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The family and I took a trip to San Francisco to meet up with the husband’s family this weekend, so that dominated our schedule. The first part of the trip was to the Dickens Christmas Faire, a local institution that Terry and his sister have attended for years, but I never got around to going to. My observation, it smelled a lot nicer than Victorian England as the place fairly reeked of some mixture of cloves and spice. I guess it’s like the Bellagio, all of the canals–none of the sewage?
Sunday was a trip to the California Academy of Sciences. This was one of a number of San Francisco museums to undergo renovation recently. It’s reopened in the last few months, so there were crowds. Husband and sister in law used to go there as kids back in the day (the 1970s), when most children’s facilities run by the city had free-admission for local kids. Now it cost us $65 to get in with two adults and the son. Dh liked it, but it was definitely not the CAS of old. SIL hated it for that reason. She did bring up an interesting point, that they had cut the number of exhibits, including ones she loved. One of them was the “Hall of Man” which had old school exhibits about the evolutionary development of mankind. The evolution part seemed to be regulated to botany and zoology in the Islands of Evolution exhibits which focused on the Galapagos, and Madagascar islands. This made me wonder how both liberal and conservative desires could be shifting the focus of teaching about evolutionary science. I’m sure that the “Hall of Man” seemed too anthro-centric, and shifting to the Galapagos gets you talking about ecosystems, not just one species. OTOH, it helps you conveniently avoid discussing man as a primate, and keep the focus on turtles and frogs, which is less inflammatory to the anti-evolution crowd. I’m just wondering?

I recently received the following email:

Lynda wrote:
Hi Alice! I just read your blog about podcasting with ELD students. I didn’t quite understand how you used the powerpoint slide and how they picked the stories.Could you please elaborate for me? I have 3rd grade ELDs and would love to try it! thanks, Lynda

Lynda is referring to this post:

Podcasting for ELD | Reflections on Teaching

I thought I’d put the answer here in case it was unclear to others, and to revisit this post and the idea of podcasting with students.

I used Power Point for the script of the show. You don’t have to use that, BUT since the fonts are big and readable in Power Point automatically, I just used that instead of Word, or some other word processing program. It makes it easier to read. The important part is that they write a script either on computer or a piece of paper, before they speak. If you are working with students of different literacy abilities, have the good writing at the start, and other reading, or editing (eventually, all of them should be writing).

I had a group from fourth to sixth grade level (9-12 yo). I had them suggest topics on day one through blog post, but you could have a “production meeting” to decide that. I would sometimes require a story about upcoming events (like parent conferences) but the majority of story topics were given by students. You might have to oral prompt them at first, but have them make the choice.

Here is a basic outline for a 30 minute ELD block:

Day 1: Have students write suggestions for topics

Day 2: Select the topics as a class or have a committee

Day 3: Create a script with the topics. You may need provide an outline or dates and times for events especially with lower-level third graders.

Day 4: Edit the script (great opportunity for sentence lifting)

Day 5: Record the show and edit (I use Audacity, some Mac users favor Garage Band). Save as an MP3, then post on a syndication service, or blog (I just used a blog).

I know, I know, this is VERY late. I got swamped, and I still am, with stuff to do from work. Here is my reflection on the last, and in many ways, the best day at ILC for me…

Chris Walsh

Started out with a very early morning with Chris Walsh. He discussed how things are changing. It was good, and had some new approaches to it, but it just doesn’t feel like a critical topic to me personally. My takeaway was when he showed a You Tube video that was a “movie trailer” for The Shining that positioned it as a romantic comedy/family film. I see kids really understand genre like that in video form in a way that is not as accessible to them in print.

Mathtrain.com with Mr. Marcos

The next session was a hidden gem. Many others went to the session on Digital Photography by Leslie Fisher, which I understand was fantastic by people with good taste. I was going to go to a session on Professional Development, but it was cancelled. So I went into a session that was billed as being about students teaching students and podacasting. It was about the FANTASTIC program a teacher in sixth grade did where he had students make movies that were screencasts of them solving problems using tablet PCs and capturing it on Camtasia. They do the movies frequently and post them on iTunes, YouTube, etc. He has eliminated the text over time by having the kids use these videos to teacher others how to approach problems. This explained a lot of logistics and tools to overcome the specific challenges of doing equation solving on a computer. Wacom tablets were suggested as an alternative to tablet PCs, I’m already making plans for implementing this and other Mathematics activities online now.

Gary Stager

Last was Gary “I hate BrainPop” Stager. This was the ONE session I was going to attend when I saw he was presenting because I have had some issues with some of his opinions in the blogosphere, and wanted to see what he believed in (it’s pretty obvious what he doesn’t like from his blog posts). He had a very spirited presentation about what he saw as the problems and the promise of computers in the classroom, and specifically 1-to-1 programs. Basically, he wants kids creating, constructing, and solving authentic problems. What he has kids doing looks like Waldorf, if they didn’t have all those notions about Jungian archetypes and wooden toys. The question I always have in a system where learning is largely student directed, is what holes will remain “unfilled”? I may be too critical in this respect.

The other area of difference I have is that he feels that most student work that is posted should not see the light of day, and only quality finished products should be published. I disagree, because much of what I’m putting up now, is work that is part of a “process” that may not have a formal ending. I do this for a couple of reasons, but most have to do with transparency. Unless i show “work in progress” the number of other teachers who can see what I’m teaching, and what my students are doing, will be very limited. When teachers post work, it lets others see “best practices”. If you just see the end product, you don’t see the process as readily. That being said, I understand his point, and why he is making it, and I can respect it, even if I don’t agree, or follow that advice. It was good because it makes me think, I do need to have more “finalized” and “formal” work posted, and I’d like to have final work vs. draft work better identified.

In summary, he had a clear, strong vision for computers in education, and that isn’t a bad thing.

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“Mistakes were made” is an expression that is commonly used as a rhetorical device, whereby a speaker acknowledges that a situation was handled poorly or inappropriately but seeks to evade any direct admission or accusation of responsibility by using the passive voice. — Wikipedia

Warning, this post will contain no material directly related to teaching.
What a difference a year makes. Last August, Jennifer Doman in cliotech: History Repeating? asked if we were at the brink of another “Great Depression”. I blithely dismissed that possibility (barring incompetence on the part of the current administration–obviously I was being too generous). I was wrong. We may not have another Great Depression, but I wouldn’t rule it out as good possibility any longer.

After a weekend at home sick, catching up on the news of the week, I’ve discovered there is NOTHING MORE DEPRESSING than reading economists during a near meltdown of the economy. Here is my reading list…

Economist’s View

This is a really great blog where the the owner (a PhD in Economics at U of Oregon) collects opinions from a variety of economists, and reprints them. WARNING! The civility level of comments on politically oriented blogs is MUCH lower than in edublogging. The blog owner is kind and civil, so ignore the trolls.

Megan McArdle

I came across Megan on BloggingHeads.tv. She is of a libertarian bent, so I don’t always agree with her, but I find her points easy to understand, and her writing engaging.

Paul Krugman – The New York Times

A thought mover among liberal economists. You might as well get it from the source, since he is easy to understand, and breaks it down.

NPR: Planet Money

A new discovery. This piece, NPR: Hear: The Week America’s Economy Almost Died, is the best explanation of the meltdown that happened. It’s going to appear as a longer segment on “This American Life” for fans of that show.

The bottomline, this crisis is not just affecting “bad banks” who made “bad loans” but companies like Honda and Caterpillar who had no part of that. If it’s not resolved, layoffs will happen.

I have freely admitted to “smoking tech crack” when it comes to cell phones to Larry Ferlazzo (who as always is the voice of reason on new technology, thank goodness because I have no sense sometimes). I have really been exploring using cell phones for my own productivity, and connecting with others. I will be going to another tech meeting next week, Discovery Education Network’s National Institute.

There has been some talk of getting together before the meeting, which requires some coordination. I shared how I had started a group tweet here. Steve Dembo is pushing hard for using the new kid on the block, Plurk. Being open-minded, I spent some time there yesterday. My partner in this adventure was Amy Cordova. I can’t believe this woman has FOUR children. She also has an “un-smart” phone, but uses txt/sms a lot. This was good because we discovered that you can post via sms to Plurk, but you can’t view or retrieve from Plurk that way (there is a mobified page for phone browsers at http://www.plurk.com/m). ” Hmm,” I thought. I’ve gotten some great cell phone tips from Liz Kolb, one of which is that you can send an RSS feed to JOTT and it will convert the text to voice. So, I went to my Plurk page, selected Friends and my plurks, then clicked on the magic orange RSS lozenge in the address window, to get the feed url. Copy the url, then go into JOTT. At your dashboard, there is a tab on the right labeled “Feeds”, click on it. Click on “add feeds” , paste in the url, and voila, it’s there. To listen, call JOTT, say, “JOTT FEEDS” and then say the feed name. The speech is not to bad for a synthetic model.

My takeaway is that Plurk may not be great for this application. It’s good for sharing links, and much better for conversations than Twitter. OTOH, for logistics in a large group, and staying in touch on the go, I think Twitter will still be a better choice. My own suggestion is that we use Twitter for meeting up, and Plurk for a back-channel.