Educational Passages

A group of 4th graders who are in the Communications and Math Lab groups with Molly Smith (Talents grades 3-8) have taken on the task of following one of five drifting miniboats that were launched this spring. The boat was launched Saturday, May 12 by the crew of the State of Maine (Maine Maritime). The kids are in contact with the captain and they are working on latitude, longitude, rate of speed and some of the other concepts of navigation.

Based on a workshop session at a conference on Science and Literacy held at the Gulf of Maine Research Institute a few months ago we decided to look for a way for our students to participate in a "miniboat expedition". For more about this project, see the website and articles below:

• http://www.educationalpassages.com
• http://bangordailynews.com/2011/04/15/news/hancock/students-to-launch-tiny-sailboats-from-mma-ship/?ref=relatedBox
• http://bangordailynews.com/2010/07/26/news/miniature-boat-from-maine-completes-extraordinary-journey/?ref=relatedBox
• http://www.pointseast.com/template.shtml?id=EkllZkuEAyqFSjcWAp&style=story

This project costs about $1500 a boat, but the volunteers who run it (Dick Baldwin, sailor; Lyman-Morse Boats; Maine Maritime Academy; Midcoast School of Technology, etc.) do all the work for free and the cost to our school is $350 for the GPS unit that travels on the boat and a monthly fee to monitor it. There will be opportunities at YES and HMS for that small group of students to share the project with others as it connects to curricula, we bring in guest speakers, etc.

The GPS unit on our boat connects to a company that will show the track of the boats in the project (at http://www.nefsc.noaa.gov/drifter/drift_ep_2012_1.html). We don't know how many months to expect the boat to be en route, one boat arrived in Ireland after 5 months, another one took a year to travel from Puerto Rico to Portugal. The hope is that if a boat makes it to Europe the students can connect with the school that retrieves the boat.

As of May 30th the miniboats have been moved by hurricane winds are are all beached on the Carolina coasts. Today there was an article in the Hatteras newspaper about the people who found the Yarmouth boat on the beach and the next steps for getting it back out onto the ocean.

http://islandfreepress.org/2012Archives/05.29.2012-MaineStudentsSailboatIsLostAndThenFoundOnHatteras.html

 

Resources: Educational Passages Endeavor Wiki

 

cross posted at:

http://showcase.yarmouthschools.org/2012/05/educational-passages-miniboat-project.html

 

Yarmouth Summer/Fall Technology Course 2012

Registrations are building for this years summer/fall technology course for K12 faculty. The site is at: https://sites.google.com/a/yarmouthschools.org/summer-2012-tech. Dates: June 19, 20 & 21 8:00-3:30, September 22 8:00-12:00, October 27 8:00-3:30 at YHS.


Teachers will learn and practice expanded uses of media for teaching and learning around these questions:

1. How will student demonstrations of learning be more innovative in my classroom?
2. How will I as a teacher move toward more choices for students to demonstrate learning?
3. How can I share or celebrate my students’ work?

As we develop the progression of topics and assignments the site will be expanded beyond the syllabus, dates and times.

Google Apps OnAir Tutorials

This summer one of my goals is to review these tutorials for possible use in our Yarmouth course and future faculty meetings.

• EducationOnAir
  tags: GoogleApps Tutorials GoogleEducator

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

More great resources for iPads & Learning

• Explain Everything – Great Tool to Create Videos of your Lesson Topics
  tags: ipads apps explaineverything videos
• Tony Vincent's Learning in Hand - Blog - Be an iPad Superstar: 8 Collections of iOS 5 Tips, tags: ipads tips
• StoryKeepers - iPad StoryTelling APPS
  tags: iPad apps DigitalStorytelling stories
• Create, Capture, Upload: New Site Features Kids’ Digital Projects | MindShift
  tags: kids creativity showcase parents diy
• 50 resources for iPad use in the classroom | ZDNet, tags: education ipads apps Yarmouthcourses

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Edcamp Boston, April 2012

• SkypePlay - The Play Project
  tags: kindergarten skype mariaknee
• 21minutes
  tags: professionaldevelopment Yarmouthcourses teachers

These are a couple of the many Diigo links that I got from EdCamp Boston that I hope to pursue. There were many conversations about "Blended Learning", iPads and learning and other topics. The "smackdown" at the end gave us many links to use with our students. Some of the notes I made are:

• 6 word memoir in Animoto
• Edmodo turn in for assignments
• LittleBirds for writing and drawing
• Fotobabble for recorded story sent to parents by email
• Storybird make student accounts within classroom
• Animoto accounts only last 9 months but can set up for class
• Prezi
• Voicethread - kids can do presentation online instead of being live (differentiation)
• Sliderocket- in google apps marketplace- has voice record, can embed twitter feeds (latest 20)
• Storify
• Paper.li - newspaper generator with embedded social media

Alice, Mike and I had a chance to visit with many colleagues from around New England.

Apple Review of iPads in Schools

• Exploring the impact of Apple's iPad on schools & schooling.
  tags: iPadApps iPads elementary

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

New England Apple Tech Update Spring2012

• Class Widgets - Custom Widgets for iBooks Author
  tags: iBooks gadgets Apple
• New England Apple Tech Updates
  tags: Apple tech 2012

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

It's been a few years since I attended an Apple Update. Mike, Alice and I all chose to attend this one due to the agenda items. It was helpful to hear about the development of management tools for iPads for schools adding large numbers of iPads. As long as we are adding a few iPads at a time we will be manually setting up iPads with either personal, institutional or hybrid accounts for each iPad. It is somewhat complicated as exploring apps requires access to iTunes cards or Apple Voucher provided apps. Another item on the agenda was the new option to create multimedia texts in iBooks. The limitations are that books can only be created by teachers and they belong to the teacher not the school. This is going to take some working out as we see what the potential is for iBooks and other epub options. In Yarmouth we are often looking for a tool that students can use as a multi-media creation tool. Most teachers are using sites, wikis and blogs for their own curriculum development online.

Google Docs for Teachers eBook

Many thanks to Richard Byrne: Free Technology for Teachers

Open publication - Free publishing - More google

Free Kids Friendly Websites

Learning at edcampme 2012

Saturday was the first Maine "edcamp" sponsored by vendors and held at Waynflete School in Portland. This was a great day of connecting and sharing with other educators whose focus is using technology to support learning. I attended a session on iPads in the Elementary classroom and learned a few new apps and some management tips. The session on Digital Portfolios didn't apply directly to what we want to do in Yarmouth, but some of their methods could be useful. Alice, Mike and I presented a session on Google Apps in the Classroom with Kern Kelly from Nokomis High School. Kern has developed comprehensive digital portfolios of their older students and each graduating senior receives a gift of their name as a web domain so that they can carry their portfolio on beyond their K12 years. He also shared a great strategy for collecting student assignments when a teacher has many students in various classes. The sessions, photos and reflections of the day are archived at http://edcampme.posterous.com/ and the twitter hashtag for the day was #edcampme.

Mrs. Wolinsky, thank you for letting us explore...

This time of year I try to fit in a unit on Creativity and Design in the 4th grade classes. I started the unit last week with an exploration of Lego Digital Designer. This is the first step of unit that is about exploration, self-discovery and creating using design tools. The next couple of weeks will be spent moving on to Scratch. Some of the students have been attending an after school class through Yarmouth Community Services with a more extended time to explore this theme. The students who have been in the after school class have been a stimulant to their classmates to explore and learn during our class periods. What did I hear from a student as they filed out of the lab? "Thank you Mrs. Wolinsky for letting us explore today!"

Yarmouth Media & Learning Day - March 16, 2012

Once again we organized an "unconference" for our spring professional development day that started with a keynote by Wes Fryer, followed by a selection of sessions by Wes and Yarmouth faculty. The site for the course is: Yarmouth Learning with Media Day. I created a summary of the feedback from the day which was very positive about the opportunity to work as a K12 faculty on enhancing the ways we use media, ourselves and with our students. 

Recent posts about iPads, Research & Apps

Chicago Public Schools implement iPads up through 5th grade
This post focuses on the new options for assessment that are possible with the camera and recording aspects of the iPad. The author describes the use of apps like:  Explain Everything, ScreenChomp, ReplayNote, and Educreations.

The 200 Best Apps for Special Education This is a downloadable booklet of apps that are selected from the many that have been designed for students receiving instructional support.

iPads in the Classroom – Lessons Learned...Lessons Shared
This is a blog devoted to the experiences of a 4th grade teacher moving from a few iPads in the classroom to 1:1.

The iPad as...
This a post with iPad apps organized by purpose e.g. iPad as reader, creator, etc.

What apps are they using in Auburn Kindergarten?
Mike Muir is writing frequently about the Auburn iPad project, including the first research based on delayed implementation of iPads in half of the Kindergarten classes.

Burlington 1:1 Summit - March 10, 2012

This summit was an "unconference" in the sense that presentations were by participants, not paid presenters. The Burlington, MA school system has been moving into mobile technology with 1:1 iPads in the high school this year, sets of iPads in the elementary schools and a review of options for the future for middle schools. Alice, Mike and I attended with Ben McNaboe (YHS class of 2011) to share our experience of 1:1 in our grades 7-12 for over ten years. Ben also presented his own session on how useful he finds an iPad to be in his freshman year of college. I attended a session with other elementary educators who are using iPads and we had a rousing lunchtime "smackdown" of app ideas.

This post from the BHS principal Patrick Larkin is a good synopsis of the philosophy and information that were shared at the summit. Burlington has many of the needed elements for moving forward with powerful learning through the use of iPads: strong administrative support and involvement, robust support for infrastructure, involved teachers developing online materials, interest in moving to a facilitated learning environment, student IT team to support teachers, supports and play a role in the new implementation.

Creativity & Design with Technology Class

We are halfway through a Community Services Class title "Creativity & Design with Technology" for 2nd, 3rd and 4th graders. This is a class I have thought about offering for a long time as a way to explore creative options using technology in a more extended format than we have time for in the school day. There was a great deal of interest in the class and the original limit was extended from 12 to 15 to the current 17 participants (12 boys and 5 girls). I am maintaining a web page of the sessions that hopefully encourages students and families to continue to explore at home.The site link is: https://sites.google.com/a/yarmouthschools.org/yestech/creativity-design
and this is the content so far:

Session 1: Download Lego Digital Designer -  PBS Kids Lab -   Session 2: Design a Comic Website -   Session 3:  Download the Skitch program (mobile app too) -  Drawing, snapshots and more. PBS Kids Lab -   Sessions 4 & 5: Download the Scratch program -    To learn more about Scratch: Cyberchase Inventor's Workshop - I came across this site which has provided resources and inspiration for this course: http://www.computersforcreativity.com. It has been very helpful to have two YHS students  help during each class session and a fourth grade student who attended Scratch camp at  MIT last summer has been a guest teacher for the last two sessions. The experiences we are having in this class will impact the "creativity & innovation" mini-units that I usually teach in the spring to all grade levels. Some other links that I hope to use for ideas to continue this into the future are: http://www.fastcodesign.com/1663416/prototype-design-camp and http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/gever_tulley_s_tinkering_school_in_action.html.