Sparta Connections

Here are our slides from today's meeting. Feel free to join in on the conversation.



Join us in the chat to ask questions and push our thinking. Also, here is the link to the wiki where we created the curriculum.

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Apply to the Google Teacher Academy - Nov. 18

Below is the official announcement and invitation to apply:

Google Teacher Academy - NYC

New York, New York

November 18, 2008

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Applications Due: October 10, 2008
http://www.google.com/educators/gta.html
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We are pleased to announce that another round of Google’s FREE training program for K-12 educators is coming to The Big Apple! Outstanding educators from around the world are encouraged to apply for the Google Teacher Academy taking place on Tuesday November 18, 2008.

The GTA is an intensive, one-day event (8:30am-7:30pm) where participants get hands-on experience with Google’s free products and other technologies, learn about innovative instructional strategies, collaborate with exceptional educators, and immerse themselves in an innovative corporate environment. Upon completion, GTA participants become Google Certified Teachers who share what they learn with other K-12 educators in their local region.

50 outstanding educators from around the world will be selected to attend the GTA based on their passion for teaching, their experience as leaders, and their use of technology in K-12 settings. Each applicant is REQUIRED to produce and submit an original one-minute video on either of the following topics: “Motivation and Learning” or “Classroom Innovation.” Applications for the event in New York City are due on October 10, 2008. If possible, please use Google Video or YouTube to post these original videos. Participants must provide their own travel, and if necessary, their own lodging. Though we will give preference to K-12 educators within a 90-minute local commute of an Academy event, anyone may apply.

Learn more about the program and the application at http://www.google.com/educators/gta.html

The GTAs have been a wonderful experience for everyone involved, with 97% of all attendees rating the GTA as “outstanding.”

Here are a few quotes from GTA participants:

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“The academy was everything I hoped for and more! I can’t wait to plan out ways to use the tools we learned about, to share my experiences with my colleagues and to re-connect with the other academy participants!”

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“The focus on innovation in education, and not just about the tools, was right on target.”

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“I appreciate the opportunity to be connected to a group of educators that are passionate about preparing students for the 21st century. I feel inspired and able to meet the challenges that lie ahead!”

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“Until now, I had never attended a conference where I was so engaged and loving every minute of it.”

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“This was easily the most important professional development experience I have ever had as an educator. World-class tools demonstrated by world-class people at a world-class facility. THANK YOU!”

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“I love [the Google Certified Teacher community] for the ideas and inspiration that comes flowing to and from it…folks share professional development strategies (technology or otherwise) that have worked. It’s nice to have a variety of ways to assist others and having that variety also provides spice for those of us responsible for doing the providing.”

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Feel free to send any questions to “gteachers@gmail.com”, and please spread the word to anyone who may be interested in joining us.

We’re looking forward to another great event!

- The GTA Team

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Google Teacher Academy - NYC

New York, New York

November 18, 2008

——————————————————–

Applications Due: October 10, 2008
http://www.google.com/educators/gta.html



For tips on the video and the application see my friend and fellow GCT Kevin Jarrett's post and for additional information, visit my blog at ThumannResources.com

Good luck!
Lisa

Wii in PE

After the June NJECC meeting a few people asked me to post the Wii in PE movie.

Here is a link to the movie:

http://web.mac.com/glenfieldschool/DigitalStorytelling/WII_in_PE.html

Enjoy!
Samantha

Jing

Jing is an amazing tool for capturing and sharing video and still images from your desktop.

I have used it to make easy "How to..." videos for staff, students, and parents.

I am also having students use it to create videos while they are using different types of software. So, when they create something great, they can share it with the rest of us. It is a wonderful to for peer coaching and collaboration.

If you start using, Jing please share your ideas here.

Here is the link for Jing:

http://www.jingproject.com/

Running the Mac OS X maintenance scripts

Running the Mac OS X maintenance scripts

Mac OS X is a UNIX-based system. UNIX systems run scheduled maintenance routines — known as maintenance scripts — to clean up a variety of System logs and temporary files. By default, these are executed between 03:15 and 05:30 hours local time, depending on the script.

If your Mac is shut down or in sleep mode during these hours, the maintenance scripts will not run.

This Dashboard Widget, Maintidget, will let you run the scripts when you choose.

Download @:

http://www.giantmike.com/widgets/Maintidget.html

2/15 Meeting - Random Thoughts

Let's blog! Sue Sullivan just gave us a site that hosts a competition for K-12 students to create the Google Doodle! www.google.com/doodle4google

Know of any other great online competitions? This would be the place to add them.

Whatever pops into your mind during the meeting, just BLOG IT! :-)

Teacher tech advisor/coordinator

Our District currently has a stipend position at each school for "A/V Coordinator". This person is supposed to help with AV setups, toner order/replacement, tech supplies orders, etc. I would like to expand this position so that the AV Coordinator can be more of a technology helper for their school. In a perfect world, we would come up with some general criteria and then I would do a training for these teachers during the summer. I would then meet with them a few times a year to go over new topics, issues, etc. These teachers would get a laptop and a stipend for their troubles. The would be expected to help lead some staff development in their own school and help their fellow teachers with basic technology issues, questions, problems, etc.

Is anyone doing any thing similiar to this? Do you have any ideas that you can share? I am not expecting these teachers to become techs for their schools, but more of a first line of defense.
Thanks!

Social Networking Sites

Sorry for the delay in posting my social networking resources. You can fine everything I showed at the November meeting at http://edtech-cooltools.blogspot.com/

Sarah Rolle

How do you spell MIT?

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On a quiet day here in Sparta, when everyone is geared up for the long weekend full of Thanksgiving meals and shopping, Ryan Lollgen and Steve Schels had something else in mind for their United States History Classes.

Ryan had made contact with Dr. Pauline Maier, the Dr. William R. Kenan Professor of History at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, after having read some of her work. A simple email and phone call to the contact information she supplied landed Ryan and Steve, and more importantly, their students, access to one of America's preeminent historians.

On Wednesday morning at 10am, we used Skype to phone Dr. Maier at her office and conducted an hour-long interview with her with questions generated by the students. The podcast of the event is available for your listening above, and while not the cleanest audio in the world, it is well worth a listen by anyone interested in a unique conversation about the American Revolution.

Maier was featured prominently in PBS's documentary Liberty a few years back, the ebullient style with which she exhibited in the documentary really came through in the phone interview. Her enthusiasm for the topics the students brought up was refreshing for us to hear, and her perspectives were poignant and insightful.

Perhaps the greatest part of the process was that she was genuinely interested in not only the topics, but why the students wanted to know these things. Her answers to the questions the students asked were above and beyond what we all expected, and reflected her desire to help the students view history as a dynamic and changing process. Here is a quote from an follow-up email she sent to Ryan:

Ryan,
Congratulations again on getting your students so involved in American
history. There's nothing like encouraging them to ask questions to avoid
the sense that history is a boring collection of dead facts arranged
chronologically rather than an exciting inquiry into human experience. My
hat is really off to you and the other teachers I have known who, like you,
are doing good work preparing students to think and, not incidentally, be
informed citizens of the American Republic. What was the line attributed
to Franklin (perhaps mythically)? I think as he left the convention,
someone asked him what kind of government the Americans would have, and he
supposedly said "a republic, if you can keep it." We need to know what a
republic is and what it demands of its people if we want to keep it.

This was a unique event for us to participate in, one that showed how we can easily bring experts into our classrooms just by reaching out to them and extending the invitation. Much like Dee Peselli did with Kyle MacDonald a few months back, all it takes is a teacher who wants to provide a memorable experience for his or her students.

Cross-posted at Tech Dossier.

Technorati Tags: sparta, skype, MIT, expertvoices

Janine's Music Presentation

Here is me email for those of you who asked: janine@cybernex.net

I would be glad to chat more with anyone who wants more info - or has other ideas to share!

May you all have as much fun as I am having when you've been teaching this long!

Ustream Address for today

If you would like to follow the presentation online and participate in the chat, here is the link.

If you are not busy today....

Today marks a big day for us in terms of our movement towards a more transparent school community: we are broadcasting a student-led conference on the environment live via Ustream and inviting you, your students, and your colleagues to watch us and interact with us through the chat.

Laura Sofen, a 7th grade Language Arts teacher and I sat down about a month ago and worked through our ideas and made this happen for our students. As Laura said, they had worked so hard, inquired so much and grown through this research process, that allowing them this outlet to show the understanding they have gained was a fitting reward.

Our goal tomorrow is to engage in dialogue, to pull you (and your students) in from wherever you are. We want our students to see "Global Warming" as truly "global," and not just something they are reading about because we are in an election cycle here in the states.

The times are 9:30am, 11:00am, and 1:30pm EST in the US (GMT-5). Please take the time to drop in and bring your students if you can. The students are in 7th Grade, so they are not quite high school age, but in listening to them practice today, they have done their homework and are ready for a global audience.

Here is the address for my Ustream channel where will be live from. Hope to see you there.

Flickr image credit: "What Global Warming?" from maistora's photostream

Technorati Tags: environment, globalwarming, conference, sparta, education, technology, edtech

Some Great Writing

I would hate for this to seem as if it were self-promoting, but since I am actually promoting the work and writing of others, hopefully you all will excuse it. We have a district technology blog in Sparta called Tech Dossier, which until recently was managed and written solely by me. Last week, I asked a quorum of teachers and administrators to begin contributing posts as co-authors. A few interesting things have happened:

• the readership has increased by at least 50%
• participation in the form of comments has increased, well, it actually never really existed before, but now every post has at least three comments
• there is lively, conversation and diverse conversation going on.

These things are all things I could not accomplish on my own in over a year as the sole writer of this blog. Now, with the aid of three teachers and two administrators, this blog has vitality and life like it never had before. Please go and check it out and add your expertise to the conversation.


Technorati Tags: sparta, edtech, education, njecc0708

Acceptable Use Policies

I was interested in new acceptable use policies which discuss USB keys, emailing projects, blogs and other new technologies.
Please let me know what new issues are outlined in your acceptable use policies.
Are AUP's on the district website?
Thanks

Tricia

PB Wiki

Congrats to Samantha Morra for being the first to contact me with her new PB Wiki address. I gave her a free upgrade for a year which is worth $24.95 a month and 2 gigs of storage plus traffic statistics and full zip backups.

If you are still interested in creating a wiki using PB Wiki, Heather Sullivan made the same free offer in her afternoon session. You can contact her at sullivanbio@yahoo.com. (That's one of her e-mail addresses.)

I want to echo Patricks comments - thanks for having me and I look foward to coming back and sharing again. What a great group of educators!!

I've received many e-mails so far with questions about Web 2.0 tools and AUPs. Keep them coming and feel free to subscribe to my monthly newsletter at http://cmsce.rutgers.edu.

Lisa

Lisa Thumann
Senior Specialist in Technology Education
Rutgers University
Center for Mathematics, Science and Computer Education

Another great thing about UStream...

is that you can embed your recorded shows into your blog!





Thanks everyone for a great day. I hope you took something away from what Angela and I spoke about. It was great listening to Samantha and Lisa talk about what they are up to. See you in November!



Technorati Tags: njecc0708,, sparta,, web2.0

Samantha Morra's Presentation

Many of you have asked for a copy of my presentation. I just threw this up on my .Mac account.

http://web.mac.com/glenfieldschool/samanthamorra/Presentations/Presentations.html

There is the original file, a PDF and a movie. The files are huge!

Enjoy!
Samantha

Chat for Patrick's Presentation

Presentation Tomorrow

On Friday, October 19th, Angela Davis and I (from Sparta Township Public Schools) will be presenting at NJECC. Last spring, two teachers from the Sparta Middle School, Erica Hartman and Jo Shuppon presented on their use a of wikis in the classroom.

This time around, I will be going into as much of our work as possible, showing wiki projects, blogging, podcasting, screencasting, tablet applications, some of our global connections and discussing how we develop our staff in terms of technology and Web 2.0. Angela will be talking about the dialogue that regularly occurs on her AP Language and Composition wiki, and her SAKAI project with a group of seniors.

We will be live broadcasting this presentation via UStream, provided it is not blocked by any firewalls that MSU has. If so, we will switch over to Google Presentations and present that way. The aim of broadcasting this is to foster a backchannel discussion that Angela and I are privy to as we present. I will open up the chat room to the member of my twitter network as well, and I hope some of that group can join the discussion as well. To access the UStream channel and the chat, just click here. You will most likely have to create an account before being able to appear as yourself in the chat, but that process takes only a few moments.

Regardless, here is a link to a Google Notebook page I created with links to things I will talk about during the presentation. See you then!

Technorati Tags: njecc0708,, ustream,, wikis,, web2.0

Alice and Scratch

I discovered Alice, from Carnegie Mellon University and Scratch, from M.I.T., last year. This year I'm planning to teach the basics of both programs to my middle school students. Has anyone been using these programs? If so, do you have any words of advice and/or example projects?
Thanks,

Norm

Middle School Blogging

I want to have my Middle School students "blog" with classmates at other schools on a local, state, national and international level. I am concerned with safety issues, so I am looking for any advice from colleagues who have already begun such a program or are in the process of implementing one.

Thinkquest

I am just beginning the Thinkquest competition for the first time. We are using PC computers. The whole thing looks a bit overwhelming! Has anyone done this and if so can you recommend software we should use for creating our projects? Any helpful hints for this project would be greatly appreciated.
Jackie

Recycling computers

I had planned on recycling some old - but still working - imacs through Apple - but apparently now you have to box them up and send them yourself. Does anyone have another solution?

janine

iMac Screen Scrambled

I have new imacs and after sleeping for a couple of periods when the screens come back on the top looks like giant pixels and the screen gets scrambled. I have emailed Dave. Was just wondering if anyone else was having this issue.

janine

MacBook battery issue

I had an iChat with Dave Marra about the issue:

Hey Dave, My battery issue: battery in my Macbook (2 GHz Core Duo) will go from 100% to reserve to sleep in about 15 minutes!!! Sometimes it will just shut down. Any thoughts?

Dave responded:
"This battery update should fix it."
>>> http://www.apple.com/support/macbook_macbookpro/batteryupdate/

Out-of-District workshop/conference policy

I've heard that some districts have a new policy that in order to go to a workshop or conference you have to submit a request six weeks prior to the event for the Board of Ed to approve. Is this true? What's the policy in your district? Will it effect going to monthly NJECC meeting?

Welcome!

Welcome to the NJECC 2007-2008 Blog. To get started, you'll need to request an invitation by sending your email address to nsulla@idecorp.com (note: we recommend creating a free Google email account for this purpose.)