A few people have asked me this in the last couple days, so I thought I’d share it here too. If you’re looking for a demo with a content provider, the best place to look is the TWICE Professional Development page. It has a customized search to the BCISD VC Programs database to find all the programs targeted to teachers. You can also do the search yourself and type “teacher” in the standards field and even adjust the cost to find free demos if you wish. Good luck planning your PD sessions!
Category Archives: Professional Development
Funding for Programming
So where do you find funding for programming when doing videoconferences? The most creative list I’ve seen yet is from Karen Mosier, Allendale Michigan, media specialist supporting her teachers.
- Ink Cartridge Recycling Program Funds
- Local business contributions and civic organizations
- Presentations made at Chamber of Commerce meetings
- Funds received from Target and Meijer rebate programs–held in school activity funds
- PTO fundraiser donations
- Application for grants
Karen shared this list in a final project for the class Planning Interactive Curriculum Connections and I’m sharing it here with her permission. I always learn so much from participants in that class! We all learn together! Feel free to join us for the next session starting October 3!
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Exciting New Class!
I’m just today filling out the paperwork for an exciting new class we’ll be offering starting November 1. Kid2Kid Videoconference Connections or K2K VC. 2 graduate credits. 5 months (November to March) with one week of readings/discussion and one K2K videoconference with a partner class each month. Stay tuned for more details. Registration will open sometime after Labor Day.
Here’s the description to tantalize you….
Videoconference (VC) connections between classes open up a whole new world of collaborative learning for students! Immerse yourself in videoconference connections with partner classes. Do one kid-to-kid (K2K) videoconference each month during this class. Learn about structures/templates for projects with other classes and implement them with your students and a partner classroom. During the class you’ll reflect on exemplary student-to-student projects, receive support during your own project connections, and apply your learning in your classroom. This class is best for teachers with easy access to videoconference technology. Interested distance learning coordinators or media specialists are strongly encouraged to sign up with a local teacher.
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Constructing Support & Analyzing Errors
I’ve been in a workshop yesterday and today with Diane Paynter, learning about Classroom Instruction That Works. Today we delved deeper into the Cues, Questions, and Advance Organizers strategy to look at complex reasoning strategies such as Constructing Support and Analyzing Errors. See Dimensions of Learning p. 162-179 or so.
As always, I’m thinking about videoconference applications to what I’m learning. It seems that these ideas could be used to refine the “debate” videoconference template. One class could present something using the specific Constructing Support complex reasoning process and the viewing class could be Analyzing Errors. (It’s analyzing errors in thinking, that is, not the steps in the skill.) Then the classes could swap and the other class presents. This template could be used on many issues, especially in social studies and science.
There’s also the Analyzing Perspectives method of complex reasoning. In the class we took the issue of cloning, and brainstormed all the people who would have a perspective on the issue. We came up with 10-12 different groups of people and then wrote what they group of people might think for a “yes” position or a “no” position. It’d be interesting to have two classes present four perspectives each on an issue that is as convoluted and controversial as cloning, and then discuss it further after the presentations.
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The Best VC Demo Ever!
I’ve been at the Macomb Summer Technology Academy for the last three days presenting The World is Your Classroom with my good VC friend Arnie Comer. We’ve done the usual demo with a content provider to show teachers how videoconferencing works.
We’re also talking about collaborative connections, and another great VC colleague, Ken Conn from Lamar Consolidated ISD, has been giving clues about his location to help teachers see how collaborative projects such as MysteryQuest can happen. Well today we are lucky enough that the students are back in school. So today the clues came from students at Navarro Middle School. The teachers here loved it! It was also amazing and impressive to see how the students were able to remember VCs they did last year and tell our teachers about them. Nothing like hearing about videoconferences from the students’ perspective!
So the next time you do a VC demo, try to include kids if you can!! It’s a wonderful experience for the teachers to see!!
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Group Work at a Distance
Ever since the Keystone Conference last year, I’ve wanted to try out an idea I learned from Carol Fleck and Kim Perry, two teachers who videoconference together on a regular basis to team teach a class. Their presentation at Keystone was titled, Together in the Trenches: Two Teachers Share the REAL Story of Daily Videoconferencing. One thing they shared was how their students work together in groups. To make the two classes into one class, they have groups that are made up of students from both sites. They rotate through using VC, phone, and web communication tools to communicate for group work.
This week with the workshop we’re doing with Lamar and Paris ISD in Texas, most of the groups consist of teachers from each of the three sites. We’ve been rotating between using VC and chat/discussion group spaces. I highly recommend this format! It was certainly challenging for the participants to meet via a chat after doing a VC, but the incredible value of planning a project with teachers that you can actually do the project with! Here’s quote from one of the reflection blogs:
I think that the best part is that you can actually implement what you are planning, because you are already partnered with people from other areas. 🙂
The participants have been great and flexible in using the various technologies to work with each other – even to the point of giving up some of their VC time to another group who needed it more!
So I encourage others of you doing PD to partner up with another site like we did because of the amazing value for the participants in the class.
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MysteryQuest Beaches
So this week I’ve also been team teaching a workshop with Bennie Tschoerner, Paris ISD, and Ken Conn, Lamar Consolidated ISD in Texas.
Today we learned about the MysteryQuest project – and did the first professional development version of MysteryQuest…… MQ Beaches! Each of the three sites was assigned two areas of the world and shared two presentations with clues about a beach in that area of the world. It was a lot of fun! We had very creative presentations pulled together in just under an hour – with visuals, props such as towels, sunscreen, and flowers!
Feel free to use this same format and materials in PD you are doing at your site! The websites for the student versions of the MQ formats are: MysteryQuest: World Geography, MysteryQuest USA, and TWICE’s Where in Michigan?
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New Technologies in Schools
In the section on running with the gazelles and lions in Friedman’s book, The World is Flat, (p. 114-127) I started thinking about some of the frustration that’s been growing in me on how the latest ed tech technologies are changing so fast! How can a teacher keep up? And is it worth spending time on one technology, such as handhelds or iPods, for a year or two and then move on to the next latest and greatest thing?
I had been leaning towards… no! But in the middle of this section, it occurred to me that maybe it is actually very good to expose kids to different kinds of technology as often as it changes. We should teach them new things and explore new technologies and ways of teaching & learning as often as we learn it. So that both we and the students get used to changing quickly! The students will need to learn to learn all their lives. So we should start them on this learning track by modeling continuous learning ourselves!
On p. 131, I read,
Wal-Mart became number one because this little hick company from northwest Arkansas was smarter and faster about adopting new technology than any of its competitors.
To me, the lesson here is to encourage students along the same lines! If they learn what the technology can do – i.e. with VC we can communicate with other people – then we should ask them – what else do you think we could/should do with this technology? Clearly to keep the competitive edge, we and our students need to keep imagining positive, constructive uses of the tools and resources around us!
So I hope the next time I feel a bit tired about the latest thing and the work it will take to learn it and integrate it into the curriculum, I remember the benefits to my students. Increase in technology skills. But more importantly, increase in learning skills!
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Blogs and VC
So I’ve been trying to keep on my advertised topic for my blog – videoconferencing! But here at NECC I’ve been learning other things besides VC along the way!
Right now I’m in the Lessons Learned: Creating Communities Online panel session, and Anne Davis is sharing how she has been using blogs in her classroom. What jumped out for me was her comment, “I’ve learned more from blogs than any other inservice I’ve been to.” This is why I’m blogging about VC! And I encourage those VCers out there doing VC to share your experiences online too! This is a way for us to learn from each other. We’re still pushing the edges with videoconferencing and we need to share with each other as much as possible! As many of you know, I comb the web regularly looking for new resources and examples of the use of VC. If more of us VC people were blogging, we could expand the collaborative experiences between students that we keep saying we want to do more!
Incidentally, the panel brought Anne in via Skype. Audio quality was excellent. Maybe next year’s NECC will bring in presenters with VSkype!
The other thing to consider is this – how can web blogs support collaborative VC projects? We’ve already dabbled in this with an ASK videoconference with blogging support by Jim Wenzloff, Macomb ISD, Michigan.
Back to the session – Tim Lauer is saying the same thing as Anne. “I wish the curriculum people were blogging” so we could be learning from the experts and the people in the trenches teaching students and working with curriculum… I like his suggestion too – that teachers write a paragraph a week about what is happening in their classroom. If VCing teachers were doing this, think how much we could learn from each other!
So if you start up a VC blog, let me know and I’ll add a link to your blog here! It’s not all that hard, just a commitment to an occasional reflection on your educational VC experience! You can do it!!
Tag: NECC