Balanced Literacy

Balanced Literacy is the focus of our staff development this afternoon. To me, balanced literacy in my computer literacy allows students to utilize their literacy skills in a variety way through multiple media. I think it's important for my students to work in online environments as well as in more traditional environments, like word processing and localized documents.

Cross-curricular literacy characteristics, I believe, begin and end with critical thinking. Students need to be challenged to evaluate, synthesize, and analyze situations surrounding technology use. That means they need to read, write, and publish in computer literacy.

VoiceThread. The next big thing in collaborative education

VoiceThread lets users create online multimedia-rich presentations that other users can view, comment on, and even edit. I'll let the VoiceThread site itself give a more specific description of its features below...

"A VoiceThread is an online media album that can hold essentially any type of media (images, documents and videos) and allows people to make comments in 5 different ways - using voice (with a microphone or telephone), text, audio file, or video (with a webcam) - and share them with anyone they wish. A VoiceThread allows group conversations to be collected and shared in one place, from anywhere in the world."
--VoiceThread website, About Voicethread

At the bottom of this post is the example that I created on VoiceThread. It is the most powerful piece of multimedia that you will ever see in your life, so brace yourself.

Actually, it's just pictures, commentary, and text of our dog, Zane. But imagine if you used this in your classroom...Imagine what you could do with your content, front-loading background knowledge, questions and inference...

Since I don't have anyone to comment within the voicethread, it doesn't show the full spectrum of its instructional potential. Maybe you would like to comment within the voicethread itself. Feel free to do so if you desire.

To comment on the voicethread, you need to establish an account, which is free and easy. In fact, as a K-12 educator, you get a free version of their PRO Account which gives you unlimited everything (this is a good thing). All you have to do after you have established an account is to click on the GO PRO! account tab in the upper right corner of the page.

Anyhow, there are several tutorials available at the site to check out. There is even a Classroom category (top, middle of the home page) that addresses the educational uses that VoiceThread utilizes. They're definitely worth a look. I learned a lot from them.

So, here it is...

Snipshot: Great Photo Web-Editor

Snipshot is a simple, but great, web-based photo editor. It has basic tools like resize, crop, rotate, enhance, and adjust (saturation, sharpness, etc.). It also has a Firefox Add-on. Best of all, there's no registration.

It receives the prestigious 0 Manuals (the lower, the better) on our DUH! Scale.

Viva Basecamp!

I've been slowly (no kidding, really?) integrating Basecamp into my Computer Literacy classes to build an online learning environment for my students. I believe it's important to give them exposure to how instruction can be delivered in an online environment because it's only going to become more prevalent in the coming years. Soon, I'm going to do a full review of the the project management tool (still free for teachers! I think.) and lend some insight as to how I'm using Basecamp in my instruction. I'll include the set-up and infrastructure of how I use the many features offered by Basecamp.

Basecamp is now free for teachers!

That's right! The good folks over at 37signals have made it possible for teachers to use this powerful project management tool for free. This is, potentially, a huge gift to help teachers track student work. I say "potentially" not because the product is incomplete or somehow insufficient. I say potentially because it still relies on the individual teacher to use it to it's full capacity. Basecamp streamlines the process of offering individualized and diversified instruction to our students and evaluating their learning. It allows us to easily track their progress and success.

No matter what they're working on.

Or how long it takes them.

I believe we, as educators, need to take full advantage of this gift. Even if you don't swim in the technology pool (but really, would you read this blog if you didn't), you can still stick your big toe in the water without fear of drowning. Find one or two students in a class and give them a learning extension so you and the student(s) can take this instructional tool for a dip.

Basecamp has great potential. And so do we.

As a teacher, all you need to do to get a free Basecamp Basic Plan is email them at email@37signals.com.

Long time, no blog

Man, the days really have a way of flying by if you're not careful. It's been a couple of months since my last post, and 3 months since my last podcast. Sheeesh. Well, I'm hopeful that I can get a show out this weekend. I've been exchanging some emails with Dan Weinstein of the DanToday educational blog. He has a number of great tools and thoughts dealing with educational technology! With any luck, he'll be our guest on Paradigm Shift's "Season Premier."

Summer is going, going...GONE

Well that was certainly quick. Summer just evaporated.

I'm looking forward to starting school in 12 days, it's the meetings next week I'm struggling with.
:-)

I'm going to do a podcast before school gets going. The only question is "When...?"

Since summer basketball finished, I've been filling my time by doing a little home improvement and a lot of edging in the yard. Have I mentioned how I can't wait for school to start?

A few weeks ago, I started a blog and podcast about the Green Bay Packers. It's called the Packer Podcast. Catchy, eh? No, I didn't stay up all night thinking of the name. It features all the latest Packer news with my own commentary sprinkled in for flavor. So, those of you that are Packer fans, check it out. If you're not a Packer fan, certainly you know one that would love the Packer Podcast! Like the Paradigm Shift, the Packer Podcast is available (FREE!) at the iTunes Music Store.

I've also been reading Young Patriots, a Charles Cerami book that investigates the important roles that James Madison and Alexander Hamilton played in framing the Constitution. I'm not very far yet as I tend to read non-fiction much more deliberately than fiction. So far, I'm very impressed with Cerami's writing. Having never studied Hamilton's background, I didn't realize just how brilliant our first treasury secretary truly was. One of the most impressive things about Hamilton is that he was such a quick study and would consistently gain insight beyond that of his mentors.

I do that, too.
:-)

Well, back to the book...