So, what are you doing? If you’re one of the 3 million people on Twitter, you are likely inclined to tell whoever cares right now, in 140 characters or fewer (or, about the length of this paragraph).

 Twitter, on the small chance that you don’t know, is the free micro-blogging service that enables users to post short messages, or Tweets, that are delivered to friends, enemies, family, colleagues — anyone who has subscribed. These are your followers. You may have one, several, or, if you’re Ashton Kutcher, 2 million.

With its enormous popularity, Twitter has invited dopey hyperbole (Time magazine went all in with a recent cover story) and snide cracks (“Who cares that I just ate a tasty corned beef sandwich?”)

But before you write off Twitter as just the latest social media “fad,” take a look at how some clever educators are using it to enrich their classrooms and even forge informal professional networks. (As with any new technology, expecially social networks, educators should first find out if their school or district has a policy or guidelines on Twitter before proceeding.)

Christopher Bergeson, a district-level technical coordinator in New Hampshire, says,  ”Some teachers are more open to collaboration and networking. Those who value personal networks are more excited about the technology even if they are not overly tech-savvy.”

It may be particulalry attractive to newer teachers, who are often in search of mentoring and coaching and are likely more comfortable being part of online communities.

By following other educators’ tweets, teachers can keep up with the latest trends, news, and happenings in education, as well as communicate with fellow educators.

“Twitter,” Bergeson says, “is like the ticker at the bottom of CNN — only a ticker populated with information about those people or things you care about, want to learn from, or want to know about.”

By using Twitter’s direct message (private message) feature or the @reply function to publicly reply to another’s tweet, explains Bergeson, “I am able to learn what my counterparts are working on, what is working, what is not working.”

Inside the classroom, Twitter can be used to review lessons and remind students what is going to be covered in class that day or the next.  Teachers say tweeting a few quick review questions and some good Web sites add depth to their lessons. In turn, students can tweet their own questions and observations.

“Twitter is a great way to keep your students thinking after class,” says Chris O’Neal, an instructional technology coordinator in Charlottesville, VA. ”You can tweet a quick provocative question about a social studies lesson, for example, that will keep their brains active.”

But what about the much-ballyhooed decline of the American attention span? Isn’t Twitter just encouraging students to absorb nothing more than superficial, quick bytes of information? Maybe, but educators are finding ways to use Twitter for just the opposite, helping students crystallize thoughts, focus attention, and  make connections that weren’t possible a few years ago.

Teachers like George Mayo in Maryland are enthusiastically employing Twitter to facilitate discussion and collaboration between students in their classrooms and their counterparts in different countries.

Mayo, an eighth-grade English teacher at Silver Spring International Middle School, used Twitter as a platform for a collaborative story written by his students. Using one Twitter account called Many Voices, Mayo invited his students, and students around the world, to add a sentence or two to an ongoing story through Tweets. Soon after, more than 100 students in six different countries had contributed.

“It was fantastic,” says Mayo, “and my students were excited to see kids in as far away as China contribute to the book.”

For the uninitiated, learning how to use Twitter — at least effectively — requires a little start-up time. But once you get the hang of it, says O’Neal, Twitter is an easy, time-friendly way of connecting with other educators and engaging your students. Even the most time-strapped educator — juggling lesson planning, paper grading, and all those other administrative tasks – can commit to reading and writing 140 characters at a time.

“Blogging didn’t really become that widespread among teachers,” says O’Neal, “because, as anyone who has blogged will tell you — it takes a lot of time and effort, no matter how long you’ve been doing it. Twitter can provide many of the same benefits as other social media but much, much faster.”

“Take an X-ray of your classroom and your teaching,” he advises. “Twitter may be able to help. It’s worth finding out.”

Original Article can be found at:

http://www.nea.org/home/32641.htm?utm_medium=email&utm_source=nea_today_express&utm_campaign=20090617Bcantwitterhelpyourteaching&utm_content=secondarticle

Computerized testing can be less expensive and deliver faster results—two advantages that many school districts have benefitted from—but it also has the potential to provide richer data on student performance, which could help inform curriculum and instruction, according to the report by the Washington-based think tank Education Sector.

“We should be thinking about how we design the assessments to fit more with cognitive science—to really think about how students progress in their learning so we can not only get better evidence about how they’re doing but get better evidence for us to get the ‘why,’ ” Bill Tucker, the chief operating officer of Education Sector and the author of the report, said in an interview.

But Scott Marion, the associate director of the Dover, N.H.-based Center for Assessment—a nonprofit organization that works with states and districts to improve their testing and accountability systems—de-emphasizes the importance of technology to improve assessment and encourages states not to wait until the technology is put into place to start reformatting testing models.

“We could have a lot better assessments without going near computers, and we could have computer-based assessments that are the same lousy assessments we have now,” he says. “I think it’s fair to join [technology and assessment improvement], but my only fear is that people think, ‘We can’t go to the future of assessment until we can provide the [technological] infrastructure in every classroom.’ ”

Perhaps a better starting place for states without a strong technological infrastructure in place, says Tucker, is to “really build that infrastructure anticipating that as we go, we’re going to think about new ways to use that infrastructure.” By building flexibility into the system, states can leave open the potential to explore more innovative assessments later, he suggests.

Promising Models

Although little progress has been made in harnessing the potential technology has to craft performance-based assessments, which aim to simulate complex real-world experiences, and measure students’ approaches to them, there are a handful of promising models, according to the paper.

One is the Problem-Solving in Technology-Rich Environments, or TRE, project. Created in 2003 with a test group of 2,000 students, TRE assesses scientific-inquiry skills by presenting students with a problem—such as questions about buoyancy, volume, and mass—to be answered in a performance-based model, rather than by multiple-choice questions. In this case, students gathered information by running experiments with a simulated helium balloon.

The computer simulation program then recorded data on what the students clicked on, how long they spent on each task, and what methods they tried in order to arrive at their answers.

Educators could then examine how students answered the questions and award partial points based on their approach to the problem, as well as see more detailed data on what students’ thought processes and methodologies were compared with what a single multiple-choice question provides.

Other examples, such as the River City project—a computerized simulation game created by Harvard researchers—as well as the Educational Testing Service’s Cognitively-Based Assessment, which is being piloted in schools in Portland, Maine, represent promising models. None of them currently has widespread implementation, according to the Education Sector paper.

Bridging the Gap

To encourage more states to embrace innovative assessment models, the federal government should provide incentives to states or districts that put them into place, the report recommends.

“That’s the role that states can play,” says Tucker. “The federal government can really develop the research, spur these tools, change the way we’re doing assessment procurement right now, but the states are really the place where it gets implemented or tested.”

To bridge the gap between what technology is capable of and the assessments currently given to students, the report calls for a second, smaller fund in addition to the current federal dollars for assessment that goes toward “the research and development of the next generation of assessment technology and practice.”

And those new assessment models should be open to the public for evaluation and criticism, says the report.

“That’s the way that we as a public are going to be able to check up to see if these tools are working,” Tucker says. “If we can think about it early on and make sure that we structure any sort of funding-incentive grants [to encourage transparency], it’s going to be helpful.”

Given the recent focus on science education, as well as concern about U.S. student’s mixed performance on international and American assessments in that subject, that sector provides a good jumping-off point for these policy recommendations, Tucker says.

“If you look at the research and what the recommendations are for science instruction, it’s a place where you really do need both content and process skills together,” he says. “It’s absolutely necessary to understand science content, but it’s also absolutely necessary to think like a scientist.”

In addition, “things like simulation and digital tools—that’s the way we’re doing science right now,” says Tucker. “It’s not divorced from the field.”

Another reason why science could be a good place to start, says Tucker, as well as Marion from the Center for Assessment, is because assessments in science don’t count toward schools’ adequate yearly progress under the No Child Left Behind Act. As a result, states and districts may have more flexibility to try different kinds of assessments.

“It’s still a place that might be a little more fertile,” says Tucker.

The report is the second in a series of Education Sector’s Next Generation of Accountability initiative, following a paper published last November called “Measuring Skills for the 21st Century.”

New educational uses of cellphones are challenging the “turned off and out of sight” rules that many districts have adopted for student cellphones on campus.

A growing number of teachers, carefully navigating district policies and addressing their own concerns, are having students use their personal cellphones to make podcasts, take field notes, and organize their schedules and homework.

And some recent, positive examples of how the phones are being used for academic learning may eventually lead to more nuanced policies. Indeed, more educators are concluding that cellphones may be the only realistic way their schools can offer the 1-to-1 computing experiences that better-funded schools provide with laptops.

“In our district, especially at high school, students have a cellphone on them at all times, just like a pencil—it’s an underused tool,” said Rosemary Miller, the technology-integration specialist for secondary schools in the Buhler, Kan., public schools. “We don’t have a computer for every kid, as some school districts do.”

Ms. Miller has helped teachers at Buhler High School learn how to use Gcast, a free Web-based service that allows anyone to create a page—as well as more specialized “channels” and playlists—to host podcasts. Students are given a phone number and a personal identification number; they call in using their cellphones and record an audio file that is posted directly on the Web page, Ms. Miller said.

At Buhler High, a Spanish teacher who is “very low-tech,” according to Ms. Miller, created a channel for her Spanish 3 and 4 students to call from outside of school and record themselves speaking in Spanish. “She had them select an excellent Spanish poet; they got on their cellphones and said, ‘Me llamo‘ and their name, and [in Spanish] ‘I’d like to present this poet, Pablo,’ and then they read the poem.”

Similarly, a French teacher had students make podcasts about recipes for French dishes, such as crème brûlée, and an English teacher asked her students, for a unit on War in Literature, to use their cellphones to interview someone who has experienced war.

“I guess this is replacing when you used to take a tape recorder and talk to your grandpa about the war,” Ms. Miller said.

Another application Ms. Miller has had her teachers try is using the cellphone as a classroom-response device. Polleverywhere.com lets anyone post a poll or multiple-choice questionnaire that others can complete using cellphone texting.

“It’s kind of like the cellphone as clickers,” Ms. Miller said, referring to the hand-held devices provided with proprietary classroom-response systems, which have a hefty price tag. One fact that she learned by doing the demonstration, however, was that many of her teachers did not know how to send text messages.

‘Best Resources Available’

Podcasting and classroom-response systems are among the more than 100 uses of cellphones that educator Liz Kolb has collected, and in some cases invented, for her book Toys to Tools: Connecting Student Cell Phones to Education, published in October.

“There weren’t any ideas for a long time about using cellphones at school, said Ms. Kolb, a doctoral candidate at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and an adjunct professor at Madonna University in Detroit. She confesses that, in her earlier job as a high school technology coordinator in Ohio, she “was someone who wrote policies against cellphone use.”

Educators note that restrictive cellphone policies—even blanket bans—are born of worrisome reports or direct knowledge that some students have used cellphones to cheat, disrupt classroom activities, bully, communicate with adults they shouldn’t be talking to, and take unauthorized or inappropriate images of teachers or students for uploading to the Web.

Ms. Kolb, however, said she had an “epiphany” when she learned to produce a podcast, leading to the two-year project to write the book. “We never had enough funds for technology in school. But the moment I tried that cellphone audio blog, I immediately realized that our students have one of the best resources available to them,” she said.

One key to the cellphone’s usefulness is the wealth of Web-based services that have cropped up recently, not necessarily marketed for schools but generally free in their basic versions. “Of course, they all have premium upgrades, or if they don’t have upgrades, you see ads,” Ms. Kolb cautioned.

In addition to podcasting and polling, other Web services include messaging sites that teachers can use to assign homework or give students quizzes. In the latter example, students can call in or text their responses, which can be stored on the site so teachers can evaluate students’ progress over time. Those services, incidentally, do not offer the security and error-free performance that would be needed for high-stakes testing, but are fine for giving teachers’ quick takes on classroom learning, according to experts.

In addition, Web-based organizers are available to bail out disorganized adolescents. For example, Soshiku, a service launched in September 2008 by Montana 17-year-old Andrew Schaper, lets users log their school assignments via e-mail or text messages. Students, including partners in joint projects, can arrange to receive “assignment due” notices to their cellphones or e-mail accounts.

Beyond Classrooms

Cellphones with cameras also have great potential for simple data collection. They can enrich fieldwork or field trips by allowing students to snap images of, say, leaves, for later identification. Students also can snap pictures of museum exhibits and placards to fuel classroom discussions.

“Mobile citizen journalism” is another popular trend that schools can harness, Ms. Kolb said, though she did not know of any school newspapers doing it extensively yet. “Schools can definitely set up their own mobile journalism text-messaging numbers,” so students who are traveling can phone in reports and images, especially if they find themselves in the midst of breaking news.

Middle schools and high schools have been the main dabblers in cellphone-learning experiments, but even some elementary schools are getting their toes wet.

Ted A. Lysiak, the director of instructional technology for the 6,300-student Euclid, Ohio, district, recently held training on Gcast for technology-resource teachers at several elementary schools.

This winter, he said, cellphones will accompany students in grades 3 through 5 on field trips—to a concert and to an arboretum—though firmly under the control of a teacher. Students will have a list of questions; they will take turns calling in their responses and reflections to a Gcast page.

“Ninety-five percent of cellphone activities are better done outside the classroom,” noted Ms. Kolb, adding that emphasizing outside activities means that students can spend classroom time analyzing the content that has been collected or recorded, rather than fussing with technology issues. Emphasizing off-campus cellphone use also helps teachers work within the more restrictive school district rules.

‘Smartphone’ Potential

Standard cellphones, of course, are dowdy relatives to smartphones, such as iPhones and Blackberries, that today get the bulk of popular attention and advertising.

Ms. Kolb said she avoided applications of “smartphones”—basically, powerful Internet-connected computers—because their high cost raises serious questions about budget and the equity of access.

Even with standard cellphones, she said, educators must make sure that all students understand the price structure of their calling plans, including the number of text messages that they can send and receive at no additional charge.

“Philosophically, we don’t want to ask the family to pay that sort of thing,” she said. When not all students have cellphones, she said, educators should encourage sharing.

Similarly, educators need to exercise tact with regard to assignments using cellphones. “You don’t want middle school students coming home from school [and telling their parents] that they need a cellphone,” Ms. Kolb says.

Fortunately, many cellphone ideas can be implemented using regular telephones or home computers, too.

Because smartphones can be loaded with full-featured computer programs, plenty of software companies are working on educational applications. “I really do think smartphones are going to be one of the real game-changers in education in next five to 10 years,” said Mr. Lysiak, “because of their [declining] cost and their capabilities.”

Once smartphones become widely affordable, he said, “students are walking around with 24/7 connection to the world that they can use for research purposes, publishing purposes, and connecting purposes.”

Equally important, he said, harnessing mobile communications will help schools stay relevant to students.

“In our district, we really feel students are bored with the instruction they are getting,” he said. “It’s not that instruction has become boring, it’s that the outside world they interact with has become so engaging, but we haven’t kept up.”

The annual DPS Instructional Technology Showcasewill take place at the Staff Development Center on Tuesday, March 19, 2009 from 4:30-7:30 (setup will begin at 3:30). This event gives DPS teachers and their students an opportunity to showcase their hard work and innovative instructional technology projects to the Durham community. 

Any interested DPS teacher can now register to participate in this great event by completing and submitting the registration form.  Projects may include (but not limited to): Innovative projects with students using technology, Claymation, Geocaching, Joomla website design, Movies/Videos, Blogs, Podcasts, Vodcasts, Multi-User Virtual Environments (MUVE), Wiki, Newscasts, Multimedia, Integration of Technology with the fine arts, Foreign language & English Language learners using technology to improve language skills, etc.  We look forward to your seeing you on March 19th

Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novels are pretty daunting fodder for the average English class, no matter how they’re approached. But Diane Hamstra, a teacher at Park Tudor School, in Indianapolis, found a way to get her tenth-grade students to dive enthusiastically into the nineteenth-century moralist’s dark thicket of language.

Hamstra used a software application called DyKnow Vision to let her students analyze various passages from the books on computer screens at their desk. She then posted their work on a large-screen monitor at the front of the classroom (the computer lab, in this case), and the students discussed the displayed examples. Hamstra has also had students analyze similar passages using pen and paper.

The difference is startling. Using the software, the students’ responses “were deeper than with pen and ink,” Hamstra says. “The focus was really sharp. There’s something about changing over to an electronic medium, something about that screen. It’s psychological. It’s a generational thing.”

No kidding. Teachers in every strata of education are increasingly dealing with a student population that is not only more wired than they are but also grew up in a techno-drenched atmosphere that has trained them to absorb and process information in fundamentally different ways. This generation of students is more likely to be armed with cell phones, laptops, and iPods than with spiral notebooks and No. 2 pencils.

Teachers who once struggled for students’ attention mainly against daydreams, passed notes, class clowns, and cross-aisle flirting now also face a formidable array of gadgets and digitized content. Smart schools — and smart educators — are scrambling to figure out how to use these same tools and information-distribution techniques to reach and excite young minds. “You have to work with the kind of brains we’ve got now,” says Susan Blackmore, who holds a PhD in psychology from Oxford University and frequently writes and lectures on new technology’s effects on consciousness.

According to Blackmore, today’s brains are shaped by various information streams — sometimes referred to as memes — constantly popping and sparking and competing for attention. This new generation of digital learners — call them the MEdia Generation — take in the world via the filter of computing devices: the cellular phones, handheld gaming devices, PDAs, and laptops they take everywhere, plus the computers, TVs, and game consoles at home. A survey by the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation found that young people (ages 8-18) mainline electronic media for more than six hours a day, on average. Interestingly, many are multitasking — listening to music while surfing the Web or instant-messaging friends while playing a video game.

Educators must figure out how to compete with this frenetic memestorm coming at them from marketers and other students. Many are. The last few years have seen a rapid classwide and districtwide use of collaborative course-management systems such as DyKnow as well as so-called social technologies — blogs, wikis, and media-syndication systems based on the Really Simple Syndication (RSS) protocol — that allow anyone to shift from consuming media to being a media creator. Giving students powerful media-authoring tools means relinquishing a degree of control, but doing so also makes it possible to help them learn in more effective ways (and tighter time frames) than ever before.

One way of competing with electronic distractions is to optimize lessons for the MEdia Generation’s rapid-fire meme-hopping tendencies. Leapfrog Enterprises, maker of the LeapPad Learning System, the talking-book device that topped the list of best-selling toys in the United States for several years, imposes a seven-second rule on the writers and designers of its teaching toys: Stories and lessons must progress in increments of seven seconds or less, at the end of which the book prompts the child to interact with it. A concession to a fragmented attention span, perhaps, but one that recognizes reality.

Collaborative learning, too, has taken a tech-driven leap forward. In the Cranbrook Schools, in Cranbook, Michigan, for instance, students use Moodle, an open source course-management system designed to create online communities. With it, users discuss class content with teachers and other students, take quizzes and tests, and get help after school.

For more information, or to access the entire article, visit: http://www.edutopia.org/ikid-digital-learner

  A group students in Kim Kerian’s third grade class are learning that iPods are good for more than just listening to their favorite tunes.
    Fourteen Crestwood Elementary third graders have spent the past couple months utilizing the portable media players in the classroom to help polish up on their reading skills.
    The project, called “Digital Dialogues: Assessing Readers Using Podcasting Technology,” aims to improve students’ reading fluency and comprehension by  reading out loud into an iPod, recording their readings and receiving feedback on the recordings. The project, which began in early October is a collaboration between Crestwood Elementary  School and Luther College.
    Every week Kerian gives each third grader participating in the project a passage suitable to their reading level. The students then do a “cold read,” where they record the passage into the iPod without practicing it beforehand. Kerian then makes the students recordings into a podcast and posts it on a Web site that a group of Luther education students participating in the study have access to.
    The Luther students, enrolled in Assistant Professor of Education Barbara Bohach’s Language Arts Methods class, are each grouped up with one third grader in Kerian’s class. They listen to the third grade students’ cold read and provide feedback on elements such as fluency, expression and self-corrections. The Luther students then send their suggestions to their elementary school partners by means of a podcast they create.
    The third graders then practice reading the passage again several times, this time taking the college students’ suggestions into account. They then re-record and re-send the passage to their Luther partner.
    “Not only are my students learning from someone else, they [the Luther students] are learning how to communicate with children, etc.,” Kerian said.
    Bohach said the project has been beneficial for her students.
    “They’re connecting with real kids,” Bohach said. “It’s a tool for enhancing instruction in the classroom.”
    Formerly, her students were mostly limited to role-playing activities within the classroom to learn similar skills, instead of having the opportunity to interact with children.
    “This is much more authentic. And I see this as a value for my students,” Bohach said.
    Howard-Winneshiek Technology Director Helen Westcott partnered with Bohach at Luther College to develop the iPod project. Bohach, Kerian and Westcott will present their findings at the International Reading Association Conference in Minneapolis this May.
    The corporate office of Donaldson, Company, Inc. donated money to the school to purchase laptops and four iPods for the project.
    Kerian said her students enjoy utilizing iPods in the classroom.
    “It’s something different. The kids love it. They can’t wait to record,” she said.
    Third grader Kayla Lentz believes the project has helped improve her reading skills.
    “I like it,” said Kayla. “My reading gets better and a different person tells me things to work. My partner has told me to read slower and use expression.”
    Jacob Knutson said he has learned a lot from his Luther partner.
    “We can communicate back to Luther students and read on iPods,” said third grader Jacob. “I have learned a lot. She told me to stop at periods and take a breath.”
    Third grader Lucas Schwamman agreed.
    “I like it because a Luther student gets to listen to us and tell us what to work on,” Lucas said. “My partner has talked to me about phrasing, pausing and re-reading to correct.”
    Many of Kerian’s students think it’s fun to use the iPod and laptop computers.
    “We get to hear people talk to us on computer and I like that,” said Ashley Fencl, one of Kerian’s third grade students.
    “You get to read stories every week on an iPod and that’s fun,” third grader Dawson Rasmusson said.
    The students are not the only ones becoming more proficient with technology. This project marks the first time both Kerian and Bohach have created a podcast.
    “I do think it’s beneficial. It’s very, very exciting,” Kerian said.
   In December, the students will be reassessed to measure any growth in their reading skills, compared to a third grade class that did not participate in a similar project. This will be what Kerian calls a “cold read,” which is reading and retelling without practice. This will allow Kerian to assess whether the project has helped build her students’ natural reading strategies and skills.
    “I’m hoping to see these skills they’ve been working on will be natural,” Kerian said.

Ways Blogs can be used in Classrooms:

Blogs as an administration tool

Often teachers wish to publish a classroom web page, but lack the technological skills or time to create a traditional html-based web page.  Setting up a web page as a blog is quick and easy.  Furthermore, editing and adding content is equivalent to using a web-based e-mail account. A classroom blog can provide students and parents with due dates, assignments, links, and other important classroom information.  For this type, the only contributor is the instructor.  The instructor posts to the blog and the students read the post and complete the necessary actions.

Blogs as a discussion tool

Discussions are central to many classes.  Discussion boards have long been available to teachers, but threaded discussions are more difficult to navigate and track.  The simple, linear nature of blogs can simplify online classroom discussions.  Blogs allow teachers to bring the topics beyond the confines of the classroom and expand the discussion to include all students in a given class.  Using a single blog, there are two possibilities.

The first method involves the teacher posting a question, quote, or other piece of information in the blog.  Students read the prompt and post a comment.  At the end of the assignment the teacher reviews the comments on the post. 

Examples: Mrs. Lowe’s Class

Example 1: A representation of the first use of blogs as a discussion tool.

In the second method, teachers grant access to students to post to a class blog, as well as, post comments.  The assignment for this set up needs to be more complex then responding to a single question, otherwise the blog will be populated with similar responses.  The sharing of resources and the jigsawing of complex subjects fit well into this method.  It also provides a chance for students to receive direct feedback in the form of comments on their posts.

Examples: Pre-Cal 30S, The Secret Life of Bees, In Need of Coffee

Example 2: A representation of the second use
of blogs as a discussion tool.

Blogs as a Publication Tool

With this final method, each student is provided his/her own blog.  They can be tied together into a community setting, with each blog linking to the others.  Or, they can all be linked from a common page.  Assignments range from short-term projects, a classroom newspaper, a digital portfolio, or ongoing reflections to the topics being studied in class.  The teacher tracks student posts and makes comments when appropriate.  Other students can be assigned the task of reading posts and making comments.  Based upon the comments, the students could edit posts before a final due date.

Examples: Blog Write, Brandon’s Online Magazine, East Side Bloggers, Immigration Experience (A project from the Immigrant Experience Journal WebQuest)

For more information on blogging, visit the Encyclopedia of Educational Technology, at: http://coe.sdsu.edu/eet/articles/bloggingtech/index.htm

We’d also like to give them credit for the majority of the content on today’s post!