Pinterest in Education

I noticed lots of people using Pinterest recently and thought I would look into ways it could be used in the classroom. Pinterest is an electronic bulletin board where users can “pin” images from around the web. These images are then categorized into various boards on the users’ profile. Pins are also shared and searchable, which makes Pinterest a wonderful resource for visual information. So what are these pin boards good for with regards to integrating them into the classroom? Pearson has come up with a list of four ways for teachers to use Pinterest:

1. Lesson Plans- As briefly mentioned above, Pinterest is a superb visual resource full of pictures, videos, and website links. You can search for pins with a specific theme or subject, i.e. “Periodic Table,” making it an ideal resource for teachers 
2. Sharing ideas- Pinterest is a social networking site that emphasizes interacting through interests and ideas. This makes it a perfect platform for sharing ideas with those who have a similar profession, trade, or hobby. For educators, Pinterest can be a great way to collaborate with teachers, parents, and students 
3. Organization- One of Pinterest’s most attractive qualities is its aid in organization. Instead of crowding your desktop with countless folders, you can pin your sources to classified boards that will display on your profile
4. Student Use- Pinterest can be a creative tool for students to use to organize resources for presentations, projects, essays, etc. If students are engaging in a group project, they can create a board for collaboration with their group members 

Link to tutorial


I am also exploring ways our journalism students may use in the classroom.
5 Ways Journalists Can Use Pinterest 

The Ultimate Guide to Pinterest (slideshare) 

Reinvention of the school textbook

I am listening to"The Digital Future Of Textbooks". The revolution brewing in your child’s backpack. One little computer tablet may soon replace all those big old textbooks.  This in conjunction with Apple's announcement this week with what it call the reinvention of the school textbook. A digital initiative involving its popular iPad devices, a new version of its iBooks ebook reader app that's optimized for iBooks textbooks, and a new iTunes U app that provides educators and students with everything they need to teach and take entire courses, respectively, using, of course, Apple's devices, here are the company's press releases (here and here).  It's interesting watching this transformation start to unfold.  I am planning on attending the New England 1:1 Summit at Burlington High School with Patrick Larkin on Saturday, March 10th 2012.  I am also encouraging members of my high school to attend the session to learn from Burlington's pilot program as they address the BYOD model. To sign up for the Summer go to  http://1to1summit.wordpress.com/ and to reserve tickets. I have already updated my phone with the new iTunes U app and plan on spending time this month exploring using some of the new tools, one being Inkling  textbooks for iPad that include interactive features.

iBooks 2. The latest version of Apple's iBooks app for iPad (and iPhone and iPod touch) features iBooks textbooks, which Apple describes as "an entirely new kind of textbook that's dynamic, engaging and truly interactive." Compared to regular paper books, iBooks are interactive, colorful, can include videos, and can be updated again and again. They don't weigh down a backpack as do heavy, normal books. 

Leading educational publishers including Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, McGraw-Hill and Pearson have pledged to deliver textbooks and other educational titles to the iBookstore, with most costing $14.99 or less. This, too, is an improvement over traditional textbooks, as any student or parent of a student can tell you: There's a huge market for used textbooks specifically for this reason.

The new iBooks 2 app is free and available today from the iTunes App Store.

iBooks Author video  Apple is additionally offering a free Mac application, from its Mac App Store, called iBooks Author. This allows you to create your own iBooks "textbooks, cookbooks, history books, picture books and more," according to Apple, and then publish them to the iBookstore. It's unclear at this time whether this will entail the same overly-strict and non-transparent policies as does the App Store, however. And I'm not yet sure how this is better/worse than similar self-publishing services from companies like Amazon.com.

iTunes U app. For the past few years, I've been talking up and recommending Apple's unique iTunes U service on the Windows Weekly podcast. There's simply nothing like it on rival devices, and if you're interested in essentially taking college classes for free--yes, really--you need to check it out. But now all of this content is available through a new iTunes U app--for iPad, iPhone, and iPod touch--which is interesting. Looking at iTunes, i can see that the iTunes U content is still available normally--similarly to the way it provides podcasts--but I wonder if this is the first step in "locking" the iTunes content to iDevices. (Today, you can download an iTunes U audio or video class from iTunes but play it back on an Android or Windows Phone device if you want.)

According to Apple, the new app "lets teachers create and manage courses including essential components such as lectures, assignments, books, quizzes and syllabuses," assuming of course all their students have iOS devices. Students, meanwhile, can "access new books right from within the app, and any notes taken in iBooks are consolidated for easy reviewing. In addition to reading books, viewing presentations, lectures and assignment lists, students can receive push notifications so they always have the latest class information."

So, given this information, I would have to assume that the iTunes U app is for students actually taking the class, whereas the iTunes U service, through iTunes, is for anyone outside the school who wishes to enjoy the class separately. It will be interesting watching my own school district move forward with a BYOD model next fall.  I am hoping the textbook model is incorporated into the planning.

Professional Development options

I had the opportunity to present at the  2011 Christa McAuliffe Technology Conference this week.  I enjoyed attending the conference and following many of the great links and resources.  I plan to spend time this week and review all the great resources.  I am also planning on following the  2011 K12 Online Conference this week.  There are somany great presentations.   If you busy checkout many of the great teasers.

I came across an interesting article on Digital Learning Enrollment Triples: U.S. Department of Education.

Learning about the following this month:
Shell Center/MARS, University of Nottingham & UC Berkeley (math)

Common Core Curriculum and Massachusetts
Teacherdomain with Common Core
My Group Genius 

Common Core APP in itunes

Why present at a conference?

It's that time of year again when I find myself preparing to present at the 2011 Christa McAuliffe Technology Conference at the end of the month.  I am fortunate to present with my good friend and colleague, Nicole Tomaselli, we have been co-presenting since 2005 at this conference.  As I worked on my presentation, a few teachers mentioned to me they would love to present but it's so much work and asked me why I continued to present,

The answer, this is my professional development.  A time to reflect on the impact I had on teachers and students over the past year to plan several of my next projects.

As I updated my Web 2.0 Social Media Glogster poster from last year I added my blog post for my Skype Project World Read Aloud Day that I did with Nicole's studentes.  I also connected one of my special education classes with another group of students in a near by distict.  I found this project on twitter with a post from Angela Maiers.

I also plan on presenting on Classroom Collaboration Using Googles Apps for Education, based several projects that I did with teachers and students last year.

I am hoping that participants at this years conference not only attend the sessions but walk away and put into practice many of the great ways they can engage students in the classroom with Web 2.0 technologies and social media tools. 

Maybe some of the partcipants from last year will share a classroom success story based on inspiration from the previous year.

Pearson and Google Jump Into Learning Management With a New, Free System

Pearson and Google Jump Into Learning Management With a New, Free System
October 13, 2011, 10:25 am
By Josh Fischman
One of the world’s biggest education publishers has joined with one of the most dominant and iconic software companies on the planet to bring colleges a new—and free—learning-management system with the hopes of upending services that affect just about every instructor, student, and college in the country.
Today Pearson, the publishing and learning technology group, has teamed up with the software giant Google to launch OpenClass, a free LMS that combines standard course-management tools with advanced social networking and community-building, and an open architecture that allows instructors to import whatever material they want, from e-books to YouTube videos. The program will launch through Google Apps for Education, a very popular e-mail, calendar, and document-sharing service that has more than 1,000 higher-education customers, and it will be hosted by Pearson with the intent of freeing institutions from the burden of providing resources to run it. It enters a market that has been dominated by costly institution-anchored services like Blackboard, and open-source but labor-intensive systems like Moodle.

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Generation Wired

An interesting article in this weeks Boston Globe - Parade Section
Generation Wired Article Oct 7, 2011
They text (and text and text). They have hundreds of “friends” they’ve never actually met. They game for hours. How to keep your kids safe and healthy in a hyper-connected world.

How Exactly Is All This Affecting Young Brains?

A 2010 study by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that students 8 to 18 spend more than 7.5 hours a day engaged with computers, cell phones, TV, music, or video games. Forty percent of kids in middle school and high school say that when they’re on the computer, most of the time they’re also plugged into other media. The effects this multitasking has on still-forming brains can be positive and negative. “The prefrontal cortex, which is essential for social behavior, planning, reasoning, and impulse control, is not fully developed until the early 20s,” says Jordan Grafman of the Kessler Foundation Research Center. “Its development is largely dependent on what activities you do.”

Studies have shown that multitasking can lead to faster response time, improved peripheral vision, and a greater ability to sift through information quickly. But it also results in a diminished ability to focus on one thing for long. “You get better at the physical and visual motor parameters of what you’re doing, but not the deeper, thoughtful aspects,” Grafman says.

How will the generation coming of age now—less accustomed to sustained concentration—be affected? No one’s sure. Dr. O’Keeffe recently spoke to a group of college students. “They said they feel really bombarded, they’re not sure they’re learning effectively, and they’re not sure how to turn it all off. We need to learn from what they’re saying and help our current teenagers as well as younger kids learn to disconnect.” For parents, that might entail modeling a bit of self-discipline, like refraining from making calls while you drive or sneaking off during family gatherings to check your email. But the payoff—real conversations in real time—just may surprise you, and your kids. Who knows? They may even like it. Of course, you may need to check their Facebook page to find out.

Using Google with Chromebook or ipad and Web 2.0 tools

Checking out Google's Samsung Chromebook / Google on the ipad / Google Blog with new features
Google Educast  http://edreach.us/google-educast

Tagxedo
Microsoft Silverlight (needs to be installed)