Putting Ed Tech Into Practice - Social Media on Paper

I teach Government for the next 12 weeks.  We were starting our investigation into the Constitution and for one of the assignments I had my students take the Preamble of the Constitution and transform it into a SMS, Tweet, and Facebook Status.

For the SMS, students were required to change the text as if they were to text it to friends and texting existed during the Constitutional Conventions.

For the Tweet students had to try and shrink the text to 140 characters.  Surprisingly students struggled trying to do this and keep it in the 140 characters limit.  I also explained and had them include hashtags that would have been used if Twitter existed. 

For the Facebook status, students had to act as if they were participating in the Constitutional Convention and update their friends on what was happening with the Constitution and their thoughts on how it would impact/change the United States.

I found an image of a SMS bubble that you normally see on an iPhone, created my own Twitter update box, and also cut and pasted a Facebook status update.  Some students got really creative with their Facebook statuses and even included the "location" for where they were.

Surprisingly, the buy in to the assignment was not as I expected.  I am coming to the realization that students I teach have not been exposed completely to using technology outside of the classroom and it is a tough adjustment for them.  The interaction online with the blog and Facebook is not nearly the percentage that I thought it would be, and I think a lot of that has to do with students not being comfortable with it and not having exposure to it.  I think it also has to do with the fact that I teacher freshman.  I feel that upperclassmen would probably have more experience and be more open to using it in and outside the classroom.

I am using the Remind101 website for SMS reminders for students, and I do have 5 times as many students signed up during this 12 weeks.

I think I am coming to the realization that the concept of "Digital Natives" might not be as broad as some people might say.  I also know that it is on me as well to figure out how to adjust and encourage use by my students.  Something that I know I need to work on and will figure out as time goes on.

Anyone else integrating technology for the first time, more specifically social media, experiencing struggles?  Anyone having great success, if so, what are you doing that is working for you?

Back to the "Blogspot"

Well, when I originally purchased the domain http://edutechintegration.com I checked to have my yearly payment for the domain automatically deducted.  Apparently it did not work and subsequent emails letting me know it did not work never got to me.  Because of this, I have had to revert back to http://edutechintegration.blogspot.com. 

My plan was to contact GoDaddy/Google and get my domain name back, but a subsequent visit to my domain has revealed that someone else has already taken it.  Talk about a quick turnaround of those companies. 

I have updated the Feed for any subscribers if you are still interested, you can re-subscribe.  Going back to the classroom has been difficult in terms of keeping this blog up to date.  Hard to find time with teaching, coaching, and being and husband and father of two young children. 

Any links that I have embedded to my own blog within posts will no longer work since the domain has changed.  It is way to much trouble to go back and try to edit all those, so you will just have to add "blogspot" if you are really interested in seeing any of those posts, at least I think that will work.

Sorry for any confusion.  I hope that I might be able to regularly post in the future as I get adjusted to everything.  Thanks to everyone who has been and continues to be a loyal reader.  Hope that everything is going well for you.

Putting EdTech into Practice - Movies in the Classroom

Most administrators will tell you they hate when teachers show movies in the classroom.  For the most part I agree with them.  Movies and videos can play a valuable role in the education process and can be an important aspect of a teachers strategy in providing lesson material to students, as long as teachers are doing it correctly.  Recently, I decided to show a video in my geography classes that I thought did a great job of showcasing a point that I was trying to make in class.

We we watched a video about North Korea that did a great job of showcasing absolute dictatorships and extreme isolation.  You can see the video by National Geographic HERE.  I ran into a snag early on and it was blocked on YouTube for some reason.  But being the resourceful person that I am, I checked my Netflix account, and found it.  FYI, if you don't have Netflix, you might think about it; they have tons of videos and movies you can stream online in the classroom.  Especially for elementary teachers. 

The video was about 50 minutes long.  In previous years of teaching, I would have asked my students to stay awake and pay attention and we would discuss the video when it was over.  This time, I did something different.  I had students divide a piece of paper in half and on one side they wrote North Korea and on the other they wrote the United States.  As I played the movie in class, I would periodically stop the video to discuss the scene and contrast what they were seeing in North Korea with the United States.  It was a great experience seeing students all turn their heads and start writing on their paper at the same time.  At the conclusion on the video we discussed it, and then I had them write for 5 minutes their personal thoughts about the video and life in Korea.  They had tons of questions as well.

This was probably one of my most successful lessons this year.  The students were engaged in the documentary video and I only had one student out of all my classes that I had to get on for falling asleep.  I even turned the video into an extra credit opportunity by asking students to comment on my classroom blog about it over the weekend.  I also used the video the next day as a bell-ringer assignment asking my kids to list 5 things they could not live without and discuss them.  We then discussed this as a class.

Here are some other resources for movies and documentaries.  Remember, it is not the movie that is important...it is HOW you use the movie that is important.

Movies in the Classroom - Provides permission slips and movies by subject matter
Movie Sheets - A collection of worksheets that go along with movies - Remember to stop the movie and allow students to write down the correct information.
Mathematics in Movies - A great option for math teachers.
Top Documentary Films - Free documentaries
Movies Found Online - A resource for free movies and documentaries.
Free Documentary TV - Free documentaries

How how could/do you use movies in the classroom? 

Thinglink - Make Images Interactive

Thinglink is a website that allows users to make their images interactive and tag them with links, information, video, sound, and other features.  There are several great ways that teachers could use this on a website or blog.  Images are an integral part of teaching for most of us.  Thinglink would be a great way to take your pictures to the next step and allow students to interact with them.

In all subjects you could link to more information related to a certain aspect of an image.  Science teachers could do this for parts of a cell for example.  Social Studies teachers could take an image, or even a political cartoon and show video or discuss the image using the audio feature.  This really takes images to the next level in the classroom. 

For more information, see the video below.

A Cleaner Internet

A Cleaner Internet is a browser extension for Firefox, Chrome, and Safari.  The concept is simple; it removes all the clutter from websites that we use everyday, especially YouTube.  There are plenty options out there that can do this, but with Internet Filtering in schools, it is a good idea to know all your options.