Through a Green Lens
views on technology integration and learning
iPad and Apple TV
21 month ago
ISP is hosting the Czech Teacher’s IT Summit this weekend, which will focus mainly on using iPads in the classroom. Our network manager connected an Apple TV to the projector in our theater so that the speakers can present using AirPlay on their iPads. This required a little bit of troubleshooting since the projector did not match the outputs of the Apple TV.
Here is what our setup eventually looked like:
- Apple TV connected via ethernet cable to a wireless router.
- HDMI output through a HDMI to DVI cable connected to projector.
- Optical output connected to digital/analogue converter connected to theater sound system.
- iPad2 connected through AirPlay to Apple TV
Thoughts:
- Wow. This set up has some serious potential. The various adapters are a bit of a pain, but the outcome is worth it – being able to view the iPad on the big theater screen.
- Keynote on the iPad is quite nice. The presentation screens are customizable and can allow you to view next slide as well as notes.
- While we are using this in the theater, I can envision this setup being used in classrooms, offices and conference rooms of various sizes.
- I’ve never been a fan of Interactive White Boards, and I really can’t see how they will survive against the tandem of iPad/Apple TV.
Google Search Stories in HS English Creative Writing
01 month ago
by pgreensoup
in Uncategorized
Earlier this year, a fellow Google Certified Teacher, Wendy Gorton introduced me to Google Search Stories. Since then, I’ve been waiting to find the perfect opportunity to use them with students. This week, I’ve been invited to guest-teach in our Creative Writing course where I plan to lead students through the process of creating their own. My plan is to show a few videos created by Google, then one created using the Search Story Generator (hat tip - Jim Sill) and then have students analyse what elements make them “work” before letting them loose to create their own. I’m hoping it will be a good brain-stretching, creative, one-class-period exercise that gives them experience with working with a new and unique genre.
Links
A popular Google Search Story – Parisian Love
An excellent student example created using Google Search Story Video Creator
Introducing A New DCA
13 months ago
We’ve spent a good deal of time this year working on creating a meaningful Digital Citizenship Agreement (which I blogged about here). In rolling this new agreement out to students we wanted to get them thinking about and talking about some of the themes and their meanings and applications. We split our 230 students into two groups; our amazing librarian took the grades 11 and 12 while I took the 9s and 10s. We first introduced the idea through a short presentation(embedded in this post – hopefully I was more engaging in the live version) that was meant to emphasize the powerful tools available to all of us and the importance of community norms and positive behavior. Then advisors led their small groups of 12 students through a discussion using the following prompts:
Prompt 1: How do you respect yourself and others in your digital life? Why is this important? Why is the school concerned about this?
Prompt 2: – How do you respect property and intellectual property in your digital life? Why is this important?
Prompt 3: – How do you protect yourself and others in your digital life? Can you share an example? Why is the school concerned about this?
As expected there was some push back by students regarding why these things were the school’s business, but overall the discussions went well and students were able to speak about the themes and listen to the ideas of others. Our goal was to raise awareness and get students sharing and thinking about these topics – this we achieved. Additionally the next day all students signed the agreement in their advisories. We had a follow up session a few months later that was also well received by students. This is a good start, but what do we do next?
GTA Action Plan: Photo Contest in Picasa Web Albums
03 months ago
After the Rain - Jana Lohrova
This past summer I was fortunate to attend the Google Teacher Academy where I spent two days meeting many amazing educators while receiving training in Google tools and being inspired by the collective creativity in the room.
Action Plan:
PROBLEM:
Our school only uses GAFE(Google Apps For Education) for faculty, not students, and they don’t want to take on student accounts for various reasons, but there is a need for using all the collaborative features.
SOLUTION:
I am going to create and implement a plan to get all ISP Upper School students (about 260) to create their own Google Accounts and then share them with the school so that teachers can utilize the power of Google products with students. DETAILS: I will communicate the requirement to students and assist students in creating Google Accounts. I will facilitate the collection of student email addresses via our website and then push them to PowerSchool and Moodle so that teachers have access to them. I will launch a photo contest to coincide with our Week Without Walls student trips (using PicasaWebAlbums) that will encourage students to actually get their accounts created so they can participate in the contest while simultaneously engaging them learning to use the collaborative features of PicasaWebAlbums. Lastly, I will create instructions for teachers explaining the best way to gather account information from students and then share documents with them as well as lead a number of after school Cyber Cafes on Using Google Docs in the Classroom.
Reflection:
Everyone Enjoying Paris to the Fullest - Lucie Soudkova
For the most part, my action plan was successful. That is not to say there weren’t some hiccups along the way. In a nutshell, I met my goal of getting all of our students set up with a Google Account and all of those accounts recorded into our various systems. The photo contest was really a bonus and a fun way to go about getting all students to sign up for an account.
All of our students have google accounts. These accounts are used as their “professional” or “school” accounts and are connected to any other accounts they create for school purposes such as Youtube, Turnitin.com etc.
We recorded each student’s google account info in our Learning Management System (Moodle) and Student Information System (PowerSchool). Now, when a new student enrolls in our Upper School we ask them to create a google account, then use that info to populate our systems such as those listed above and Edublogs.
Using the Photo Contest as a catalyst for getting all students to create their accounts worked well…for account creation. Students wanted to contribute photos and view each others’ photos of our Week Without Walls. Most students created their accounts by the deadline and I only had to chase down a few of them. From the outside, the photo contest ran smoothly, although I did encounter some unexpected issues with using Picasa for this event.
I used Google Sites to create a portal for the Photo Contest, and used PicasaWebAlbums as a way to share albums to students so that they could submit photos to various categories. You can view the portal here.
The issues with PicasaWebAlbums mainly had to do with sharing and specifically me sharing with too many students in a short period of time. I needed to share 4 albums to 300 people so that they could have the ability to upload to the albums. This was too much for Picasa; it seems Google thought I was spamming if I shared with too many people too often. I was finally able to share everything necessary in small batches over about 10 days, which was a big problem since I wanted to share everything out before students went on their trips. I’m not sure if Google has changed any of this, but I know with the advent of Google Plus they’ve been making some changes to Picasa Web Albums. Maybe this is easier to do now – I’m not sure, but I definitely would look into the sharing features and limitations before I tried another photo contest using Picasa.
My biggest personal learnings were associated with both Google Sites and Picasa Web Albums. I had not created a Google Site prior to this, and so this project really had me digging deep into the menus to see just what Sites could do. The visual nature of a photo contest lent itself to embedding of media, slideshows and instructions. I’m pretty confident with Sites now and feel that I can create sites pretty quickly and easily. I think Google Sites are fabulous for people don’t have advanced web design skills but who need to create a site for an event, a class, or for hosting any sort of information.
Final Thought:
My action plan was centered around the idea that we wanted a way to utilize the power of Google Apps without hosting our student accounts on our domains. While I like having our student accounts off the domain, giving students complete ownership, this set up does have drawbacks. It just isn’t as smooth to share things with students as it would be if they were organized in the teacher contacts and possible in groups. However, I do think that having students off domain is possible, and should not be considered a barrier to effectively using the collaborative power of Google Apps if a teacher is in a situation where the school does not or will not put students on Google Apps. I’d love to hear about other schools that are having success with this same sort of set-up.
AUP or DCA?
14 months ago
What is negative, loaded with rules and consequences, stuffy and outdated, and never read but signed by all? Your school Acceptable Use Policy? Our AUP certainly met that description – but not any more. Our IT/Library team was tasked with tweaking our Acceptable Use Policy. We deleted and altered until our AUP was no longer recognizeable. With (lots of) inspiration from Educational Origami, a new Digital Citizenship Agreement (DCA) emerged that is student friendly and focused on positive behaviors. We also think it models our community values and can be used as a teaching tool. Check it out.
Educational Origami
Much of our document was adapted from the work of others at Educational Origami thanks to their generous use of a Creative Commons license. Have a look at their site for inspiration to revamp your school’s AUP.
Would You Hire You?
04 months ago
As part of our roll-out of a revamped Digital Citizenship Agreement (formerly Acceptable Use Policy), we had the opportunity in an advisory class session to engage our Upper School students in thinking about their online identity – their personal brand. @bobthebrarian and I created a lesson, Would You hire You?, designed to have students evaluate their digital footprints and reflect on how they are portraying themselves to university admissions officers and potential employers.
Lesson Materials
Presentation (with teacher notes included)
Teacher Notes for Presentation in PDF
Reflection
I was fortunate to substitute for a regular advisor at the last minute. My group of 12 students was mostly engaged for the entire lesson and gave me some good insight in our debrief at the end. We had a good discussion, although I wished I would have come up with debrief questions prior to “on the spot.” While a majority of the students rated themselves to have mainly positive digital footprints, it was also good to hear how many of them had a good grasp of privacy settings and other strategies. In fact, every hand went up when I asked “who has ever asked a friend to remove a photo or other content from a social network?”. You can look at that as 1) there are photos out there of all the students behaving badly, or that 2) all students know the appropriate steps to advocate for themselves and attempt to remove potentially damaging photos – I’m choosing the second view.
Edublog Award Nominations
05 months ago
by pgreensoup
in Learning
It is time to nominate bloggers for Edublog Awards. You can nominate your favorite blogs before Friday, December 2. What are you waiting for? Here are mine:
Best class blog – Nancy VonWalde – ISP Grade 3V - An excellent start to blogging with grade 3 students.
Best ed tech / resource sharing blog – Keith Ferrel – Ed Tech Ideas - A waterfall of resources focused on elementary students and teachers.
Best teacher blog – John Crane – Second Year IB Psychology - Resources, links and info for the IB Psychology student.
Best librarian / library blog – The Daring Librarian - Fellow GCTer Gwyneth blogs about all things info lit.
Best School Administrator blog – Arnie Bieber – School21C - Conversations about the future of education.
Best free web tool – Google Apps for Education - Collaboration has never been so easy.
Lifetime achievement – Kim Cofino - I’m “always learning” from Kim, who inspires so many of us in the edtech world.
Turntable Trig
05 months ago
Today we experimented with using iPads in a math class. We had 3 school-owned iPads as well as one brought in by a student. Students used the Vernier Video Physics app in groups of two or three to review and investigate trig graphs.
Turntable Graph
Ms. Flaherty first reviewed a couple of math concepts that the students had already reviewed as part of their homework by watching a YouTube clip. Then I demonstrated how to use the various tools built into the Video Physics app to plot the points of a sticky note as it travels around a Fisher Price Turntable, and to set the scale and change the location of the origin. From there, we handed off the iPads to the students and away they went.
Once students plotted the path of the sticky note, and viewed the resulting graph, they then worked through the following prompts:
- Find the equation of your curve.
- How does the equation change as you change the A.) origin, B.) scale?
- By adjusting the position of the origin and the scale crate a graph that has: A.) An amplitude of 5 B.) A wave axis of 10
Findings, Thoughts, Reflections:
- Students were engaged in the hands-on learning, and shared the device appropriately around the group so that everyone got a chance to manipulate the data.
- Students are really comfortable with iPads. They took to the app quickly and were easily able to use the gestures to perform specific tasks within the app.
Investigative Math rocks. I wish that when I was learning math I had had access to the tools that students have today. Changing different variables and seeing how that affects the output helps students get a better understanding than just working out problems.- Personal devices are better than school-owned devices. When the teacher asked students to send her the files this became obvious. The student who was using his own device easily emailed a few photos to the teacher because his email was already set up in the iPad’s system. Web versions of email (we tried gmail) don’t allow attaching files from an iPad because they don’t know how to navigate the iPad file system. The work around is to either attach the ipad to a laptop and use iPhoto (or another photo app on a PC) to pull down the images, or have students enter their email info into the iPad system, send the files, then delete the account before the class ends and their email account and ipad are handed off to another student.
European Student Film Festival
06 months ago
This past week International School of Prague hosted an amazing learning event, The European Student Film Festival, where students attended workshops on story, lighting, music, digital sound, camera work, casting, and competed in a 24 Hour Film Challenge. The excitement about the event is still evident in the hallways this week as students continue to talk about what an exceptional and inspiring event it was. I was impressed by the student creativity and problem solving displayed throughout the festival, and the overall quality of films that were submitted in the regular competition as well as the 24 Hour Film Festival. I’ve embedded a playlist of the festival winners in this post, and here are links to the challenge films as well as the entire lot of competition submissions.
Interacting with Experts
06 months ago
by pgreensoup
in Learning
Stuart
Interacting with experts is not something our students get to do every day, but an especially keen, risk-taking teacher that I work with showed me that it isn’t that difficult any more. In Mrs. Caskie’s IB Language and Lit class, the students have been reading Stuart, by Alexander Masters….and then asking questions of the author.
Mrs. Caskie stumbled across Masters’ blog and, on a whim, asked if it was “okay” for students to write him and ask questions. Then she asked her students to think about what they would want to ask the author as they read the book. This was a theme that she kept repeating until she finally said, “then let’s ask him – he’s got a blog.” So they did. And Masters has been responding to the questions one by one making this learning opportunity particularly personalized.
Mrs. Caskie is excited about how this interaction with the author might serve as a springboard for some creative written or oral tasks. Some of the student generated ideas are:
- a transcript of a “lost tape” of Stuart’s
- putting Masters on trial for exploiting the homeless/disabled person with students writing the court transcript,
- a missing chapter – perhaps of when Stuart was young and happy
- a comparison piece with Masters and Orwell meeting up and discussing identity, culture and the idea of moving.
As with most authentic tasks, the students have been engaged and motivated. My own learning is not something new, but a reminder of just how powerful technology is – it can connect us with professionals. In the case of these students, technology has given them the opportunity to include a professional author in their Personal Learning Network. We should sieze the opportunity to make this happen for more students; apparently all you have to do is ask.
If you’ve read Stuart, you may want to check out Masters’ latest book: The Genius in My Basement
