Maine Learning Technology Initiative

Students are often cast on to a desert island of research and asked to find the resources they need to help them find their way back to civilization. They may have received little or no instruction in how to tell if a resource is reliable, which can often make the process of research a bewildering and sometimes frustrating endeavor. As teachers, we need to help our students in evaluating resources, make them aware of what constitutes a reliable source of information, and alert them to the pitfalls.

In Thursday’s webinar, I put forward four questions we can have students ask themselves when they begin to evaluate a web resource:
“Why was this site created?”
“Who’s paying for this?”
“Why does the site look like this?”
and “Can the same information be found elsewhere?”

These questions begin to establish the motivation of the site’s creators, what message they are trying to convey, and the all important piece that student’s often struggle with: can the information be verified?

We discussed some pointers that students can use to gauge the reliability of a resource, which included authority, bias, design, transparency and currency. The feelings of the participants in the webinar was that there is no one pointer toward reliability, especially not domain names, which are often regarded as a guarantee of trust.

Students can use citation generators to help them establish the credibility of a resource. By filling in reference, students have to be able to identify certain information from a site that helps them critique it more thoroughly. Two citation generators available online: Easybib and Son of Citation Machine.

Using a social bookmarking site can give  a student a quick glimpse at how many people have at least looked at a site, and why that may be useful site to peruse. Delicious and Diigo are two such social bookmarking sites.

Some further website evaluation tools to take a peek at:

USM Library Website Evaluation Checklist
C-TEC Website Evaluation Form
Kathy Schrock’s ABCs of Website Evaluation (dated, but still a great guide)

In the webinar we also discussed the publishing of student work, really the end result of conducting and organizing research for a student. There are many benefits for publishing to the student, such as raising confidence in writing for an audience and the ability to receive feedback from someone other than a teacher. Many of these points have been covered in previous webinars by my colleague’s Barbara Greenstone and Phil Brookhouse: please check out their work if you haven’t yet done so.

There are many paces in which students can get their work into a wider audience:
Using blogs is an interesting method of creating an ongoing discussion and feedback. One place that caters to student blogs is Edublogs.
A wiki can be created so that only members can critique a piece of work, which can be of benefit when considering the age and maturity of a student. Wikispaces works well in this aspect.
There are dedicated sites to publishing student work, many can be found with a websearch Teen Ink is one such space.
Student wok can also be published in non-traditional, text-based format. Google Earth Community is a space for publishing files created in Google Earth, and can be a fun format for students to focus their research findings. Podcasts can be created and published on Podbean, for the delight of the world. And our old friend YouTube is a reliable space to host video.

I’m also making an impassioned plea not to do away with the school magazine! Many schools have a goal to be paperless, however I believe this is one bit of paper we should keep out of the trash. The school magazine can hold many pieces of student work, is easily distributed amongst peers and has a sentimental value that can last many years. I myself still have copies of my old school magazine, and do not plan on getting rid of them. With the publishing and productivity tools available on the MLTI devices, professional and attractive looking magazines are straightforward and achievable.

Be sure to watch a recording of the webinar – click on the tab marked ‘Webcasts’ above, then ‘Archives’, and locate the June 17th 2010 recording.

Wide angle view or strong focus? Current or timeless? Authoritative or opinionated? Both? Neither? Students have it hard these days, navigating web resources to find the information that will attend to their questions. In this webinar, we’ll attempt to help our students out with a few pointers, rules of thumb and a dose of sound judgement when it comes to evaluating digital resources. We’ll also discuss the various avenues available to students for publishing their research findings, why this is a good idea and what to do with the feedback they receive.

This session will be delivered on Thursday, June 17, at 3:15 PM and again at 7:15 PM. For information and to register, please choose the WebCasts tab at the top of this page.

Image by Bill Sodemann on Flickr, http://www.flickr.com/photos/8852942@N08/4175299981/

Thanks to the folks who logged in Thursday afternoon or evening to participate in the webinar, Mount Desert Island High School: A Case Study for Integrating Accessible Instructional Materials (AIM) in the Content Areas. My guest facilitator was Paige Collins, MDI HS special education teacher and fellow member of Maine’s AIM Community of Practice. Additional guests included Mark Arnold (MDIHS technology integrator), Roberta Raymond (MDI HS special education teacher in the Life Skills program), and Casey Rush (MDI HS Drama/English teacher).

The topic of AIM in the content areas is important to the education of all students, but particularly for students with disabilities that interfere with their access to printed text. Print disabilities include blindness and low vision, certain physical conditions (e,g., a disability that interferes with physically turning the pages of a book), and specific learning disabilities, such as dyslexia. So, to put the need for – and implementation of – AIM into context, we explored the actions of these educators because MDI High School has begun to provide instructional materials in electronic formats for all students, so that it’s not necessarily an accommodation for students with unique needs. That is, it’s a model of universal design for learning (UDL) because all students have access to flexible formats of materials that inherently allow the use of assistive technologies, such as text to speech, screen magnification, and portable media players.

We set out with the essential question:
How does a school develop a system of differentiated instructional materials for all learners, including students with print disabilities? Read more…

Many forms of digital storytelling rely upon the incorporation of powerful soundscapes as a crucial ingredient. Indeed, soundscapes can in and of themselves constitute digital narratives — but to do so, they must be carefully constructed. We will look at some of the elements that go into creating great digital audio, including music, voice, and environmental sound, and the tools and practices that translate them into a finished product.

Joining this Webinar:
This webinar will be offered twice on May 20 — once at 3:15pm, and once at 7:15pm.
To register for the webinar, please click on the following link: Registration.
If you have not participated in one of these sessions before, guidance and support regarding how to access these webinars is available by clicking on the following link: Support.

Copyright, or to be more specific, the use  and misuse of copyrighted materials, is a subject that is surrounded by much confusion and therefore fear for many educators. Students who have known nothing but the internet in schools need direct instruction and guidance on what they can be using from online sources, and also how to protect their original work they post. As educators, we should be learning as much as we can about the use of copyrighted material, and then helping our students navigate this legal mountain range.

Some of the ins and outs of copyright law and fair use are covered by information in the links below. This should not be considered a comprehensive list, and neither should you consider my attempts to explain copyright law as legal advice! Please consult as many sources as possible, and if you’re still confused, I’m sure your school has legal consults available.

Copyright overview and history:
US Copyright Office

Copyrightkids – Fun resource to get students thinking about copyright issues

Copyright and Fair Use in The Classroom – Interesting guide to copyright, from a college perspective.

History of Copyright Law – Wikipedia page does a great job pulling together a complicated history.

Copyright Infringement

Carol Simpson – Consultant on issues of copyright, has an interesting database of cases concerning copyright infringement in schools.

Do The (Copy)right Thing – Article on educator’s lack of attention to copyright from thejounal

Fair Use

Code of Best Practice for Fair Use in Media Literacy Education – Download the document from this page.
A Fair(y) Use Story-  Video mashup of various Disney movies to make a statement on fair use of copyrighted materials.

User Rights, Section 107 – Music video explaining the tenets of fair use.

Bound By Law? – Thanks to Barbara Greenstone for the link to this comic explaining copyright and fair use.

Copyright / Copywrong Quiz – Thanks to Cynthia Curry for forwarding the link to this quiz on fair use in education.

The Shepard Fairy Obama “Hope” Poster Controversy – Thanks once again to Cynthia Curry

Creative Commons

Creative Commons

Search engine for Creative Commons licensed work. Also available on the Firefox browser search tool.

Creative Commons on Flickr

Be sure to watch the recorded webinar sessions by clicking on the Webcast>Arcives tab above.

As new media forms test the boundaries of existing copyright laws, educators can be left feeling uncertain as to how they can be using media in education, what they shouldn’t be copying, and how students use media as part of their school work. File sharing, sampling and remixing, downloading and podcasting all present new methods of distributing information, but how can educators go about this without getting themselves in hot water? This webinar will look at some of the issues around copyright that affect schools, begin a discussion on Fair Use of copyrighted materials, and how to avoid any trouble with copyright altogether.

This session will be delivered on Thursday, May 6, from 3:15 – 4:15 pm and 7:15 – 8:15 pm. For information, please access the WebCasts tab at the top of this page.

Image from the Library of Congress

April 29th sessions recorded:

Afternoon: http://stateofmaine.na4.acrobat.com/p32117522/

Evening: http://stateofmaine.na4.acrobat.com/p97793153/

MLTI is proud to partner with Gulf of Maine Research Institute’s Vital Signs initiative, a  program that encompasses technology, content and pedagogy using inquiry-based learning. Incorporating the four strands of science learning to deal with essential questions regarding invasive species, Vital Signs offers teachers and students a way to be real scientists dealing with real observations and data.

Vital signs website, http://vitalsignsme.org/, provides a rich environment that allows users to set up accounts so they can add to the data and make comments on fellow citizen-scientists’ observations. However, even if you do not register, you can access the ever-expanding datasets about invasive species through the Expore Data tab.

After formulating an essential question, a user can set up a useful query using the Advanced Search feature. The results of the search can then be downloaded as a CSV (comma separated values) file and inserted into a spreadsheet like Numbers, using the Sort and Export feature.

Once in the spreadsheet, pertinent data can be specified by deleting the extraneous data columns. Then charts and graphs can be made using the appropriate data.

Even better, Google Fusion Tables, http://tables.googlelabs.com/, can be used to take the latitude and longitude data to place information on a map, and then export the map as a layer (KML) into Google Earth. Wow!

This is just a general overview. The specific steps are outlined in a document available at

http://vitalsignsme.org/how-create-google-earth-map-layer-your-own-data-set.

The four strands of science learning are explained in Ready, Set, Science:

http://www.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=11882&page=17

Comics and video provide rich possibilities for digital storytelling; however, neither affords the viewer opportunities for interactive exploration. Interactivity allows viewers to delve deeper into different portions of the narrative, and choose their focus according to interest and necessity. Can this type of flexible narrative be created without extensive programming experience? We will see that in fact, it can, and look at two very different toolsets for doing so.

Joining this Webinar:
This webinar will be offered twice on April 8 — once at 3:15pm, and once at 7:15pm.
To register for the webinar, please click on the following link: Registration.
If you have not participated in one of these sessions before, guidance and support regarding how to access these webinars is available by clicking on the following link: Support.

Our students are in an unprecedented position of being able to gather, sort and reflect upon information and data with ease and precision. Digital tools available on the MLTI devices and online give students the ability to record observations, conduct interviews, collect data and then use this information to produce meaningful results. By conducting original research, students can better understand ‘real world’ phenomenon and contribute their learning to a wider knowledge base.

My co-presenter for this webinar will be Sarah Kirn, Program Manager for the Vital Signs project, part of the Gulf of Maine Research Institute’s educational outreach. Sarah will be taking us through how the Vital Signs project uses original research by student and citizen scientists to build a picture of the spread of invasive species through the state. The process of collecting data through fieldwork, contributing the data to the Vital Signs database, and using the data in analysis creates a powerful learning experience for students, as well as raising their aspirations for science careers.

We will also look at other ways students can take advantage of digital tools to conduct original research, and how this can be part of a wider research process.

Please click on the Webcast link to register for or join the 3.15 and 7.15 webinar.

In addition to the webinars. MLTI and GMRI are offering a workshop that introduces teachers to working with Vital Signs data with students during the week of March 24 – 31. For more details, please visit the MLTI site.

Thanks to the folks who logged in Thursday afternoon or evening to participate in the webinar, Access to Learning by Students with Blindness and Low Vision. Our guest facilitator was Nancy Moulton of Educational Services for Blind & Visually Impaired Children (ESBVIC), a statewide service of Catholic Charities Maine. Nancy is a Teacher of Students with Visual Impairments (TVI) and Regional Supervisor.

We set out with two essential questions:

1. How can we support the learning needs of students with blindness and low vision?
2. In the process, how can we be better teachers of all students? Read more…