LA.8.2.1.5

LA.8.2.1.5 The student identifies, analyzes, and applies knowledge of the elements of a variety of fiction and literary texts to develop a thoughtful response to a literary selection

I would really like to see students turn in a digital story like I created last week. I think a response to a moving piece of fiction or non-fiction would be a great assignment. I would like to see them read something that evokes an emotional reaction. Whether it is something sad like Diary of Ann Frank or perhaps it is something extremely uplifting like the rescue of the Chilean Miners. I think this type of activitiy lends itself strongly to a subject or assignment that is more narrative based. I don't really want to see a story about why 2+2=4.

At the very minium this needs to be still images and either narration or a piece of music chosen to fit the mood of the story. I think students could probably go as crazy as 3D graphics if they wanted but I would set the sky as the limit and still pictures as the floor. If a student is using music then I think the slides need to have text. If the student is using narration, the narration should match the mood of the story.

• I would open up the media center and connect our students with newspapers, news magazines, and any of the literature that is on the shelves. The final project needs to be digital but the sources for where a student gets his/her don't have to be. Obviously many will choose an online newspaper or TIME magazine online. Also I think Google Images would be necessary as there may be some pictures that won't be able to be obtained any other way. However these images will need to be cited with some kind of generic citation.

•Students will need to have access to a piece of presentation software. In my school district we are fortunate enough to have Power Point on every student workstation. If students have something else at home they want to use that is fine with me. While at school they can use Power Point and export their slides as PNG's to take home and put in their other program. Students will need to access to Digital Cameras, data cables, computers with USB ports. They will also need access to a music library. I can get access to all of Apple Loops if I have a MAC with Sound Track Pro. Or the music teacher generally has a pretty large library that he/she might not mind sharing. Students may also want to use Movie Maker. I think I would make movie maker the standard. Slides can be exported to PNG files and put into Movie Maker. Movie Maker can be used to add transitions, other title slides, sync the music or narration and the file can be exported to a number of self contained movie files. We may even upload these to YouTube.

• Students would need to see some examples of good digital stories. They would need to be familiar with the elements that make a story. They will need practice with some of the equipment. I would need to create a rubric for grading these assignments so students can see what I am looking for. I also think they need some time grading some examples with me. That way they can hear and experience the thoughts that go through my head when I looking at a digital story.

The Magic of Digital Story Telling

About a week ago I was supposed to have an interview with St. Pete. College and I was supposed to give a presentation. I had a marvelous 3 point presentation planned on professionalism in communication. It was going to be a homerun. I had practiced it about 5 times revising the content to make sure it was in the 10 minues alotted. The grandeous presentation had passed all of my expectations, but I hadn't let my wife critique it yet. She came and watched. She gave me a few compliments and then said "What if you tell a story?" At first I was dispondent and quiet because I didn't want to have to start all over, but she was right. A story can convey the same ideas but through some character development and a decent plot, a story has the power to hook listeners in a way even the most awesome 3 point presentation could never rival.

I really liked this assignment because it gave me another chance to practice that skill. I think this is something that instructional designers forget. Teaching modis operandi is give information. Teaching where we spew facts, strategies, numbers and dates is like trying to catch the rain in a cup. Sure you'll get some but alot will still fall on the gound. A story can really focus a person's attention more than a presentation. People are drawn into a good story. A good book sucks our attention. I know I am a whole lot more attentive when a story is being told than when a graphic organizer is being passed out.

I work in an elementary school and have an elementary education degree but I also have a degree in Social Studies and I have not done anything with it since entereing grad school. So I choose a historical topic to do by digital story on.

I first used Power Point to collect and organize my photos and text. From here I reopened it in Keynote. I know that Camtasia allows you to export Power Point to video but I don't have Camtasia and Keynote does the same thing. So on my wonderful MAC, I get the Clip Art resources of Microsoft and the functionality of Keynote. I exported the slideshow to Quicktime. I then imported the video into Final Cut Pro and added a music bed provided by Apple Loops. It took a while to upload to YouTube because of the size.

Viola! Digital Story. Took about an hour once I had conceptualized the project. It's kind of sad but you can watch it below.

Principal gives me $1000.00 dollars to buy software?

This is actually a question that I am dealing with right now, but since I just helped the real life school get a $500,000 grant this is a little smaller scale.

First of all I am assuming that the computer already in my room is loaded with all the software currently available on every student machine in my district. (XP, Office 2007, Compass Odyssey, and AR). I would spend a whopping $59.95 to purchase Kidspiration. I think it is an awesome tool.

Polk County has drunk the Max Thompson LFS Kool-Aid so we are all about graphic organizers and summarizing thinking. Kidspiration helps kids build their own graphic organizers and is simple enough that first graders can master it. With the remaining money I would buy another computer and copy of Kidspriation. I would also have enough left over to cover the $100 to Microsft for the XP license as well as the Office license.

After looking at the specs for Kidspiration I am fairly certain that my iPod Touch could run it.

Windows
Processor: Pentium II 266 MHz or faster
Operating System: Windows 98, ME, 2000, XP (including XP Tablet PC Edition) or Vista; 128 MB of RAM; 75 MB of available hard disk space; 250 MB for full install
Display: 800x600; 1024 X 768 recommended, 16-bit color or higherCD-ROM drive (for installation only)


Maciacintosh (Notice how they spelled Macintosh? Where was the spell check?)
Processor: Macintosh G3 300 MHz or faster
Operating System: OS X, version 10.2.8 or newer; 192 MB minimum RAM75 MB of available hard disk space; 250 for full install
Display: 800x600 minimum; 1024 × 768 recommended, thousands of colors or higher; CD-ROM drive (for installation only)

The computer I am currently using

XP Pro
Celeron M 150 GHz = to a lower Pentium 4
2 GB of Ram (.13 of which is being used by the graphics card)
104 GB of free space (Original HD would probably had 36GB left)
The ATI Raedon Express 200M graphics card is currenly running at 1024 X 768, 32 bit
3 USB 2.0 slots
1 PCMI card slot
S-Video out
CD-RW/DVD
Mic/Headphones/internal speakers

The Mac I was using earlier

OS 10.5 Leopard
Intel CoreDuo 2.16 GHz
2GB of RAM
96GB available HD
Raedon Express1600 Graphics Card
1680X1050 32bit
5 USB 2.0
1 Firewire 400
Additional Monitor connector
Super Drive CD-RW, DVD-RW(DL)
Mic/Headphones/internal speakers

On my own I went and got an A+ Certification. A+ is the IT industry standard for PC repair and diagnostic for both hardware and software. This is a part of my job so this assignment was not a stretch for me. I was going to find a server based application and see if pick one of the server's specs against the application for compatibility but I went with the MAC option instead.

One of the downfalls of this weeks reading in my opinion was the ommition of formatting. Storage formatting is something that I think is very important. MAC uses one kind of formatting and Windows uses another. MAC can read Windows formatting but Windows can't read MAC. (MAC's are great, I can sync my plain LG cell phone and my MAC can read the files in it). Formatting is how data is organized. While in theory both are formatted similarly, they don't act the same in practice. The how and why is not important. What is important is that if you go back and forth between MACs and PCs as I do you need to have the storage device that you are sharing between the 2 in a format that both MAC and PC and read and write to. FAT32 is the file fomat that can be read and written to by both MAC and PC. Think of it as O+ and O- blood types in one. I have a couple of flash drives that I carry around that are formatted in FAT32 so that no matter what computer I am on they can be read and written to.

You don't want to format your computer's hard drive in FAT32 because Either FAT32 only recognizes up to like 32 GB or it can't save a file larger than like 4GB (can't remember which but it has size limitations) Smaller storage devices are fine with FAT32.

Social Media and Reputation

It's true that a good reputation is probably one of the most valuable things you work at never tarnishing. Daniel Solove gives an awesome example in his book "The Future of Reputation gossip, rumor and privacy on the internet" about how before print someone's reputation was more redeemable with the passing of memory. He also asserts that there was a time when the fear of damaging your reputation forever was a scary enough consequence that the majority of people really worked at making sure that they did nothing to damage that.

What has happened to that fear? Let me first premise this statement with a defense of myself. I am not one who believes that everything in Hollywood is contributing to the unravelling of our moral fiber. However, it does seem that there is a certain class of Hollywood/reality tv celebrities that are always in the gossip columns for being trashy or classless with something they have posted or has been posted about them. For them this seems to work in their favor. "All publicity is good publicity"as they say.

But what about the rest of us? There are those out there who are engaging in the same brazen nonsense and either they or one of their frenemies are publicly posting the details to the www. It is well documented that potential employers occasionally scour our facebook pages and twitter feeds to find out about our reputations. I am one who cannot live without a job so I prefer to keep my online presence a little generic. Not because I am out living it up like Tiger Woods and I don't want anyone to know, but because I want to protect my reputation. Part of staying safe is not engaging in risky behavior.

I work at an elementary school where 11 and 12 year old girls have been caught grossly lying about their ages on their social media pages. They are not only putting themselves at risk but they are putting the boys they are trying to talk to at risk by communicating with them under false pretenses. My default response to social media is if you don't have one, you don't need one. Why do we need an "online presence"? I put a premium on trust and I think that is why I don't engage in a lot of social networking. I'm just not drawn to it at all, but I do love fantasy football...go figure.

here is the link to my newest profile

Activity 2 Reflection

Excel is a valuable productivity tool especially with the switch in teaching paradigms. Teaching used to be considered an art, but more and more it is becoming a science. Every instructional decision has to be backed up with data and Excel is a really nice way of managing numerical data.

The Excel assignment was a nice practice assignment for me, but not a real challenge. My AP sends me excel assignments to do for him all the time so the functions that we were using are something that I have a lot of experience with. We have a large database that contains all of the testing data for students in our county. This database allows us to query various reports and import the data into Excel for further adjustments. I use the conditional sort a lot.

I don't usually have multiple pages so it was neat to learn about the dynamic page changing. I could see that being really useful if something on each page needs changed like a header. I found the ExtraCredit option particularly interesting because I don't get into the statistical functions very often. I could see that as a nice quick and dirty check to evaluate correlations. I liked the context of checking the success of a test in comparison to the success of a homework assignment. That is a nice way to see which homework assigments may need tweeking to be more useful to the students.

I am not sure this is an either or question...

Is it more unethical to allow threats to students/schools or to deny students/teachers access to instructionally-relevant Web-based tools and content?

I think it would be unethical to not allow students (K-12) unrestricted internet access if the web was a necessity. However the web is not a necessity in a K-12 setting. I believe using a computer to do research is a necessity but there are many alternate means that are much more educationally focused for which to obtain information using a computer. When we are asked to do assignments, it is expected that our outside sources be scholarly in nature. As of now full web based scholarly outlets are still burgeoning. The number one resource for scholarly materials is journal databases. Even the poorest media centers have access to one or two journal databases.

With that said I believe we are moving to a place where unrestricted internet access will be a necessity and at that point it will be unethical to deny students access. Because of this transition state I think it is more unethical right now to deny teachers unrestricted access to the internet. Teachers need exposed to the possibilities now so that when we reach the time when unrestricted access is a necessity, they will have the skills to lead and guide students.

Having IT experience I know that it is possible to differentiate restrictions. It is possible for teacher computers to be defined in a large network and have open restrictions while student computers (or login accounts) have needed restrictions. There could even be a process for the student to engage in that would allow these restrictions to be lifted once the school’s liability was substantially reduced for that student

School districts would really much rather have unrestricted internet access. Unrestricted access is cheaper, there is less maintenance of equipment and fewer hardware/software compatibility issues. They are forced to restrict access because they have not been able to free themselves of the liability.

I believe that at an appropriate age or mentality a student’s actions should be able to be gauged. If it can be proven that the student intentionally abused the internet then the educational institution should not be liable. I think the best course of action for schools is to work towards getting students to an appropriate understanding of the dangers of the unrestricted internet usage thus removing the legal liability that fuels so much of the reasoning for blocking access to the internet. I believe that ISTE’s NETS standards lay out a really nice framework for moving in this direction.

Wendy Drexler is a Genius

Wendy Drexler is a Genius!

This assignment is brilliant! Finally a practical application for blogs and constructivism! I love the way that the RSS Reader and the Blogs could be used to measure how much knowledge had been gained on a particular subject, not to mention the final project. This really fits in with where the chapter alludes that we are heading. People are connected and our schooling should reflect that and tap into that connection. All of our media outlets are going to the internet. It’s only a matter of time until televisions with ANSI tuners will not be necessary because all of your television will stream to your house. And eventually the Internet will be completely wireless and mobile broadband (controlled by the cell phone companies right now) will become the standard by which the internet is delivered to the user.

I see the mobile broadband as the future because until home internet accessibility is equitable for all K-12 students, teachers aren’t going to be able to take that next step with digital assignments(like the assignment in the video). This student obviously had internet at home and a good command of computer skills. Mobile Broadband is the only feasible option for a school district. There is no way that a school district is going to contract with a company using a cabled network (RoadRunner, Comcast). Having to install at each house would be too costly. Contracting with the cell phone companies on a student rate for the Mobile Broadband and the USB receiver makes so much more sense. No lines to run and cell service is already everywhere people are. Eventually all cell towers will support 3G and 4G technology so that data transport will be even quicker.

The next question will be getting modern computers into the hands of students and how does a school system support laptops/netbooks? And how do school districts avoid the courtroom? Does anyone have any ideas?

I don’t have an idea yet for making modern technology equitable and available to students, but I do have an idea for filtering the types of content students could get into using the school provided internet service. O.K. , The manufacturer of the Mobile Broadband USB receivers will be hard coded with a default gateway address that routes them through an approved web filter. We use “Websense” in our school district and it would just be a matter of upgrading the routers within the cell towers, a cost to the Cell companies that will probably be covered by Government Money.