Monthly Archives: June 2004

Moodle meeting

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I got together with Pete Misner Wednesday afternoon at Starbucks and talked about Moodle for a while. Pete gave a workshop earlier in the week where he demonstrated and taught the participants how to use Moodle and manage courses. Once again, it was great to be able to meet someone face to face that you might only interact with digitally 99.9% of the time. Pete described a bit about how his school used Moodle to manage a senior project course. It sounds like things went well enough that he’s going to expand by quite a bit next year.

We’ve developed some online teaching expertise over the past few years of the Hopkins Online Academy (now part of Northern Star Online) and I hope that some of that expertise can now be leveraged to bring some online learning elements to our regular courses. If nothing else, Moodle is a great way to host online, threaded discussions, collect digital assignments, communicate hyperlinks, and all kinds of other collaborative work for individuals or groups. I’m trying to figure out how I can use a Moodle course to facilitate communication and collaboration among the teachers involved in our 1:1 project.

We talked a little about the need for an individual space for each Moodle user. Blogging, for example, would be a little difficult unless each student (or teacher) were to blog within each individual course. That might be fine for certain types of activities, but I might prefer that students maintain a single blog so that their online writing could be found in one place. I think that would promote continuity and would certainly make blog maintenance a lot easier. If Moodle had that feature, I could consolidate our weblogs, wikis, and online forums into one system that would have a single sign-on and outstanding external authentication. The savings in management time would be significant.

I think it’s time to buy a good PHP book and start Moodle-hacking.

I’m home

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Our plane landed in Minneapolis/St. Paul at 11:50 p.m. and I walked through the door of our house at 1:10 a.m. this morning. It was a great conference, and I’m tired. I’ve got a few more entries to post, but that will have to wait until later today.

Classroom amplification

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This session, How to Make Technology Sound and Enhance Student Achievement, is about classroom amplification technology and classroom acoustics can have dramatic student achievement effects. This is a very interesting topic, something that we know a little about in Hopkins with our Audio Enhancement systems that are installed at Tanglen Elementary.

The presenter, Dr. Paul McCarty from BYU, is discussing an unpublished study that summarizes some of the recent work that has been done in this area. There are many advantages to having an amplified classroom.

  • More attentive students
  • Less voice fatigue for teachers (less absenteeism)
  • High achievement

The achievement gains seem to be more pronounced for upper elementary grades since oral instruction becomes more prevalent with older students. Quite a number of studies were quoted, but I don’t know of a particular Web site that lists them. I will attach a copy of a Classroom Amplification Fact Sheet (65kB) that I created to communicate with some folks in my district.

Using GIS for Critical Thinking

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I mentioned on my previous Vendor Recap post that I’ve been fascinated with GIS for a while now. The power of overlaying data on maps is really awesome for thinking about all sorts of relationships that have some sort of geographical connection. I tried to think of applications for physical education back when I was in the classroom, but I didn’t have much luck. Those social studies teachers have it made on this one.
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Digital Portfolios

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I’ve been interested in portfolio assessment for a while so this session was a natural for me. The presenter, Brian McLaughlin, is a teacher who has been using digital portfolios with his students. He gave some background about digital portfolios, talked about why to use them, and listed some key items to include.

The portfolio assessment guru is Dr. Helen Barrett, and most of Brian’s specific suggestions can be found in her work. A couple key points: include a variety of materials and not just the very best stuff, talk with students about good information design principles, and include examples of drafts and outlines.

I need to read more of Barrett’s work. With our new 1:1 computing initiative, digital portfolios make too much sense to ignore.

The Food Report, Part II

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My colleague Sid Chadda told me before the conference that I had to make it to Cafe du Monde for coffee and beignets. Of course, I had no idea what a beignet was. Now I know.

That’s a mountain of powdered sugar you see there on top of that fried “doughnut.” Very delicious.

I had the best steak of my life tonight at Dickie Brennan’s Steak House. It was an “8-oz filet served with creamed spinach and Pontalba potatoes, topped with masa flash fried Louisiana oysters and finished with béarnaise sauce.” Now I’m not a big oyster guy so they put some big Gulf shrimp on there instead. It was a melt in your mouth experience to say the least.

The Garden District

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Carlyn and I took our second and final tour today. We spent three hours this afternoon on a driving and walking tour of the New Orleans Garden District. The Garden District was established by the Americans who came to live in New Orleans following the Louisiana Purchase. They didn’t receive a particularly warm welcome from the Creoles that lived in the old city (today’s French Quarter) so they decided to build their own city with its own grand street (today’s St. Charles Ave). At one time, the two cities were completely separate, but combined to form New Orleans in the middle of the 19th century.

Land is scarce in New Orleans and so there isn’t a lot of room for gardens even in the Garden District. The ground is very fertile since the land here was built from all the topsoil that has washed down from upstream. Everything is very green. Here are a few shots from the first house we visited.

Most of the architecture in the Garden District is Greek revival. Many homes have columns with beautiful wrought or cast iron fences. Here are a couple photos from one of the home we walked by.

The last home we visited was simply amazing. I can’t remember the name of the family that built it, but let’s just say that they spared no expense. This home actually had a large yard and this bit of statuary.

Vendor recap, Part I

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I took the morning today to hit the vendor hall and see what was new in ed tech products and services. It’s difficult to describe just how large the vendor hall is at this convention center. I spent several hours in there, stopping at displays and chatting with vendors, and I didn’t quite make it halfway through. I will post a photo tomorrow of as much of the hall as my viewfinder will allow.

Here’s a short list of some of the interesting things I saw:

  • The folks from LeapFrog SchoolHouse were showing some new products. Carlyn and I sat through a demo of how their products can be used to promote early literacy. I’m always sceptical of purely drill-and-practice programs, but I don’t think these tools fall into that category. The books and equipment seem to work together to create a reasonable interactive experience that I think most students would find motivating.
  • The Library of Congress has created a Web site called American Memory. According to the site, the American Memory project “is a gateway to rich primary source materials relating to the history and culture of the United States. The site offers more than 7 million digital items from more than 100 historical collections.” I didn some poking around and searching and was really impressed by some of the photographs that can be found. Anything we can do to get students working with primary sources is good!
  • Pasco, the company that makes cool probeware for science teachers, was giving out 45-day demos of their My World GIS software. I installed it, but haven’t had a chance to play yet. I think GIS is so cool. I always wished I was a social studies teacher because the GIS applications were so obvious. Of course, there’s an open source GIS package called GRASS, but it’s not terribly user-friendly. Or perhaps, as they say about Unix, it’s not that it’s not user-friendly, its just picky about its friends.
  • In the cool science tool department I found a booth that was displaying the HOBO Data Logger. These little devices are battery operated and can sense light, temperature, etc. They were handing out reprints of a great little article that described a science project that a girl did where she tried to figure out whether UPS air or ground service was better for shipping temperature-sensitive materials by shipping two HOBOs to the same location by both methods can comparing the temperature logs. Fun.

That’s all for now. Student information systems, video streaming, electronic whiteboards, and all manner of NCLB-related remediation products seem to be the most common vendors so far. I’m going to try to finish the last half tomorrow and I’ll report back with any more interesting products.