My 5 Take-Aways from Edubloggercon
#ebc11 #edtech #elearning #iste11
I am currently hanging out in the blogger cafe at ISTE 2011 in Philadelphia and having a great time with my fellow bloggers. But before I get caught up with everything ISTE, I wanted to get a few things written down about yesterday’s Edubloggercon. So here are my five take-aways:
1. BYOD IS UNSTOPPABLE. (Bring Your Own Device) Five years from now we will be laughing about how we wanted to buy all students a district owned laptop for 1:1, when all students really wanted to do was to bring their own devices like iPods, iPads, and smartphones. We need to let them store in the cloud and not on our networks and let them use cloud based apps like Google Docs.
2. TEACH WITH PASSION, LEARN WITH PASSION: We all crowded around a local 16 year old student named Jeff who taught us that he wants to learn from teachers who are passionate about their subjects so that he can be passionate about his learning. He has been lucky that at his school he has such teachers — we were amazed.
3. STUDENTS SHOULD HELP STUDENTS: Before a student gets help from his teacher he should ask 3 or 4 of his classmates. Holy crud, the teacher doesn’t have all the answers! I don’t know how to use Prezi, so should I ban my students from using it? No, instead we should let them teach each other technology that we don’t understand.
4. STUDENTS WANT SOME AUTONOMY: They want to have a little choice in what they do. If we give an assignment, we should let them pick their own method of learning proof — sometimes. You could really be surprised by what you get back (good and bad).
5. MAKE A GOOGLE CLASSROOM: This one is connected to the point I made above. If you don’t know already, the company of Google has an 80/20 rule. Employees are to give 80% of their time to current Google projects, the other 20% of the time they can work on whatever they want — they still must work, but they can work on anything. Imagine if we allowed that at school. Just think of the cool projects that kids could work on during this free learning time.
To be fair, I must admit that only attended 1/8th of the discussion, since there were 8 classes per hour and I had to pick. So this was my take, other participants probably walked away with totally different ideas.
- Brad Flickinger
Off to TIE Colorado
#edtech #edchat #elearning
Tomorrow I am off to speak at TIE Colorado at Copper Mountain. This year will be a little different in that I will be leaving my laptop at home, everything that I will be presenting will be coming off of my iPad 2.
Using iMovie on an iPad 2 to make movies.
I will be presenting two workshops; Movie Making with Elementary Students and Podcasting with Elementary Students. So there I will be making movies and podcasts with my iPad if you can believe it. When the iPad came out last year I thought it would be a great consuming tool, but now I use it for almost everything I do. In fact, this blog post is being typed into my iPad (although I am not really typing, I am dictating instead).
So with the movie making workshop, I will show teachers the tricks I use to get students to make awesome movies and with the podcasting class I will show my secrets on how I have made over 280 podcasts with my elementary students.
If you are at TIE Colorado, please come and find me and say “Hi.”
Over 80% of Atomic Learning videos work on iPads
#edchat #elearning
It seems that every week I used my iPad more and more and my laptop less and less, so when stumbled across the recent blog post from Atomic Learning stating that most of their videos now work on my iPad, I looked over at my dusty laptop and said “sorry.” This was No small task when you consider the tens of thousands of videos that are in their library.
I just went to my AL account and I happy to report that the videos work great on my iPad.
In fact, I am writing this blog post on my iPad using an app called Blogsy, so thank you Atomic Learning for keeping at the leading edge of the curve. Which is good because by this time next year my laptop could be on eBay.
Read MoreAtomic Learning Vs. YouTube
#edtech #edchat #elemchat #elearning
The other day I was having lunch with a fellow teacher and I asked her how was enjoying her Atomic Learning (AL) account. “Oh, I use YouTube instead,” she told me. Although I was about to freak out, I took a deep breath and I asked her to explain.
She told me that whenever she had a question about how to use a piece of software she just went to YouTube instead of her Atomic Learning account. I guess that I had become so addicted to AL that I never considered using anything else so I explained to her that she was wasting her valuable time searching on YouTube when she could do much better by using her AL account. We agreed to meet during her planning period so I could show her what I was talking about.
At the agreed time we met in her room to do a little one on one training on how to properly use her AL account. So I with my laptop and this teacher with her desktop computer had a little head to head challenge: Atomic Learning Vs. YouTube.
Image via Wikipedia
I asked her for a common software question that she would look up on YouTube. She said that last week she wanted to know how to export a chart from Excel and put it into a PowerPoint presentation. I asked her to show me how she found the right video…
First she went to YouTube and then she searched for the video she wanted. Hundreds of videos came back to her inquiry and then she proceeded to watch each one – looking for the one that would teach her what she wanted to know. She thought she found the right one, but then it turned out to be for the new PowerPoint and not for the 2003 version that we use at our school. Finally, 17 minutes later, she found the one.
Now it was my turn…
I logged into Atomic Learning, clicked on the “Find Answer to Tech Question” button. Entered “import excel chart” and then selected the filter of PowerPoint. 5 answers came back and I selected the PowerPoint 2003 one and soon we were watching the 1 minute video. Total time: 2 minutes 13 seconds to find and watch the right video.
Needless to say, she was convinced.
Building my Personal Learning Network PLN Part 1
#edtech #edchat
I have been hearing the ideas about building your own PLN for the past year and even though I have most of the parts already in place, I think that it is high time for me to get serious about doing it up right.
Step 1: Understand exactly what a PLN is.
A PLN or Personal Learning Network is really a collection of online and offline resources that you will use on a usual basis to make you better at whatever you do. Since I am a tech teacher, my PLN will be resources that will make me a better tech teacher.
- Image via CrunchBase
Step 2: Start with Twitter.
I don’t know why I started with Twitter, but to me making room in my hectic schedule to read 140 characters is a lot easier that finding time to read a book on edtech.
I have had a twitter account for years, but if you don’t have one, or you have no idea what twitter is, a good place to start is the video below. When I searched Atomic Learning I found 57 video tutorials about Twitter — so you have no excuse not to set up a Twitter account.
Once you have Twitter you now need some people to follow. After using the search function for edtech and school technology to find some people to follow, I clicked the follow link on the people I liked and thought could help build my PLN. If you want to see who I am following, just click the link below.
Brad Flickinger’s Twitter Account
The next thing I did was to set up some twitter searches for the hashtags (#) that people from my list where using as a sort of keyword for subjects that might help me as well. I found these hashtags to follow on Twitter.
- #edtech
- #edchat
- #elearning
- #elemchat
Now I can follow Tweats about these subjects for my PLN without following individual people. Following these hashtags really gives me a “feel” for what is happening in the world of edtech — this keeps me up-to-date. I use a program called TweetDeck to keep it all straight on my laptop. For example, right now while writing this blog post; Twitter is buzzing about tablet computers and teaching — cool!
Already now that I am a little more organized, I feel like my PLN is starting to look better. The last thing I did was to schedule a little time three times a week to check in on Twitter and see what is happening. I feel smarter already.
Check out Part 2 in a few days.
Related articles
- Twitter as PLN (twowritingteachers.wordpress.com)
- My Personal Learning Network is the most awesomest thing ever!! (elearnspace.org)
- Developing and Deepening your PLN with Twitter – Hashtags For Educators (newtrierlibrary.blogspot.com)
- The Power of the PLN – Getting Started (List 1) (citrushightechnology.com)
Sponsors
Recent Comments