Okay, these are two totally different thoughts on tech and presenting. One is from Laura Bergells from her blog “Maniactive” or “More than Powerpoint” entitled “How do you earn attention when presenting.” 

Laura tells a tale of a presentation she went to where the presenter was rude, arrogant and all together a jerk about tech. The presenter told the audience to pay attention only to him and turn off all electronics.  hmm, my that sounds familiar to these teacher ears.

In the end, Laura asks, “How do you EARN attention when presenting to a modern, tech-savvy audience?“  Right. How do we, as teachers EARN our learners attention. I “present” 3 times a day, for an hour and a half, to three different groups. How do I EARN their attention? Are they required to give me their attention?  I think this is the main question of the modern teacher.

Which brings me to the second idea from Dangerously Irrelevant. How many teachers have I heard say both of the phrase, “I am not good at math,” and “I am not very good at computers.”

I can not count that high. I try to be polite, and helpful when presented with these individuals, but I really have to struggle. These teachers think their audience is just going to give them their attention, and they have to do nothing to earn it. What really gets me is the wave of the hand that says, “it doesn’t matter”. Really?  It doesn’t matter that you are defective?

Don’t you think your learners have figured out you are defective? Does that impact the attention they give you? Personally, I have to say yes. I think I must EARN my learners attention. Every day. 3 times a day. For an hour and half each time.

No wonder I am tired at the end of the day. No wonder I look forward to going to school the next day so much!

I was frustrated last school year because it was a pain to use my projector.  I had an S-Video cable wired for my TV, 2 Video cables, one for the school’s computer and one shared between my elmo and laptop, and a fourth cable for my iPod.

It was the shared cable between my laptop and elmo that was the frustrating thing. A ppt was running on my laptop, but to show student work, or the book or anything else, I would have to unplug the cable from the laptop, and then plug into the elmo, and then back again.

ARG!

So at the end of the year, I was thinking how I could fix this. How could I get all my tech wired into the projector, but not have to swap cables. I can’t physically run more more cables, because all the connections on the projector are full.  And then it hit me!  A KVM switch!

All a projector is is a Video Monitor. The KVM switch (the last time I used one of these was 20 years ago) allows you to have multiple computers hooked up to one (k)eyboards, (v)ideo, and (m)ouse.  Since the KVM switch doesn’t know or care what kind of video it is using, it “should” work.

Well, it does.  Today I went into my classroom and got it all wired up. I still have the school’s computer cabled  directly to the LCD, but all of my tech will go through the KVM switch. I can have 4 different machines physically wired to the projector, and then with the push of one button on the switch, jump to any of the other machines.

I ended up purchasing one of these Belkin Omniview SOHO 4 port switches. I bought mine from ebay. I purchased a 4 port KVM so I could have room to expand in the future. I only need 2 ports right now.  Another reason I purchased this switch is the hard buttons. Using an elmo means you can not switch using the keyboard. I needed a physical button to switch devices.

I have had other teachers complain about the fact they could only use their LCD with their elmo, or their computer, but now, with a cheap 2 port KVM switch, they can do both!

I have really been struggling this year with my electronic organization.

Firstly, I am in charge of web development using the Angel LMS for the group of teachers creating and teaching our Advanced Algebra Applications 5-6 course. It is a new course, and the only course in the US that teaches the math it does. 

What that means is that I am in charge of a small amount of content today (250 megs) that will blossom over the next few years. Assessments, worksheets, photos, videos, and more will be created by this course.

And then there is the 200 megs of my AP stats material, and the 400 megs of powerpoints I created for my Alg 2 courses last year.  They suck, but given they were my first year teaching it and my first attempt, they will get better.

All that material is on my laptop.  Yes, the same laptop that is strapped to my back on my way back and forth to school on my motorcycle. Yes the same laptop that can be dropped and all the material created is gone in a second.

EEEK.

I have dealt with backing up before and have been doing manual backups.  That is so yesterday. If you have not been introduced before, meet Dropbox! It is a wonderful system that will synchronize your files with any number of computers for FREE! (2 gig limit on the free accounts).

With the very small Dropbox app on my computers, I now have full access to every file on my laptop I want. Using a very small “junction” hack, I directed Dropbox to look three folders in my directory, AP stats, Alg 3 -4, and AAA files.

Now, on my Mac laptop, my Destop at school, my smart panel desktop at school, my desktop at home AND my laptop I have access to every single file.  Even more, if any file is added in ANY of those locations, it is added to ALL of the computers I use the next time I turn it on.

Even better! I can access those files anywhere I have web access.

But wait, there’s more!  It is FREE for 2 Gigs.  Now, I actually have 2.25 gigs, because I used a link to login from another blog. As a way of giving back (and perhaps getting more myself) I would like to invite you to use Dropbox as well.

All you need to do is follow this link here, enroll in the Dropbox service, and you get a free extra 250 megs and so do I. Many of your (and mine) file backing up and syncing problems go away using this service. Heck, I may not even need to take my laptop with me everywhere I go!

In another case of “working together benefits all”.  Dan Meyer posted a picture of himself throwing a ball into a trash can.  Except, he only posted the first half of the flight.  (See the original here.) This picture is one in his series of “What can you do with this?”, that challenges educators to think outside of their comfort zone and think inside of relevant, challenging, and interesting lessons.

David Cox then takes that lesson, and explodes it into a terrific lesson on quadratics, measurement and all around engaging math.  Oh, except it really wasn’t David.  IT WAS HIS LEARNERS who exploded it and created a fabulous lesson out of it.  Crazy what learners can do when we stop spoon feeding them and give them tools and interesting problems.

Well, ColleenK had to one up everyone and create an applet that would allow for anyone to do the same problem with different initial conditions.

I can see starting with Dan’s picture. Throwing that on the screen and asking the question that Dan asked. Will he hit the can?  Leave it at that.   Let the learners decide what they need to know in order to answer the question.  Having Geogebra handy would be a great idea.  Allowing the learners to answer the question on their own, with support and guidance when legitimately asked for (meaning “i don’t get it” is not legitimate) and the encouragement to TRY.

Summing up with something like David did, allowing each group to show how their solution is different or the same, and then putting Colleen’s app on the screen and giving each group a completely different set of initial conditions.  Or better yet, out to the lawn with a digital camera and MAKE sets of initial conditions.

Now that is successful teaching at it’s finest.

Why don’t more teachers communicate like this to see the really innovative and creative stuff we can do? (sorry, not the purpose of this post, but still a question that must be asked.)

This seems like a seemingly simple question for teachers:

Could you identify 10 excellent web sites for your grade level / subject area?  

via dangerously irrelevant

Scott posted this a couple of weeks ago, and got a lot of people thinking about what web usage really is and really means. He ended it with a follow up post that included the following statement.

I’ll take them at their word and say that perhaps I overestimated the quality, if not quantity, of the online resources available to K-12 teachers. If so, this paucity of high quality online resources for educators is pretty sad given the longevity and history of the Internet as well as the ability of any educator to now easily have an online presence.  via

Hmm. Dan and others don’t agree that there are 10 sites that are worth using regularly for pedagogical purposes.  In the couple of weeks since this posting by Scott, I have been tracking my web usage to see if I have 10 that I have used regularly.  Here they are.

Google Reader.  I use it every day.  I follow about 145 blogs currently on Reader, and read about 20% of the articles. Indexed, and Graphjam are daily, as well as Dan’s and many many more.  That counts as FOUR.  Have you seen Indexed?  Amazing graphs that really, when selectively used, gets learners interested  in the content of the graphs.  Same with GraphJam.  Those learners who say, “I hate graphs” don’t say it any more after a little graphjam action.

Google Docs.  I use google docs in one of my courses. Learners are required to share their assignments with me, not turn them in on paper. Love it. Full tracking for accountability purposes, and very well done.

Google Maps.   Hmm, I see a pattern. Have you used Google maps to do problems?  I have. Thanks to Dan.

Stats Monkey.  If it wasn’t for this website, I would not have made it through my first year of AP Stats.

College Board’s AP Central: Same reason. Very important for me.

Qipit: Every teacher has been there. Some profound thing written on a whiteboard, a fellow teacher with eraser in hand to erase and move on.  One click of the camera on your cell phone, text the picture to Qipit’s number, either the black and white number or the color number, and BOOM, you have a PDF in your email within a couple of minutes.  Yes, I use this regularly.   Even with the technology in my classroom, the board still gets used.

Forums like the Physics Forum and My Math Forum. You know, sometimes you just need to ask someone anonymous your stupid question about some advanced math topic.

And how about YouTube (another google product, blocked at school, but I download things to my iPod), Vimeo (not blocked, used at school), TED.com, Annenberg Media, Geogebra (used for math, similar to Geometers Sketchpad, but FREE and easier to use), Tracker (used for analyzing the math in videos, FREE).

I have used every single one of these in my classroom over the last year. That is more than 10, and I still didn’t really go into my Reader list. Art, Design, Finance, Statistics, Technology, Science, Physics, Education, Mathematics, Political, News, Lifestyle, Comics, and Presentation are all folders in my Reader.  Blogs count. Some of the best ideas I have gotten over the last year have been posts by other bloggers. Tag them with something relevant.   Share them through Google Reader. Subscribe to each other’s sharings.

I used to use Google Notebook for research, but since they have discontinued development on it I became a little skittish about continuing to rely on it.  And then I discovered Zotero.

I am in heaven. Seriously.  All of my pdf’s of journal articles now have a home, with full bibliographic information pulled from the University’s library system.  Do a search, click an icon, full bibliography is downloaded and stored in Zotero right in my browser.  Download the PDF, create a link in zotero, and now I have all the information in one spot, easy access.  Have a note or thought to add?  Add it in Zotero. It will forever be there.

Does the article apply in more than one research area? Create separate libraries within your catalogue of data. Now the same article is present in multiple places.

Prefer to work with tags?  Not only will zotero download the tags from Eric or Ebsco, it allows you to edit them and create new tags.

Related artices?  Yup, you can forge relations outside of the libraries.

The only thing zotero does not do (yet) is allow sharing and syncing. That is in the beta 1.5 which has been released.

But the real benefit comes when you have to use the papers you collected and actually write something. Download the Word module or the Openoffice module (depending on what you use) and you can have the program pull sourcing information directly from your zotero database into your paper. Then, when you need the bibliography, click one button and bibliography shows up preformatted to whatever format you prefer.

Truly this program makes most of the research class I am taking at UNR irrelevant. We spent so much time wasting effort while talking about formatting in APA format. Yawn. The software does 95% of it for you, all you need to do is check errors in your database (like capitolized letters in the title. MLA wants, APA does not, that is a manual check you need to do).

Why can’t professors and teachers get with the times and actually USE the technology that is out there? Why are we wasting time, even at the college level, talking about formatting when the software does it?  This brings up the whole digital native / digital immigrant thing for me, and I am really tired of it.

The digital rollover occured 30 YEARS ago. If we all aren’t digital natives by now, we need to pull our collective head out of our bums and get with the 21st century.

Download Zotero (it’s free) and use Zotero.  Totally worth it.

I am in the last semester of my M.Ed., have to do a major project in addition to the research class and produce a publishable piece based on original research, took on a position with a new teacher organization to promote technology use in the district, and have three preps.   I realize that organization is key to my success this semester.

With that in mind, here are some of the tools I am using to make sure I don’t let stuff slide.  Total cost for tools 1 – 4  tools combined is ZERO.  5 comes with the Word package.

1.  Gmail and Google Calendar:  Gmail has a new “Tasks” built in under Contacts.  Go to the Google Labs (the little green flask next to your email address at the top” and enable the Tasks feature.  I also use the Calendar to keep track of everything, and I do mean everything.  Assignments, meetings for class at UNR, meetings for IEP’s, deadlines, …  I used to use a couple of calendars, and I ditched everything for one that I can access easily.  Here is a screen shot of what the tasks looks like along with the feature enabled in gmail.

2.  My cellphone.  Did you know that you can text something to your google calendar and have it added automatically?  Yup.  Now, from anywhere, all I do is send a text message to 48368′ (GVENT) and google recognizes my cell phone number (some set up required) and adds the event to my calendar. You can also check your appointments and have gcalendar text you ahead of time about appointments (up to 5 times if need be!)  Want more info, check out this site.

3.  I still use the PocketMod calendar as well. Sometimes you just need a small little paper calendar to jot a quick note or a followup bit of info.  I do not rely on it, and the details must be entered into google calendar the same day just to make sure I don’t lose anything.

4.  Zotero.  If you use Firefox, and you do academic research, you simply must have Zotero.  It indexes PDF’s from journals, stores the citations directly from ERIC or other databases, allows for tags, related info, and most importantly EXPORTS BIBLIOGRAPHY DATA DIRECTLY TO WORD in whatever format you need.  All the stress of “am I in MLA or APA format goes away.  Create a bibliography through Zotero and all you need to do is double check for fine details, not construct from scratch.   You will find it here.

5.  OneNote.  I was using Google Notebook, but they have stopped development on it so I searched around for alternatives so I would not lose any of the many notebooks I have on different topics.  After playing and experimenting, I settled on OneNote because it simply rocks. I purchased the Ultimate Suite from Microsoft on their Ultimate Steal website and don’t regret a single dollar of it.  $60 for every single software in the suite, 91% off.  All you need is an email address that ends with .edu.  If you don’t want to purchase, check out these lifehacker page on free alternatives to Notebook:   Ubernote Review,  Evernote, Zoho and Evernote again.  OneNote is much more robust than the others, but it costs.

Now I just have to make sure I back up my laptop weekly so I will not lose anything if it crashes!

Sam pointed out that my software replaced the podcast with the pdf, leaving me with 2 copies of the same thing.  DOH!

So I spent a week trying to get Edublogs to allow the upload. No success, and lots and lots of failure! 

So, here it is, linked from Box.net.  Operations with numbers MP3

Which left me with a week of trying services to figure out a way to share files like this.  I settled on Box.net, simply because it was easy.  The free service gives you 1 Gig to share.  That is a lot of space, unless you are sharing a ton of MP3 files.  We will have to see if I need to upgrade or just get my own server space. I am collecting lots of images, video, and sound, and it is difficult to share this.

So what are the technology needs of the modern teacher?

Let’s look at Dan.  He has HUGE amounts of video available on his site, as well as the new geometry section, constant images, and text.  How much of that is required to be accessible to the teacher every day?

And if your school district is like mine, the firewalls and filtering they have set up keep the teachers out of things like Box.net, but not the learners.

I scanned my hard drive today, and I have over 10 gigs of data on it.  This is just my laptop that I only use for school and my personal classes I am taking. No pictures of family and friends, no CD’s ripped just for fun, only professional stuff on this computer.

10 gigs.

That is a lot of files that I use, have used, or will use.  I carry my laptop with me everywhere, because I can not depend on an internet connection at school (personal computers are not allowed to connect to the district system) and useful sites like Box.net are blocked because of “file sharing”.

It would be so much easier to just upload the whole hard drive to a secure, yet accessible site, and just use the files from that location.

Should teachers have to take on the burden of cost for this too? After all, we already purchase paper, pencils, and other supplies for our rooms. Heck, 15 seconds with Quicken tells me that I have already spent $351.91 this year alone.  The year is not over, not by a long shot. 

Do we need to start bearing the burden of server space and web hosting too?  It can get expensive, and yet the monthly charges for a service like Box.net (I just signed up for the free service though) also can get pricey.  5 Gigs for $95.40 a year ($7.95 per month) or 15 gigs for $239.40 per year ($19.99 per month).

For those prices a domain name from GoDaddy.com is only $8.99 and I could get an unlimited account for only $170.88 per year ($14.24 if you sign up  for a year, it is only $12.74 per month if you sign up for 3 years!)

At what point do teacher stop being just classroom entities and start becoming producers of content.  I think we NEED to be already there.  And if we are, is sharing with just our learners sufficient?  Dan already has shown us how much can be done.  How willing are WE to step up to the plate and start sharing what we do in the classroom with each other?

And if we do share, we must bear the burden of cost on our selves.  I know my district won’t pay for it (although shouldn’t they if it helps me, my learners, and my school?)