What's with the post title: CR20AZ08? = Classroom 2.0 Arizona 08
And if we twitter that, it will be found and listed in a tweet? Thweet? OY! More to HOPE to master =)
WELL, not master, hope to understand well enough to have a vision for application

More from the Un-Conference - More advanced use of wiki's:

Alice Christy - modeled how her students (teachers) could use it and they drove the development - 'ownership' alicechristy.org, classes, 547, scroll on right to pbwki, on left web2 tips

http://www.alicechristie.org/classes/547_548/w20.html

More great ideas:

• Conversation starter before staff training
• clearinghouse for projects for PD classes, teachers can upload and house their class related projects (paid for private space)
• place to share new web 2.0 tools, ideas, articles....
• NECC wiki space to pre-plan collaborations before the summer conference in San Antonio, Tx
• Moodle hybrid courses - wiki energizes the on-line
• showcase for training program
• Develops sense of community
• Family wiki - personal use
• teachertechbits.wikispaces.com
• imported student PPT's into wiki from web-based application
• warner@warnered4thgrade@pbwiki.com

Skype - now we are connecting to Dan McDowell

• publishing with students
• Study Guides
• on-line community between students - across district ** apworld.wikispaces.com
• choose your own adventure

Un-Conference Wiki: http://www.classroom20wiki.com/Arizona+2008

I picture myself running a PowerPoint with some notes and then writing out math problems from the back of the class.  I'll probably have a bunch of practice problems for the class to work on.  I'll walk around and plop the tablet down on someones desk so they can do the problem with the whole class watching.  In algebra we are factoring so I'm sure it will be nice to see how the students work out the problems themselves.  It will also be nice for everyone to see other people make common mistakes.  All work will be saved as pdf's and uploaded to our website. 

I can't wait!   

The blog post I was reading today talked about participatory learning and using twitter, YouTube and blogs in the classroom. I especially loved this section of the post:

"And then it struck me that since I was showing Howard Rheingold’s vlogpost, we might actually be able to FIND Howard on Twitter and, perhaps, use Twitter to allow the students to ask him about his video. To do so would, in my view, convey the immediacy of social and participatory media in a way that nothing else would.

To my delight, Howard was not only available but sent a message to our class! It was very cool to move from the recorded Howard to the live-virtual Howard. So I said to the class, “That was Howard Rheingold. And here he is in our Twitter! Do you have anything to ask him about that video we just watched - or about Twitter?” … a couple of the students took the plunge and Howard graciously replied (one had even read his Virtual Community book for a prior course). This was a very generous gift of time from a guy who is teaching three courses and functioning as a human server for a most inhuman volume of requests for time, insight and connection. Thank you Howard!"

I *love* this. This is exactly what makes Web 2.0 in the classroom and in education so exciting and amazing. To think that we still have our children sitting in front of textbooks reading things that were probably already outdated decades ago and yet we still continue to teach them in the same way, from the same materials.  When I think back on my days in middle school and high school I remember certain moments from my classes and any and all of them involved participatory learning. Whether it was making up my own version of the "12 Days of Christmas" that involved tossing Barbie Dolls off a filing cabinet, or acting out scenes from Hamlet in a Fisher-Price Little People Castle while "King For Just One Day" by the Thompson Twins blared in the background, they stuck with me - they had an impact.

I'm not saying that I think every teacher or every subject is best taught using Web 2.0 technologies, I just think that we're doing a disservice to our students if we don't at least learn about and try to incorporate participatory learning into our classes to make things a little more relevant.

Als een van de momenteel 4829 Classroom 2.0-members (zou u lachen om mijn 8-bit-appearance?) geef ik een bericht door van Steve Hargadon uit de US, networkmanager van Classroom 2.0 op Ning en edublogger, ook op de Infinite Thinking Machine.

• Classroom 2.0 is een wereldwijd netwerk van leraren en scholen, dat 2.0-onderwijspraktijk op het niveau van de secundaire school, m.a.w. de didactiek met 2.0-gereedschap en meer, wil promoten door te delen, te evalueren en erover te reflecteren.
• The Infinite Thinking Machine wil leraren en studenten de 21e eeuw binnenloodsen door hen de technologische bronnen, ideeën en dus inspiratie aan te bieden die onderwijsvernieuwing kunnen opwekken en sturen.

 Foto Steve Hargadon's Page on Classroom 2.0

Hier Steves (dringende) bericht van 3 januari 2008.

Tomorrow I'm experimenting with a live talk show program by starting a discussion on using Ning in education.  If it goes well, I'd like to consider a regular (weekly) show on Web 2.0 in education.Here is the link to the first educational "Ning-cast":  http://www.talkshoe.com/talkshoe/web/tscmd/tc/12083.  It is scheduled for tomorrow, January 3, at 6pm Pacific / 9pm Eastern.  You can listen to the show live (or later recorded) without signing up at Talkshoe.com, but if you do sign up for a free account, you can have the choice to participate in our show online, by Skype/VOIP phone, or regular land line.  Those who choose to download the Talkshoe software can also particpate in a chat window.  There are good instructions on the site.If you aren't going to download the software (PC & Mac only), you can call in as follows: 

1.  Dial: (724) 444-7444
  2. Enter: 12083 # (Talkcast ID)
  3. Enter: 1 # or your PIN (you set up a PIN number if you register)

OK, so for the brave pioneers, tomorrow night!  Talk to you then.

Steve

Visit Classroom 2.0 at: http://classroom20.ning.com

Allen daarheen!? Of kiest u voor uitgesteld relay? Of wordt het misschien volgende keer?

Accenture explains that there was an apparent expectation gap which simply means the customer expected that the product would do something but it didn't or they couldn't get it to do the thing they wanted it to do. Their solution is to return it.

If you are a regular reader of this blog, you may already have anticipated what's coming next. The inevitable question for those of us in Academia-

Where Are Your Expectation Gaps?

I encounter them every day of every year that I teach. Particularly with regard to student behavior. I expect a certain behavior so that each may learn in the classroom. But it doesn't always turn out that way. The expectation gap is wide with some students and on-existent for others. I wish I could keep the latter and return the former. I know most teachers feel the same way. But students aren't products (though politicians may think so). We're not allowed to discard them (thank, goodness!).

So how do you bridge expectation gaps in the classroom? I'm deliberately not answering the question here so that many may comment.

photo by merman at flickr

There are scouts, those who go ahead and explore the landscape and discover the possibilities. They are followed by early settlers who arrive immediately after and discover uses of the landscape and begin to build a new settlement. Following them are those who've heard the tales of a new world and made the decision to join the experiment. Those who remained behind had one of two options; ignore the new world developing out of their immediate sight, or become a facilitator for the development while maintaining the necessities and structures of the old settlements that supported the new.

This post started rattling around my head a couple of weeks ago while I was on the elliptical at the gym. I was reading Linked: How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means by Albert-Laszlo Barabasi while I was trying to sweat off the pounds accumulating while I read my RSS feeds. I had begun this book previously, but left it bookmarked on the shelf for quite a awhile, until a tweet by @bokardo (his blog) that eventually led me to his Amazon list of must read books. Linked was listed and I pulled it off the shelf and stared anew. I had begun the book before I was Twitterized, even before I started to seriously blog about EdTech. The book took on a new dimension this time and my brain went into overdrive as I considered it's message in light of Twitter, Ning's such as Classroom 2.0, Slideshare, Diigo, and the list goes on.

The more I read, the more I focused on my experience with my Twitter stream. I find my stream to be the place I discover much insight and wisdom, as well as information and directions to great ideas on the web. There is a large EdTech community within Twitter and the flow of information and exchange of ideas is far beyond anything I experienced as a classroom teacher for 20+ years. Since being Twitterized, I have often thought of a Tom Peters' quote I read in Re-imagine!: Business Excellence in a Disruptive Age,

A New Social Contract. Societies that educate their young to break the rules and invent vivid new futures.

This appears to be the attitude of the network of EdTech practitioners and evangelists I follow on Twitter. There is a strong network that has emerged and nurtured itself there, so as I was reading and running in place I grabbed my phone and tweeted the following three tweets:

I was struck by the cocktail party picture that Barabasi was playing with early in the book, using it as a description of the process of network formation. The path that information can travel seems to be something like a drop of water gathering with others to form a trickle, the trickle ending up in a rivulet, the rivulet to a stream, and on to a tributary, to a river, to the sea. There is power in the social joining of similar minds. With the Internet and social networks it happens at a significantly greater pace than that - but the idea works for me.

Barabasi's "Third Link" brought the idea of "six degrees of separation" to the discussion in my head and this is where the thoughts began to coalesce.

"Six degrees of separation is intriguing because it suggests that, despite our society's enormous size, it can easily be navigated by following social links from one person to another - a network or six billion nodes in which any pair of nodes are on average six links from each other."

Now, the idea of six degrees of separation has been made somewhat trite by public media (old media primarily), but it has proven, over time, to be a reliable theory. No, this isn't a book review, so here is the next connection that surfaced as I was reading.

I regularly pick up new links to Twitter toys via the Twitter Freaks group on Diigo (started by Lucy Gray of Infinite Thinking Machine and High Techpectations). Just prior to my reading I had been playing with TweetWheel a tool developed by Augusto Becciu and plotted my network:

I noticed some interesting things. First, some of the EdTech practitioners I followed also follow tech industry icons such as Leo Laporte, Robert Scoble, and Cali Lewis or information outlets such as Ars Techinca, but not many. Now that isn't a big deal, just interesting. The second thing I noticed was that none of the above were following any EdTech practitioners, evangelists, or bloggers that I an following, now that I found disconcerting. The final observation was how many of the EdTech's I was following were following each other - the web was amazing.

Here's the rub. There is such a wonderful network of EdTech's thinking, sharing, learning, growing within the Twitter universe (and other places, but Twitter was on my mind) . . . BUT . . . isn't this just preaching to the choir? I remember how wonderful it was, while I was in the classroom, to run into another educator who had visions for how technology was going to re-invent the learning environment in their classroom. There is an amazing energy that is generated by that interaction. Even more exciting was the rare situation when a teacher sitting nearby would interrupt the discussion, eventually joining in, and getting excited about beginning to bring tech tools and applications into their classrooms for the first time.

It is that last experience that ties this all together. Before Twitter, I didn't have any contact with @ijohnpederson, @mrplough07, @lsshanks or @markwagner, I didn't know who they were much less that they were involved in the EdTech arena. Through Twitter I gained access to their current thoughts and ideas, their blogs, and most importantly I reduced the six degrees of separation to ZERO. No this isn't a pro-Twitter rant, it is a chance to point out that not only did I reduce the distance between the people I follow from six to zero, but I also reduced the distance between the people they work with and want to influence (think the ones following the early settlers) from six to one. This network is the strongest tool possible for making massive change in the way education happens. This network is directly connected to other strong EdTech networks giving it added strength with each connection.

How can I help those in my Twitter stream or my friends at Classroom 2.0 make a difference in their educational venues? How can I allow them to enter my classroom or school and help me make a difference there? There are many options, such as responding when someone I follow is presenting Twitter as part of a Web 2.0 enhanced approach to classroom re-invention, staff development, or professional growth. I can share the links I gather using my Twitter stream + Yahoo Pipes + my RSS Feed aggregater in the most advantageous way in my building. I can print hard copies of their blog posts, as well as send links via email to teachers within my building (or that I have worked with over the years), addressing the things I have heard them talk about in the lounge, the halls, or the parking lot. By doing this, I bring these great voices from six degrees away, to one, and then to zero. I can effectively bring you, the EdTech's from my social networks, into the classroom of many other teachers that you would not otherwise have any contact with. Hopefully, your insight, wisdom, and vision will inspire and encourage and the movement to re-imagine education will grow exponentially - that would be the true releasing of the power of the EdTech network I have discovered in the Web 2.0 world - which would change the answer to my third tweet from May 5:

We increase our listening audience by reducing the degrees of separation between good teachers and good ideas and by increasing each others sphere of influence. Barabasi said in the introduction to Linked ,

". . . we live in a small world, where everything is linked to everything else."

Hope you won't mind when I link you and your ideas with other great teachers and watch how things can change.

Blogs of Twitter-ers I mentioned above:

@ijohnpederson: IJOHNPEDERSON

@mrplough07: The Next Step

@lsshanks: 2020 Nexus

@markwagner: Educational Technology and Life

Powered by ScribeFire and Beans ‘n Cream.

The first thing I would like to write about today (or tonight) is my Skype chat with the bloggers at 17 chances to Make a Difference. Mrs. Hernandez invited me to be interviewed by her class. They were the same age as I am.

I thought that everyone was really nice. I was really excited to do this chat, and I am excited for the next skype chat I will have. Mrs. Hernandez said we might be able to Skype again. I felt bad because I was able to see the class but they couldn't see me. They had a webcam, but we don't have one yet. I'm hoping that next time we will.

I thought that the questions and anwsers they gave me were really different from anybody else's. I think that the younger you are the more different your questions are because most adults ask the same things of me, but kids have different questions for kids. Mabey that's just how I feel.

The kids from 17 Chances to Help asked me really great questions like what kind of music I like. They also said that I have an accent, because they are from Florida, and I am from New York, which was really funny.

I hope that I will get to talk with them again. I also hope you will visit their site because they are blogging about making a difference too!

Tech stuff:

If I tried to summarize everything I learned and saw, I'd be here blogging all day, which I really don't want to do, since I've got lessons to plan, laundry to do. Suffice it to say that I was most impressed with the five-minute mini-demos during the morning session. I hadn't come across xtimeline before, and though I do think the site needs a major design overhaul (what's with the teeny tiny font?) before they bring it out of beta, I love the idea of using it as a presentation format for my 5th and 6th grade library/research skills classes. I also loved the general concept of building annotated trails through the internet with Trailfire, but unfortunately, that site also needs a little work before it is simple enough to be worth using in the classroom. As far as I'm concerned, if a site takes me more than ten minutes to figure out, then it's no longer a teaching tool, but rather an example of technology for the sake of technology. Though I'm as yet vague on how I might use them in the classroom, I had fun playing around with Twitter and PIBB. I'm curious as to how many of my students and their families use Twitter, and whether it might be worth creating an account for the school library to broadcast quick news bytes.

Pedagogy Stuff:

The day's big take-home-message-moment for me came during a Skype discussion with Vicki Davis's high school class in Georgia (the state, not the country). In the course of the conversation, Vicky commented that she thinks it's important for educators to move away from what she calls "point and click teaching." That is, rather than dragging our students one step at a time through the process of learning new web and software applications, we need to give them room to figure things out for themselves, to learn to be intuitive learners.

I'll admit that my teaching style does sometimes veer a little towards the "point and click," in that I have a tendency to walk my students through each minute step of the particular skill I hope to teach, whether it's using the library catalog or searching for newspaper articles in one of our electronic databases. There's a clear reason that I do this -- namely time pressure. There's only so much one can accomplish, after all, in a 30-45 minute class period. But given the rapidly changing nature of technology, it probably is more important for students to develop meta-cognitive inquiry skills -- to grow in their understanding of how information-search systems and interfaces function in general, rather than how our specific OPACs, databases, and websites work at a particular moment in time. And the best way for them to do that is, as Davis points out, through self-directed inquiry. I need to think about how I can shift my pedagogical style in this direction, while still offering helpful advice and structure during class sessions.

Right now as I am writing this, my mom is almost finished tallying up the total dollar amount of all the receipts. Mrs. Phillips thank you so much for that big bag! That really means a lot to me!

Dash's Markets will donate 5% of the total dollar amount we all collect this month to Ski4E! And the total amount for just today was:

$3351.55!!!! So far, we have raised $167.57 through receipts alone!

I hope I figured this out right!

I also caught another person making a difference today. She really makes my world a better place and means a TON to me.  It is............. MY LITTLE SISTER, NINA! She is always willing to help me when I am feeling sad and is always helping me do jobs.  Like today when I went on a penny hunt for Ski4E, she helped and found all of the coins. Also, she put her lunch change in the bucket (she could've spent it on a slushie or cookies).  Nina got Silly Scented markers for Christmas. Crayola makes them and they smell really stinky. They are called "Scary Movie" and "Voodoo Vapor" and they smell gross. Nina makes up funny games with them, and she lets me use them all the time too. She always shares with me, and that is cool. She makes a big difference to me, and I'm not just saying that.

Coco's site is a safe site, like mine. She is moderating comments, and she also put a sitemeter up as well. I've added Coco to my blogroll too.

If you have a safe site that is focused on positive ways to make a difference in the world, please let me know! I will add you to my blogroll too. I think it would be really interesting if I could meet some more kids to link to as well. I am learning about internet networks and communities right now. Coco and I have two little "houses" in the same neighborhood now. This is like a community. And we will visit each other!

My mom also showed me an article today that Mr. Will Richardson wrote about sites like mine. Mr. Richardson is leading a big project with schools where I live, and he is also an author. I was really surprised and happy that he wrote about my site. His article sent me some visitors today. Thank you Mr. Richardson!!!!

Mrs.Strong is a very pretty gym teacher who also coaches a volleyball team. She cares a lot about us and the sports we play. Also, she really trusts my friends and me. Trust means a lot to me. I think that it's great that she trusts my classmates and me.

...............................................................................................................................................................

An Update on Supporting my Cause of the Month: Ski4E!

Yesterday, I got an email message from Ethan Glaser's grandmother. She told me some great things about Ethan! He sounds like an inspiring boy.

As I mentioned yesterday, Ethan needed to have a liver transplant when he was little! That sounds really kind of scary, but it hasn't slowed him down at all. Ethan likes to ski and ice skate, and his grandma says that he has a really great sense of humor! Ethan calls his grandma "granny", and I like that. My friends Sam and Kate call their grandma "granny" too. It's a pretty name.

Today, I have begun collecting change so that I can make a donation to Ski4E at the end of this month! I also plan to return bottles and go on another penny hunt this month too. And don't forget to PLEASE GIVE ME YOUR DASH'S CASH REGISTER RECEIPTS! These can really help the Children's Organ Transplant Association.

I really want to say a big THANK YOU to my teacher, Mrs. Nabozny, at Lindbergh Elementary School! She gives me time to talk about my project in class, and she lets me encourage my classmates to participate. My classmates are great!

Please remember to support Ski4E and the Children's Organ Transplant Association this month! Let me know what you do to make a difference, and you could win a prize from me at the end of this month and the opportunity to be named as a donor at the end of the month, along with me!

I've started saving for Ski4E! You can donate here! Let me know if you do!