Aloha! First Days @ Lab School @ Punahou School

The Duke
Originally uploaded by Miss Martini (AnnaLynn M.)

The first few days of Lab School @ Punahou are behind me and today is the last day of week 1.  I have already taken part in some really interesting discussions, learned about new techniques and methods to apply to my own teaching and have met and talked with some very inspiring educators.

The Lab School is a 2-week professional development program, that Ted Landgraf described more as an unconference. There are cohorts, which are basically groups of specialized interests. This year, I am participating in the Mobile Technology cohort and Dave Wee (Big Building, Lots of Books) is auditing the Media and Digital Ethics cohort. However, one of the great things so far, is that you are not super tied to attending just your cohort meetings. If there is something you are interested in participating in, you can just talk to your facilitators and attend. I am making it sound like it is very formal but it's not at all.

Another great event are the keynotes. They are on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons and there are 2 speakers for each keynote session. This week we had:

Katie Morrow, who is the Tech Integration Specialist at O'Neill Public Schools in Nebraska. She's doing some incredible things over there and was just an inspiring person to here speak and to talk too. She's over at Teach42Morrow website. Definitely check out what she is doing and follow her on Twitter! Katie spoke on "Choice, Challenge and Change in the Classroom." 

Miguel Young from iTunes U was iChatted in. He spoke about some of the trends in mobile technology in education and pointed out some great new partners on iTunes U.

Dr. Neil Scott talked about the Makery Cloud Project. He is over at the University of Hawaii and they are just doing some incredible things that include teaching students the importance of design, curiosity, invention, entrepreneurship, making things and taking pride in their work. One of the points he made was about keeping workers relevant even with all these things that are used to automate things.  You have to see what these kids are creating! It's incredible!

Hillary Freeman, from Nueva School, spoke about 21st century thinking skills (computational thinking, ISTE) and how these can be applied to any curriculum.

There was a lot of discussion and modeling of challenge-based learning methods practiced by a lot of Apple Education sponsored schools. 

The entire environment in this program is about sharing and collaboration beyond the school walls. It is inspiring and exciting to be a part of this group of innovative educators.

Cool Tools from School Library Journal

I'm taking some time to read the December 2010 issue of School Library Journal. These are some of the things they highlighted that I plan on checking out or have my students checkout during one of our units.

Richard Byrne, over at Free Technology for Teachers blog, wrote a bit about Twiducate. Social network created by the teacher and similar to Twitter. What a great way to teach kids about online behavior and how to utilize SNS for education. Our students are still at the age where their SN is really more social than educational. You also have a lot of control over the site so I think this might make certain lessons more entertaining as well as educational.

There is also EduPad, which isn't even live yet but I thought would be great to look at. During the virtual ebooks conference a few months ago, one of the speakers mentioned how teachers and librarians need to be the creators as well as the consumers. This might be a great place to start - by creating apps related to our lessons.

On a personal note, I really want the Edifier Soundbar. My old iBook is now my giant iTunes player. (seriously, it cannot handle more than 2 applications at time and those 2 apps are iTunes and Last.fm) So, it would be great if I could have an amplifier.

I'll let you know how it goes.

I did write a lesson on how to use Google Docs - document for my 7th graders so I will have to post about that later after I see how it goes. It might be disaster but I'm hopeful.

Paper.li - your personalized twitter newspaper

My friends have been posting their paper.li content so I thought I would give it a try. I am actually enjoying using Paper.li as a way to make my twitter stream a bit more manageable. Also, people have asked me about what a read and who I follow online and this is a great way to share that information. I have set it up so it's only a weekly update. If you have a paper.li you want to share please post a comment.

It's actually does give an picture about some of the things that I am in to. I might have to test this for my personal stream. 

You might want to check it out too.  

Lynne D Johnson - WomeninTech Daily http://paper.li/lynneluvah/womenintech

Will Richardson's "Finish this sentence..."

I follow Will Richardson on Twitter. Today he twittered:

"Finish this sentence: "The world has changed, content is cheap and collaboration is easy. As educators, we must..."

I am going to think about it and post something later. But what do you want to say about this? What would you contribute to this discussion?

Hello! Moodle!

We get to use Moodle to enhance some of classes. I am very very excited about this. I used Moodle in a class taught by Dennis O'Connor for UW-Stout called "E-learning for Educators" last year.

I have started setting up my class page and am actually using some of the techniques I learned about in Dennis' class, like setting up an "icebreaker" activity so that students can familiarize themselves with the how the page works. Since this is the first year, I am going to use the multitasker game from My Pop Studio.com. I am a little worried that it is geared towards girls but I think the boys will have fun with it.

I have been reading a lot about how students spend a fair amount of time online and I think this will be another way for us to engage them in discussion. I do not think it will add too much to their schedule because they will be online anyway. I am interested in using the chat feature one day just to see how it works and also to see how students react to it.