Democracy

"Democracy is the conviction that there are extraordinary possibilities in ordinary people"~ Harry Emerson Fosdick

How do you learn?

Reflections of Survey of Emerging Technologies

As I wrote in an earlier blog post, I am currently taking a PODetc course Survey of Emerging Technologies taught by Theresa Stanley.

The course has forced me to take some time to try some new emerging technologies that I have wanted to try for some time.

The first was subscribing to Google Reader. I have been a long time subscriber of Bloglines and use it as an aggregator for various ed tech blogs that I read. I have been meaning to try Google Reader for some time to compare the two. I am absolutely loving Google Reader. One of the really nice features is that you can embedd it into your iGoogle page. I decided to subscribe to some education sections of newspapers. It has been nice having it on my home base with all of my other widgets every day.

The second tool that was new to me was Delicious. I have been meaning to get an account for some time. It was so easy to set up. My favorite part is the social part. The fact that you can share book marks with your friends is really powerful. My Delicious Account is at located at http://delicious.com/tstephens12.

So far it has been a great class and I would highly recommend it to those of you who want to carve out some time to try new tools. Theresa's next class is starting March 2nd. You can visit our website for more information.

Registration Closes Monday!

Registration for taking the following PODetc Online Courses for graduate Credit closes Monday, January 19th, 2009.

Creativity and Innovation in the Classroom


Description: This online course examines the ISTE standard "Facilitate and Inspire Student Learning and Creativity" and how educators can apply and integrate it into their current curriculum. This course will give classroom teachers insight into how to balance their curriculum with integrated technology. Participants will design curriculum to be used in their classrooms and work in a collaborative environment to share ideas and build a surplus of useful strategies and ideas as determined by the community of practice.

February 2 - February 27 (4 week course)

Technology Literacy 102: Building Knowledge Management Systems

Description: This online course is appropriate for administrators, teachers, library media specialists, and technology leaders. We will focus on the examination of online tutorial sites, social networking tools, and knowledge management systems as sources of just-in-time support for integrating technology into the teaching and learning process!

February 2 - February 27 (4 week course)

Earn 1 Graduate Credit through the respected University of Wisconsin-Green Bay
or Participate in a noncredit option through the Online Professional Development Leader PODetc!(PODetc -- Professional Online Development from the Educational Technology Community).

Note you can register after January 19th if you are not taking these course for graduate credit.

My Favorite Ed Tech Blogs

As part of the PODetc Course, Survey of Emerging Technologies I am taking we have been asked to find three Ed Tech Blogs to follow.

My three favorite Ed Tech Blogs are:

The Thinking Stick by Jeff Utect an Elementary Technology & Learning Coordinator International School in Bangkok

Some Tech Sense Blog by Amanda DeCardy who works in an International School in Shanghai.

Webblogged by Will Richardson author of Blogs, Wikis and Podcasts.

Reflections on my Blog

This blog post is actually an assignment for an online course I'm taking called A Survey of Emerging Technologies, which is being taught by Theresa Stanley.

Our assignment was to set up a blog and reflect on the process of setting it up. I set up my blog in July of 2006 and I found blogger to be very user friendly. One thing I am continually evolving on is the use of widgets to make the blog more interactive. This has been fun. The next thing I want to learn how to do is to make an interactive poll on my blog.

As part of this assignment we also had to read a blog post by Henry Jenkins called Why Academics Should Blog. Some of the points that I took away from this blog entry was that blogging is indeed a committment. The more disciplined I am about posting the more readers I get. Also that it is a way to keep you writing. I recently read a book for doctoral students on how to complete your dissertation. The book talked about the importance of becoming addicted to writing. My blog has definitely helped me to want to write more and slowly become more addicted to writing.

Dick Diener Recognized by NMSA

Dick Diener, a consultant for The Stephens Group and a teacher at Lake Shore Middle School, worked on several podcasts with students which were recognized by the National Middle School Association. Dick said that the ideas for these podcasts came as a result of participating in The Milwaukee Digital Media Conference.

Podcasts include:

Messenger of Friendship (Miss Ibaraki/Kasumi Tsukuba) Japanese Friendship Doll Podcast (2006-07). Megan Gray (currently a student at HHS) received special recognition for her work as the voice of the doll. This podcast is at the Milwaukee Public Museum:
http://www.mpm.edu/exhibitions/featured/friendshipdoll/podcasts.php

• Veterans Memorial Podcast Project (2007-08). Jacob Paulmann received special recognition for his work on the final podcast about the memorial in Belgium, WI. Jake read a piece titled, "The Flag Stands For...: A link to the podcasts is here:
http://mtsd.k12.wi.us/Lake_Shore/podcast/vet-mem/Podcast/Podcast.html

Congratulations Dick!

Ocean Challenge Live!

Lorraine Leo sent me these links that she uses with her students:
Skipper Rich Wilson, a former math teacher, is the only US skipper competing in the Vendee Globe, around the world alone. You can follow him on Twitter http://www.twitter.com/Rich_Wilson
and through http://www.sitesalive.com http://www.vendeeglobe.org
also through http://ehrweb01.aaas.org/sail/
Also http://www.roythezebra.com if you work with anyone with early literacy...a great site and kid-tested.

Thanks for sharing!

Subscribe to CoSN Twitter

CoSN now has its own Twitter account. To follow Twitter updates go to CoSN Twitter Feed on the Left Side of my blog and click "follow me on Twitter".

Stephens Group Words for 2008

I recently added a cloud tag to my blog. It was interesting to reflect on which words I tagged most often in 2008.

21st Century Skills-- This year we added a new belief statements to our mission statement, "We believe all students need to graduate with 21st Century Skills". All of our professional development efforts have been aligned to support this belief statement.

MDMC2008- - MDMC stands for the Milwaukee Digital Media Conference. This year's conference was a huge success. We had 120 educators collaboratively work with us on real world digital media projects at the Milwaukee County Zoo. You can read more about the conference in an article published by The Milwaukee Journal.

One-to-One Computing- - This year The Stephens Group started a new division of our company on One-to-One Computing with four consultants who have experience working with one-to-one computing programs. We started a free social networking site around this topic and currently has 37 members from all over the country. One-to-one computing was also the topic of my comps paper and will be my dissertation topic too- so I'm sure it will be tagged a lot more in 2009.

PODetc-
PODetc is also a new division of our company. It stands for Professional Online Development for the Educational Technology Community. The online relationships that have been developed are truly amazing. We have had teachers and administrators from all over the world in K-12 and higher ed take our courses. On Monday we start our fourth session of graduate courses for educators. We currently have five courses aligned to the new ISTE NETS Standards for teachers.

Social Networking & Twitter- - As Tammy Lind, our director of professional development stated recently, "I have learned more from people on Twitter this past year than all of my professional development including my master's degree combined". Consultants need to be constantly learning. Social networking tools such as Twitter and CollectiveX have helped us reach out to our clients, share information with one another, get just-in-time support and brought us closer together. I'm sure we will be leveraging these tools even more in 2009 as we broaden our personal learning networks.

Ultraportable Devices- This year through an internship with CoSN I had the opportunity to work on a report on ultraportable devices. I have become really interested in this topic as it also related to my dissertation. In my consulting work, I have been surprised that school districts have been somewhat reluctant to go this route with their hardware purchases. If we are really serious about providing student centered learning experiences, I think these devices have huge potential for changing the teaching and learning process.

San Jose Digital Media Course- This year we held a course at the San Jose Museum of Art to create vodcasts (or video-podcasts) using a method of inquiry that can be used in any discipline. We will be holding the course again June 22nd-29th. More information is available on our course wiki.

Wiki- 2008 was definitely the year of the wiki for The Stephens Group. The Stephens Group has seven wikis. Some are internal for consultants to share information and collaborate. Others such as our Information Technology Planning Wiki are to share information with clients. We use this one a lot with our clients as a means of sharing research and best practices when developing strategic information technology plans. Our biggest wiki, however is the wiki we created for this year's digital media conference. Educators worked in teams to create multimedia wikis around exhibits at the zoo. We are very proud of their work! You can view their wikis at http://mdmc2008.wikispaces.com/Directory.

It comes as no surprise that the most tagged word in 2008 was Web 2.0. Many of the technologies we are using as a company have not changed from 2007. However, what is changing is how we use them. Our company has consultants and clients in multiple states. Web 2.0 tools has really allowed us to work more efficiently and seamlessly across multiple timezones.

I'm looking forward to seeing what new words get tagged in 2009!