Subsequent webinars will be held November 2, December 7, January 4, and February 1.  Mark your calendars now!  Each webinar will be recorded and added to the MLTI Archives for future viewing. Attendees will be eligible for two contact hours for their participation in the live webinar, just follow the feedback link at the end of the webinar and you’ll be prompted for your contact information to receive your contact hour certificate.

The Maine Arts Assessment Initiative (MAAI) has been designed to create an environment in Maine where assessment in Arts education is an integral part of the work all arts educators do to deepen student learning in the arts. MAAI includes professional development opportunities, regionally and statewide, to share and expand on arts educators knowledge and skills. Teachers will be invited to contribute tools, resources, and examples of quality assessments and supportive standards based curriculum documents for all to access.

Please follow these steps to connect to the webinar:

1. Click on the link http://stateofmaine.adobeconnect.com/pk201008.
2. Enter your name in the Guest box when prompted.
3. In order to listen and speak during the meeting, you will need to be connected by telephone as well as the Internet. To help you connect by phone, a box will appear asking for your phone number so the Connect conference room can call you back. If you have a telephone with a direct-dial phone number, please accept this option, enter your phone number, and we will call you right back.
4. If you have a telephone with no direct-line phone number (if your phone is only reached by a switchboard), please click on CANCEL when the call-back box appears, then dial-in to the meeting using this access combination:
   1. Dial-In: 1-866-910-4857
   2. Pass-Code: 140893
5. To participate in the webinar, you will need:
   1. a computer with a broadband connection to the internet (Cable, DSL, or WiFi); Dial-Up will not work!
   2. Adobe Flash Player 10 installed on your computer; most computers already have the Flash Player installed – however, if yours does not, or if your Flash Player is in need of updating (version 6 or older), you can download the player for free from Adobe by clicking on this link; this is a safe and quick download.
   3. An open phone line; we recommend using a hands-free headset or speakerphone.

Illustrated instructions for logging in to the meeting can be downloaded here.

Image by superkimbo on Flickr, used under Creative Commons License.

This webinar will introduce participants to the intricacies of teaching students from diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds in general education classrooms. We will be joined in conversation by Maureen Fox and Tom Talarico, both teachers of English Language Learners in the Portland Public Schools. They will share their knowledge and expertise, drawing on personal experience, to provide a background and understanding of the issues facing English Language Learners in our classrooms. We will also look at how technology, specifically applications on the MLTI devices, can be used to support multilingual and multicultural learners.

The webinar presenters will be Jim Wells and Cynthia Curry.

Image from the Kentucky County Day School on Flickr, used with an Attribution-NonCommercial 2.0 Generic license.

We should be encouraging our students to explore and add to current archives of material available to them. Some of the online collections that were examined in the webinar included the Maine State Archives Civil War Sesquicentennial Collection, the Maine Memory Network and the Library of Congress Flickr Collection of historic images. These three collections give a varied picture of how primary source materials are being presented to the public, and really only hint at the kinds of material available. To deepen this examination, students could be directed to search YouTube for primary source video, such as news broadcasts and amateur footage of events, and the Internet Archive for audio recordings.

The creation of digital copies of primary source material using student laptops is surprisingly simple, with the addition of a scanner or a digital camera that can create high resolution images. Scanners that can create images of 800 pixels per inch are now very affordable for most department budgets, and can be used by many to create an impressive library of digital images of documents, photographic prints and other material on a page, such as maps, plans and newspaper articles.
On the MLTI laptops, the application Image Capture makes the process getting a scanner to work very easy. For most scanners, it is a straightforward ‘plug and play’, and the ability to work with the images pre-scan is taken care of right in the application. Adjusting resolution, size of the image created, naming and location the image will be placed on the machine is now a matter of a few clicks.

Scanning guidelines for archival material can be found on the Maine Memory Network site.

Once a digital copy has been created, it is important to name the material correctly. This can be for the purposes of retrieval if the copies are added to a database, for both the creator and another user. If standard naming conventions are followed, it will make it more useful when sharing the material for anyone to locate and understand the material. The Maine State Archives have provided a naming convention for files containing digital copies, and can be found here.

Using digital tools to create meaning and understanding from primary source materials can occur in many ways. Using Comic Life to ‘unpack’ an image is a great entry point for many students: the whole image of the material can be placed in the center of a page, and cutaway focus images of the detail can then be added to the page, with text bubbles providing commentary on the detail. iMovie can be used to generate a Ken Burns style documentary (the default setting for still images in iMovie is the Ken Burns effect). Using Google Earth to locate the source material’s origin or current archive, through adding placemarks to the map, is a powerful way to build relationships to the material through geography. Building online collections, through blogs and wikis, and also through Flickr sets, provides the opportunity for the wider world to comment on the material, thus leading to new perspectives and new understanding around documents that were perhaps previously only available to a few.

The connections to the past that can be created through students using primary source material are important for the future of history and historical learning. By creating and gaining access to primary source material that before the arrival of the digital age was restricted, we can hope to build a new story of our past, and thereby gain a new understanding of who we are today.

Library media specialists should be the hub for the wheel that connects 21st century information technology with all the content areas in Maine’s schools. Principals, as the educational leaders in schools, make key decisions that can support, enable, and sustain the core supporting role of the school library program.

Principals and librarians are invited to join in the conversation with our panel of librarians and principals including Teri Caouette from MLTI, Nancy Grant from Penquis Valley High School, Pam Goucher from Freeport Middle School, and Eileen Broderick tech integrator and library media specialist from Rumford Elementary School.

To sign up for the free webinar please select Webcasts at the top of this page.

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/

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?

Over the course of the afternoon and evening webinars, Paige, Mark, Roberta, and Casey shared specific elements of MDI HS’s approach to providing flexible media to students. Like other schools, MDI HS is building the plane while they’re flying it, but there is an awareness of UDL that separates their work.

MDI HS has a unique MLTI history, and our guest team credited that for their school’s advance toward digital learning. For readers of this blog who are unfamiliar with the MLTI, the project started by deploying 1:1 laptops for 7th and 8th grades in 2002. In 2007, the MLTI expanded to high school teachers. For the 2009-2010 school year, high schools were given the opportunity to opt-in to the MLTI for 1:1 in grades 9-12. MDI HS, however, began to phase in 1:1 for grades 9-12 in 2005. The Class of 2008 was the first class to be 1:1 with MLTI laptops from grades 7 through 12.

Featured aspects of our discussion:
An Individualized English class in which students conduct a “Design Your Own (Reading) Adventure (DYORA).” Students find their own Lexile levels to guide (but not dictate) their choice of three possible books to read for the project. The selection process of those books has specific criteria. Students analyze each book and meet with the teacher to conference on which of the three books is the most appropriate final selection. The process of digging into the meaning of the selected book is scaffolded in varied ways. To learn more about this project, please visit the Individualized English class web site and choose “DYORA Proposal Pages” from the left sidebar to access the document (a Pages file).

Casey Rush gave us a tour of his class web site, The Virtual English Notebook. All of Casey’s instructional materials are accessed by students through this site, which includes pages for civics, global literacies, and vocabulary. His Literary Selections is host to numerous digital versions of materials that are available online for free.

Mark Arnold shared Issue 33 of the school’s TechNotes Newsletter, the title of which is Universal Design for Learning (UDL) & Differentiated Instruction (DI).

Included in our discussion of these materials, and many online educational materials in general, was the issue of accessibility for students who are blind and use screen readers, such as VoiceOver on the Mac. Although not all elements of the web sites we viewed are accessible to VoiceOver, our guests explained their awareness of this weakness and that their primary goal at this time is to give teachers the support needed to provide materials that are accessible to their existing population of students. As a special educator and a tech integrator, Paige and Mark expressed commitment to progressing toward accessibility withVoiceOver.

We also featured a discussion of Bookshare, which is an online repository of both public domain and copyrighted materials in digital text (txt, html, DAISY) and Braille (BRF) formats. Bookshare operates under the copyright exemption law that allows copyrighted materials to be rendered in specialized formats for individuals with qualifying print disabilities. Currently, their collection is over 70,000 digital books, textbooks, teacher-recommended reading, periodicals, and assistive technology tools. I call it the Amazon of Copyright Exemption.

As a result of federal funding, Bookshare offers free memberships for U.S. students with qualifying print disabilities. MDI HS has an organizational membership to Bookshare. Paige explained that students with print disabilities at MDI HS are currently having their needs met through teacher-created materials, web sites, online textbooks, and the school library’s collection of audio books. She described how qualifying students who are transitioning to postsecondary environments will be introduced to Bookshare as a resource for acquiring books they will need as they continue their education.

Other sources of specialized formats of instructional materials were mentioned. For example, Recordings for the Blind & Dyslexic (or RfB&D) provides human-narrated audio of publications. And the Maine State Library has a Talking Books Program for individuals with print disabilities.

Additional resources presented and shared during the webinar:
Maine AIM

National Center on AIM

Maine AIM Web Notebook

MDI HS Teaching & Learning Guide Builder

Readability

Ms. Greene’s MDI HS Mathematics site

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.