Category Archives: Curriculum Resources

The HITS are ready

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I’m happy to announce that the Hopkins Information Technology Standards for Students (HITS) are now available for all the world to see on the Web under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial license. These standards are the product of many talented Hopkins educators. From the HITS Web page:

The Hopkins Instructional Technology Standards (HITS) were developed by the Hopkins School District to define a set of technology skill expectations for all K–6 students. The HITS were developed and refined by many Hopkins educators over a number of years and reflect the Hopkins curriculum, portions of ISTE’s National Educational Technology Standards for Students (NETS-S), and the technology integration work that has been done in Hopkins over the past few years.

Each grade level standard includes a description of the skills and a checklist. Items from the HITS appear on student report cards and are assessed on a completed/not completed basis. Work on standards beyond the 6th grade are underway and will be included here once they are completed and approved.

The bulk of the standards were developed before I started working in Hopkins, but it’s been my pleasure to help with some refinements. I’m especially glad that our district’s leadership has decided to make this work available to all under Creative Commons licensing. Although it’s not required by the license, I’d love to hear from anyone who finds these standards useful enough to incorporate into their own district’s work.

Moodle update

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I installed Moodle on a spare server last June as an experiment. Since my district was an online learning pioneer in Minnesota and continues to work in that area as part of the Northern Star Online collaborative, it seemed logical to see if some of our teachers who have gained experience teaching online might be interested in incorporating some of those skills into their face-to-face courses. The results, at least in terms of popularity, have been dramatic.

What began as a little-promoted experiment has turned into a system that serves nearly 1,600 students in 150 courses across the district. We’ve got teachers and students doing online forums, journaling, sharing links, making wikis, and using many of the other standard Moodle modules. Most of the teachers are using Moodle as a simple course Web page system, posting links to relevant Web sites and uploading course documents, but the flexibility of the Moodle system makes it possible to start simple and add more interactive elements later.

I don’t know how long we can sustain the current growth rate, but I look for Moodle to take off in our elementary schools next. The elementary teachers who are using it love how easy it is to assess their students’ writing. I’m also planning to explore how Moodle can be used to support online staff development. So much Moodling, so little time.

Google Maps in the social studies classroom

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One of the best parts of my job is the opportunity to get into our district’s schools and see what’s going on in the classrooms. I see something really cool nearly every time. Earlier this week I was in a 4th grade class at Glen Lake Elementary watching a teacher do a social studies lesson about the Southwest and its climate using her laptop, an LCD projector, and some of the online resources that our new social studies curriculum provides.

She let me jump in and show her students the new satellite mapping feature of the Google Maps site. I opened a couple browser tabs and loaded a view of the Twin Cities metro area on one and the Phoenix area on the other. After switching to the satellite view and doing some zooming in and out, the differences in landforms were obvious and I think it really made sense for the students. They also really got a kick out of zooming in on a satellite view of their school and finding their homes in the surrounding neighborhoods.

That quick lesson was just the latest example of how “always on” access to technology can change the way teachers and students operate. No one would march their students down to the computer lab for a 10-minute Google Maps experience. Having the technology in the classroom, ready to use at a moment’s notice, makes it possible to blur the line between learning about technology and learning with technology. I get excited when I consider the kinds of questions that these students can ask and answer on their own with the Google Maps site alone.

Online “gizmos” at ExploreLearning

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ExploreLearning.com is a subscription service that has about 600 science and math simulations. Here’s the official word from their site:

ExploreLearning offers a catalog of modular, interactive simulations in math and science for teachers and students in grades 6-12. We call these simulations Gizmos. Gizmos are fun, easy to use, and flexible enough to support many different teaching styles and contexts. Our Gizmos are designed as supplemental curriculum materials that support state and national curriculum standards; in addition, Gizmos help teachers bring research-proven instructional strategies to their classrooms.

Once they have an account, teachers can make various simulations available to their students. All of the simulations have supplementary materials and most have some assessment features. One feature that intrigues me is the ability to link directly to the simulations. That would make it easy to add one to one of our Moodle courses. We tried several different “gizmos” during the presentation including the Doppler Effect, roller coast physics, and an infectious disease simulation. They all seemed very well done and I would definitely use them if I was still a physics teacher.

Rich media presentations with mPOWER

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Multimedia Design Corporation has a multimedia product called mPOWER. It looks similar in capability to eZedia and MediaBlender, but my first impression is that it’s a bit more intuitive to use. The program has direct hooks into Apple’s iLife applications that allow you to import photos, movies, and audio very easily. The desktop version works on PCs and Macs. There’s also a Web-based subscription version that can be used to access presentations that are on the Web and modify them. The “webinar” feature looks pretty interesting too. Subscriptions to the Web-based version are very cheap and according the sales rep the webinar attendees don’t need their own subscriptions.

The software imports HyperStudio which is interesting to me because we’ve still got some old HyperStudio stacks lying around that are increasingly difficult to play on our newer machines. The content is stored in XML format for maximum buzzword compliance. I’m sitting here cringing at the moment because the sales rep who’s doing this presentation clearly has no idea what he’s talking about with respect to XML, HTML, and streaming over the Web. I hate sales B.S.

The final verdict: the software is definitely worth looking at. Price looks pretty good and there are a bunch of features that could be useful for putting content on the Web.

Video capture in the science classroom

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I was a high school science teacher before I got into ed tech full time. Just about the time I was leaving my teaching job at Henry Sibley High School, we bought some of the Vernier sensor and software products. Unfortunately, I never had a good chance to use them before I moved over to my current job in Hopkins. As cool as those sensors are, setting up a moderately complex physics experiment can still be pretty complicated. Thanks to what appears to be a new feature of Vernier’s Logger Pro 3 software, it’s now possible to do some really interesting experiments using video captured from a digital video camera.

I had the pleasure of making a visit back at my old stomping grounds yesterday and got a demo of the software from my former colleague Peter Bohacek. He showed me some video clips of spinning wheels and gyrating slinkies and the graphs that were produced from the video analysis. What a great tool! Why set up a ramp and roll balls down it to calculate the acceleration of gravity when you can do it by analyzing video of a student throwing a football? All of the labs Peter showed me seemed much more authentic when analyzed with the video. The data looked great and the students really seemed to understand it. I will definitely be showing this to the science department in my district.

Inspired by March Madness

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Raise your hand if you know what a tar heel is? Did you know that a Jayhawk was a abolitionist guerilla from Missouri or Kansas around the time of the Civil War? I was watching an NCAA tournament basketball game today and realized that researching some of the historically significant team nicknames would make a fun social studies activity. Oklahoma Sooners, Tennessee Volunteers, North Carolina Tar Heels, and Kansas Jayhawks are just a few of the ones I thought of. So what other major college teams have nicknames that aren’t just large cats, birds of prey, or some other garden variety mascot?

Some more on my list would include:

  • Iowa Hawkeyes
  • Ohio Buckeyes
  • Indiana Hoosiers
  • Purdue Boilermakes

Here’s a list of the Top 25 College Nicknames. Go UC Santa Cruz Banana Slugs!