We are very excited to share with you our new educational technology initiative that is taking place at Avoca!  We are calling this initiative, Blog Wild! In a continuing effort to go green, as well as to integrate 21st century technology skills into our curriculum, we have created a blog page for each child at Avoca West and for grade 7 students at Marie Murphy. This forum will allow students to post their work to a greater audience while using far less, if any, paper to do so.

This program, developed by a district-wide team of teachers, takes a number of precautions in regards to Internet safety. Through our system there is no direct contact with students, as each post that the student makes and each comment that is received is reviewed by a teacher before it becomes public. A positive learning environment that encourages student connectedness is our goal.

Students will be posting projects that they have completed in their various classes, facts and reflections about current topics of study, and so much more! Instruction about how to blog safely, ethically, and effectively will be provided to all students in Encore Technology and Encore Literature classes at Avoca West and Core classes at Marie Murphy.  Students will also be taught how to appropriately comment on blogs that have been written by their peers.  Students should always be logged into their blog before making comments.  This commenting is a feature that we hope parents, grandparents, etc… will take advantage of as well.   Parents, grandparents, etc. do not need to log in to make comments.

To find the student blogs:
1. Go to the district webpage http://avoca37.org
2. Under District Links, click on the school link of your choice.
3. Under Team Pages, click on the grade level of your choice.
4. Under Navigation, click on the “Student Blogs” link.
5. Find the name of the student you are looking for, and click on their blog link.

By providing students with an authentic audience, we are motivating them to truly invest themselves in publishing their highest quality work. Over time, students will have created a digital footprint of how their skills and knowledge have developed, and how each child has grown as a learner.  We hope they will learn how to create a positive professional presence on the worldwide web, one that they and their families can be proud of for many years to come.

Very excited to see the long term growth and possibilities through this project!

Below is a copy of that presentation which breaks down into two halves:
1. An overview of the PD practices we use here at Avoca and
2. Results from a survey we did with technology educators from our learning networks.

In the second half of the presentation we discussed the results specific to NSBA award winners, a number of which were in our audience.

You can check out the full survey results here:

Exceptional Professional Development from Exceptional Schools Survey

And the presentation here:

In a couple weeks we are going to open up our student blogs to the public which should be very exciting.

WPMU Plugins

Simple Dashboard – removes widgets dashboard for all blogs – typical teacher doesn’t need any more info than than what helps them post.

Batch Create – so happy WPMUdev Premium put this one out – allows mass creation of blogs which for our project with students is a necessity – in conjunction with others it is a huge time saver.

Blog Defaults – sets many defaults including a default theme and modifications to blogroll and categories automatically created when a new blog is made. In conjunction with Batch Create is a powerful combination to crank out 100s of blogs.

Default Categories – using this with the two directly above, we could push out categories correlated with subjects/classes students are taking. Also enables you to push out at a new category to all blogs if necessary – for example we wanted a category “Book Review” that any student could use – instead of each kid one by one we could blast it out.

Peter’s Collaboration Emails and Peter’s Post-it Notes (WP Plugin)- Peter has made two great plugins that are vital to what we are doing here at Avoca with student blogs. Collaboration emails allows review of posts by category – for example if a kid writes about Science they would check the science box.  The post is then sent to the Science teacher for review and publishing. If there is an issue with the post the Post it Notes plugin can slap a post it note right on the post for the student to review in the dashboard. Takes some manual labor to get it setup but a fantastic tool!

Power Tools – allows php commands to be sent to individual blogs or the whole site.  Here’s one example of how we use it – with student blogs I have about 80 students pre grade – rather than going to each blog and adding their teachers as administrators I can push out a command that will add them all at once. Tremendous time saver.

Tag-feed – premium plugin that creates a feed of any post, site-wide, that uses the same tag or category. We use this to create the feed “Book Review” and Feedwordpress to take that feed and create a compilation blog of all book reviews by kds.

Unfiltered-Mu – convenient, but dangerous, plugin that disables wpmu from stripping <iframe>, <embed>, etc in posts/pages. Useful but use with care.

WP Plugins

Angsuman’s Authenticated – activate this plugin and the blog is password protected.

Anarchy Media Player – makes using audio and video simple for teachers – all they do is upload and insert into post.  Anarchy creates a standard video player or flash audio player depending on the file type. We edited the video poster frame with our lighthouse logo which is easily done.

BM Custom Login – easy to use editing of the login page – put the lighthouse logo there but when I have some time there is more branding possible.

DD Import Users – batch create users for blogs and specify their roles.

FeedWordPress – creates posts from a feed which we use in conjunction with tag-feed to have all student book reviews aggregate into one blog.

FireStats – stats for your site pure and simple.

KB Advanced RSS – takes the standard RSS widget and adds a number of useful features – all of the RSS widgets are done using this plugin.

Next Gen Gallery – upload images and next gen does the rest – inserts whole albums/galleries of pictures into posts made into a slide show or browseable image gallery.

Page-Links-To – turns a page or post into a URL – in our navigation area there examples of this in action – at avoca37.org under navigation clicking Business Office takes you to their site.

Translate – creates a widget to translate content into a variety of languages.

User Permissions – using this along with Angsuman’s Authenticated enables our school board to use the site for their meeting info. Certain posts can be read by school admin, while others are available to school board members.  This plugin allows this scenario to happen.

WP-Mobile – enables a mobile version of a wp blog – is editable but the default appearance is great – is enabled for our entire site.

WP-Table - we use the original version from Alex Rabe but this is the updated version that seems to have some additions that will make me upgrade(export table to csv would be useful)

Thanks to all of the developers of these great plugins – any I am missing or ones I am using that have better alternatives?

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We replaced all of the middle school laptops with White Macbooks running Leopard. We install most of the usual suspects which I won’t go into too much detail about.  We use Office, but have included iWork 09 and NeoOffice this year which are going to help us study which way we are going to go with these types of apps. Trying to shake the reliance on Office so looking at these and Google Apps.

Since we use Macs we include iLife 09 but still include iMovie 06.  We find that some of our younger students struggle with the new iMovie interface so for what we do either one works just fine. Also the standard video players come with our laptops – Quicktime Player and Flip for Mac to play WMV files easily.(3-2 Reds – Cardinals get Holliday, Lilly has shoulder problems, feels right)

But many of our apps are freeware or open source apps that we have found over the years. The goal is to provide something for all subject areas which we think we are getting close to doing. And although kids don’t have a lot of idle time at school, limit the draw of online shoot ‘em up games and the like. All of these are free unless otherwise noted.

Acorn – of course the first one alphabetically is not free, check with Flying Meat for pricing info. But we had been using Photoshop Elements v 2.0 for years on our iBooks. Upgrading was quite costly so we are moving to the nifty Acorn. As mentioned it’s an image editor for the rest of us which I think our younger ones will be able to pick up quite quickly. We also have Adobe Fireworks 8 as an option for image manipulation.

Aquallegro – ear training for music classes. We do have a Midi Lab but this is a small app that has many features including  Note Names, Intervals, Solfege, etc. There is a wide range of configurable options that make this app usable by all ages – including those whose ears are very rusty like myself.

aTypeTrainer4Mac – simple typing trainer that spits out a report when done and can import text files that you can practice typing.  Works in various languages as well. Parents often ask for a typing app so their child can practice.

Audacity -  iLife has GarageBand but we do also include Audacity for quick recording needs.

Caveman’s Calculator – in an increasing digital world I thought we would include an analog tool. A humble slide ruler that can be used for many mathematical applications.(Cubs 3 Reds 3)

Celestia – students can fly through space visiting virtually any planet – really quite amazing resource for any science class studying outer space. Check out the Demo(Celestia->Demo) to see what this app does.

CRONoMeter –  dietary tracker that is for good health practices. This will be the first year for this app but it will be used in science class and I could see possibilities for this in PE or Health class.(Still 3-3 but Ron Santo is talking about seeing the movie The Hangover, priceless)

Evernote - this is becoming quite popular it seems and for our middle school kids it will hopefully become their resource for keeping track of all of the types of research they do. Easy to use interface, integrates with web browsers, can tag notes, and sync to the Evernote server. First year for this one too, but I see great potential.

Frame by Frame – easy to use stop motion animation which works with any video camera. Interface is iMovieish but has two windows that help keep track of each movement when doing claymation.

Google Earth/Sketchup – Google Earth- no brainer. Sketchup is new for us – we’ll see what happens with this.

LEGO Digital Designer – grew up with Legos and nice to find this app from the Lego company. Not exactly sure which class this could be a part of – maybe none – but I think many kids will be into building their own creations.

Master Spell - free spelling practice for students and one that teachers can create their own spelling lists with their own recorded voice. Maybe using this will create a spelling bee champ.

Mathematica Player –  over 5000 math, science, art and more simulations can be downloaded and played with this player.

Mental Case – this is shareware but great discounts for schools. Beautifully designed flash card creation or you can grab flashcards from Flash Card Exchange – not sure memorization is my kind of learning much anymore but can come in handy it certain circumstances – foreign language?

No1 – simple mathematics game where the student has to manipulate the operators of a 4 number expression – seems easy but proves to be tricky and a great addition for math class. (Cubs 4 Reds 3- Hey Hey!)

Paintbrush - paint program that is basically the old MacPaint that edits images at a basic level. Exports to standard image formats that can be put into other documents or on the web.

Pencil – 2D pencil like animation for creation of cartoons. Somewhat similar to Flash but learning curve seems easier.

Phun – a 2D physics sandbox that is in essence a game but an amazing physics simulation. A little hard to describe but watch the video to get the idea. I like apps where kids have to create and manipulate real world objects.

ProVoc – easy to use vocabulary trainer where teachers can create a vocabulary list from a class reading and submit it to students for their practice. Has been retired but still functional in Leopard. Somewhat similar to Mental Case and both apps have an iphone version.

Scratch – children’s computer programming from MIT which engages students in mathematics and computational skills. Web site has many resources for getting started.

Stellarium – your own personal real time planetarium includes 210 million stars – incredible. A need for any astronomy lesson.

Thanks to all of the developers of these apps. Feel free to comment with additions to this list or…well…any comments. And let’s go Cubs!

But as I was watching the local news on Chicago public access tonight, I realized that what they were passing out was The Printed Blog – a newspaper comprised of blog posts that I could take on the train and read.

It seems as though the strategy here is to provide a newspaper in the a big city that is very local. For example, I live in Chicago in an area called Lakeview and the paper passed out here would have ads from my local stores and posts from local bloggers I believe – I think they are still sorting this out a bit.

You can submit stories, pictures, music, to be considered for printing in the next version. Eventually, local distributors will print it out on their inkjet printers and pass out.

I’ll post the video of the segment from Chicago Tonight as soon as it’s posted

but is this really a blog when it’s printed out and passed out at my local train stop?

I’ll definitely grab a copy on my way to the train next Tuesday.

More details here

Looking forward to bowling on Thursday….

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/28787998/from/ET/

My favorite portion is the team being used to Macs but finding not only PCs but six year old Microsoft software and that they were struggling to put captions on online videos. Sure am glad so much technology $ was spent on the Barney cycle instead of improving the flow of information in the White House….