Ed Tech: dream and believe - learn and achieve
Originally prepared to accompany a video conferenced remote presentation to the teachers of Palliser Regional Schools as part of their first district wide professional development day on the integration of Technology>>>
Download the slide deck@
http://www.scribd.com/doc/2868706/Ed-Tech-dream-and-believe-learn-and-achieve >>>
and LISTEN TO THE PODCAST@
http://teacherspodcast.org/2008/05/04/ep-16-ed-tech-dream-and-believe-learn-and-achieve/

For alternate modes of viewing or to download go to:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/2868706/Ed-Tech-dream-and-believe-learn-and-achieve

LISTEN TO THE PODCAST @

http://teacherspodcast.org/2008/05/04/ep-16-ed-tech-dream-and-believe-learn-and-achieve/

Digital Video in the Classroom:
An Evolving Resource List

How To
Hands-On: A Guide to Using Video and Multimedia Production in Project Based Work http://techtogo.blogspot.com/2008/03/i-accidentally-found-old-friend-while.html
Video in the classroom http://www.needleworkspictures.com/vic/
Video Project Rubric http://www.uwstout.edu/soe/profdev/videorubric.html
How To Embed Video in Classroom Presentations http://www.techlearning.com/story/showArticle.php?articleID=17701372
Video in the classroom (KQED) http://www.kqed.org/topics/education/educators/videoclassroom/index.jsp
Monroe County Intermediate School http://www.misd.k12.mi.us/technology/dig-video.html
Media Ed http://www.mediaed.org.uk/
CUE Community http://community.cue.org/group/videointheclassroom

Resources
Digital Video in the Classroom An Internet Hotlist on Digital Video Editing http://www.kn.pacbell.com/wired/fil/pages/listdigitalpa.html

Sample Video Projects
Planet 5th Explorers (http://www.mpsomaha.org/willow/p5/projects/explorers.html
http://www.teachertube.com/view_video.php?viewkey=97f1c0e786e05e0007cc
http://kis21learning.pbwiki.com/Links+to+Real+World+Examples+of+21st+C+Educators


Reflections on Practice
World-Changing Project-Based Learning at Mabry Middle School
http://beyond-school.org/2007/07/16/world-changing-project-based-learning-at-mabry-middle-school/

BOOK REVIEW:
Dr. Rudy Crew's
"Only Connect: The Way to Save Our Schools"

Back in the Day with Rudy!

Changing Our Schools to Produce Kids Who Can Compete in the Global Economy

CAN OUR KIDS COMPETE GLOBALLY?
YES – IF WE GET SMART

It is especially interesting to read this type of book when the author is someone you’ve worked with. Back in the day, when Dr. Rudy Crew was in charge of the New York City public schools and I was part of the district's central office staff, I observed him up close and rubbed elbows with him on occasion.

Dr. Crew is the genuine article, a dyed in the wool educator. He worked his way up through the ranks of the world of public schools, eventually becoming Superintendent of several of our nations largest and most challenged districts. He has left a trail of successes behind him and is an especially important role model for educational leaders at this point in time when more and more often non-educators, generally lawyers or managers from the world of corporate business, are entrusted with the futures of our young people.

Dilettantes beware! This book speaks with a level of authority that only this type of experience and commitment affords. Rudy is currently in charge of the Miami Dade school district (Florida), a lofty perch from which to reflect on the accumulated observations of a lifetime of deep involvement with the institution of Education.

In a sense, Only Connect represents Dr. Crew’s throwing down a number of crucial gauntlets. For those directly involved in, or deeply concerned with, the future of education these will resonate as defining challenges. Repeated throughout the book is the idea that what’s missing in our schools are the connections between what they offer students and what is actually worth doing in life. This is an idea that is easy to accept. After all, it is not much of a stretch to say that the trend we’ve been seeing in our schools for a good number of years now is to DISconnect everyone and everything from the real world as we get students to produce satisfactory test scores. We’ve come to pursue these symbolic results, which are disconnected from the actual processes of living and authentic learning, keeping subject areas disconnected from one another and from people, activities, aspirations and dreams that students can relate to.

The reader of Only Connect is presented with an astute mapping of those connections that must be established. As Dr. Crew frames it, if education is to be gotten right; students will have to connect to the human qualities that make for a “mature and conscious contributor to society”: Personal Integrity, Workplace Literacy, Civic Awareness, and Academic Proficiency – our classrooms to the qualities of: Caring, High Expectations, and Diverse approaches to learning – and our schools to 14 categories of stake holders without whom they can’t succeed; these include every type of organization from the Federal Government to the Service Community as well individuals of every stripe from parents and students to teachers and principals.

The map laid out is dotted with crucial stops along the way in establishing or repairing and strengthening these connections. These involve improved: physical school plants, instructional standards and frameworks, and funding. What Mr. Crew doesn’t seem to have identified yet is a vehicle by which the actual ground referred to by that map can be traveled by real boots on the ground filled by students and teachers.

The vehicle which will enable this, although he doesn’t see it yet, really has technology at the core of its engine. While the book does discuss technology a bit, the message is somewhat contradictory. It becomes clear that Dr. Crew uses technology personally to ‘connect’ to the world of information and things he cares passionately about when he makes statements like:

“Turn on your computer, log on to the Internet, and you’ll see what I’m talking about. Here in the first decade of a new century with an economy based on information, in the flat world Thomas L. Friedman talks about, it’s become apparent that the old laws of supply and demand don’t apply to knowledge in the same way they do to oil or air conditions in the summer. Knowledge is not a finite resource, and scarcity economics don’t apply to it…”

Yet, in the same introductory chapter he also states

'Here’s what “connection” and “global” do not mean: They do not mean the Internet in every classroom. They do not mean laptops for every child.'

And he certainly is on the right track when he asserts

“In many communities the idea of the global classroom is a reflection of how much hardware and software your district has, when the real question is whether or not your kids experience contact with skill sets that will be demanded of them when they go out into the world. Focusing on computers alone is like spending all your time and money on buying shovels when your job is to build a skyscraper.”

But connecting schools and students to what is real will involve more than simple focus and purposefulness in the acquisition and use of classroom-based technology. It is not TECHNOLOGY, but the new set of thinking, learning, and communicating practices brought about by technology that will. And of course while these aren’t technology per se, they are inextricably intertwined with it in many ways. The new paradigm of education that will help create the curative connections Dr. Crew prescribes is simultaneously grounded in the ways technology is changing human intellectual activity AND in the ways human intellectual growth evolved so that it would need to and could develop those technologies.

Until a catchy new name comes along for this multi-dimensional new ground of being and learning, something like ‘SMART 2.0’or ‘Cogno Sapia’, we’ll simply acknowledge its existence and identify it as a new paradigm in which learning is as integrated a dimension of human existence as breathing and being. We see its emergence for instance in the way the new social networking resources connect learners in the act of identifying and accessing materials to be studied while those processes are in progress, in the way our young are connected to information bearing technologies during all waking hours, and in how the technology industry has learned to direct its developmental energies towards satisfying these emergent human ‘needs’ and encouraging their growth – Learning, Knowing, Living are not technology, but they are also no longer states of being that can happen without it. We have entered a period in which one can only connect when one is connected and that happens digitally!

Mark Gura

I accidentally found an old friend while web surfing today. This 36 page - downloadable (PDF) teachers guide to student digital video projects was produced by the department I ran back in the day, the Office of Instructional Technology (OIT) - New York City Board of Education.

This was offered FREE to the many thousands of teachers who used it to good effect over the years. I am glad to see that someone still has it running on a server somewhere!!! This was done at a period of time when producing curriculum, teaching guides, and content for students was something we took on regularly as part of the job. Ah, those WERE the days... At any rate, here it is... Easy to understand, rock solid approaches to guiding students in the production of digital video projects. Authentic, relevant activities for 21st Century students. I hope this one stays up for a long time to come.

Apparently you can still download it from:
http://www.evc.org/pdf/Hands_On_Guide.pdf

OR, if the above is not working go to:
http://web.archive.org/web/20020122022715/www.nycenet.edu/oit/video.htm

HANDS-ON: A GUIDE TO USING VIDEO AND MULTIMEDIA PRODUCTION IN PROJECT-BASED WORK.

The Ultimate Black History Month Listing of Instructional Resources Online
FREE – Easy to Use Prepared to accompany episode # 10 of The Teachers Podcast www.teacherspodcast.org

The Ultimate Black History Month Listing of Instructional Resources Online(scroll the bottom to adjust view or click on link above)

Smart Projects Curriculum Update
I just checked the links for the posts below and amazingly they all seem to be fine. There are a couple of phantom ones though; my staff and I were 'disappeared' by the Klein administration during the winter of 2003, so obviously links to versions dated after that lead nowhere.

RESCUED CURRICULUM!
Trove of Technology-based Lesson Plans Recovered
(ELA, Math, Science, Social Studies, etc.)

A while back a friend told me about the Internet Archive, a not-for-profit with the website: http://www.archive.org/about/about.php

This site offers an extremely valuable resource called the Wayback Machine and is found at: http://www.archive.org/web/web.php

The Internet Archive has been saving websites on its own servers for years and consequently, important websites that may seem to have disappeared, or that may have been deliberately scuttled, can be located once again.

Back in the late '90’s and early 2000's when I was the director of (the New York City Board of Education’s) Office of Instructional Technology (OIT), my staff and I went to great pains to provide curriculum to support the city’s 80,000 teachers in integrating technology into their subject classes. A number of comprehensive documents came out of this effort and were posted on our website. Over the course of the several years that we made them available, they were downloaded many thousands of times by New York City teachers (and many others, some from as far away as Thailand) Some time in 2004, the current administration decided to 86 these gems, despite the expense incurred in creating them and their popularity with teachers and administrators hungry for such items. Why? Who knows? - to many it seems there has been a general effort to obscure the efforts of all who came, worked hard, and produced items of value before the current crop of ‘education leaders’ arrived. I recently discovered, however, that some of this mother lode is still available through the Wayback Machine. Below are some links I came across recently and the goodies available on the other end of the download. It seems to me that there are good teachers out there who can get value out of these, and I sincerely hope they do! (these pages haven't been lubricated in a long time and you may need to try more than once to get them to download).

OIT General Website: http://web.archive.org/web/*/http:/www.nycenet.edu/oit

December 17, 2001 archive of the site:

NYC (NYC Educator Created) Standards for Technology-based Instruction
Chapter I: Overview (22 K)Chapter II: Literacy, Mathematics and Science Performance Standards Connections (381 K)Chapter III: Learning Environments (13 K)

*June 3, 2001 archive of the site: http://web.archive.org/web/*/http:/www.nycenet.edu/oit (this one seems to have a good sampling of what was there originally, still intact enough to download)

Tech Integration Curriculum Guides
Language Arts:
http://web.archive.org/web/20010613041655/www.nycenet.edu/oit/laguide.pdf

Mathematics: http://web.archive.org/web/20010613043129/www.nycenet.edu/oit/mathguide.pdf

EXEMPLARY PROJECTS
Smart Projects ...a catalog of wonderful things to do with kids and computers
(unfortunately, this full version doesn't download. However the sections listed below, do):
http://web.archive.org/web/20010610232919/www.nycenet.edu/oit/projects.htm

Art: http://web.archive.org/web/20010613040834/www.nycenet.edu/oit/SmartProjects-Art.pdf
Interdisciplinary Projects: http://web.archive.org/web/20010613034119/www.nycenet.edu/oit/SmartProjects-Interdis.pdf
Language Arts Projects: http://web.archive.org/web/20030518041646/www.nycenet.edu/oit/SmartProjects-LA.pdf
Mathematics Projects: http://web.archive.org/web/20010613033649/www.nycenet.edu/oit/SmartProjects-Math.pdf
Science Projects: http://web.archive.org/web/20010613042322/www.nycenet.edu/oit/SmartProjects-Science.pdf

December 11, 2002 archive of the site:

Instructional Resources for Language Arts Teachers by Teresa E. Bader and Anna Mendez
http://web.archive.org/web/20030330200520/www.nycenet.edu/oit/laresources/index.htm

Please explore the many other versions of the archives. Many still carry the downloadable items that OIT worked hard to produce and share with colleagues.