The second in a series of workshops from NWPM colleagues at MRA 2008, these are notes from Portland Middle School teachers Amanda and Garth Cornwell’s session on “Partnering Students, Parents, and Teachers Through Technology.”

Begin with questions from the audience:

How to get younger students to access technology on their own?
How do parents react, what do they [...]

Here are notes from my Crossroads Writing Project colleagues, Lavon Jonson and Sonja Mack: “Blogging — Maximizing Writer’s Notebooks with a 21st Century Dimension.”

Background

Bringing blogging into the traditional process of using a writers notebook
Writing with your students encourages them to write (Graves, etc.)

Blog Growth

In April 2007, 70 million blogs, 90% by teenagers
In four years the [...]

Notes from Randy Bomer’s keynote at MRA 2008:
“Writing Transformations: How New Literacies and New Times Invite Us to Rethink Composition”

Literacy is changing, literacy as design
Obstacles: accountability measures and deficit thinking

If we are constantly trying to fill in gaps, we are not moving into the future. Looking at education from a deficit model results in damaging [...]

Kevin tagged me to continue Miguel’s Passion Quilt meme.
Cool! Given that I have been reading about memes in Lankshear and Knobel’s New Literacies, this was timely.
So, here goes:

Images from my ENG 315: Writing in the Elementary Schools Courses, Spring 2008
Why these images? Well, they highlight some of the conversations that we have been having this [...]

Sorry that it took so long, but getting back to another crazy week finds me now, on the Friday might before MRA 2008, catching up on SITE.
That said, I have one final set of notes and reflections, and this keynote was a good one. Dr. Antonio Battro, the Chief Education Officer for One Laptop Per [...]

Tom Hanson from Open Education recently emailed me and alerted me to a post about technology infrastructure and professional development in schools.
How Do We Ensure Our Schools Are Staffed with Technologically Savvy Teachers — Open Education
Unfortunately, in many schools and for many teachers, the above five suggestions simply are not happening on [...]

These are the final three sessions that I will attend at SITE before heading home. I have notes on the keynote and follow-up conversation from this morning that I still need to clean-up and process (as well as a podcast for my presentation from a few days ago). I will get that all done later, [...]

Reflective Digital Media in Teacher Education
Timo Portimojarvi, University of Tampere, Finland

Developing curriculum of teacher education

Cultural view of curriculum and profession

Historical, cultural, and political objectives
Teachers are social and cultural actors
The development of the curriculum is a practice-based research process

Three-level curriculum model

Personal level – autobiographical and individual process of developing a personal and professional identity

Experiential life world

Streams [...]

A Digital Storytelling Implementation Experience with Early Childhood Students
Aslihan Kocaman-Karoglu, Middle East Technical University, Turkey

What is digital storytelling?

Story telling as an ancient tradition; digital storytelling integrates visual, interactive, and reiterative with constructive ideas

“combining the art of telling stories with some mixture of digital graphics, text, recorded audio narration, video…” B. Robin, 2006

Purpose of the Study

Outlines [...]

Thinking Creatively: Teachers as Designers of Technology, Pedagogy, and Content (TPACK)
Punya Mishra and Matthew J. Koehler, Michigan State University

Three points to the refrain

Teaching with technology is a wicked problem
Wicked problems need creative solutions
Teachers want to create solutions

Teaching

It is messy: Teaching is always “about something” — the content
Yet every discipline is messy, too — the canon, [...]