Vinny Vrotny is a technology integrator at an independent school in Chicago, and he was asked to put together a succinct presentation for grandparents about the work his teachers and students are doing. He came up with the following five ways that teaching and learning have changed at his school due to Read/Write Web tools:

1. Allowing teachers and students to communicate and exchange information with others around the world. (Examples used are an 8th Grade Cultural Exchange that we have begun and a faculty meeting on global collaboration presented by Jennifer Lindsay in Bangladesh)
2. Allowing teachers and students to see the world in new ways. (Example used was the American Holocaust Museum’s GoogleEarth Darfur project, which is being used by our eighth grade Service Learning Project, our ninth grade Regional Geography and History course and our twelfth grade Holocaust elective)
3. Allowing teachers and students to reconstruct history. (Showed our fifth grade’s Mayan village recreation using Google Sketchup)
4. Allowing teachers and students to share new stories. (Played an excerpt of our third grade’s podcasting project to research and tell the stories behind the named spaces around campus)
5. Allowing students to change the world. (Told about our eleventh grade’s service learning project as inspired by reading Greg Mortenson’s Three Cups of Tea)

I just like the way that’s all framed. It’s not “we can blog” or “we can use Sketchup.” It’s what we can do with those tools. The presentation itself is included if you need some ideas for that group of grandparents (or others) that might be headed your way.

Technorati Tags: education, learning, grandparents, technology

I’m going to be doing a spotlight session in Grand Rapids next week for MACUL titled “Podcast, Vodcast, Screencast Nation” and it’s a new one for me so I’m entering into the production stage. I’m wondering if anyone has been doing anything with screencasts with their students, or frankly, at their schools? I’ve got a couple of examples which I’d like to add to, so if you have any best practices out there that you’d be willing to let me show off, let me know.

Well, we had our four-hour in-service today to show off our Tablet PC pilot and to talk about our vision for technology. It was, I think, as good as it could of been in terms of trying to get 250 or so teachers on the same page about totally changing our classroom model for technology. We had four teachers, young and old, get up on stage in front of the group and showcase their use of the tablets, and by any measure it was an inspiring show. The Spanish teacher who I have written about here before really wowed them some of the ways he integrates inking into his PowerPoints and even video. (You have to see it to believe it…) So far in our follow up survey, 94% of the teachers of over 200 respondents said they wanted a tablet next year. It is a very powerful technology.

Because we ran a bit long, I never did get to do my new tech show and tell, but I did quickly show what I think is one of the most powerful potentials of the tablet. Imagine a digitally submitted student essay or story which you’re able to annotate with ink AND record a voice narration at the same time and send back to the student. Then imagine being able to organize all of those files on your own computer, and being able to publish them to a student’s Weblog where he or she can have them as a resource or where parents and peers can also get a broader understanding of what a reader’s experience is on any piece of writing.

That’s what I’ve tried to show here. It’s a 4:30 Flash movie captured using Camtasia which, in it’s most recent version, is an amazingly powerful tool with tons of potential for educators. What I’m trying to imagine is a paperless classroom where students and teachers can annotate their work in both ink and voice and archive all of it for reflection and publication at some point. It’s such a neat tool, and I’m wondering what other people think after watching it. Let me know…

So in the craziness of the first two days of school, I’ve been running around trying to visit/support our 33 teachers who are piloting Tablet PCs in their classrooms. The good news is that they’re already doing very cool things, and we’ve only had two units that crashed. (Some weird thing where all of a sudden the stylus stops working.)

Anyway, I’m trying to keep them motivated, so I did a quick hopefully motivational screencast/congratulations for them on my own tablet using Windows Media Encoder. I’ve already been asked to add it to the next training…

I love it when technology is fun…and works. Whew!

One thing that I find intruiging in the phrase “Read/Write Web” is that neither “read” nor “write” really means what it used to when we talk of literacy or being literate. I mean, reading is no longer just being able to make sense of the letters. Literate readers need to be able to evaluate the source and meaning of what they are reading to glean its true relevance and importance, and they need to be able to “read” the varied mediums that writing now embraces. “Writing” is no longer just putting words to a page. We can write in many different forms depending on the situation or the need, with audio or video or other digital images. These are big changes in short periods of time, and many will be thinking and hopefully writing about these changes more and more as they become more mainstream.

Which leads me to this essay by John Udell. He talks about screencasting in the context of writing, about how writing is changing, and how we need to think about the implications for our classrooms.

We’re just scratching the surface of this medium. Its educational power is immediately obvious, and over time its persuasive power will come into focus too. The New York Times recently asked: “Is cinema studies the new MBA?” I’ll go further and suggest that these methods ought to be part of the new freshman comp. Writing and editing will remain the foundation skills they always were, but we’ll increasingly combine them with speech and video. The tools and techniques are new to many of us. But the underlying principles–consistency of tone, clarity of structure, economy of expression, iterative refinement–will be familiar to programmers and writers alike.

In the middle of his piece, he compares essayists and programmers and the ways in which they deal with their texts. It’s an interesting analysis that I think has a lot of merit. Writers and programmers must both struggle with making the code work effectively. And I love the fact that many more programmers are writing the code I can understand because I’ve learned much from their words even though I’ll never really understand their other language.

Different students are going to embrace different ways of expressing their ideas. As Udell says, traditional writing is still the foundation, but it can’t “just” be words on a page any longer. It’s daunting to think about how education will respond, but it’s also fun to think about the new, creative texts that are on the horizon.
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