This is our class blog. It will serve as our discussion forum, connection to each other, and the main webpage you will be accessing. If this is your first visit, then please first read the entry below (titled, 'Practice Session') and follow the instructions there--- then return to this one.
The content here should keep you pretty busy--for now you only need to know a few things.
This blog can be viewed by anyone, but will only allow the participants of EDC922 to interact with it. When you would like to respond to someone or comment upon a session, just click on the 'comment' link below each of my postings (you should sign up for a Blogger account ASAP and choose a 'User Name' that is easily identifiable) until then choose the 'anonymous' button under 'choose an identity'; I'm sure some of you have already begun to practice a little.
In the left-hand margin you will see links to individual lessons (accessible every Tuesday).
If you need to contact me then please email me at DaveFontaine1@gmail.com.
This blog, in addition to its use as an interactive communication tool, will also be where you can access and download your weekly sessions. The presentation links to the left will be accessible on a week-to-week basis (Tues. afternoons). I've said it before, but it bears repeating---When attempting to download always choose 'save' rather than 'open.'
The syllabus is also linked to the left. Google has a free service that allows you to just upload any Word document and with one additional click it gets published online with its own URL. The course syllabus is an example of how easy it is to use, and we'll practice with this tool before next week.
One more aspect that will be unique about this course is that I support a completely collaborative teaching philosophy. Following that mindset, I will keep your assignments, comments, and reflections viewable and accessible to future participants of this course. The 'goal' of that is:
- For future participants to gain from the collective knowledge of your experiences;
- Use what you have done; and
- Incorporate new ideas into their classroom.
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Some of the content for our sessions is also covered in my "Blogs and Wikis" course. Where that is the case I'll also give you a link to the 'comments' of past participants about that topic.
Before we go any further I would like each of you to practice using this forum and introduce yourself. We will be spending the semester together, so it is important to learn as much about each other as possible. Click on the 'comment' link below this posting, then you may click the 'anonymous' button and write a few paragraphs about yourself. (If you are feeling bold you may sign up for a Blogger account now and use the 'user name' that you create when you 'comment' rather than choosing 'anonymous.')
Please include:
-your name
-email address (so that you may contact each other directly if needed),
-your educational background,
-teaching history,
-current teaching position with location, and lastly
-what you hope to come away with when this semester is over, along with any additional information about you that you wish to share, like your motivation for choosing this course...
After you have finished posting this profile, come back to this page and read the '922-Session 1' posting (below this one), then find the 'Session 1' link (along the left-hand margin), download it, and view it. When you are finished with the session please click on the 'comment' link again and add any comments, insights, or reflections you have for Session 1, under the Session 1 posting.
Sometimes it takes a little while to get the hang of using this forum. I have taken this into consideration by reducing the workload of the first session. (Of course, if you get distracted easily, then you could spend hours exploring.)
Week 1's primary goal is to make sure everyone is on the same page and skill level before we sink our teeth into the meat of this course. However, if you run into any 'techno-speedbumps' then please feel free to contact me with any questions.
Everything here is licensed by Creative Commons. This means that you have complete authority to download, save, share, and use all of the lessons in your classroom, but are prohibited from any commercial uses.
You will notice that each slide of the PowerPoint presentation has the narration transcribed in the 'notes section' of each slide. This is because each semester we have teachers from around the world taking this course. We've had teachers from Canada, China, Alaska, California, Phillipines, Sudan, Singapore...taking my courses (And they may need help understanding my "Ro-diland" accent) but more importantly, the transcribed narration allows you to take these slides and use them in your own classroom. (or, if you find my voice putting you to sleep, you can just read the slides instead)
Good luck this semester! I look forward to working and collaborating with you.
Dave Fontaine
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STOP--DO NOT READ ANY FURTHER UNTIL YOU HAVE FOLLOWED THE INSTRUCTIONS ABOVE.
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922-Session 1 "eBooks-What They Are and What Do They Look Like!!!"
This semester will take us onto a new path!
A path that leads to more collaboration--
more cooperative learning---
and more opportunities to create differentiated instruction and visual learning---all with the goal of helping foster literacy, and learning, for our students.
Here is a taste of the excitement that awaits you when you download our first session.
Good luck and take plenty of notes because I don't want to miss any of your ideas, excitement, and insights when you post your comments!
Here is a copy of Session 1 if you want to view it online w/o the download
You may also read past participants' comments here and here. Some people find reading them before the session helps with their perspective.
Have fun!
Dave
PS-If you have any trouble downloading any of these sessions from the link on the left, then I've got backups on Authorstream.com. Just visit the link and type in edc922 in the search box, then view the most recent session, or click here to go to Session 1 directly.
21 comments:
Hi,
My name is Susan Geidner. (geidners@avoca37.org) I earned my bachelors degree in early childhood education from Indiana University in Bloomington, and my masters in curriculum and instruction from National Louis University. I had been a classroom teacher in grades k-3 for 20 years, before becoming the library media specialist at Avoca West Elementary School 3 years ago. Avoca West is a very tech rich district in Glenview, IL. In December I earned my LMS certificate from Illinois State University. Through this course I hope to become comfortable with the ever changing world of ebooks, and find ways to use them effectively with the staff & students in my district. My other reason for taking this course is because it will move me to the top lane on our salary scale & with the 1st of four sons heading to college in the fall, I need every penny I can get! :)
Greetings fellow bloggers, my name is Simon Burden and my email address for communication is burdensabroad@hotmail.com. That’s the important bits and now just a little about me.
I’m a 4th grade teacher at an Elementary school in Singapore. I really enjoy teaching but came to it later life, I received my degree in Elementary Education in 2005 from UNLV. Before that I was in the gaming business, starting as a roulette dealer and ending as director of marketing. I know you want to know so here goes; there is no way to beat the casino in the long term. The odds on every game are always in favor of the house and over the long term they will win; my advice is decide on your losing limit, stick to it and have fun.
When I’m not teaching I enjoy competitive running, biking, reading, and like many of you living abroad and travelling. I am lucky to have a wife who shares the same passion as I for travelling and teaching, together we have taught in the USA, Cambodia, China and now Singapore.
My motivation for choosing this course was twofold. I need 6 credits to renew my license and wanted a course that was completely internet run with the added caveat because of where we live, that there was no live chat times. Secondly I really wanted to do a course that I could use in the classroom and I think this will suit that purpose extremely well.
I look forward to working with you all over the next two months and good luck.
Hi. My name is Kathleen Leonard-Waterman, and I am a high school foreign language teacher in Mass. Here is my school district:
http://www.bmrsd.info/
As with all districts as of late, we are suffering from drastic budget cuts. My hope is to find ways to continue with our high academic standards despite the lack of funds. My email address is kathleenlw@gmail.com
It's nice to "meet" you.
Hi,
I'm Melissa Techman and you can find me at:
mtechman@k12albemarle.org
and I'm mtechman at Twitter, Pinterest, Diigo and Symbaloo
I became a school librarian via the alternative certification path, after being a children's librarian at Houston Public Library. My family is Irish and I've been a naturalized U.S. citizen since I was 10. After living in E. Africa, England, TX, and North Carolina, I now live in beautiful Charlottesville, VA, where I am a K-5 librarian with Albemarle County Schools.
I'm interested in learning as much as possible about ebooks and enriched books, because the publishing context is changing minute by minute and I hope to help my students, their families, and my colleagues understand their options.
It'll be great learning from and with all of you.
Hello everyone!
My name is Leslie Stryker and my email for this class is falibrary@gmail.com. Long ago I earned my bachelor's degree in geography at the University of Toronto. Took time off, moved to the Mount Washington Valley (NH/Maine), had a family, and eventually went back to school, online, for my LMS degree at Clarion University. It's now been four years that I have been on the faculty at Fryeburg Academy, Fryeburg, Maine, as a teacher librarian.
I was hoping the digital book thing would go away, but I am choosing to become educated about this information format to better serve the students, staff and faculty at the school. (Can you tell I am not a fan? I am looking for some personal growth here.)
Looking forward to the journey!
Dave,
At the end of session 1 in the syllabus, I was following the instructions re: going to google books; then download "new offline mode". However, there is not My ebooks on the page is sends you to google play. I noodled around for a while but did not come up with anything re: offline mode. ?? Mary Ellen
I too had a bit of trouble with the Google ebooks. I tried the google play button (that was the only one I found as well) and was given a message that the option isn't allowed in my country. Singapore does have a lot of rules!
It is nice to start getting a handle on some of the terms I have been hearing bantered around. I love technology and those techie people but sometimes when you aren’t speaking the exact language it can be very frustrating and often techies don’t have the time to explain all that part to you when asked. I am very interested in the open source resources and wonder about the content quality. I am also very curious about building content and where the resources come from for that. I am in elementary and we teach almost all subjects. While I don’t rely on traditional texts (I am in an IB school) I do need resources for creating learning experiences for my students. I find I struggle more when teaching the younger ones who need some guidance and direction towards material at their reading levels; I do remember creating webquests with links and activities back in the day.
First session: being at an IB school and in the PYP we have NO text books, it’s entirely (apart from some stand-alone Math lessons) research based. Therefore, Creative Commons/OER may be another avenue of exploration for the kids. I can’t help but wonder how people that have taken the time and effort to study and write about their chosen subject, get paid. We all need money to live, having been a consultant; I know that I often wrote articles for free but to help enhance a reputation in my given field in order to bring in paid employment opportunities. So maybe these writers have the same ideas.
I am interested in looking and evaluating the quality of the information posted. One of the things we teach our children is to always question the source of the information. Also, I cannot believe that the big publishing houses are going to take this lying down. They are making millions from college kids buying outrageously priced and as Dave points out in his article, often out of date textbooks. I am definitely looking forward to getting more in depth.
Session 1 reflections: I have heard terms "open source" and "creative commons" quite often, but never really knew what they meant. I love the idea of sharing ideas globally, but like Simon, I wonder what the motivation is for people to give all of their creative ideas so freely rather than having them copyrighted in the traditional manner and hopefully profiting from the sale of those ideas. I like to think that many heads are better than one, and hope that OER and cc leads the current and future generations of students who are being educated this way to value the idea of connecting globally because we truly are stronger when we work together as we all have something of value to contribute. Exciting and a bit overwhelming all at the same time!
Greetings from a very tardy participant here, some major technical difficulties around the holiday weekend here. My name is Amy Theisen. My home email is aimlesstn@gmail.com.
I did my undergrad at Marquette University in Math with minors in History and German. Entering the job market during a major recession, I ended up not using that at all, and worked as an air traffic controller for ten years. I went back to school for a Masters in Education from Rockford College and taught Math for ten years. I went back to school for one more masters in Library and Information Science from the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee. I am currently the school librarian/technology integrator at West Allis Central High School, an inner ring suburb of Milwaukee. I am currently developing a bookshelf of eBooks and am looking to help my students find additional resources beyond those that are provided by our school library.
My district is currently transitioning to a one to one model with iPads, they made a major purchase this spring to distribute for the fall semester. They plan to have this fully implemented in two years. The only problem with this is that they are spending all of the available resources purchasing the devices and are purchasing no content or apps. So one of the priorities for us is to find and develop content to support the curriculum.
I didn't realize how much money the textbook industry was making, but it makes sense. I think my favorite thing about eBooks is that you can embed multimedia content.
Hello, I’m Lori Andrada (andradal@newhtfd.org). Now that I've made it past an error that kept me from posting, let me introduce myself. I have a M.S. in Child Development and Family Studies with an emphasis in Early Childhood Education from Purdue University and I’m certified to teach children from ages Birth through Kindergarten. I taught at the lab school at Purdue University for three years before moving with my family to Connecticut. I coordinated the Early Childhood Faith Development program at St. Elizabeth Seton Church for many years and worked as an early childhood consultant in Connecticut, administering the Early Childhood Environment Rating Scale (ECERS-R). After taking courses at Southern Connecticut State University, I received my endorsement in Library Media. Currently, I’m in my second year of working as a Library Media Specialist at two small primary schools in New Hartford, CT.
In my school district, we updated our AUP and we are at the beginning stages of working toward one-to-one computing for our students. Inspired by Heidi Hayes Jacobs and Alan November, as we realign our curriculum with the Common Core State Standards, we are challenging ourselves to make changes that will better prepare our students for living in the 21st century. In this course I’m looking forward to learning more about e-books and open source resources and how to incorporate their use seamlessly into instruction.
Session 1 reflection. My apologies for just responding. Graduation is Sunday for us - finals began this week for regular students and week full of graduation related Senior events which I have either chaperoned or attended as a parent. Whew - I am ready for the summer.
I enjoyed session 1 very much but I will admit, I spent way more than 3 hours following all the trails from the reading! So that got me thinking about how to avoid that for students when using OER philosophy? I understand that we want them to search and uncover the knowledge themselves but are there parameters built in to curriculum that help the students focus their wandering down web trails to those that will get them to their objective? I have found that students are increasingly needy with regard to working on their own. I have many students who will not even attempt problems without my coaching them by either telling them what to do or prompting them where to begin. It seems the students do not want to understand - they just want to get it right. How will those same students respond to being given open ended questions to solve?
With regards to the comments about the shared resources, I would agree I also wonder what the quality will be. However, the nature of the collaborative is that you can take someone's good idea and tweak it into a great idea for your classroom. People don't sell their ideas because it is very difficult to get anything published unless you self publish and you would have to have enough material to fill a book. But, to post your ideas in a colloborative is similar to sharing a lesson plan with someone in your own school or with your department, only on a bigger scale. You can get feedback, different points of view and hopefully in the end a better product.
I also am finishing up the school year. Our last day is June 19th. We had graduation yesterday, and now it is time to prepare the underclassmen for final exams. I, like Mary Ellen, and trying very hard to follow all of the links and trails, but find myself getting a little bit lost. My fear is that I am overlooking some of the requirements, despite the time I am putting into the exploration.
Like in Amy's school, our school is (slowly) moving towards the iPad model. I have one, but the students currently do not.
No worries about exploring links and missing things, Kathleen.
There is so much to see and learn, I am always challenged with showing you too many resources vs. not enough, so I expect most class participants to gain a superficial overview with the hope that you will come back for more depth when you're ready.
Like Kathleen, our school hopes to move to one-to-one computing, but it is slow going. All of our licensed teachers have laptops and many now have ipads to use with their students. We have a computer lab in each school very old computers in the classrooms.
I believe the move to one-to-one computing is important to prepare our students for the 21st century, but I still wonder how to make it sustainable/affordable. With all the technological advances, it's an exciting time to be working in the field of teaching!
I found the reading "Writing in the 21st Century" very helpful for laying out an historical perspective on the teaching of writing. I must admit, that as I am trying to conceive what we must consider as we want to prepare out students to live and work in the 21st century, I can feel a bit overwhelmed. I am still used to thinking of instruction in a very linear way and yet the daily world that we and our students live and function in is no longer linear!
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