I threw together a VuVox collage to create a mini presentation for our annual Education Staff Retreat at KET. The presentation is a bit rough on the edges but it was fun to work with VuVox to create it. See if you can find the “Hot Spot” to Alan Levine’s 50 Tools for Story Telling. It is a GREAT resource for educators in finding Web 2.0 tools.

Happy George Washington’s B-day! Hey, speaking of presidents…. there’s a presidential election going on: an election, in which the word “change” has been evoked throughout. What a fitting theme to all the activity that is taking place in the world of distance learning! Connectivity, choice, and personalization can now be provided as never before to ALL students regardless of geographic location.

Some of the new components of KET’s Distance-Learning German program are outlined on this short video. Click here and have a look!

The DL German Program at KET was awarded the Public Media Innovation Fund Grant from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) last month! This is an exciting time! Here’s a slide show I created for a group of Highly Qualified Teachers on Zoho (ZohoShow) in order to 1) present a basic overview of our program and the changes that are in store, as well as 2) provide some background on Web 2.0 tools and formats. ZohoShow worked pretty well though there were some quirks and the finished product is less than polished…. At any rate I thought that it would be a good way to demonstrate the efficacy of read/write web-based tools—by using some in the presentation.

You can also click here to go directly to the ZohoShow site if you prefer.

Mind maps are great brainstorming tools, of course. Here’s a look at some brainstorming I’ve done using mindmeister. Just click on the map to navigate on your own. Drag the blue box to the right.

Sure, I understand the phenomenon of mass collaboration. There’s no rocket science involved. It makes sense as a scientific theory. Why the hype?

Well, whenever you experience its workings first hand, you can’t help but feel a little awe-struck.

Case in point: As I’ve l been experimenting with a myriad of wonderful web tools out there — for the development of a new, single-year of curriculum (and desperately trying to narrow down my focus,) it has become clear that it will be necessary to keep things as flexible and open-ended as possible. There’s no way around it. Things are changing so quickly.

For some time I’ve been carrying around this urgent but vague notion about what is needed: something flexible and open-ended…okay, but what? And now I find that many others have been working on this idea all along: it’s called loosely coupled teaching. Last week I first encountered the term in a post on Scott Leslie’s blog edtechpost and found out that there is even a whole group of educators who blog about LCT ! Some great ideas there!

Loosely coupled teaching makes use of loosely coupled tools, i.e. individual platforms that exist on the public internet. On his blog, Leslie is compiling a list of best practice examples of courses “taught using contemporary social software/web 2.0 tools outside a course management system.” Leslie concentrates his interests mainly in the arena of higher learning, but no matter. LCT shows great potential for K12 and dl as well.

And so I am awed and thankful that this conversation has already been taking place. The ongoing collaboration could bear some substantial results.

The rate at which amazing educational tools are being created and refined in just the last months is beyond comprehension. I hope by now you have come to terms with the fact that there is no way that you will be able to keep up with it all– especially if you are a teacher (i.e. you ALREADY have no life.) The good news is there are some great edtech bloggers out there who do a lot of important investigative work for you. My favorites are Will Richardson and Wes Fryer. In the end however you will have to decide on your own which technologies work the best for your unique circumstances.

Where to start? Well, what are the priorities you’ve set out for yourself in your teaching?

As a world language teacher, the idea of helping my students establish connections with young people in the target culture has long been a central part of my approach to instruction. But now that I have gone into distance learning, connections play an even bigger role. Connections are part of what has become the triumvirate of top considerations for me when deciding the road ahead. The formula I’ve come up with goes something like this: connections+collaboration= community. For years, research has shown us that community is essential to students’ feeling of success and satisfaction in distance learning. See here. Thus we have to urgently seek out means of connection and collaboration for our students to ensure that a community can establish itself.

New web technologies provide us with so many great tools. In the last month I have narrowed my focus down to a small assortment that I’m monitoring closely, some older and more familiar than others: Facebook, Ustream, Voicethread, Gabcast, Mindmeister, Google Earth, Yugma, Skype, and Second Life. Though the list is long, I think that each platform offers something unique..and yet is easily accessible and user friendly (Second Life may be a bit of an exception here.) Many of these tools and platforms can be used in conjunction with others. I’ll be commenting on my experiences with them in future posts.

Doubts? Plenty. I do worry about what happens if the community that we’re aiming for does not materialize….Students seem so “maxed out” these days. Will they be willing to set aside time and get actively involved?

How to avoid failure? We’ll build towards community slowly. Providing students opportunities for connections comes first. Of course we will push the opportunities through incentives…. And then collaboration will be required as well.

The need for students to be able to add text comments to class content –like on the youtube site or on Chinesepod (see below) — seems more and more inevitable. The advantages cannot be overlooked…. especially for K12 distance learning where we have to overcome geographical obstacles and work to ensure that students perceive a special sense of belonging and community. In K12 distance learning it is just as important that instruction be delivered with a personal touch as it is in the regular classroom. By writing comments, students will begin interacting with each other and –before you know it–teaching one another. The teacher can chime in too of course.

If that is indeed where we are going then it will be important to draw up a list of expectations and etiquette for acceptable Web 2.0 use. I am not sure if this has already been done, but a colleague sent me this link from the Des Moines Register where they have established an etiquette policy for their readers that evidently has been quite successful.

What we’ll allow and what we won’t.

Spelling out a few rules.

So much to do. I’ve decided that I’m going to borrow from others…

Susan and Thomas describe the Personal Pizza project as a fun way to get back into the language and vocabulary that students learned the year before. That would fit perfectly into the review and intro unit that I plan to start off the new KET German II program with. The Personal Pizza could be the first “event” of the Ger II year and provide a context around which the language (themes/ functions/grammar) to be practiced could be organized.

For the project, the students use (or construct) a pizza box which, when opened, shows a pizza–a personal pizza, mind you–that like any normal pizza is divided into slices (I have just 7 listed below.) In each slice the students provide artwork representations –no writing!–according to the following instructions:

1. describe self

2. describe activities you like to do and activities you dislike to do

3. describe 4 things about school

4. describe your favorite season

5. describe the upcoming weekend (using words perhaps / sometimes)

6. describe a typical day

7. complete the thought After school…

For the event Susan explained how she interviews each student one at a time (usually out in the hallway, while the other students work on something else.) Each student must bring his or her pizza box and point to the artwork while talking about each slice in the target language. The teacher uses a rubric that she checks off as the student presents.

Why is this so exciting? We can now do this in a DL context. Web 2.0 platforms make it possible. I can think of many possibilities, but Voicethread and UStream would be two very strong choices. Both are web-based, user friendly, and interactive. Simple podcasting would work too of course.

Last month’s report by the NSBA (National School Boards Association) which found that the dangers of social networking are overrated and that schools should allow students to use such networks was a big step forward. In the weeks following there was molto discussion on assorted edu blogs…like here and here. The recommendation of the NSBA has been weighing heavily on my thoughts because at the moment I am trying to decide on which technologies and networks we will build our distance learning program on for the coming years. Since our students are all over the country, and many of them attend regular high schools, we cannot be sure of the kind of access they will be permitted at their school site—-many schools do not allow YouTube or Yahoo, some schools do not even permit wikis or blogs.

Just a month ago that fact alone probably would have caused me to decide for a very secure, protected environment for our curriculum–one that would be acceptable to all. But now I find that that voice of realism in me which up to now has remained hesitant and reluctant in regard to utilizing real-life web sites–unedited and unfiltered– for resources and tools is beginning to change. Instead of getting bogged down on what’s NOT possible everywhere now…wouldn’t it be more realistic to recognize that in a matter of a few years students will be using these sites all the time –actually they already are!— for all sorts of routine communicative tasks. (To be continued.)