My Second Day at the 06 Laptop Institute
8:45: Keynote by Pamela Livingston, The Peck School, Morristown, NJ
Pamela wrote a book, 1-to-1 Learning, about laptop programs in schools, based on research and her own experience leading a laptop program for 7th and 8th graders.
Multitaskers vs. Unitaskers: is the distinction real? Yes, in the sense that we more comfortable, less anxious, in one mode or the other. [MrWoodleigh is a MultiTasker now]
Laptops are digital assistants, more than tools. Yes!
Ubiquitous computing: computers are readily available, but not particularly visible.
Laptops about to tip: The Gladwellian notion that they are about to take off. Yes! (I’m channeling Ed McMahon).
Laptops can allow students to get to higher-order thinking by making the lower-order stuff go more quickly, to do more self-directed learning, and to stay better organized.
For teachers: provides a wealth of resources, increases communication with students, and can help teachers plan.
Nicholas Negroponte of NECC — doing the inexpensive crank-powered laptop program for world-wide computing. She thinks this program will be revolutionary. It is cool; I should blog on this.
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Teachers must get their laptops first and have a change to learn them.
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Malcolm Knowles — father of andragony (the study of adult learners)
10:00 Tables, Tablets, and Technology: The Rocky Hill Model
Stephen Farley (Upper Head), Barbara Streuli (Tech Specialist), Scott Young (Science Chair) all from Rocky Hill School in Rhode Island.
Rocky Hill strives to promote a culture of thinking, a culture of participation, and a culture of reflection. They built an open campus (fishbowl rooms, for example) to promote transparency and accountability.
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Harkness table, tablets, wireless projector. They use blackboard, too. They have power coming up from the middle of the Harkness table. There’s magic in making the projector available to all the students.
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Using digital ink to comment on student work has the advantage of leaving an audit trail — both teacher and student have a record of what’s been said.
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Posting class notes is good. Yes!
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Blackboard: used for syllabus, discussion, posting class notes, and posting sample assignments.
11:15 Paper to Electronic Delivery by Rachel Holsinger and Debbie Wheeler, teachers at the Sayre School in Lexington, KY.
Problem: Wasteful Printing.
Solution: MS Word with form fields for student answers. You can lock the document so that the form fields are the only writable places. You can have fill ins, drop downs for multiple choice, check boxes, etc. With drop downs, put Choose One as the first choice.
Problem: Scrolling. Students complained that the labs looked too long, takes lots of scrolling.
Solution: Separate instructions and student answers. Pair the students up; have one display the assignment and the other fill in answers. They turn in the results together.
Problem: Students skip instructions.
Solution: Reformat: eliminate scrolling (use slides), write large, add graphics and videos. Add hover bubbles. (They write class exerciese in Acrobat). Make it fun (obviously). Make it colorful.
Problem: Software. Word is not a layout tool.
Solution: New Software
- Web pages: Fireworks and Dreamworks.
- Digital slides with MS PowerPoint or Keynote.
- Acrobat: for hover bubbles and embedded movies.
- Adobe InDesign for layout (but expensive).
Problem: Distribution. Students don’t use a textbook.
Solution: Put it on the server (they use files and folders), not available off campus.
Problem: Submitting Documents. Having students email them to you will fill up your box and confuse you.
Solution: Submit it to the server. Set up strict naming conventions.
Tips:
- Keeping old assignments helps you know whether the kid made too big a jump do to plagiarism
- They use secure exam to lock down the machine during test-taking
- Use color backgrounds and/or watermarks so that teachers can see at a glance whether the students have the right thing on their desktops
- Tell students to close their laptops when not it use. Use lots of glass.
- Circulate among students
For laughs: http://www.peepresearch.org
1:30 Moodle by Peter Richardson, Director of Technology at Rutgers Preparatory School, Somerset, NJ (who knows Kent Jones pretty well, from the sounds of it).
For laughs: SNL Myspace.com send up: http://bree25.buzznet.com/user/video/play/16709 (alreadly Blogged this)
Moodle is a Course Management System. Moodle often used for distance learning.
Written and designed by a guy who came out of the Constructivist movement.
It’s open source and free. Data is stored in a sql database, often mysql.
13000 registered sites around the world.
Features Demo (http://moodle.org/course/view.php?id=34)
Features: on-line assignments, handles turning in assignments, chat, forums, journals, quizzes, wikis, blogs, podcasts.
Resources vs. Activities. Resources are things the teacher prepares and uploads. Activities are things Moodle does for you: set up a chat session, forum.
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He offers Moodle training classes 1-2 times a year.
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His Moodle site: http://online.rutgersprep.org/moodle
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Use import feature to copy a template or move a course forward.
elgg, an ePortfolio system, can be integrated into Moodle. It’s a separate downloadable module.
Pick up the book Using Moodle: Teaching with the Popular Open Source Course Management System
His blog: http://online.rutgersprep.org/elgg/richardson/files. His slides are there.
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