Our Last Tuesday Night Together+ Recipe!

For our final class, we enjoyed a lovely spring evening.  I thought it might be too windy to be outside, but I saw that this was a hearty group when every single person chose to eat out on the deck.  We ate chicken (and vegetable!) chile casserole and shared summaries of completed papers.  Notice the picture of Chris sharing his Second Life paper from "the pulpit"!

I had requests for my easy chicken chile chicken recipe:

4 cooked chicken breasts--cut in pieces

1 can cream of mushroom soup--I use low fat

1 can cream of chicken soup--I use low fat

1 onion chopped

4 oz can of chopped chiles

1/2 pint sour cream---I use low fat

6 oz green chile salsa or regular salsa(hot or mild)

12 corn tortillas: cut in rectangular strips

1 pound cheddar or jack or colby cheese

Cook the chicken breasts---I usually season them with salt and pepper and a little cumin and brown them in a frying pan before adding a little chicken broth, covering the pan and simmering on low for about 40 minutes or until tender.  You can also bake them.

Mix soups, onion, chiles, salsa and sour cream together.

Put about 3 T. chicken broth in the bottom of a rectangular casserole dish and cover the bottom with tortilla strips.  Place half the chicken on the tortillas and then cover with 1/2 the sauce.  Repeat with the remaining tortillas, chicken and sauce and then top with the grated cheese.

Refrigerate overnight to get flavors to mix.

Bake at 325 degrees for one hour.

For the vegetarian version, just use mushroom soup and substitute assorted vegetables (raw) for the chicken.  I used egg plant, zucchini, asparagus and red pepper.  Instead of putting chicken broth in the bottom of the casserole, use butter or olive oil.

Second Life + Finishing Papers in First Life

Dr. Cynthia Garrety provided us with some exciting possibilities for thinking about using Second Life in educational settings.  We are fortunate to have Cynthia, a national expert in this area, working in our program.  As the picture shows, students were clearly interested in her ideas.

Emily's presentation on a nutrition program for elementary classes was a second highlight of our evening.  Emily had carefully planned and sequenced her talk and was exceptionally clear and professional.

Our final paper groups met and defined both concerns and titles for papers.  I look forward to seeing some drafts of papers this week, and I am pleased with the progress in this area.  Students seem to be supporting each other in this work and I know this will strengthen the final products.

And we are almost finished!

Emily-Morgan

Dou Dou-Ryan

Andrea-Siti

Huae Lei-Collin

Chris-Michael

Diana-Kristine

Amber-Ruslan

Midterms and Podcasts!

And the winners of our digital story competition are:

Collin (mangoes)

Morgan (Alaska/fish)

Ryan (NASA tracking)

Chris (Achilles tendon)

Dou Dou (Chinese New Year)

Stefan (Iraq) Stefan is not pictured since he he away at "camp"

Congratulations to all!  I was interested that even though our class is large, we had no problem recalling the topic of any of the digital stories.  I think this provides further evidence of the power of this approach.

Having successfully completed the midterm exam, we have now moved to a different emphasis in the course.  For the first 2.3 of the class, our emphasis was on the 3 course readings and on creating classroom technology activities that focused upon student learning.  We are now moving toward a focus on the course final papers.  In these papers, students will write an article for teachers and/or practitioners on a technology application or technology applications designed to impact student learning.  For this week, we are working on focusing in on topics for the paper.

Last night, our resource reviewers shared interesting new software approaches with us.  Siti reviewed a free Office-like application called Zoho and Angie reviewed a web site authoring system called Geocities for teachers.  Both are powerful resources for educators.

We then moved to pod-casting and began by looking at some examples located by students in the class.  Evrim then introduced the big ideas of podcasting, described how to do it and then we were off and running with students creating short podcasts on life in different countries.  I was impressed with the enthusiasm that students brought to the podcast assignment.  No one said---'This is too hard---we don't have enough time!".  Instead, each pair immediately went to work on structuring and conducting the interviews and then preparing the podcasts for sharing.  the two that were shared in class were both interesting and lively.  I look forward to viewing the remaining podcasts this week.

Oh What a Night!

Honestly, I did not have high hopes for the digital stories from 505 for this semester.  Students had seemed somewhat reluctant to share their ideas for their stories in class, and both Evrim and I had received few inquiries about the stories while they were in progress.  I had the sense that perhaps this group of students had not embraced the digital story assignment as fully as classes in the past.  And was I surprised (and Evrim too)!

Each of the digital stories was both personal and informative.  We discovered new and interesting things about our colleagues----from torn Achilles heels to adventures in Alaska.  We also discovered that we have several students in class who are gifted photographers.  From tearing up over Stefan's piece on Iraq to enjoying the humor in Chris's story of his Achilles heel, I was quite enthralled with each of the stories.  As I mentioned in class, I had planned to grade the stories (I was even equipped with my rubric!) as I watched them, but I found the stories so compelling that grading them the first time through was impossible.  I know I will enjoy watching them again, however!  It is clear that digital story telling is a powerful tool for creating learner centered (and knowledge centered and assessment centered and community centered!) classroom environments.

The evening also included a review of Flickr by Ezzie and she mentioned some features (the map piece and the groups piece) that were new to me and looked very useful.  

We also spent a little time on "big ideas" from each of the three readings and suggestions for reviewing and tying the readings together.

All in all, it was a memorable evening.

SITE (Society for Information Technology & Teacher Education) Conference

Hello All,

Spending two weeks away from home, I missed Ames already. I have also been following the class blog to keep myself updated. That is another good thing about Internet and communication technologies we can cross the borders of time and distance. My visit at University of Virginia was very rewarding as I got to know their instructional technology program, professors and graduate students there. Moreover Charlottesville is a great city with full of history and culture and architecture is also amazing.

Dr. Thompson and I now are at SITE conference in Charleston, South Carolina. The conference just started and we are attending the sessions on variety of topics ranging from TPACK (Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge) to games and simulations in education. Site is a well-known organization in education which promotes research, scholarship, collaboration, exchange and support. Iowa State University has been represented with many graduate students and professors here in the last 20 years. Next year it is going to be in San Diego in March, so you might want to consider submitting your 505 final paper to this conference for next year. It is a great conference with full of interaction, networking and friendship.

The website is: http://site.aace.org/

I'll be posting my insights here as I attend to the sessions and learn new technologies or ideas to share with you. Hope you are having a great time in Ames and please let us know if you have any questions about your digital stories.

Here are some pictures from my UVA visit with me, Karly (ISU graduate student), Daniel and other UVA graduate students.

Too many loose ends.......+ TPACK, Language Learning, Survey Monkey and Doodle!

My idea for class tonight was to take time to tie up some loose ends from the first few weeks: technology and process writing, digital stories in the classroom, Logo and problem solving and TPACK (technological pedagogical content knowledge).  Though this seemed like a good idea to me, I think the evening turned into a series of somewhat unrelated topics.  If I had it to do over again, I would have presented the topics in a variety of ways and worked for more student involvement.

Highlights of the evening included Dou Dou and Mike's resource presentations.  Both presentations were well-organized and each presenter was clear in his/her description of the resource. 

I was also pleased with our Logo and problem solving small group discussions---each group added some specifics to our knowledge of how Logo can assist in the teaching/learning of problem solving.  Most groups agreed that Logo is a valuable tool for teaching students to solve problems through learning from mistakes.  I added the idea that Logo can help students learn to define problems and to divide problems into small pieces.

We will meet online next week and we will also be using the new class wiki to record ideas on pros and cons in the 505 experience.  I look forward to learning from student comments.

Content Area Tools + Digital Story Progress

We welcomed Daniel Tillman from the University of Virginia and Daniel's expertise fit right into our evening's activities.  Daniel demonstrated the Craft Robo, an emerging technology that shows promise for creating engineering and design activities for K-8 learners.  He also shared his expertise in documentary film making with us and provided some guidance for our work with digital story telling.  Evrim followed up with an activity designed to encourage planning and story boarding for digital stories.  She made a strong case for the fact that storyboarding will save time in the long run.

Both resource reviews were from content areas---Amber reviewed a soil evaluation package and Stefan reviewed TI resources (usually for math, but Stefan demonstrated applications across content areas).  Both presenters did a good job relating their specialized applications to the class as a whole.  Amber handled a minor technology glitch well---all of us who work with technology have to develop the ability to keep on going if the technology does not do exactly what we have in mind.  Amber modeled this ability effectively.

I will be changing our schedule a bit for next week, substituting wikis (a simple, yet powerful application) for podcasting.  I don't want students trying to produce podcasts and digital stories at the same time.  We will then introduce podcasting on March 10, the day we share digital stories.

Next week we will focus upon readings, wikis and setting up our online class for the following week.

Building Knowledge Together

Both Bransford and Papert write about knowledge building activities for students.  I try to design 505 as a knowledge building environment for students (and for me and Evrim too).  Last night we had several examples of this knowledge building.

In groups, students defined some specific similarities in the thinking of Bransford and Papert and when the groups reported back, the shared information sparked interesting, informed discussion.  Collin's point about Bransford's discussion of misconceptions relating to feedback in the Logo environment provided a new connection between the two for me-----and I am sure for others in the class.  As evidenced in the picture, students in each of the groups were truly using the readings to make their points.

Diana provided more new knowledge with her well-organized presentation on Google Docs.  She shared several capabilities of Google Docs that go beyond sharing documents and interest in the presentation was high.  Her enthusiasm for Google Docs made her presentation especially effective.  Quote Diana: "Google Docs Rocks".

Our "What is Learning" adventure revealed that we have several skilled photographers in our class, as well as students who can share knowledge about IMovie and Movie Maker.  This shared expertise will help support our digital story assignment.

I forgot to suggest that students begin to collect images for their digital stories, so I am hoping that students reading this blog will get the message.  We would like to do a little preliminary storyboarding in class next week, so bringing a few images will help students get started on their digital story.

Success + Winer in Iowa!

We tried a new approach to our discussions this week.  Evrim suggested having students share their delicious pieces (sounds like a candy bar) in pairs and then having each pair report back to the whole class on one of the pieces.  From my perspective, this approach worked very well--almost all the delicious pieces provoked thoughtful, informed discussion.  Next week we will again work on beginning discussions in small groups and we will change the class furniture arrangement, as suggested in blog comments.  In any case, I am pleased with our progress.

Our new topic this week was technology in the teaching of writing and we focused upon ideas for pre-writing activities.  Evrim introduced the group to Webspiration and we played with Webspiration's capabilities by doing a pre-writing task centered upon explaining Iowa winters to people who have never lived here.  Most of the groups were writing for an international audience and several of the products demonstrated the power of using a graphic organizer to encourage and arrange pre-writing ideas.  And the activity was fun!

Lei introduced the group to Hot Potatoes and did a good job of introducing all the features of this useful tool  All of our resource reviews thus far have covered interesting, useful applications.

Next week we will begin our work with digital images.

Fabulous Logo Assignments

I had some fun grading Logo assignments this morning, and I was quite impressed with the creative approach that many students took to this assignment.  Assignments included a replica of a picture in a parent's home, a school model, interesting flowers and even two peas in a pod.

Grading the assignments also made it clear to me that I did not emphasize the idea of super procedure or calling procedure enough in class.  I will explain that idea tonight and allow students to resubmit----using a calling procedure is a trivial process in the programming sequence, but an important and powerful idea.

Pictures from Class

I also posted the link for the class picasa album. Take a look:

Evrim

505 Spring 2009

We are getting there.......

I think that the size of this class makes discussion a little more challenging.  Since reading discussion is an important part of this class, I am going to try some different ways to get a little more participation.  Next week, I will have everyone take a minute and write down their "delicious" piece of the readings at the beginning of class and then we will use these in later discussions that evening.  I also plan to try some smaller group discussions with Evrim and I moving around a little and some online discussions.  We will just keep working at this until we find what works for this group.

Evrim shared some interesting ideas and valuable resources for our work with blogging.  I am hoping that students will be able to add some resources to the online discussion on blogging this week.

Morgan got us started with podcasting and also shared some resources on this topic.  I believe that we will have a follow-up session on podcasting from Andrea that will focus on elementary applications.  Since Morgan is in secondary science, this will be a good combination.

Major topics for the evening included why Logo?, blogging in education, and metacognition.  Taken together, these topics suggest the focus in this class on active, learner-centered computer applications.

I am enjoying the group and the opportunity to get to know students from different disciplines.  I am confidant that we will continue to form a community of technology using educators.

Highlights from our Second Meeting......

For me, the resource presentations were the highlight of our meeting tonight.  Both Ryan and Russ did an excellent job of choosing and presenting their resources, wikis and Moodle.  Each of them actually used the resource in the presentation, which was very effective.  Each presentation was well organized and clear.  I am always pleased when the first software presentations are successful, since that sets a high bar for everyone else!

It seemed a little difficult to get discussion going this evening.  I am hoping that the group will relax about speaking up and I need to work on techniques to stimulate discussion.  I think that the lecture presentation may have discouraged discussion and I will work on a different approach for next week.

Our Turkish visitors made for a very large group tonight and that may have inhibited some of our discussions also.  We can keep working on discussions together and perhaps our online discussion this week will help get in class discussions rolling also.

Our first night!

When I looked at my class list before class, I was somewhat concerned when I saw that we had 21 students in  this graduate class.  Since I like to emphasize discussion and interaction in my classes,  having a class this large seemed rather daunting.  In fact, I was feeling nervous about the size of the group as the evening began.  After a few minutes, however, I began to feel that this diverse and motivated group of students was going to form into a cohesive, interactive whole.  As the evening progressed, I became more convinced of this as we began to discuss and interact more and more.  The Logo session was active and fun and by the end of the evening, I was even pleased at the size of the class.

Having Evrim Baran help with the class will be an important part of our success and our ability to continue to interact and work together.

Somewhat ironically, we will have some visitors from the Turkish Student Project next week---so our group of 21 will turn into a group of more than 25.  I think, however, that we are ready for that.