Connecting Communities Using Technology

Motivating students, connecting parents to classrooms, and bridging the gap/divide between all partners and stakeholders in a community is a challenge that many public schools now face. How can we use our schools as a platform for students to showcase their own learning experiences? Giving students the opportunity to serve as a teacher or expert in a field can become a motivator.

We are trying to use a community computer lab to serve as a meeting ground for students to showcase their work, present material to a wide range of interested partners, and provide scenarios where students must problem solve to address technical and real world situations. We have only met twice, but our numbers doubled in just two weeks. Senior citizens, immigrants, and older adults lack technical skills, money, and access to learning services.

Students in our technical courses have a choice to either develop a video tutorial, teaching a technical skill, or participate as a teacher/tutor in our community lab. Video tutorials are recorded in English and Spanish. Adult participants in our community labs receive individualized training. Students working in the community lab serve as instructors. The problems and scenarios presented to students in a community setting require student to problem solve and apply a higher skill set.

Activities for teachers to consider in a secondary environment:

1. Have students record an eBook review to post to a classroom blog or tweet group. Ask students to share their recordings and experiences at the community lab and invite parents. Students could expose participants to online reading material. Many of our senior citizens and adults express interest in learning more on how to access Google Books, Overdrive, and iTunes.

2. App Night: Share your favorite app for learning, along with student integration examples.

3. Photography 101: Students take photographs of items related to academic vocabulary, develop flash cards, and showcase their flashcards to parents and community members. Students teach photography skills, introduce academic vocabulary, and give resources to immigrants interested in learning another language or improving their academic vocabulary.

4. Math Night: Many participants are eager to learn how to produce a family budget. Have students teach spreadsheet skills and graphing skills to adults.

5. Social Media for Learning: Students can actively participate in class and at the community lab modeling researching, connecting, and developing a professional learning network for a variety of professions.

6. Research: Students share research skill sets and could even present a classroom research project to the community.

7. Web Design: Students can help adults learn how to create a website or build an eportfolio. Students use their eportfolios as examples.

8. Web 2.0 Tools for Multimedia and Presentation Use: Students develop a How To Presentation and introduce web 2.0 presentation tools: Prezi, Google Presentation, etc. to the community. Students could also share a presentation that they created for class e to share with adults.

9. Surveys, Polling and Forms

10. Technology How To IT Podcasts: Have students develop short presentations/podcasts on an Technology How To Topic in either English or Spanish.

The Power of Project Share

Project Share is providing and excellent platform for a community of educators and students to connect, collaborate, research, and create content. Unlike other course management systems, project share gives educators the ability to network with other public school entities across the state and is creating a systemic approach. Teachers and students in our district have the ability to access content in a mobile environment that includes productivity, web 2.0, and custom tools. Google Apps for Education serve as a great resource for collaborative work groups but fails to offer a true course management system. Moodle lacks the ability for educators to connect and share with other schools on a similar platform. In addition, it is hard for an educator to find extra hours in the day to actually build a moodle content. It is nice to have a free resource to tap into that is a ready made course management system that is similar to what other districts and schools utilize in the state. Want to utilize an existing web 2.0 tool? Project share gives educators the ability to add a custom tool menu to embed other tools and third party websites inside a course.

The power of project share is that it also connects Texas to the global network of Epsilen. Another powerful set of tools available to educators includes a fantastic lesson plan system allows for educators to tap into NYT resources, The University of Texas McDonald Observatory online content repository, and PBS digital library. Project Share resources and collaborative pieces will save our teachers time, district travel expenses, and professional development resources.

System issues with Epsilen do exist and hopefully system engineers will continue to address bandwidth issues. However, project share serves as a the best solution to provide a unified effort in addressing a real need, a systemic approach to 21st century learning.

Would you like to see project share in action? Dublin ISD would love to collaborate and welcomes you to visit our wonderful small community. All students 7-12 grade access all courses using Project Share, and all teachers participate in PLN utilizing the project share platform. To learn more, please join our Connections Grant Group in Project Share.

Creating With Digital Timelines

Digital timelines are a great way for students to illustrate past events and act as a historian to produce and create content. There are many fabulous tools available to educators that can really add to your social studies curriculum content. One great resource teachers can tap into would be your local library and museums. Students can photograph content found in their local community to connect curriculum to their world.

Students in our local elementary are studying physical and human characteristics of the local community to learn geographic concepts, map skills, and the idea of chronological events. Students are researching and working with the local museum to create an illustrated digital timeline on the history of their school. We found 5 significant events: First educators (whose pictures are in our local museum), a state basketball from a state championship game, first yearbook, rodeo band uniforms to reflect cowboy rodeo culture, and information on the actual construction of the current Elementary building built in the 1980's. Students will use their iPods to record information about these items and will produce a digital time line. This idea could be adapted to fit any American event in history such as Early American History, Civil War, WWI,Great Depression, WWII, NASA, etc.

Need a digital time line resource?

Check these out:
Dipity Digital Video Timeline
Data Driven Timeline
Timetoast
Xtimeline allows you to create widgets
Preceden: Great Simple Timeline for making simple graphs

Creating QR Code Content With Your Local Museum using iPods and Kaywa

Students in Dublin are learning how to apply research to their community and how to create content to share with the world. Students last spring worked with our local historical society to create QR bar codes for the community and will continue to work on projects this year. The process is described below and we would love to connect with other schools and museums to repeat this process.


Museum GT Project Planning:
1. The museum curator, Mary Yantis, will select items for students to catalog. These first project students will catalog around 60 items.
2. Choices for Creating QR Codes
a. Student take a photo, use their iPods to take notes on the item, and create QR codes later in computer lab using free web site http://qrcode.kaywa.com/Kaywa. Students learn how to summarize important content in 140 characters or less. Students could also create a video podcast on the item and create a QR code using their video description instead of a text description.
3. Students use the B-Tag app to access QR codes and instructions for access QR codes are given to museum curators along with training.

To learn more about this project, visit our Connections Grant Website.

Research and Student Production Connections Possibilities:
1. Students could use voicethread to create a video of the museum and embed bacodes inside video.
2. Other museums in town are interested in replicating.

Other Ways to Extend to other Teachers:
1. Create a Virtual Tour of Your School
2. Make Displays Interactive
3. Link Books To Online Resources, Link Homework, Link Worksheets, Geocached QR Code Test
4. Explore physical models and maps
5. Use QR Codes to Vote or Poll
6. Use to Make A Graph or Data Chart
7. Add QR codes that lead to book trailers to the backs of library books . . .
8. Add QR codes to math worksheets with video tutorials of how to solve the problems.

Copyright in the Classroom

Protecting ideas is more important now then ever before. Ideas are the first component to creating a new process, product, or concept, and as we teach students to become creators and publishers, it is vital for our students to know how to protect their works and productions.

How do you teach copyright to your students? I have found a couple of great resources that you might find helpful.

Copyright Interactive Quiz

Interactive Copyright Web Quest

Public Domain Tracker

Copyright Criminals PBS Lesson