Classroom Videoconference with Smithsonian Museum Staff

If your school has videoconferencing capabilities the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum offers two interactive programs. To the Moon and Possibly to Mars, and Kites, Wings and Flying Things bring museum staff and docents, along with artifacts from the Smithsonian collection into the classroom by videoconference. Students interact with the presenters and learn by inquiry. Teachers must participate in a 30 minute pre-lesson video conference and you have to make your reservation at least one month in advance. You can learn more about the programs here.

Be Creative in Finding Stimulus Cash

Education Week's website has an article about different places to access stimulus money. You can read the article here.

The article mentions programs available through the Departments of Labor and Agriculture as well as Education. There are also dollars available through workforce training programs, "recovery zone" bonding programs, and other programs that creative district business managers and superintendents may be able to utilize.

Creative Ways to Fund Technology

While the stimulus package will provide billions in funding for technology in education it's always valuable to discover other sources of technology dollars.

Scholastic's website has an article titled 16 Surprising Ways to Fund Technology with sources and links included.

Number 2 talks about applying online for surplus federal computer equipment. The link in the article is dead but you can check out the new website for CFL (Computers for Learning) here.

Resources from Federal Agencies

Federal Resources for Educational Excellence or FREE is a government site that provides access to incredible information from dozens of federal agencies. There are over 1500 resources organized in four categories: Animations, primary documents, photos and video. The information comes from agencies as diverse as the Peace Corps and the National Security Agency.

One of the things I found at FREE was a link to ARC (Archival Research Catalog), the searchable database of the NARA(the National Archives and Records Administration). There are over 126,000 scanned digital images of important (and not so important) documents from the National Archives. It's a great place to find excellent source material for digital presentations, or just to look around.

How to Create a Community Website

A community website, or wiki is a place where people with similar interests can come together and contribute to a common website. Web design skills are not required thanks to simple push button input of links, pictures, articles etc.

Wetpaint is a site that enables you to set up your own wiki, about anything you want, at no cost.
Here's a video from CommonCraft that explains how it works.

More Resources for Teachers that want to Twitter

If you are a teacher that is considering using Twitter in the classroom or for professional networking you will benefit from visiting this next link. It's the Training and Resource Link page on Twitter for Teachers. It's the most comprehensive list of Twitter information that I've ever seen. Twitter for Teachers is a community collaboration website or wiki dedicated to teaching educators about the hows and whys of Twitter.

This excellent resource was built using wetpaint.com, which deserves a post of it's own.

Elementary School a Paragon of Technology in Education

I had the opportunity this morning to visit with Tim Lauer, Principal of Meriwether Lewis Elementary in Portland, Oregon and co-author of the book Bringing Children and the Internet Together. I had previously posted about Mr. Lauer with a link to an interview he had participated in for 21st Century Learning on EdTechTalk.com.

From the moment I entered their main office, Lewis Elementary stood out from the hundreds of schools that I have visited in the past. Visitors sign in on a laptop computer connected to a label printer that immediately spits out an adhesive visitor's badge printed with the person's name, along with the date and time of arrival.

As I had arrived my customary ten minutes early, I affixed my badge and had time to watch a photo slide show on a flat screen monitor mounted high on the wall outside of the main office. (see photo at bottom, far right) It was apparent before I even met with Mr. Lauer that I had arrived at a school that values the use of technology in many aspects of the elementary environment.

I sat down with Mr. Lauer in his office under the soft glow of his MacBook Pro displaying the most recent school newsletter. After a quick upload and print setup of said newsletter, we got down to discussing the ways that technology is utilized in his school.

Starting on the administrative side, Lewis Elementary uses an electronic attendance system that can produce a student's entire attendance history at the touch of a button. Mr. Lauer also utilizes Twitter (what's Twitter?) to stay in communication with staff and parents. He also uses his website as a place to keep notes about how technology can be used by students (and teachers) to further their understanding of their world. The school has also set up a Google Group to disseminate information about school happenings, as well as links to the electronic versions of all the school newsletters (cool to see the same, freshly posted, newsletter online that I saw on his laptop a couple of hours ago). Teachers are also given time "on the clock" to do class notes so students and parents can see homework assignments, announcements about field trips, and information about general class activities. Teachers are also taking advantage of iphoto '09 which, most impressively, allows teachers to sort their digital photos, by student, using the built-in facial recognition capabilities.

Students are also well served by technology at Lewis Elementary. Second graders are learning to play the piano using MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) keyboards (see photo at bottom, center) connected to computers in Lewis' computer lab (see photo at bottom, left). Third graders visit the computer lab for forty minutes twice a week, while fourth and fifth graders visit for forty minutes four times a week. They learn computer basics such as keyboarding, but also experiment with the digital arts including: Digital photography, video production, even musical scoring using Garage Band.

Music teacher Tony Jamesbarry is integral to the implementation of technology at Lewis. Not only within the musical applications previously mentioned, but architecturally he has students using Google Earth to choose a plot of land using satellite imagery and then Google SketchUp to draw a virtual 3D building on that land. We visited the computer lab as Mr. Jamesbarry had a class working on keyboarding skills with an interactive whiteboard up and waiting for the next lesson. Mr. Lauer pulled out his iPhone and showed me an application that he and Mr. Jamesbarry had discovered that allowed his phone to be used as a touch screen to remotely control the cursor on the whiteboard, wirelessly, from where we stood in the doorway of the lab. I believe I actually said, "Wow!".

But what I found to be most impressive about Mr. Lauer and Lewis Elementary was that they did not fall into the all-too-common trap of focusing on technology to the detriment of other programs. They have an amazing outdoor education center and learning garden, an instrumental music and band program, as well as an extensive visual arts program.

Here is a school that can be held as an example of how elementary schools can implement technology intelligently and thoughtfully. Meriwether Lewis Elementary is a model for how to utilize technology not as novelty, but as a useful resource for teaching, learning, and communication.

Interactive Graphics

I've been creating and using interactive graphics since I started Portable Planetarium in 1998. This is one of my favorites. It's a 360 degree image taken by the Mars Spirit rover from the surface of the planet Mars. My incredibly multi-talented friend J. Steele wrote the JavaScript that allows you to pan around the image by moving your cursor within the picture. You can move left, right, up or down to explore the image as if you are controlling where the camera is pointing.

Note: It's a pretty large file and may take up to a minute to load even with a broadband connectiton.

Here's another one...It's an interactive planetary gallery. You will have to have Flash installed to see it. Roll over the planets to see data about that planet. Click on a planet for a full size image. Click the starfield to see the constellations (can you see and identify the four constellations without clicking?)

More Video and Interactive Resources

Here's a link to free video from National Geographic. There are many different subjects represented. For example, a lesson about blue whales would be so much more effective if it included the video embedded below. It's possibly the first video ever captured of a baby blue whale; already the size of a school bus. The file is just four minutes out of a nearly hour long blue whale documentary. You can also explore an interactive piece here. Or try to tag and track blue whales virtually, here.

Whether an instructor uses the video on an interactive whiteboard, projects it on a screen, or embeds it in a blog, the usefulness of interactive pieces, video, and the tools to present them are a big part of the present and future of technology in education.

Earmark Article in the Oregonian

Here's a link to an article about earmarks in the Oregonian. Interesting to note that in the tenth paragraph the article talks about how school programs are one of the earmarks that garner universal support.

Twitter on NPR

Here's audio of a story about Twitter on Scott Simon's Weekend Edition Saturday (3/1/09). Hear host Scott Simon, nonagenarian Daniel Schorr and NPR's Social Media Specialist Andy Carvin talk about what Twitter is, and how it's used.

Twitter Video Primer

This is a short video called Twitter in Plain English.

Want to know what the twitter is all about?
(congratulations this is the 1,000,000th use of that joke!)



Twitter in Plain English from leelefever on Vimeo.

I found the link to that video at Free Technology for Teachers it was produced by the CommonCraft video company.

Interactive Table of the Elements

I Found this link to an interactive table of the elements at Free Technology for Teachers. The blog has a ton of cool technology for teachers...For free...In case anyone failed to pick that up from the title of the blog.

You can roll over actual pictures of all the elements to get the expected information, but I clicked on titanium (TI 22, atomic weight 47.867) and it opens up to dozens and dozens of entries and pictures. Every element drills down to a bunch of other files. You could come back every day for a year and not see everything.

ARRA Dollars for Education

I posted American Recovery and Reinvestment Act dollars by district here a few weeks ago.

For a broader view here's a link to a table showing total dollars going to education and for which areas. State educational technology grants total $650 million. Notice that the numbers on the table are in thousands.

Here's a PDF of allocations by LEA's (local education agency) in Oregon and Washington State here. You can click here for access to the rest of the states.

As in my original post it's important to note that these are estimates. These numbers will change depending on state level adjustments.

You can read more on Hilary Goldmann's excellent blog on ISTE.

Tim Lauer Talks About Technology, Education and Leadership

I've been following Superintendent Neil Rochelle's blog Changing High Schools since I linked to it in a post a few days ago. It's really driven home how important it is to have strong leadership to drive the creation of and to maintain a successful technology program.

Principal Tim Lauer has been involved in technology in the classroom almost from the beginning of the web age. As Technology Director at an art magnet he partnered with a local science museum and was setting up computer labs, building servers and utilizing the web in the classroom in the early to mid 90's. Now he's a Principal at his own tech savvy elementary school.

Here's audio of Mr. Lauer speaking in '07 about technology in education and his leadership role. It's called 21st Century #42 and it's posted at EdTechTalk.com

Sir Ken Robinson-Creativity and Education

After blogging yesterday about streaming video, I've spent many hours since exploring YouTube and TeacherTube.

I found the following video of Sir Ken Robinson talking about creativity and education. It's from the 2006 TED conference. TED (Technology, Education, Design) started in 1984 as a conference to share ideas. Today TED continues to bring together amazing people and their ideas and gives presenters eighteen minutes to share their convictions in what they call TedTalks.

If you haven't seen this video and you have a spare twenty minutes I highly recommend watching it. It's unusual because not only does it impart great ideas about the value of creativity, but it is also truly amusing.

CAUTION: Dry British wit ahead...

Streaming Video

YouTube is a great resource for educational videos as well as video about technology in education. Go to YouTube and do a search for "technology in education" and you'll get dozens of videos to watch. Including this one, a video about foreign language teacher Jose Picaro's top ten tips for using technology in the classroom. Here's one that teaches the Pythagorean Theorem in sixty seconds.

A couple of educators have started a similar website called TeacherTube. It's another resource for sharing instructional video. I really liked this one, a video starring Lawrence Perez that presents students a pre-algebraic introduction to the Distributive Property.

Iroquois Central's Path to Technology

This is an ISTE guest blog by the Superintendent of Western New York's Iroquois Central School District, Neil Rochelle, author of the blog Changing High Schools. It's a great overview of the different ways technology can be utilized in the classroom.
He also talks about the process of implementing technology into his district.

"We started with a few extremely motivated teachers. Blogging was the start. Posting assignments, homework (being absent was not longer an excuse to not having work done!) and even lecture notes. A student would volunteer to be ’scribe’ for the day and post the day’s lecture/class notes."

The first sentence in his quote is the key to almost every successful program I have seen.