And just what does she mean by cite external sources? And other final paper concerns.....

I am seeing a lot of action around final paper work.  This is a great sign that most of the papers are now in progress and I am pleased about this.

Several students have asked about citing outside sources and what is acceptable.  Since this is a paper for teachers, I am not looking for extensive literature reviews.  I am looking to see that you have knowledge of what others are doing in your topic area.  Thus, if you are writing on implementing Moodle in your school, you would want to check out what other K-12 schools are doing with Moodle.  Your sources will probably be from the web and will be based on practical experience and they will broaden the effect of your paper.  Web citations are fine for this assignment.  My interest is that you show an awareness of the work of others around your topic---a typical 505 final paper might have 2-6 references.  Use APA format for the references---Evrim's paper illustrates this format.

Evrim's paper seems to have created some anxiety-----her paper was beyond expectations for 505 and she has continued to work on it for publication.  A typical 505 paper is 8-12 double spaced pages and can't be much longer for publication in most practitioners' journals.

I remain available to read your drafts, if you wish.  You can email your draft to me and I will try to comment asap.

I will work to keep up with the outlines as they are turned in this week and to make sure your idea is on the right track.

Happy Thanksgiving to all!

So What's Next?

With the midterm over, most of the course readings and major assignments completed, we are now in the home stretch for CI 505.  For the next three weeks, students will be writing final papers for the course (see previous post).  On Dec. 6, our face to face meeting, each student will briefly describe his/her final paper and turn it in, if it is completed.  I can, however, accept final papers until Dec. 17, so student who need more time can have it.

Our course work and discussions over the next couple weeks will be at a slower pace than usual, so students will have the time to develop their papers.  I am hoping that students will also use the discussion board as a place to talk about their developing paper ideas.

As usual, the semester has passed by quickly.  I will hate to see this group move on as I have sincerely enjoyed our work together.

The Midterm Exam Approaches.....

Next week is the time for the midterm exam in our class.  You will access the exam from the main page for the course and once accessed, you will have 2.5 hours to complete the exam.  The exam will include 3 questions and should take about 1.5 hours (30 minutes per question), but I do not want you to feel rushed in the process, and thus I have allowed 2.5 hours.

The purpose of the midterm is to provide the opportunity for you to synthesize and apply material from the readings, discussions, and assignments in the class.  I encourage you to specifically cite the readings as you make your case in answering the questions.

You  may take the exam any time from Monday, Nov. 10 through Sunday, November 16 at midnight.  Thus, 2:30 am on Monday, Nov. 17 is the latest time you can submit your completed exam. You may only access the exam one time.

We suggest that you do your exam in a word file and continually save this file.  When you are finished, you can return to WebCT and cut and paste each answer from your word file.  This way you have a backup midterm exam in your word file.  If you have any problems, please contact Clyciane or me immediately.

Review for the exam should include reviewing the three books, discussions, notes, and assignments.  We also have a review discussion in progress online.

Given the active engagement of this group and the quality of the assignments I have graded, I fully expect a successful exam experience.

Final Paper

During the last half of November and early December, we will be working on final papers.  The final paper is a piece that students write for a practitioners (Usually teacher) journal, such as Leading and Learning with Technology/.  The article may be about a specific technology application (such as blogging or podcasting) implemented in a classroom situation.  The article could also be about a particular approach to professional development in technology or a position paper on a topic like digital equity or the challenges of a young teacher working to integrate technology in his/her classroom.  The audience for the paper  should be teachers (or perhaps museum practitioners) and the paper should include specific examples.

Typically, practitioners journals publish articles that are from 2500-5000 words, so the completed papers should be in that general range.  Pictures, graphics, charts can be included.

Previous topics have included, "Blogging in a Fifth Grade Math Classroom," "GIS as a tool for Social Studies Teachers", "Connecting Technology to Literacy Professional Devlopment in an Elementary School" and "Using a Wiki as a Collaborative Writing Tool in a Middle School English Class".

Your first step in creating your paper will be settling on a topic and a title and running this past me.  We will work on this the week of Nov. 24, so now would be a good time to start thinking of a topic.

ITEC 2008----a few new ideas!

Having attended hundreds of conferences over the course of my career, I have learned a bit about how to approach professional conferences.  Here are a few of my rules for myself:

*Always attend the keynote speeches---keynoters are carefully selected for good reasons and are often the highlight of conferences

•Work to have informal conversations with colleagues

•Try to bring at least a few NEW ideas away from the experience

I am pleased to say that I followed by own rules at ITEC and that I encountered a few ideas/approaches that were new and valuable to me.

As I mentioned in our discussion section, Alan November's keynote was centered on the idea of using students to do meaningful work in the classroom---work that contributes to the classroom community.  November commented on the "farm kids" phenomena and suggested that farm kids tend to develop a strong work ethic because they know that the family needs the work they produce.  Many farm kids are a vital part of the family economics.  In a similar way, teachers can organize classrooms where children are contributing to knowledge construction in the classroom.  Like farm kids, they are doing real and valuable work.  And, of course, technology can contribute to making this type of work possible.  Podcasts, interactive white board presentations, wikis, using google docs are all ways that learners can create authentic products that share their knowledge.

November's idea of real work is certainly similar to ideas we have discussed this semester, but his comparison to farm kids was a new idea for me.  And perhaps it will be useful for some of you.

Taking a Bit of a Break!

We are now more than half way through our semester together and I suspect that students are heaving a sigh of relief upon the completion of the digital story assignment.  In honor of this completion, we will slow down assignments and activity by pushing this week's assignments and discussions into next week.  I think it is a good time for all of us to take a bit of a breather....

Thus, Week 8 of CI 505 will look a lot like Week 7, with the addition of a software review and a chapter in Bransford.

Interestingly, the students in CI 505 at a distance have a better record of submitting high quality assignments on time than most of my typical on-campus 505 classes, and the record for this particular group has been outstanding.  I also know that almost all of the students in this class are working full time.  So I hope that a little break will help us all catch up and be ready for Week 9 with renewed enthusiasm.

No video this week......the attached photo booth picture will substitute.

The Weekly Videos---For You or For Me?

Every Thursday morning at 11 am, Clyciane brings her camera equipment to my office and films our brief weekly video.  Generally, we film quickly and ignore some of the minor imperfections---the phone ringing, my stumbling over words or repeating myself.  Occasionally, we have to do a re-take if I get the information wrong, someone comes to the door, or I just lose it and start to laugh.  All in all, I think we both enjoy doing the videos and we have become  efficient at it.

For me, the weekly video episode is an important part of my teaching.  Each Thursday morning, I construct the agenda for the following week, review goals and assignments for the week, review the weekly readings, check discussions and blog comments and generally prepare as I would for a face-to-face class.  It turns out that this preparation time is important for me.  the structure of the weekly videos forces me to take a little time to reflect each week on where we are in the course, how things are going, and what I want to have happen the next week.  When we finish a video, I always feel as though I have talked with you all and had the chance to address issues and focus.

Thus, the weekly videos are an important part of structuring our experiences together for me.  I wonder if I am using an outdated model when I include these videos and if I could communicate the same information to you without the video.  For now, however, the weekly videos are an important part of our course for ME.

I am interested in the usefulness of the videos for YOU.  Please feel very free to be open and honest here.  I am curious to better understand how this approach works or doesn't work from the student perspective.  From the teacher perspective, I think I will always need my Thursday morning experience, whether or not the planning and reflection results in a video.

Thanks for thinking about this with me.

NTLS + Communication

I am beginning this post with evidence that I was in Washington DC last week!  A few of us arrived early to finish planning the 2008 National Technology Leadership Summit and took a  few hours off for a Segway tour of DC.   the people with me are professors in instructional technology  from Australia(long beard), Texas and Virginia.

New Literacies and better connecting informal learning (outside of school) and formal learning were the major topics for the Summit.  There seems to be general agreement (at least among this group!) that we need to do a better job of building connections to the technology-rich outside school lives of many students and what happens in school.

As I think about 505 thus far, I know that we have several lines for communication within the course: discussion sections, this blog, office hours, email, weekly videos, weekly agendas.  I am wondering if we have too many channels for communication or if these channels are working for you.  I am interested in your perceptions of which channels are most and least useful.  I am also interested in your suggestions for additional methods of communication  that you might find useful.

One thing that occurs to me is that we do not have much opportunity to communicate in an informal way.  In a face to face class, there are always before and after (and sometimes during) class chats.  I wonder if you miss that and if so, if you could suggest ways to make this happen.

                                                               

Logo and Blogging Assignments

Now that WebCT is up and running again, I am catching up on my paper grading.  I wanted to be sure that students received some feedback on their blogging assignments, since several later assignments use the same approach.  In general, most students were clear and learner=centered in the assignment they posed for their students.  The best assignments emphasized the opportunity for students to interact with each other on the blog and thus had a clear value added for using blogging.  Similarly, the strongest assignments also encouraged student reflection on a topic.  In general, most students provided a concrete example of what an entry might look like for students.  Several of you used ePals for your blog format and several commented that some schools do not allow blogging right now.

The Logo assignments were generally strong, with clear, well-organized procedures and one calling super-procedure.  The most common error was the failure to write a super-procedure using Logo syntax.  The HOUSE example on page 116 of Mindstorms is a good example of a Logo super procedure.

I am concerned that WebCT let us down, especially since we are just beginning to establish our course procedures and routines.  I have used WebCT for several years and this is the first time I have experienced a major problem or a lengthy shutdown.  I am hopeful that we will all recover from this interruption.  I entered my Logo comments in the gradebook, rather than the assignment area, and I am not sure that students will be able to read the comments.  We will figure out this part, however, and you will get your comments!

6,298 Hits Last Week!!

WEBCT has a tracking option that allows me to track student use of the site.  Given the distant nature of our relationship, this feature provides interesting (and in the case of this class reassuring) evidence of our connections.

For example, with one exception, every student in the class visited our site and the schedule on Monday.  Since I envision everyone viewing the agenda and video on Mondays, this is good news to me.  And the one student who was not there on Monday visited early Tuesday....

We have had 6,298 hits from Sept. 2-Sept. 9 (one week)---that is an average of about 330 hits per student.  And (not to worry) a hit means that you have visited a discussion, an annoucement, the schedule, the video, a resource, etc.  Thus, in a typical site visit, most of us will make several hits.

For the same one week period, we had 249 visits to our WEBCT site---that means each student visited about 15 times or about twice a day.

For those of you who like numbers----7pm-8pm is our most frequented hour and 2am-3am is our least frequented hour (thank goodness).  Sept. 8 was our heaviest use day so far.

And to move away from numbers to substance, I am very pleased with our beginnings.  The discussions are active; students are using and illustrating our readings; Aaron got us off to a good start with software reviews and even asked the group to be a little metacognitive about the process; we had a good turn out at office hours last week and a good chance to answer questions, especially for our students who added the course a bit late.

Thanks to all of you for getting us off to an active, informed start!

Our Discussions Begin!

Beginning today, September 2, we will start our online discussions.  Although we will vary the format of these discussions throughout the semester, we will always work to use our discussions to connect the class readings to classroom experiences, as well to other resources in our field.  My hope is that the discussions will serve to help students create the meaning around the readings and to relate the readings to their prior experiences (......as Bransford suggests is important!).  I hope that students will ground their comments in the readings and begin to use the works of our authors to illustrate and expand thinking about technology use in classrooms.

Papert's work creates a nice backdrop for our reflections on technology use.  In 1980, Papert was almost a prophet of later technology use in schools and some of the challenges this use would create.  One of my favorites quotes from Papert comes from the Introduction to Mindstorms:  "In many schools today, the phrase "computer-aided-instruction" means making the computer teach the child.....in my vision, the child programs the computer and in doing so, both acquires a sense of mastery over a piece of the most modern and powerful technology and establishes an intimate contact with some of the deepest ideas from science, from mathematics and from the art of intellectual model building."  Although Papert was talking about Logo here, his idea could also be useful in thinking about Web 2.0 uses of the computer in classrooms where students are building and creating blogs, wikis, videos, podcasts.....

Unfortunately, Seymour Papert was in a serious accident in Vietnam last year and is currently still recovering.  He will always be remember, however, as the visionary who helped guide our early use of computers in classrooms.

For this week, I am hoping that students will begin to use readings to illustrate examples and vice versa.  If we get off to a good start in this area, we will have a model for the rest of the semester.  Evrim and I will be working to guide these initial discussions, without dominating them.  We will see how it goes.

And the picture if of Seymour Papert!

We are off and running.......

We finished our first face to face meeting on Saturday, and I was pleased with the opportunity to reconnect with cohort group students and meet our three new students: Mahima, Steve and Sheila.  This was our first try at having our out-of-state students participate through video conferencing and although we had a few hitches, it seemed to work quite well.  The way we had the room arranged, it felt as though Becky and Lynn were right with us-----and although we could not see Kristin, I think she had a better sound connection on Skype.

We will take it a bit easy this week-----we will share "gears of our childhood" in our discussion and prepare for a discussion of all three readings next week. 

Time to Get Ready!

I am back at work after 2 weeks in Colorado and it is time to get serious about setting up the CI 505 online class.  Fortunately, this is not the first time I have taught CI 505 online.  I do, however, need to make some major changes in the course based on Web 2.0 approaches and our new book by Will Richardson on Wikis, Blogs and Podcasts.  Given all our "getting started" meetings this week, I need to make these changes quickly so that I am ready for Saturday's face to face meeting.

Having led the seminar this summer, I feel as though I "know" most of the students.  I know the students by their posts, not their appearance, however and I will need to review pictures before Saturday.

I look forward to our adventures in 505.  I know that the students are a group of experienced technology educators and I hope that 505 will provide an environment that connects new potentials in technology with contemporary learning theory to help students create and evaluate effective technology applications for learners.

In lieu  of a mid-semester meeting, we will be doing software reviews online this semester.  We did a few online reviews the last time I taught 505 online and they seemed to go well and in some cases, were more effective than face to face presentations.  I am hoping that students will come up with creative ways to present their material online.

I will be blogging regularly about my reflections on CI 505 and I hope that students will comment and add their reflections on their progress in the course.