatchewan receives a Cool Cat Teacher Award

Sometimes I come across efforts and innovation and I just have to say, "YES!" they get it!

So, I'm giving another Cool Cat Teacher Award to the librarians that are learning and cooperating over at the Disruptive Innovators Wiki. (Feel free to grab this graphic if you're from that wiki if you want it and link to this article!)

Their statement on their homepage should be shouted out to the rooftops:

"Characterized by creating, collaborating, connecting, and conversations, Web 2.0 has the potential to transform learning in today's classroom and school libraries. Teacher-librarians must build an understanding of the information sources and knowledge management that is demanded and desired by twenty-first century learners. These tools can be used not only by our students, but as educators to enrich and share our professional knowledge." (emphasis mine)

Who are the disruptive innovators?
Here is their self introduction.

"The vicarious star-studded glamour of the Hollywood era provides a backdrop for a professional development opportunity available to Saskatchewan teacher-librarians. Designed to engender a passion for reading and exploit the potential of a range of emerging technologies, Meet The Stars: Books & Web 2.0 explores all facets of the school library program - information literacy and the reading and literature programs. Meet The Stars is poised to become an overnight sensation in Saskatchewan libraries."

This course wins a Cool Cat Teacher Award for the following reasons:

1) It understands the nature of being wiki-centric but still encourages each participant to have a voice. On the left side of the wiki are links to all of the participants blogs -- (some great blogs worth reading!)

Participants' Blogs

• Donna's Blog
• Carlene's Blog
• Jane's Blog
• Amy's Blog
• Chris's Blog
• Diane's Blog

2) It doesn't teach technology for the sake of technology but rather, it uses technology to enhance enjoyment and learning of the subject matter.

I love the quote,

"Designed to engender a passion for reading and exploit the potential of a range of emerging technologies,"

Passion for reading AND technology enhanced discussion! It is not about the technology but what the technology DOES to enhance what we're already DOING!


3) Use of multiple senses.

I love the voki's that the instructors have used to embed their voice into their introductory page. Widgets of all kinds are great enhancers to projects.

4) Facilitating connections.

The introduction page just gives me chills. Real people using technology to connect and improve their lives.

This is an excellent model of best practice, in my opinion! Great job!

I would suggest that they could use the table of content tag at the top [[toc]] to make the pages a little easier to navigate and also if they want to facilitate sharing, they could have a standard tag for this course in order to share information through delicious and then have an RSS feed to pull it into the wiki (look at the edubloggerworld example of how this works.)

They are light years ahead of others and it is amazing what they are doing! I hope you'll stop by their wiki and leave a comment on the discussion tab like I did! Wow!

It is so important we call attention to those who are doing things RIGHT!

Hat's off to Disruptive Innovators! You are blazing the trail!

tag: education, teaching, bestpractices, wiki, wikicentric, learning, digitalliteracy, digitalcitizenship, disruptive innovators, wikis, educators

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Online Connections Course gets a Cool Cat Teacher Award

Sometimes I just want to reach through the Internet and give a super big High-Five, hug, and "yahoo" all at once.

This is how I felt when I read about Jennifer Dorman's class that she has developed called Online Connections.

I also want to give a high five to the administration that had the vision (and trust) to give her the reigns for developing such a class.

(I believe that teachers should be enmeshed in curricular decisions and in fact that will do a lot to prevent waste and promote improvement. As a whole, I believe that education has a lot of decision makers who couldn't hold down a class much less teach anything. But that is another blog post.)

Jennifer says:

The class is called Online Connections and the focus of it is loosely centered around the notion that technology has changed the way people learn and work and that we must expose our students to the reality of this changing world. For a techie and former social studies teacher who often felt somewhat constrained by curriculum, this is like going to teacher heaven.

Now, take a look at her outline:

I created essential questions and enduring understandings for the course and posted them on the class wiki. While these statements make a lot of sense to me, I have been challenged by how to make them clear and meaningful for my students (who I will only see for 22 school days!).

• I created a partnership with a class at the Korea International School,
• generated a learners toolbox that students will use to review Web 2.0 applications and how they can be harnessed to learn and create products of value,
• aggregated various news feeds to help students gain a more global perspective,
• put together resources to help students construct understanding of copyright and online safety,
• and am in the process of developing what I hope will be a Quadrant D

I challenge you to go to her blog and read more! So, this is why I created a Cool Cat Teacher Award for her work. (Who knows I may give more in the future?)

1) She partnered with a school in another country.

2) She created a learners toolbox full of some great tools, along with a class wiki to pull it all together.

3) She harnessed the power of RSS to customize information from the Internet. (She used Grazr like we did for Horizon.)

4) She addresses digital citizenship. (See Copyright Information and Online Safety from her wiki.)

5) Her purpose is to create a shift in their thinking and perception backed up by valid research-based methods of teaching and a desire for excellence backed up with a purpose for participation and global awareness.

6) She makes no excuses. (She only has 22 class days but is full of optimism and can-do attitude.)

Her wiki has blown me away and I've got ideas for how I'm going to revamp my wiki! And I love her inclusion of Derek Wenmoth's Four C's of participation in online communities.



One of my purposes in blogging this year is to share what great teachers like Jennifer are planning and doing! Great job! (If you know of one, let me know.)

Congratulations, Jennifer! You've done an outstanding job getting this course together, let me know how it goes.

And a word to administrators out there -- empower a teacher to develop a course like this! I would argue that such a course will do more to benefit the future of students than any other course that could be offered.

tag: education, teaching, best practices, global awareness, wiki, learning, participation

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