Instructify

You’ve finally gotten a laptop to work with, and maybe you’ve started to use it in the classroom. Now you’re going to conferences, and you’ve heard about people “blogging” and using laptops at conferencing, but you’re wondering how to do this, and why?

First, think of blogging as a more efficient and effective way to take and share notes from your conference experience. Next, you don’t have to have or keep a blog to more effectively share what you learn. Now that we have that out of the way let’s think about this some more. You are probably being sent to that conference so that you can learn lots of new stuff, and then come back and share what you learn with others. Traditionally, you’d take handwritten notes, but unless you take shorthand, even minimal touch typing skills (I’m only a 35-50 wpm gal myself) are much more efficient than hand-writing notes. Give up the note pad, and use your laptop. In electronic form your notes can go to the whole district, and save you the awkwardness of reading your chicken scratch notes at your department meeting.

Now for the how part. I recommend this great article on blogging conferences from the TED site. As they point out, “Even if you don’t blog, it’s worth reading before your next conference, for tips on getting the most out of your time in the audience.” Here are some highlights:

1. Set up your documents in advance, and type in background links (their website, blog, who they work for, etc.) and the name of the presenter before the session.
2. Arrive early and have your physical setup (the back or somewhere near an outlet. My tip is to bring a good surge protector with a long cord - mine is eight feet long). Keep your laptop fully charged and plugged in whenever possible, so that it is ready to go should you not have power access.
3. Check in with others who are blogging or using laptops, to share notes and fill in any gaps.

But what should you use to take notes? Start with your word processing software of choice. If you are not publishing on the Web but will be emailing the notes, what I often do at district meetings is take notes in Power Point. This forces you to summarize, because if it won’t fit on one slide without reducing the font below 24 point, you are probably writing too much. Whatever you use, save often (most blogging editors have a way to save without publishing).

How do you share the information if you don’t have a blog of your own? Use your school/district LMS, email it, put a wiki page up, or put it on a Pageflake.

Now, if you are working on a blog, and expecting wifi at your conference, you may be disappointed. Some convention centers like to charge for access, some conferences (especially education technology ones) have been having their wifi overwhelmed by all of us coming in with our spiffy new wifi laptops. Do not count on having online access all the time, be prepared to type in Word now, and post and share later. -ALICE MERCER

How to blog a confeence via TED

Related Stuff:
Avoid Killing Students’ Interest and Attention with Power Point
Turn Useless Totes into Stylish Messenger Bags

Photo credit: Arbron on Flickr

If you are already a blogger, and you get a kick out of sharing your musings and findings on the web, then you’re already doing a great job. If you don’t blog, then here are a few reasons why you should start.

Understand Your Voice - Your voice (no, not that nails-on-the-chalkboard noise that comes out of your mouth every time you say something) is an important part of your identity. The more you write, the clearer that voice will become. You might even find that the voice in which you write is clearer and more easily understood than what you say out loud. Write now, and write often.

Understand Your Audience - As a teacher, you’ve already got a captive audience. But you probably say a lot of things on a daily basis that you have given little to no thought to. Blogging or journaling allows you to formulate your thoughts to a specific subject, and with the power of the web, puts it right in front of your audience’s face in a matter of moments. When you blog, you can say what you need to say as clearly as you need to say it. Blogging also allows a feeling of proximity and intimacy for the reader, and is more like a conversation than you think.

Vent - Got something you want to say? A public outburst could cost you your job, but formulate your opinions and thoughts into a well constructed blog post and others might feel your pain. Its certainly not a good idea to go publicly denouncing the principal as a bonehead, but you might find solace researching and suggesting best leadership practices so next time the poo hits the fan you can have a compelling argument.

Be Creative - There are no rules to blogging. There are guidelines and things that have worked for others in the past, but there is no right or wrong way to do it. If you have a strong enough voice and you know your audience and topic, then post away. Try something new, give in to cutting corners and color outside of the lines. You spend a lot of your day dealing with bureaucracy and structure, so live a little– make yourself laugh once in a while.

Reach Out / Keep Up - The blogosphere and Web 2.0 are happening. They are going to continue to happen and exist as long as there is electricity. And here’s some news for you: it’s all only getting bigger and more important. I’m not saying that there isn’t room for you here, you just owe it to yourself to stay connected. Blogging immediately throws you into the global environment, and is a great way to share and explore ideas with people all over the world.

Make Money - While I can’t speak from too much personal experience on this one, I know it’s possible. If your blog is successful, you can charge a pretty penny to advertise on your site. Likewise, if you are a great writer, you can always freelance write for existing blogs. Now might be the perfect time to quit your second job as a diner waitress.

Why Not? - Do you have anything to lose by blogging? Absolutely not. Blogger and Tumblr are just two of many intuitive and FREE sites that allow you to start writing and sharing your discoveries and ideas with very little hassle. If time is an issue, then maybe this could be an opportunity to find where you can cut a few minutes out of your day just to prove to yourself that you can do it. After all, you’ve seen all the reruns of 2 and a Half Men anyway, right?

The tools are there. You have a brain full of thoughts. You work hard teaching others all day, now its time to learn something for yourself. If you already know how and love to blog, we’d love to hear from you in the comments on how it has affected you and your teaching skills. -JEREMY S. GRIFFIN

(photo via DeclanTM on Flickr)

Is your school using a professional learning community? PLCs are great ways for educators to work together to ensure every student learns what he or she needs to.

If your school is about to take the plunge, or already has a PLC and wants to make it even better, you can get more out of your professional learning community by adding an online component.

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By now, you’ve no doubt heard the tragic story of a Missouri teen who committed suicide after interacting with a fake Facebook user. The incident has sparked another round of intense discussion in schools about the power, value, and danger of social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook. The knee-jerk reaction in many schools has been to block access to these sites and encourage teachers to stay away. Is this the right approach?

Last week, I outlined some of the basics of using Facebook as an educator. This week, I take a look at mixing schools and social networks.

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It used to be for college students only, but now there’s no escaping Facebook if you’re a teacher. Students are jumping ship from clunky, older services like Friendster and MySpace in record numbers, especially now that Facebook has added applications, video, and a host of new options. If you’re not yet using the social-networking behemoth, you may feel apprehensive about joining.

Still, as students flock to social networking sites, they’ll tune you out pretty quickly if you answer their “why aren’t you on Facebook” queries with a clueless “Face-what?” Teachers don’t have to be power users every time kids discover a new technology, but you’ll fare better in the classroom when you try to meet students where they are. If you’re feeling bold enough to try social networking for the first time, these tips will help you navigate Facebook. Heck, they may even help you teach with it.

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As the semester draws to a close, you’ve decided to cash in your remaining goodwill with your students and assign them a research paper. Research assignments are hard work for both teachers and students. In addition to having to grade the things, you’ve got to teach your class a whole new skill set: how to research wisely and effectively. Fortunately for them, they’ve got a few more tools at their disposal than when you and I were in school. In addition to pointing these tools out, you can show your pupils how to be smart about using them.

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Recently, I overheard someone say these very words: “I am the least creative person in the world.” It made me very sad to think that I was not only standing next to the least creative person in the world, but that he acknowledged it. (I didn’t believe this man was the least creative person in the world, though, I just think he had not yet found his area of expertise.) I like to consider myself a bit of a wordsmith, as well as quite the comedian, and not to mention a pretty mean doodler. Granted, these are only a few areas in which one can really be creative, and because of the technological access available to younger generations, it may become easier to find and nurture those fields of creativity no matter what the genre.

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Too many schools fear the Internet like your four-year-old nephew fears his bedroom closet. Forget resources like OpenCongress.org or FreeRice - these Luddites think every online kilobyte is infested with scammers, predators, and pornography that magically appears on screen the minute the teacher turns her back. So, after spending thousands of dollars equipping classrooms with computers, some schools try to wall up the Internet where kids won’t find it, like in a story by Edgar Allen Poe.

You and I, of course, know this is useless - kids can access whatever they want at home, and students have been figuring out how to break firewalls since they were invented. But how do you convince your school administrators that removing the barriers will open students to a veritable gold mine of educational tools?

It’s up to good Web citizens like you to be an advocate for educational technology. Don’t worry, you don’t have to fight this battle unarmed. Instructify presents these three rules to help you.

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It is my own fault for not being bilingual. I have everything I could possibly need at my disposal to learn one or more languages, but I have not yet taken the time to learn something. Shame on me. It’s something I’m trying to remedy, though, and it’s something that’s entirely possible for me to do. With all of the resources on the web for language learning, I will never have to set foot in a classroom.

Unfortunately, it’s not me we’re worried about. I’m doing what I can, sure, but my childhood has long since passed, and I know enough about what I know to get by in the world. Whether it’s in familiar territory or parts unknown, I feel I have the communication skills I need in order to get me out of just about any pickle. Lucky me, right? For a lot of people, this is not the case, however. It’s important to consider the needs of language learners in a time when technology is an ever-present entity in our lives, so it’s just as important for developers to know what they are putting out there. They say it takes a village to raise a child, but what does it take to raise a village?

With more and more user content available on the Internet every day, it seems only likely that there would be an influx of user submitted materials to help language learners. And yes, there are a lot of sites out there designed specifically to keep people like you and me learning languages at a cost of next to nothing. These sites offer everything but the kitchen sink when it comes to learning a new language— the kitchen sink, of course, being actually living and interacting in a place where your language of interest is commonly spoken. Sites like BBC Languages, which offers eight different languages and oodles of resources for each so that you’ll be able to learn at your own pace. There’s also tools like Labpixies translator widget, which instantly translates text from one language to another. But how are these and other resources beneficial to those who are unable to easily access this technology?

The idea might not be that we can allow the millions of hungry minds access to these sites to learn on their own, but what it can do is teach teachers how to communicate. It is becoming easier and easier for those of us with access to computers and the internet (and if you are reading this, I am guessing you have both) to learn a new language, so why not take advantage of the tools that are readily available to not only expand our own horizons, but to learn more effective ways that we can share language. Here’s a list of some of our favorite online language learning tools, as well as a handful of others. –JEREMY S. GRIFFIN

Related Resources:
BBC Languages
Labpixies’ Babylon Translation Box
American Sign Language Browser
Chuala
LiveMocha
Mango Languages

So your students need to do research for your latest assignment. You’ve probably shown them a few Web-based tools to make their lives easier, too, like Footnote or SlideShare.

Nowadays kids can find out almost everything they want to know online. But as the Luddites love to point out, the Web’s full of half-truths and stuff that’s just plain incorrect. Anybody with an ISP can communicate anything they want to the entire world. So how do you separate the PhD who wants to share his knowledge about Physics from the guy who thinks he’s a scientist because he watched a few episodes of Nova?

If you want your students to grow into intelligent, productive members of society (hint: you do), the best lesson you can teach kids is how to separate the nuts from the nougat for themselves.

With that in mind, here are 5 strategies students (and you) can use to figure out what information is worth citing, and what is worthless.

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Welcome to this week’s Instructifeature. Instructifeatures are our new weekly doses of teaching strategy and will appear, as if by magic, every Wednesday.

Tired of blank faces when you ask the class for their thoughts on Tom Sawyer? How about when you ask if there are any questions about the long division lesson, not a single student raises a hand? You can hardly get kids to pipe down when the morning bell rings, but ask the class a direct question and the first thing you hear is an awkward pause.

In-class discussion is an art, and you’ll probably spend most of your teaching career wondering how to keep kids engaged. Fortunately, in this age of the interweb, you can take advantage of online discussion forums to get the dialogue flowing.

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If you’ve been on the internet in the last few years, then I don’t have to tell you about the myriad self-produced content dripping from every strand of the web. Education is an expanding ocean, and with the availability of user-content based sites, it is natural that we as educators should come to take advantage of the technology. Each multimedia sharing network is a veritable floodgate of possibility. We’ve compiled a list of some of the ways users of these sites are embracing the value of online multimedia-based education.

Flickr – http://www.flickr.com — Flickr is leading the pack when it comes to user compiled photo collections, but its not just for uploading pics from your recent trip to DragonCon. The site has an array of Creative Commons licensed photos that can be used to create visual examples of your learning material. Even with Google image search, you won’t find the kind of clarity and accuracy found here. Just by searching “how to” in the Flickr tag search, you’ll find all sorts of user submitted tutorials on anything from “How to Tie Your Shoes” to “How to Study for a Statistics Exam.” Got your own photos of the Great Barrier Reef? Sign up and upload them for free, help out a Marine Biology teacher in Rhode Island.

YouTube – http://youtube.com — You probably know as much about YouTube as I do, so I will spare you the walkthrough. There’s loads of content here, all of which is easily viewed with no downloading necessary. Chances are, your students have computers at home, which they will no doubt be using to do their homework– so why not integrate some of the otherwise unattainable videos found here? There is no topic left untouched, so if you are searching for footage of Howler Monkeys or The Zapruder Film, you can find it here. Also, more and more users are sharing their skills via video in “how to” format. If your school is under firewall, there’s also TeacherTube.com, for a strictly educational approach.

Del.icio.us – http://del.icio.us — More than just a social networking site, del.icio.us is a network of all the best of what the people have to offer. References and links and bookmarks abound. This network directly links to what other users find helpful, interesting and noteworthy. You can manage your own bookmarks here as well, so you might connect with others with your own interests and share teaching methods and lessons all over the world.

These are just a few examples of the sort of opportunities that are taking education and educational tools to the next level. Take advantage of these and other such sites to reach students and other educators in the midst of an era based on online user networking. –JEREMY S. GRIFFIN