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Three Offerings from ISTE

ISTE has timed a good number of books for that magic time, Summer, when I can read ’til my heart’s content. I don’t have the the NET-T in my hot little hands yet, but anyone who’s interested has seem the megaphoned from NECC last week. No, the three I have in mind are Visual Arts: Units for All Levels by Mark Gura,  Database Magic by Sandra Dounce, and Tablet PCs: in K-12 Education edited by Mike van Mantgem.

Visual Arts: Units for All Levels

By Mark Gura (160 pages ISTE, 2007 ISBN 978-1-56484-242-8)

ISTE asserts that the audience is Grade K–12 teachers, preservice teachers, technology coordinators, school and district administrators, teacher educators.

This book is in the familiar format of curriculum series that ISTE publishes. It is synched with new NETS-S and with The National Standards for Art Education (Visual Arts). Typically it is divided into two sections. The first is Mark’s framework for the incorporation of technology in the visual arts classroom. It is very formal. I kept looking to get to know the author here. Well, I had to wait until Section 2. Seeding each subsection with a wonderful quotation and using illustrations carefully Mark provides twenty instructional units. Since I teach Lit on Film, and a suggested project in that course is the production of a claymation or stop-motion film,  I gravitated to Unit 17 “Transformation by Clay Animation”. It will provide so much for my students who choose this project, transforming he manner in which I look at the possibilities. All of the Units meet the standards set by this one, in my mind.

Database Magic

By Sandra Dounce (180 pages ISTE, 2007 ISBN 978-1-56484-245-9)

The author and the editors at ISTE are aiming for Grade 4–12 educators, curriculum specialists, teacher educators, professional development personnel, preservice teachers, school and district administrators.

A CD is included with A good many Microsoft Excel and Access files. If you are familiar with Neo-Office the Mac version of Open Office you will able to utilize the Access files if you are a Mac school.

The book is in the curriculm series structure and is synched with the new NET-S. Section 1 fills almost a third of the book. Though written in gentle terms, I believe it is recognized that the teachers are going to have rather steep learning curve with databases, especially true databases. Sandra uses the first five of six chapters in Section 1 exploring databases. The final chapter focuses on the database functions in Excel.

Section 2 has sixteen units iusing the Excel spreadsheets and the Access databases included on the accompanying CD.  The second section opens with some background and a look at the spreadsheets and databases included on the CD. Sandra has gone to great lengths to not only profile the units in detail but to create a number of worksheets for each lesson.

Understanding databases and being able to create and use them is a critical 21st century skill. The most popular apps on the WWW today could not exist without the creation and integration of databases - from vitual campus visits to Facebook.

Tablet PCs: in K-12 Education

Edited by Mike van Mantgem with Dave Berque, Edward Evans, Tracy Hammond, Kenrick Mack, Mark Payton, and David Sweeney (100 pages ISTE, 2007 ISBN 978-1-56484-241-1)

The audience for this book is the usual cast of characters: K–12 teachers, technology coordinators, library media specialists, instructional leaders, preservice education students, and faculty.

For those with no exposure to tablet PCs, this may seem like a niche concern. It is near and dear to my heart because one of the case studies presented is from Vermont Academy, well within biking distance in the village of Saxtons River Vermont.

The book, in a mere hundred pages, answers the the what, when, and how of the use of tablets. This includes technical facts and lesson plans.

If you are exploring being a 1:1 school or fortunate to have the funds to add a COW (Computers On Wheels), you might want to seriously consider tablets instead of ’simple’ laptops.

Three Books For Professional Development

A few weeks ago, when I wrote about the latest ISTE books to be published, one of my readers commented and followed up in an e-mail exchange about that post. This person was glad to see the reviews, however she had already picked three books to used in a Summer workshop for teachers. I thought you might choose one of her choices to add to your Summer professional development reading.

Published by Corwin Press in 2006, this book is beginning to show its age a bit already with regards to current implementations and manifestations. HOWEVER, Will Richarson’s wisdom, analysis, and understanding is not going to become outdated. If you are staying up with current developments and implementations you can apply Will’s pedagogy and practice. Get your principal, school boards, students, parents, and colleagues to read chapter nine - “What It all Means” and the epilogue, if they will sit still for it.

This another book published by Corwin Press in 2008. Alan November has been where it all happens a teacher. He is not a thinktanker or ivory tower theorista. That being said, He puts  ICT standards and practice under the microscope and in the spotlight - Critical thinking, research, source validation; finishing strategies and evaluations. You will skim it half-an-hour and read in depth in two hours.

This is the 2006 edition of this book from Penguin. Daniel Pink presents the thesis that this present age - the Age of Technology is not a left brain age as most of us would think as we founder amid a sea of hardware and software looking for a leftbrainer, fair to say, engineer type to teach us not only to swim, but to breathe under water. We don’t need an engineer we need a rightbrainer, a visionary to ease us into the next stage of human development.

Larry Ferlazzo

http://larryferlazzo.edublogs.org/ - Larry has average almost three posts per day over the last month. I’m sure that this has gone on for ages. He started with “The Best of…” series that continues on, and he has an awesome English Website.

Silvia Tolisano

http://langwitches.org/blog/ - Silvia posts so many high quality, informative posts that I am amazed. She does her “links of the Day” and average 1.5 posts per day over the last month besdes that “links” post. She has a gift for breaking down software and is tireless in annotating images to amplifiy these efforts.

Miguel Guhlin

Miguels blog “Around the Corner” at http://www.edsupport.cc/mguhlin/index.htm - is a joy to read. He tore loose this weekend and published six posts. His interest is not caregorizeable, but whatever he writes about draws my attention. My favorite from the weekend was “Ubuntu Story”.

I just discovered Teacher Portal this morning. Suzie Vesper, a teacher from New Zealand is the central nervous system of this wiki. It is a deep, rich resource for elementary school teachers and parents.

Lee Speers, an educator from Pennsylvania, published a powerful post today: ‘Thirty Things Good Teachers Do’ in his blog named The World According To Speers.

A wonderful, royalty-free resource is the Educational Technology Clearing House. “ETC is a collaborative project of the Bureau of Instruction and Innovation, Florida Department of Education and the Florida Center for Instructional Technology, College of Education, University of South Florida. The links included in this clearinghouse appeared to contain useful information at the time they were chosen. If you discover that a site linked from this clearinghouse is no longer relevant, or has inaccurate or inappropriate content, please email the project director .”

1. Yudu Freedom Publishing at http://www.yudufreedom.com/

2. Proppian fairy tale generator - http://www.brown.edu/Courses/FR0133/Fairytale_Generator/gen.html

3. Math Playground http://www.mathplayground.com/

ISTE 

What do you think of the books that are published by the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE)? Bearing in mind that I am an unpublished author (I’m bearing it in mind, so you needn’t.), I will keep my snootiness to a minimum - those who can’t write publish reviews instead.

BOOKS

On the whole, and I have a shelf of them, I am pleased that I have bought the books. Some have pleased more than others. The newest book - English Language Arts Units for Grades 9–12 by Dr. Christopher Shamburg is actually, I trust, in the mail. But I have some thoughts about three of the most recent ones that I would like to share. 

Web 2.0: New Tools, New Schools  by Gwen Solomon and Lynne Schrum is a book that one would imagine would be great if it were serialized, because of the speed at which the WWW evolves. I have been planning a one semester intro to Web design and I am going to use the Appendices to expand the concept of a Web presence and associated tools for these high school students. The tenth chapter has twelve wonderful tutorials for educators. The first nine chapters discuss the tools of the moment and some really rich discussion about the Web and education. Chapter 6, ‘Leadership and New Tools’ is worth the price of the book, as far as I’m concerned. Many of us have had something to say about the tyranny of top down management. What we say probably differs by where we are in the Great Chain of Being. The authors espouse, quite convincingly, that school and district administrators are the difference-makers in the 21st century paradigm.

John Hendron’s book, RSS for Educators, caught me off guard. The title is so pedestrian that I sighed when I ordered it. It is, however, a wonderful book, written by a person with the soul of an artist. After a wonderful introduction, he breaks his considerations into three sections:

• School applications: blogs, wikis, podcasts, and VoIP and synchronous communication;
• Core software applications: Audacity, GarageBand, blogging, news aggregators;
• Classroom Apps: blogging, wikis, podcasts, newsfeeds, advnaced RSS.

He has two excellent appendices - resources and a glossary. 

Since Michigan made passing an online class a graduation requirements and statewide online schools are sprouting like mushrooms after a rainy week, public school administrators and teachers need to considering the importance and efficacy of partivipating in online education. Cathy Cavanaugh and Robert Blomeyer have edited What Works in K-12 Online Learning. Susan Patrick, President and CEO of NACOL writes the forward. The book has eleven chapters from educational philosophy to online phs ed. I am so pleased that ISTE brought this out in a timely manner.

China Miéville is an English writer of both fiction and nonfiction. He’s a graduate of the London School of Economics, and, by the look of the titles in the nonfiction writing, probably a Marxist. His fiction is my focus for this short blurb.

 I saw his latest fiction ‘reviewed’ in Wired. I liked the review so I bought it and before I was a day into started ordering what turned out, for the most, a backlist of his other novels and short story collection. His newset book is Un Lun Dun, a through-the-looking-glass sci fi adventure, with a political subtext for precocious junior readers or adults who may navitate to it via the Harry Potter River. Zanna finds the entrance to this world quite improbably in her neighborhood and finds a place that is not just London’s mirror twin, but the whole world. I persuaded only one of my students to read it in my ‘Rhetoric of Sci Fi’ course, but she wholeheartedly loved it.

Some of his other work is bleak near future, catastrophic worlding and some really strange, over the edge sci fi. Some of the places he takes you have more than rough edges. Frankly, one of the novels had an ending which I found really silly the first time I read it, but it grew on me. These works include Looking for Jake: Stories, King Rat, Perdido Street Station, The Scar, and Iron Council. The last was the only one I had to really stretch to embrace.

ALPS - ” Active Learning Practice for Schools is an electronic community dedicated to the improvement and advancement of educational instruction and practice. Our mission is to create an on-line collaborative environment between teachers and administrators from around the world with educational researchers, professors, and curriculum designers at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education and Project Zero. The ALPS site is as wide as it is deep. Each of the three regions within the ALPS site has it own resources for cultivating active learning practice in schools. But rest assured the ALPS site is unified in its educational philosophy and vision: that students must be active, engaged, and thoughtful participants in their own education. Each region offers a wealth of pedagogical terrain to explore.”
Addendum:
One of colleagues from Canada featured it on her Active Learning Blog Carnival http://activelearningcarnival.blogspot.com/ in April.

   Photoshop from Adobe now has an free online version at http://www.photoshop.com/express/. They provide a basic editor and two gigs of storage online. It has a good menu and can be useful in the Web 2.0 world. However, with no software on the HD, the first shortcoming the leapt out at me was not being able to scan images with the software.Sign-up is a snap. 

 ”Timelines Online are available at http://www.xtimeline.com. Self-described: ”When we developed the timeline tool, our friends thought of many ways to creatively use the timeline. Some of them thought the timeline could become a great public service, a resource for history education and for debate over current issues. The ability of these timelines to entertain and educate convinced us that other people would enjoy our timeline as much as we do. And that’s how xtimeline came to have a home of its own. “

I got a real kick out of PocketMod this weekend. Check it out at http://www.pocketmod.com/ I made a scad of these little booklets out of single 8.5×11 sheets of paper. As craft-challenged as I am, I whipped them right out. The developers explain: The PocketMod is a new way to keep yourself organized. Lets face it, PDAs are too expensive and cumbersome, and organizers are bulky and hard to carry around. Nothing beats a folded up piece of paper. That is until now. With the PocketMod, you can carry around the days notes, keep them organized in any way you wish, then easily transfer the notes to your PDA, spreadsheet, or planner.

The PocketMod is a small book with guides on each page. These guides or templates, combined with a unique folding style, enable a normal piece of paper to become the ultimate note card. It is hard to describe just how incredibly useful the PocketMod is. It’s best that you just dive in and create one.”

 Skip   

For those who have been keeping up here - I FINALLY RECEIVED MY XO-1 COMPUTER FROM MIT!!!!! It is an amazing piece of engineering. In one gigabyte of storage, it has twenty  wonderful  programs and utilities. It needs maintenance and update utilities and a printer utility. It has a good camera - for video and stills - and mics. The students in my classroom jumped right on it.

Here is a really fine site: http://www.teachersfirst.com/index.cfm - Ron at ISTE wrote:

“TeachersFirst is a website designed to meet the needs of  K-12 ‘teachers in the trenches’ by focusing on  resources that teachers need and can actually use in the classroom.  Each resource is selected and reviewed by one of TeachersFirst’s reviewers, all of whom have classroom teaching experience.”

The Network For Instructional TV are the owners and it is very slick - full of flash scripts. I joined, and it looks useful after a cursory look.