Maine Learning Technology Initiative

Here are links to tools and materials for the MLTI Team’s hands-on BYOL (Bring Your Own Laptop) at ISTE 2010.

Session Description
Session Slides

For the Substitution and Augmentation exercises:
Click2Map
MapLib
TitanPad

For the Mofication and Redefinition exercises:
LimeSurvey
KwikSurveys

Supporting Research for the session
Puentedura, Ruben R. As We May Teach: Educational Technology, From Theory Into Practice. (2009) Online on iTunes U

Thanks to everyone who attended this webinar, the last in the Writing Process Lens for this school year. In this session we talked about the last stage of the writing process, publishing. We discussed why we must give students a purpose for writing other than to complete an assignment and an audience for their writing other than the teacher. In our MLTI classrooms, with 1-to-1 computing, students have a vast array of choices of ways to display their work and share it with the public. I demonstrated some examples of ways students can use the software on their MLTI MacBooks for publishing and suggested some online opportunities as well. Click on the Webcasts – Archives tab at the top of this page to find the links for the recordings to review the discussion of Pages, Keynote, iPhoto, and ComicLife. Here are links to  web resources mentioned in the webinar:

Web Publishing

• KidPub
• MidLink Magazine
• Write Source
• WriteFix
• Teen Ink

Print Publications

• Stone Soup
• Cicada Magazine
• Creative Kids

Fan Fiction

• Top Ten Fan Fiction Web Sites
• Harry Potter Fan Fiction

Jim Moulton’s blog post on Publishing Student Writing

Some resources contributed by participants:

• Lulu for self-publishing
• The Best Book on Northern Brown Snakes – a Lulu example created by a 2nd grade class
• Star Wars – fan fiction site
• Invasion Comic – an example of a publication created in Comic Life by middle school students
• MagCloud – another site for self-publishing
• Vermont’s Young Writers Project

Thoughts about assessment:

• Establish criteria before starting the writing project
• Checklists and rubrics
  • PBL Checklist creator
  • Rubistar
• Writing portfolios – look for evidence of improvement and growth
• Self-assessments and peer assessments – to self-assess effectively students must care about their work

Thanks once again to all the participants in this series of webinars. I know I have learned a lot from the participants and I hope we will continue to learn from each other.

Made on an iPad by Ann Marie Quirion Hutton

One of the most exciting changes brought about by the advent of technology in our classrooms is the abundance of tools for publishing student writing. As a veteran teacher, I remember the days (and it doesn’t seem so long ago) when I struggled to find ways students could share their writing with someone other than me. Publishing gives students a purpose and a real audience for their writing and when students write for a reason other than to get a grade, they write better.

This week’s webinar, Publishing and Assessing, will take a look through the writing process lens at how to help students finalize their work and share it. Our MLTI MacBooks have many applications that can help students illustrate and display their writing in professional-looking products that can be printed or shared digitally. We’ll begin by exploring the many templates available in Pages and then move on to look at other iWork and iLife applications students can use to turn their writing into multimedia products.

Of course, the internet offers many opportunities for student publishing and we’ll discuss how teachers can help students publish for a real-world audience using the many web tools that are available. We’ll also take a look at sites that accept student writing for publication.

We began a discussion a few months ago about how to assess student writing. We’ve talked about formative assessment and how feedback can help students with revision and we will expand that topic this week to include some assessments that look at a writing piece as a whole. As always, your ideas, experiences, and resources will be an important part of this webinar so please come prepared to share.

Please join us this Thursday at 3:15 or 7:15 pm. Click on the WebCasts tab at the top of this page for information about accessing this webinar and for a link to the registration page.

No fooling! Our April 1st webinars included lively discussions about the value of students’ online communication with written language. I especially want to thank Sherry Connally for allowing me to drag her away from her brand new grandson to join us. Sherry described her doctoral dissertation about how middle school teachers and students use social technologies for communication, collaboration, and building relationships. This dissertation will be published in a few months and made available through ProQuest.

Image by Plus Delta, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.0 Generic license.

We talked about ways teachers can give students opportunities to use written language for real communications (not just writing an assignment for the teacher) and looked at a wide range of possibilities, from simple email to using social networking sites like FaceBook and Ning. When we asked if the participants felt that texting, chatting, and other kinds of online communication were having a positive or negative effect on student writing, the results of our poll were mixed. Here are some of the comments:

• I have heard of studies that say that texting etc. are good, and I have heard of studies that say it is bad.
• Students develop effective communication techniques through trial and error.
• When students write/key reports, they are using “web” language.
• The grammar and spelling are negatives, but I have used blogs and it really encouraged my students to use their writing as an interactive communication tool with their classmates.
• The students use “u” instead of “you” etc.
• “Web” language has a long tradition – read the letters of Jane Austen and Lord Byron – written in ‘code’
• If social networking is used in the classroom and focus is put on language skills, then texting, chatting and tweeting can be very useful.
• If we think of it like braille or morse code.  Both have shorthand. We used to teach shorthand in school.
• My student’ academic writing contains “LOL” type stuff.
• -Love using “forums” with my Spanish classes.  They are communicating in Spanish which is what I want them to do.
• They need to know when it is appropriate to use that kind of language.
• Kids today speak two languages.  The traditional English and chat.  They just go between the two.

Ruben Puentedura shared links to two articles about the effects of texting on student writing (Thanks, Ruben!):

• Texting ‘improves language skill’
• Is Texting Making Us Bad Spellers?

Other resources we shared:

• Email
  • ePals (working in partnership with MLTI to provide email and connections to students around the world)
  • Email Etiquette
• Blogging
  • Class Blogmeister
  • 21 Classes
  • Blogs v. Wikis
• Wikis
  • PB Works
  • WikiSpaces
• Chats, BackChannels and Micro Blogging
  • Skype
  • Chatzy
  • TodaysMeet
  • Twitter
  • EdModo
  • BackChannel Chats as Classroom Tools (recording of a webinar with Sarah Sutter and Deb Taylor)
• Social Networking
  • FaceBook
  • Ning
  • Jabbster
• How can we promote civility in online discourse? One place to start is TweenTribune

The webinar participants also had a lot of ideas about filtering and teaching digital citizenship. Here are some of the ideas and resources that were shared in the chat box:

• Chats and BackChannels
  • backchan.nl
  • Tiny Chat
• Digital Citizenship
  • Common Sense Media (another partnership with MLTI)
  • For all things Chat/Skype/Video Chat – obviously educating parents and students about how to use them and how to stay safe is important.
  • I include Common Sense tips every week in my newsletter to parents.
• Social Networking
  • I have a classroom Ning site set up for my computer apps classes.  Students blog, answer forums and add comments to their peers’ discussions.
  • Edublogs and WordPress for blogging with students.
  • My daughter’s class uses Blogspot to respond to weekly assignments.
  • Twitter is a great way to provide professional development. Following educational leaders who provide lots of resources and links is most beneficial.
  • I’ve used Facebook profiles as a way of creating character profiles during writing and reading activities.
  • One school uses FB to facilitate the iTeam meetings, another choir rehearsals.
  • Facebook is blocked in our school.
  • We (teachers) have overrides to get througth the blocked sites.
  • Google Docs is better for this and easier to manage
  • Check the Terms of Use to determine if children under 13 can use ePals or Google Docs
  • Pew Internet – great resource for research on what social media looks like, and what teens are doing with it.

Thanks to all the participants who contributed their ideas, opinions, and resources on this topic. It was a valuable opportunity for us to learn from each other.

This week’s webinar in the Writing Process series will be a departure from our journey through the stages of the process. Instead, we will take a look at how students are using social technologies to communicate through written language, both in and out of school. Whether it’s through email, chat, blogs, texting or social networks like Facebook and Twitter, our students are engaged in this kind of writing every day. How can we help students use these powerful new tools effectively and ethically?

Sherry Connally, Principal of Rangeley Lakes Regional School, will be the guest host. Sherry recently completed her doctoral dissertation, An Exploration Of Maine Middle School Teachers’ Use Of Social Technologies. She will discuss her findings and talk about ways that teachers are helping students learn to communicate, collaborate, and build relationships through social media.

We will look at some examples of ways teachers can leverage interest in this type of communication to help students improve their writing, and we will share resources for doing this. As always, we will encourage participants in the webinar to share their experiences and resources so we can learn from each other.

Please join us Thursday, April 1 at 3:15 or 7:15 pm. You can find links for registration and information about how to access these sessions by clicking on the Webcasts tab at the top of this page.

Illustration by Ann Marie Quirion Hutton based on an original by Maarten Korz, licensed under a  Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 2.0 Generic license.

Thanks to everyone who attended yesterday’s webinars. I’m grateful that the power stayed on throughout both sessions and we were able to get through them. The discussion in the chat box was lively in both sessions and we learned a lot from each other. Here are the highlights:

What is the difference between revision and editing?

A few thoughts from the participants:

• I think anyone (teacher, peer, e.g.) can edit. Revising is done by the original author.
• When I think of editing, I think of making corrections to obvious errors (ie. punctuation, spelling).  When I think of revising, I think of making improvements to getting the thought process on the paper in an organized fashion.
• Revising is structural where editing is correcting errors.
• Editing is the mechanics and revising is adding details, voice, etc.
• Revising is ideas; editing is mechanics.  Together they make a piece of writing.
• I think of revision as improvement and editing as correcting.
• I think revisions go beyond surface.
• Revising working with content; Editing working with mechanics etc.
• Revising is improving content, editing is improving the punctuation and stuff.
• Revision=changing what you’re saying, editing=polish.
• Editing is for correcting mechanical parts and revising is re-working the language
• Revising is thought based and editing is more mechanical.
• Editing to me is more like correcting a grammatical error, spelling, etc. Revising involves more: changing
• Revisions are content, editing-making ideas fit frameworks

Organizing Drafts and Showing Progress

Teach students to organize drafts (as well as prewriting and organizing materials) in folders and use naming conventions for files. Have students use “Save As” to keep copies of all drafts to show their progress.

Taking Advantage of Flexible Text

Be sure students know how to manipulate text with copy or cut and paste, select and replace, find and replace, and drag and drop. Students are more likely to make real revisions in their writing when they no longer have to completely rewrite each new draft.

Writing Applications

Give students choices. Some have features that particular students need.

Applications on the MLTI MacBook:

• TextEdit
• NoteShare
• Pages
• NeoOffice (will not be included in next image but can be added)

Coming on next image:

• WriteRoom (distraction-free writing)

Others to try (free downloads that can be dropped in the MyApps folder):

• AbiWord
• Bean
• OpenOffice

Editing Tools

• Spellcheck and grammar check built into most word processing programs (Check out Pages Proofreading)
• Online tools
  • SpellCheck.net
  • SpellChecker.net
  • Orangoo
• The spellchecker poem: Candidate for a Pullet Surprise

Dictionaries and Thesauri

On Your MacBook

• Dictionary
• OmniDictionary

Online Tools

• Lexipedia
• Visuwords
• OneLook
• Wordnik

Why we love Alex…

Alex is a relatively new voice for Leopard that can be a great editing tool. Follow the directions for setting up a key stroke for reading selected text.

Grammar, Usage, and Writing Conventions Resources

• Dr. Grammar
• Confusing Words
• Common Errors in English
• Purdue OWL
• Grammar Girl

Resources from participants in the chat box:

• Reading Misspelled Words
• Magnetic Poetry
• Checklist Generators
• Merriam-Webster Online
• Mac OS X help for text to speech and speech recognition
• Dragon NaturallySpeaking (speech to text)

Image by Natalie Roberts licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.

This week’s webinar in the Writing Process Lens is Drafting, Revising and Editing. It’s all about the words – drafting, revising, redrafting, revising, drafting some more, and when all the words seem to be the right ones in the right order… editing. The beauty of digital text is that it is flexible and easily changed, allowing students to make real revisions more easily than they can on paper. We have found that when revising doesn’t require rewriting the whole piece, students are more willing to do it. We’ll take a look at the features of various applications for word processing and discuss how we can help students choose which to use. We’ll also talk about how to organize a formal writing project, saving and archiving notes and drafts to show progress in the writing process.

When the revisions are done, it’s time to edit and we’ll talk about using spelling and grammar checkers as well as other tips for helping students find and fix errors. I’ll also share some of my favorite web resources for learning more about grammar and writing conventions and, as always, I’ll invite participants to share theirs.

Please join us Thursday, January 14 at 3:15 or 7:15 pm. You can find links for registration and information about how to access these sessions by clicking on the Webinar tab at the top of this page.

Illustration by Ann Marie Quirion Hutton

Thanks to everyone who attended Thursday’s webinars and special thanks to Julie Canniff, Sara Needleman, and Lisa Hogan for their contributions to the conversation about giving and getting feedback. Below are some links and notes related to topics we discussed.

The Effect of Feedback on Learning

• Dylan Wiliam and Paul Black, Inside the Black Box
• Kappan article, “Working Inside the Black Box.” The full text of this article is available as a PDF through MARVEL. Authenticate to MARVEL first and then click here.
• Susan Brookhart, How to Give Effective Feedback to Your Students

Evaluative vs. Descriptive Feedback

• Product descriptors and rubrics (highlight for descriptive feedback)
• For copies of documents that Julie and Sara shared, contact me and I will forward your request to them.
• Anne Davies – Assessment for Learning

Establish Criteria

• 6+1 Traits of Writing
• Look at examplars
• Have students contribute to building a rubric (Jill Spencer says, “Also, I’ve found that taking time to reflect with questions like…Why is it important to use criteria? Why is quality work important? These questions begin to help students see the purpose for their efforts.”
• Rubistar

Teaching students to give feedback

• Laurie Walsh’s document, How do you comment on a classmate’s writing? (Thanks, Laurie!)
• Give kids sentence starters based on your criteria or model like 6+1 Traits
• Create a culture where kids care about their work and agree on criteria that is not personal but that really describes high-quality work.

Ways to give feedback digitally

• NoteShare – Voice Memo
• Pages (and other word processing programs) – use callouts in different colors
• Use markup and annotation tools in Preview for PDFs.
• Some Studywiz activities are good for feedback.
• Lisa Hogan suggests using callouts to have students self-assess. They use callouts to point to evidence that they have met the criteria for high-quality work.

Online programs that give students feedback

• MyAccess
• Criterion®
• Class Blogs
• Online writing sites where students can submit writing

Recordings of the webinar will be available in a few days on the Webcasts Archive page of this blog. Please join me again on February 25 when we will talk about drafting, revising and editing.

Image by Terry Hart licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.

In our next Writing Process webinar, Giving and Getting Feedback, we will explore how teachers can give students feedback on their writing and how students can give each other feedback. Feedback is an essential part of the writing process and we’ll talk about how descriptive feedback helps students make revisions and redraft to improve their writing pieces. Our guests for this webinar will be Julie Canniff and Sara Needleman, two faculty members of the Teacher Education Department at USM. They will be a part of our conversation about establishing criteria and giving descriptive feedback based on that criteria.

Lisa Hogan, Tech Integrator at MSAD 75, will also be in the room to talk about her experiences with middle school students and the writing they did in science classes. We will look at some resources for getting feedback online and discuss the difference between evaluative feedback and descriptive feedback and how we can teach students to give each other feedback that really helps them in revising their writing. Finally, we will demonstrate how teachers and students can give each other feedback on their digital drafts, without having to print each one and mark it up. And of course, we hope you will let us know what techniques and strategies you are having success with in your classrooms.

Please join us Thursday, January 14 at 3:15 or 7:15 pm. You can find links for registration and information about how to access these sessions by clicking on the Webinar tab at the top of this page.

Illustration by Ann Marie Quirion Hutton

Thanks to everyone who attended yesterday’s webinars. I had a great time talking with Jim about Organizing and Connecting Ideas and Information, and I hope you had fun listening and adding your ideas. If you missed it, links to the recordings are on the Webcasts page of this site.

We asked two questions early in the webinar about the kinds of writing you do and the kinds of writing you ask your students to do. I thought it would interesting to compare the two so I collected all the responses from the chat boxes and made Wordles so we could compare.

Here are the responses to What kinds of writing do you do?

And here are the responses to What kinds of writing do you ask your students to do?

We looked at some tools for helping students organize ideas and information. Below are some resources for helping you learn more about these:

Graphic Organizers and Mind Maps

• Bubbl.us – Web tool that can be used without creating an account.
• Free Mind – Documentation
• OmniGraffle – Tutorials

Lists and Outlines

• Word Processing Programs
  • Pages – Using outline templates and outline feature (video)
  • NeoOffice – Guide to Outlining
• OmniOutliner – Tutorials
• NoteShare -
  • AquaMinds Learning Center 
  • The Well-Organized Student

Storyboards

• Keynote – How to Create a Storyboard (eHow)
• Comic Life 
  • Comic Life in Education
  • Plasq Forums

If you are interested in the Student Research Guide notebook, you can download it from the ACTEM NoteShare server. It’s in the Barbara Greenstone Collection. If you need directions for accessing notebooks on this server, please send me an email message.

Ideas and Resources Harvested From the Webinar Chats

• Some students organize information in their heads before they start writing.
• New Yorker cartoon about organization (mentioned by Jim)
• MaineLiteracy Portaportal page
• Resources from Greece, NY
• The 2.0 Beta of bubbl.us is very stable, and can embed URLs in the nodes.
• “When I write I use both mapping and informal outlines.  The web helps me get started–to generate ideas, see connections, etc. Then I go to an informal outline to organize as I start to draft.  Thus I have learned to be more flexible when working with young writers–need to know our students to know how to help them work through the process of writing.”
• Give students experience in a variety of tools rather than assuming they will always use the one they use first…
• Venn diagram classic GO for compare/contrast
• This tool (Bubbl.us) would be great in brainstorming a new unit! 
  •  yes, very helpful at uncovering kids’ prior knowledge as well as gaps
• “One of my students showed me OmniGraffle.  She was quite pleased to discover it before me.”
• Social Studies students could use this to outline govermental structures (or any other kinds) and include that in their presentations.
  • and exported as images, placed in iPhoto, useful across many apps.
• That’s pretty cool (keystrokes in OmniGraffle) because the interface is pretty busy – so you don’t have to even click on any of those buttons in the toolbar 
• Everyone should use the ACTEM NoteShare server!
• Helping students to think metaphorically about the topic/ideas can also provide a stucture for the text.
• Using visual images first is often an ice breaker for reluctant writers!
• Or their cell phone cameras – they’re an amazing resource (to document field trips).
• Can use presenters notes in Keynote for text and slide for images.  Kind of like a storyboard

Thoughts about synthesis:

• Students are more likely to think deeply and create something new when they care about the topic.
• We have to give them repeated opportunities to do this, to have conversations that have real implications.
• Challenge based learning – make it real! http://ali.apple.com/cbl/
• Examples of “making it real”
  • Interviews with older people or with a career person.
  • 7th graders published and illustrated picture books for first graders
  • “Last year my Mandarin classes wrote captions in foreign languages for photos of school events.  We published a few pages of these in the school paper and had readers guess what they meant.  English answers were on another page.”
  • Making a movie about cells and how they work for 5th graders
  • Storyboards and scripts
• Thinking of Bloom’s Taxonomy and cognitive skills
• We have many great tools to make those ideas “whole.” Keynote, iWeb,iMovie, iDVD, Garageband and podcasts to name a few. The variety of the tools gives learners the motivation and the control. The greater learner control, the more meaningful the content is to the learner and the longer the information stays with them.