FLAT CLASSROOM PROJECT REFLECTION

Visit Flat Classroom Project
In his book, The World is Flat, Thomas Friedman looks at technological advances that are creating a more level economic playing field with disadvantaged countries rising in knowledge and wealth. Telephone and computer technology that was previously a stronghold of developed countries has been mastered by countries such as China and India. This makes these nations economically competitive. Friedman sees the flattening effect to be comparable to the Industrial Revolution.
Friedman also discusses the effect of outsourcing jobs from the United States to foreign countries. Reallocating jobs from America to a foreign country raises that country's economy and standard of living, and consequently, the demand for American goods and services. This is a positive development which will continue to grow until world economies are lateral or, a flat line. A flat world means we are all economically dependent and in more communication with each other. This represents opportunity to some and a threat to others. There can be a positive “flat” world with mutual benefits for all, or a negative “flat” world, where through terrorism, there would be mutual detriment for all.
After reading the book I felt it opened my eyes in the sense that I was able to compare it to the classroom setting and saw where the relation between, The World is Flat, and The Flat Classroom Project could be connected.
It was exciting to become a participant in The Flat Classroom Project. As an expert advisor our job was to provide feedback and point out resources to the team we chose to advise. After the ball got rolling we were able to communicate with the team members updates and additions. My specific groups topic was Globalization and Outsourcing. They focused on the background of the subject, current news on Globalization and Outsourcing, its impact on Education, Government and Politics, and the Arts. I feel that I would have enjoyed more interaction on part of the students because it was fairly one sided in the communication between Advisor and Student. There was some great dialog though from student to student.
When looking back on the organization of the involvement of the project, I feel like it was sudden and unplanned because of all the misunderstandings and lack of notice when things needed to be completed. If the communication or the project was a little better organized it may have gone more smoothly. I do understand though, that there were many levels of people working on this project together and sometimes it’s hard to manage such large groups of people.
Along with my involvement in the project I was able to experience many different means of communicating. I toughly enjoyed the Skype sessions, VoiceThread, and discussions on the Wiki and Ning. It amazes me all the various ways we can now stay connected.
Overall, I am pleased with playing an active roll in such an exciting project. I am also thrilled to be able to say that I participated in The Flat Classroom Project as an Expert Advisor. The opportunity and my involvement look great as a future educator.

Visit my Ning Page for the Flat Classroom Project!

Super Why!

I just love the SUPER WHY! website. PBS Kids is something the students can relate to because a majority of them watch PBS Kids when they get home from school. The programs are of great quality and always have an educational background to them. Plus the SUPER WHY! podcast made #11 on the Top 25 Educational Podcasts on iTunes! Check it out!

The "YouTube" for Educators

TeacherTube has been such a great resource for me and many others as it is a reliable and safe place to look for educational clips and short videos for classroom use. With children today, there are many different learners in the classroom. The students love to see, hear, and do! Try out TeacherTube the next time your looking for that "something extra" to add to a lesson! It's a great resource!!

Second Life in the Classroom

We are working with and learning about Second Life in my class and I was wondering if anyone had any ideas of how it could be incorporated into the classroom as a learning tool? If you are unfamiliar with Second Life take a look at the links and explore! Let me know what you think and if you have any ideas as to how it could be used in education.

What's a PLN??

ALL ABOUT: The Flat Classroom Project

The Flat Classroom™ Project is a global collaborative project that joins together middle and senior high school students. This project is part of the emerging tend in internationally-aware schools to embrace a holistic and constructivist educational approach to work collaboratively with others around the world in order to create students who are competitive and globally-minded. The project was co-founded by Vicki Davis (Westwood Schools, USA) and Julie Lindsay(Beijing (BISS) International School, China) in 2006. The Flat Classroom Project 2006 was featured in Chapter 13, 'If it's not happening it's because you're not doing it', of the latest edition of Thomas Friedman's book, The World is Flat' upon which it was based.

One of the main goals of the project is to 'flatten' or lower the classroom walls so that instead of each class working isolated and alone, 2 or more classes are joined virtually to become one large classroom. This is done through the Internet using Web 2.0 tools such as Wikispaces and Ning.

The Project uses Web 2.0 tools to make communication and interaction between students and teachers from all participating classrooms easier. The topics studied and discussed are real-world scenarios based on 'The World is Flat' by Thomas Friedman.

Top Education Podcasts

A podcast has a news feed (known as RSS) that allows it to be cataloged in various podcasting directories like iTunes and Podcast Pickle. The popular directory, Podcast Alley, has cataloged over 41,000 podcasts and nearly 2million individual episodes. If you are interested in listening to the podcasts mentioned here, launch iTunes and type the name into the search field.

In addition, the news feed allows podcatching programs like iTunes to automatically download new episodes. Once you have found the podcast you want to subscribe to, simply click its Subscribe button. There's no need manually check a website to see if there's new content; iTunes does it for you.
For the Top 25 Podcasts in Education visit www.openculture.com's list compiled from iTunes!

YUMMY!!

Delicious uses a non-hierarchical classification system in which users can tag each of their bookmarks with freely chosen index terms (generating a kind of folksonomy). A combined view of everyone's bookmarks with a given tag is available; for instance, the URL "http://delicious.com/tag/wiki" displays all of the most recent links tagged "wiki". Its collective nature makes it possible to view bookmarks added by similar-minded users.

Delicious has a "hotlist" on its home page and "popular" and "recent" pages, which help to make the website a conveyor of internet memes and trends.

Delicious is one of the most popular social bookmarking services.[2] Many features have contributed to this, including the website's simple interface, human-readable URL scheme, a novel domain name, a simple REST-like API, and RSS feeds for web syndication.


Use of Delicious is free. The source code of the site is not available, but a user can download his or her own data through the site's API in an XML or JSON format, or export it to a standard Netscape bookmarks format.

All bookmarks posted to Delicious are publicly viewable by default, although users can mark specific bookmarks as private, and imported bookmarks are private by default. The public aspect is emphasized; the site is not focused on storing private ("not shared") bookmark collections.[3] Delicious linkrolls, tagrolls, network badges, RSS feeds, and the site's daily blog posting feature can be used to display bookmarks on weblogs.
According to: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delicious_(website)

Podcasting about Podcasts

Click here to be redirected to Podbean.com and take a listen to my Podcast About Podcasts! Enjoy!!

Vicki Davis spent her evening with my Emerging Instructional Technologies class as she shared how she uses the social networking wonders to understand, reorganize and share the network of resources we call Life. We had the opportunity to then do a "brain dump" on a class Wiki and I thought I would share my reactions with you as well!

What struck you as you listened to Mrs. Davis?
What struck me the most was the way Mrs. Davis made everything look so easy and the way she ad everything incorporated into her life. The accessed everything like it was second nature to her. I like the fact that she has incorporated so much technology into her classroom because that is the way students today are learning. Even though she is a digital native she has chosen to stick with the times and continue to truly be a life long learner. I am so impressed and inspired by her!!

What have you thought about since then?
Since then, I have been thinking about all the opportunities and ways of including the PLN as a daily routine for my students projects. I have really taken into consideration the comment Mrs. Davis said during our conversation about there being a different tool for every task and that one tool is not going to get the job done in the most efficient way. You have to ultimately find the right tool for the job. This way you get variety and your sure to not over-use or burn out the tools and your students!

What would you like to ultimately learn from this?
I want to be able to access with ease like Mrs. Davis did. She found ways to incorporate everything into her VERY busy life like it was a breeze! The Diigo was neat too and I would really like to learn more about that as well!

To see my other classmates reactions and comments as well as Dr. Z's, feel free to visit the Wiki and read their responses!

The Ultimate Resource on Using Blogs and Wikis in Education

I found a site where you will find excellent information and resources on the effective use of Blogs and Wikis in education. This site is great for an educator that is unsure of how to begin using either a Blog or Wiki in his or her classroom.
There are links and videos that go along with the entire process which make the page very user friendly! Check it out and get more information about using Blogs and Wikis in your own classroom by following the link below!
http://opencontent.org/wiki/index.php?title=Using_Blogs_and_Wikis_in_Education

Social Networking...it's in or should I say "outside" the classroom!

Julie Lindsay is the author of a blog posting titled Social networking in the classroom: Learning by Stealth where she explains that her class does not end when the students walk out the door. The collaboration, interaction and socialisation continues. Her students interact with each other, they interact with her, their teacher, via online tools of various names and varieties which could all come under the broad term of 'social networking'. They have their own online areas, including digital portfolios, as well as community areas. They post to blogs and respond to each other. They are out there using social bookmarking, class wikis, creating podcasts and vodcasts and putting them online, using social imaging (flickr) and anything else she can think of to encourage motivation and excitement in their ultimate quest for learning.

Learning from the World

Educators can build young people’s knowledge of the world by looking online for international content. The websites of international news organizations, cultural institutions, and universities, to name a few, provide broad and deep resources on other countries and global issues. Some pioneering after school programs have begun to go beyond web research projects to connect young people to rich online global experiences. For example, many international organizations are starting to provide educational events for older youth in Teen Second Life, a virtual reality platform online. Global Kids, an after school program in New York City, implemented the “I Dig Tanzania” summer camp in 2008. In this program, high school youth in Chicago and New York followed a paleontology excavation in Tanzania led by a team from the Field Museum of Chicago, learning about Swahili language and culture along the way. Participants followed what the real researchers were doing through streaming video, asked questions over satellite phones, and then dug virtual fossils and assembled them together into an exhibit in Teen Second Life.

Check out my resource to find similar articles at: http://www.asiasociety.org/education-learning/afterschool/expanding-horizons-through-technology

The SOUND of a Classroom

Check out this article from the New Horizons For Learning site!

Listen Up!: Using Audio Files in the Curriculum

by Tuiren Bratina, Tom Bratina and Anthony Bratina

Technology and Academic Achievement in the Classroom

There is a need to prepare teachers to use technology effectively meaning schools and district's have to adopt new models of professional development. Too often the limited staff development available focuses on the computer, not technology's role in learning and teaching. Ninety-six percent of teachers reported that the most common training they received was on basic computer skills. Another survey of public school teachers found that while most (78%) received some technology-related professional development in the 1998-99 school year, the training was basic and brief, lasting only 1 to 5 hours for 39 % of teachers, and just 6 to 10 hours for another 19% of those trained. The results of this failure to prepare teachers to use these new teaching tools were predictable. In 1999 a survey commission by the U.S. Department of Education reported that two-thirds of teachers surveyed were not comfortable using technology. In this day and age that cannot be happening!
Recently, a growing number of researchers have published studies that provide substantial evidence that technology can play a positive role in academic achievement. Several organizations like Edutopia, the North Central Educational Lab (NCREL) and the Center for Applied Research in Educational Technology (CARET) are documenting research studies that link technology to increases in academic achievement.
Having first hand experience with seeing the benefits of technology in classroom settings, I can attest to the students being more involved in the learning process and taking ownership in the way they learn a new concept or skill. We as educators need to use the tools that interest the students and it technology is what gets the information threw to them, why are we not using it more to our advantage?

Visit my recourse, the New Horizons For Learning website and see other related articles.

GPS

CACHING on the University Of Northern Iowa campus!
This is a great way to teach map skills and Cardinal directions. Pair students and send them on their way! Everyone loves finding treasure!!

YUM...this is DELICIOUS!

Delicious is a pretty "sweet" organization tool for keeping your tags in order. In the classroom Delicious could be used in the classroom for research when you assign an assignment for a project. You could also keep your websites together in a bundle as a teacher. They may be the sites you visit to get lesson plans or ideas for your classroom. Check out my Delicious and see for yourself! What ways would you use it in your classroom?

ZOTERO Review and Reflection

Zotero makes organizing research a breeze! There are many options Zotero offers while you do your browsing. My favorite option is the snapshot you are able to make of the window you are reading. This option allows for you to treat the window as a document that you're able to manipulate by highlighting and even posting notes or friendly reminders about why you are highlighting something particular. You can also create tags, attach files, and organize searches into folders for easier navigation. I encourage you to check it out for yourself at www.zotero.org, and do some exploring!!

The Ideal Classroom project was assigned to allow us to create a version of our ideal classroom given an unlimited budget! What would we include?...the possibilities are endless!!

The overall topic for our project involved creating a classroom that was very science friendly.  My group members and I wanted to include ample amounts of floor and storage space for activities and equipment.  We wanted to make a classroom that induces student learning and involves all the students in hands-on projects.  The classroom needed to be large and house the proper technologies for lessons involving them. 

To produce this project my team members and I used Google to draw the blueprint and layout of the classroom, Word to organize our thoughts and word process information, and we also created a Blog to share what we created.

Our group worked very well together and were able to meet and share our ideas.  We all shared responsibilities and completed a very nice piece of work!  You can view the blog we created be clicking HERE! Enjoy!

Robot Teachers?

     Moving American schools into the 21st Century starts to sound like it's getting a little far fetched when it comes to our schools buying robots as teachers.  This ROBOT BLOGGER doesn't seem to think we are far away from the concept at all! Just think of it...what would school be like with a robot teacher?  Students from the San Cayetano Elementary School in California got a first hand experience!

The Fillmore Gazette reports that, At San Cayetano Elementary School, Students are reaching for the stars –and remote control devices.
Last year, San Cayetano was one of 50 schools nationwide that the National Aeronautics and Space Administration selected as a NAS Explorer School. The innovative program is designed to bring NASA’s engaging math, science and technology lessons to teachers and students. Robotics is an important component of the curriculum.

Last summer, San Cayetano teachers Brandi Walker and Melanie Schrock attend a week-long workshop at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena to become proficient in teaching rob

otics. After sharing what they earned with other upper-grad teachers as the staff created a schedule that allows most fourth- and fifth-graders 13 one-hour sessions to learn robotics.

Teachers assembled the robots; the students added enhancements and completed all the computer programming to manipulate their movements. 

“This is truly a combination of hands=on math and science,” said San Cayetano Principal Jan Marholin. “How will a student ever forget the first time he or she has programmed a computer using math skills and reasoning?”
Most students are already technologically savvy, having been exposed to computers all their live, so they are fast learners, said Marholin. “They get it, they love it, and it’s an amazing thing to watch.”

     San Cayetano has entered JPL’s annual robotics competition this spring to see how the students’ skills stack up against teams from other NASA Explorer schools. In the competition, which JPL will broadcast live on its web site, students pre-program their robots to navigate an obstacle course and perform tasks such as retrieving simulated planetary mineral formations – all within two minutes.

THE FILLMORE GAZETTE

SAFE Science Sites For Students

Safe resources for students are hard to find on the Internet! Here are some great places to start! The following are websites that are student, teacher, and even parent friendly! They are geared towards science topics and have excellent games, lesson plans, activities, videos, and stories for elementary aged children. Take some time to check them out...you may find something you enjoy!

Try Science
The Magic School Bus
The Weather Channel Kids
American Museum of Natural History
Science Buddies Classroom Resources
Discovery Education
National Park Service
Science News For Kids
PBS Teachers
The Teachers Guide

Teacher to Teacher: Linking it Up!

The world wide web is such a great place to gather information and find just about anything you could ever possibly need for your classroom.   In fact there is so much information it would be nice if there was a site that you could follow to serve as a guide or informational hub of sorts!  That is exactly my purpose for creating this blog.  I plan to, as I search the net for information, put all my findings as links so that the hard work is already done for you.  You will then just be able to stop by and check out my blog for anything it has to offer you concerning elementary science and new technologies.

I will not waste a moment longer and get right to the good stuff! The following are links to other blogs that serve as excellent resources concerning the topic of elementary science and new technologies.  I encourage you to check them out and subscribe if you see what you like.

The Art Of Teaching Science: Issues Related to Science Teaching

This particular blog has great photos and videos in most of its posts and does an excellent job of making information accessible from other sites quickly.

Science-Lessons.CA: Discovering and Exploring Elementary Science

If your looking for games, activities, lesson plans, worksheets, and posts about anything science then this is a super one to visit.  It does a really nice job of posting a variety of different topics in all the science areas!

Science Matters: Connecting The Dots in Science Education

This blog is definitely for upper grades but still proves to be a good resource in providing new ideas from the writers point of view.

Intel® Play™ QX3™ Computer Microscope

The classroom of today is ever so changing and sometimes it's hard to keep up with the students when they often times know more about the hottest new gadgets! We are living in the age of techies and it is important to incorporate the use of technology into our lessons whenever possible.  The subject of science is a great place to start when your looking to get your students interactive using technology.  There are a countless number of different tools that are involved an experiment.  No longer though are schools investing in those "old fashion" microscopes! Handheld microscopes are the NEW teaching tool of tomorrow.  The Intel Play QX3 Computer Microscope  has many benefits to offer a classroom of excited learners.