Create a Permeable Classroom - Part I: Google Docs Presentations

Over the past few weeks educators around the globe have discovered some powerful new tools. Google added presentations to their web-based office suite, which already had word processor and spreadsheet components. Also, a wide variety of services now allow users to create their own streaming video "channel" using just a webcam and an Internet connection. These tools make it easier than ever to give your students an authentic audience for their work - and to bring their peers or content area experts into the classroom. This post is the first of two. In this post I'll share about Google Docs presentations and in part II I'll share several services that allow you to create your own streaming video shows.

Google Docs Presentations

Google Docs (formerly Google Docs & Spreadsheets) now allows mulitple users to view or edit a presentation online. Users can create a presentation from scratch or import and then share an existing Powerpoint presentation. Surprisingly, these presentations are also a way to bring an international learning community into your classroom. Here are some of the benefits and limits of this new tool, followed by some early educational examples.

The Benefits

• Web-based: File storage, editing, and even the final presentation happens right on the web. This means that your presentation (or a student's presentation) can be accessed at school, at home, or on any other internet connected computer. You can edit from anywhere, and even present anywhere. There is no need to worry about software versions or compatibility when you move from computer to computer - and no need to worry about paying for software or updates.
  
• Collaborative: Users can edit or view presentations from multiple locations... simultaneously - or asynchronously. This means that students can complete group work from their own homes, and you can collaborate with other classes world wide, all without worrying about juggling multiple versions of a document via email. This also means that students, teachers, parents, or others around the globe can virtually "attend" a presentation online.
  
• Backchannel Chat: During an online presentation, participants have a chat "room" to the right side of the presentation slides. This allows face-to-face participants the opportunity to interact with each other while the presenter is speaking. Presentations can now be interactive, and many more students can participate via text than they can via voice. More importantly, it allows peers and experts from around the world to interact with the class. These two things enable a shift of power (and authority) away from the presenter to the students and to other experts around the world. It is a compelling new sort of presentation experience, particularly if visitors are actively included as part of the presentation.
  

The Limits:

• Computers and Google Accounts Needed: A presenter can project the presentation on a large screen as they would with powerpoint, but obviously for face-to-face students to take advantage of the chat room functionality they will need to have their own computers. Also, in order to participate in the chat students (and any virtual visitors) will need to login using a Google account. Naturally, anyone who wants to participate in collaboratively editing the presentation will also require a Google account. Google accounts are free, but do require an email account and a registration procedure.
  
• No Archives & Limited Export: It is easy to get information into Google Docs, but not nearly as easy to get information out. The chat transcript is not (or at least no longer) archived, and it cannot be cut and pasted. (Screen capture programs can be used to save a chat as an image or video, though.) Also, although you can import PowerPoint presentations into Google Docs, it will not export PowerPoint presentations. It will only export a zipped html file that will allow you to run the presentation in a web browser when you are offline.
  
• No Audio, Video, or Screencasting: If you are attending a presentation remotely via the web it is easy to follow the presenter through the slides, however you cannot see the presenter or hear what they are saying. Also, if the presenter shows other programs or sites to their face-to-face audience, you cannot see these remotely. In short, Google Docs does not provide any streaming audio or video and does not provide any screen sharing or screencasting features. This makes a Google Presentation of limited effectiveness for remote attendees... unless a third-party application is used to transmit audio, video, or the presenter's desktop. This is where several new streaming video services might come in useful.

In part II of this post, which I'll share next week, I'll discuss the benefits and limits of new services that make it easy for anyone to stream video using a webcam. In the meantime, here are a few examples of pioneering early uses of Google Presentations in education.

Examples

• Google Presentations - A presentation about Google presentations, originally created by Vicki Davis and forty (40) other educators around the world! This presentation actually serves as an introduction to using Google Presentations, including ideas for classroom and professional development uses.
  
• ES PTA Presentation - A presentation about Web 2.0 tools for parents, including the benefits, concerns, and proactive strategies for safety (based on the Internet Awareness presentation which I created for the Laguna Beach USD under a Creative Commons Share-Alike license). Kim Cofino presented this to parents in Bankok, with an audience of educators from around the globe contributing in the backchannel chat.
  
• BTC Interview - A presentation that Jennifer Jones used during a job interview - using the presentation she brought her online learning network to the job interview with her! She explicitly involved "the network" by including prompts in small text in the lower corner of most slides. This is a good model for being sure the online audience can participate and contribute to the presentation, even without streaming video or audio.

You can also read my personal reflections about these examples and about Google Docs presentations in general at Google Docs Presentations: Limits, Benefits, and Questions.

If you've tried Google Docs presentations with your students, or if your students have already used a Google presentation themselves, please leave a comment (and a link). We'd love to hear your story. If you've got other stories about your own learning with Google Docs, we'd love to hear those as well. Please leave a link to any blog posts you may have written on this topic yourself, too. And of course, feel free to leave questions or other comments about this post.

Check back next week for Create a Permeable Classroom - Part II: Live Web TV.

Tips for New Classroom 2.0 Teachers

Every veteran teacher knows that the first 6 weeks of school are the key to success for the rest of the year. The tone you set in your classroom and the practice of routines you establish with your students are key to creating a successful learning environment. Yet, despite 6 weeks of ‘practice”, classroom activities don’t always go as planned and when unplanned chaos takes over, teachers regroup, come at it from another approach, and often seek the advice of their peers. Thank goodness for veteran teachers who are willing to share tips like those found at Middle Web’s First Days of Middle School.

These wonderful ideas have been built from years of “experience” in Classroom 1.0. The educational technology world is filled with advocates for Classroom 2.0 who share the opportunities of Web 2.0. But some are starting to ask questions like “Why are more teachers not flocking to use Web 2.0 tools?”

Maybe, what teachers need is some really concrete tips and strategies on ‘management’ in a Classroom 2.0 learning space. Pioneers of Classroom 2.0 are ‘experimenting’ themselves; not all these experiments work exactly as planned. We need to remember that not all teachers or administrators work in an environment where they feel safe or supported to be pioneers in such a public arena as Web 2.0. This is much different than trying something new inside your own building or classroom. Fears of legal repercussions fuel environments that are not supportive of implementing a Classroom 2.0 model.

Perhaps those of us who do work in supportive environments should not only share our stories in terms of the opportunities that Web 2.0 bring us as a learning community, but we should start to put together a page filled with tips and strategies that teachers interested in using Web 2.0 tools could use to get started. These tips would also benefit IT Staff and School Administrators who would be more supportive of Web 2.0 tools in education if they could see a collective inventory of concrete classroom management (or risk management) strategies.

So in that spirit I’m going to start with three Classroom 2.0 management tips and invite other pioneering educators to comment with their own advice. Remember that what might be obvious to a seasoned Web 2.0 teacher might not always be obvious to a “first year” newbie interested in creating a Classroom 2.0 learning environment.

• Create more than one email account using web based services like Gmail or Yahoo Mail that you can use to sign up for web 2.0 tools.
  


• Start by limiting your use of Web 2.0 tools to inside your classroom until you feel comfortable that your students understand the rules for using these tools. Just like students need “practice” to learn what it looks like and sounds like to take a trip to the library, they will need your guidance to visit a virtual location such as a class wiki. And don’t give up if one of your students steps out of line, anymore than you would give up going to the library.
  


• If your students are under 13, consider signing in using one of your alternate web based email to register for a “classroom” account to a Web 2.0. tool. You can then sign in “yourself” as the teacher to a tool (like a WIKI) that you want your students to contribute to OR you can give them the username and ‘password of the day’ to sign in and make it part of your daily routine to change the password at the end of the school day. Many Web 2.0 tools stay logged in once you have signed in, so you might only have to do this once a day.

I’ll post more ideas in my next post but for now let’s hear your tips

(Photo Credit)

News Flash!

Kristin Hokanson is a technology integration mentor in Upper Merion, Pennsylvania, and she recently introduced me to a great Flash-based videoconferencing tool called Flashmeeting. Flashmeeting is very easy to use from both meeting attendee and meeting booker perspectives. The interface allows for one person at time to speak using audio and video. Other meeting attendees can text chat at the same time. Link and file sharing, voting and virtual whiteboards are some of Flashmeeting's other features. Meetings are recorded and can be viewed again at a later time. These replays are editable, and meeting minutes containing the chat log, voting records, files and URLs. These can also be saved PDFs.

To book a Flashmeeting, you must jump through a few hoops and fit certain criteria as Flashmeeting is part of a research initiative at the Centre for New Media within the Knowledge Media Institute at The Open University in the United Kingdom. Data from meetings are used for research, so you must agree to having events recorded.

A week or so ago, I booked my first Flashmeeting as a meeting space for a Ning I
created, the Global Education Collaborative. Sunday night's meeting was a trial run for me. I thought I had booked a meeting for Sunday, September 16th, at 8PM CST, but I actually had booked it a day earlier as FlashMeeting's server is on UK time. Of course, they caution users about this, but I obviously didn't quite get it. Just prior to the announced meeting time, I scrambled to schedule another meeting for the correct time, and shot off the new meeting URL to potential attendees. Fortunately, about 10 or so people popped into our conference over the next two hours and great connections and conversations ensued.

Sharon Peters of LEARN was one of the first people to join the conference, and this Canadian is a treasure trove of knowledge. She has experience to back up her ideas about global education, and she cited many resources of which I had not previously been aware (view the replay to find out her recommendations). I was multitasking during our Flashmeeting, and I noticed Kim Cofino, the Elementary 21st Century Literacy Specialist at the International School Bangkok in Thailand, submit a message via Twitter, a sort of group instant messaging service. I sent her a direct twit with the link to our meeting and she subsequently joined us, fresh with ideas from the Learning 2.0 conference in Shanghai, China. I also noticed my friend, Westley Field, from Sydney, Australia, online via iChat and quickly sent him the link to our meeting. He joined the conference and told us all about his work at the MLC School and with Teen Second Life.

Early in the meeting, Sharon said that global collaborations happen when people
develop personal connections. If that is a criterion for successful projects, then I think Flashmeeting definitely can facilitate the necessary relationship building.  It was a truly invigorating online meeting, and you can see for yourself by watching this edited replay. Check out the meeting notes,too, for a flurry of URLS that were shared. I look forward to holding more Flashmeetings and connecting with educators world-wide. Let me know of your interest by stopping by the Global Education Collaborative ning site and leaving a message!

Tech Savvy Learning Communities (a la Moodle)

"The daily working life of most teachers is one of unrelieved time pressure and isolation; they work, largely alone, in a classroom of 25-30 children or adolescents for hours every day." Prisoners of Time. National Education Commission on Time and Learning. April 1994

Since this publication was released over a decade ago, many technological tools have emerged that have potential to relieve the isolation and combat the lack of mutual time to plan, converse, and reflect that teachers so desperately need. In her article "Professional Development Through Learning Communities", Kathleen Fulton talks about how the same forces that drive us to use technology to create learning communities for students, "offer the opportunity for new models for the professional growth of teachers. Learning communities share a way of knowing, a set of practices, and shared value of the knowledge that comes from these procedures. These learning communities, with expanded human and technological resources, bring together students, teachers, and community members in directing the course of education in new ways."

Tools like Tapped In, Second Life, Google Groups, and Ning communities such as Classroom 2.0 provide innovative ways to create virtual places for professional development, collegiality, collaboration, and social interaction. But one tool, that may be overlooked to help teachers form learning communities is Moodle

Moodle is most known as an Open Source LMS (Learning Management System) (similar to Blackboard and WebCT). Many schools are using it to either offer online or hybrid courses or as a digital space for a face to face class where students can use Moodle to submit homework, view online resources, or have online conversations with their classmates. Moodle also has modules that allow students to take quizes, surveys, or participate in a classroom wiki.

My belief that the best technology professional development is embedded in the process of participation in authentic meaningful tasks for teachers and not as a separate activity lead me to create an opportunity for teachers to gain skills and confidence using a tool like Moodle by turning it into a technology tool that could be used to help our teachers save time, increase collaboration, and relieve isolation. If you have access to Moodle, try setting up a Moodle "course" in topic mode (instead of the weekly mode) and hiding the modules that say "grade" and "assignment". Give it a cool name that identifies it as a "teachers space" for your school, then:

1. Add a forum called "Teachers Room" for general dialogue between staff.


2. Create another forum called Staff Meetings. Post all agendas and minutes as a discussion topic to this Forum and encourage teachers to continue the staff meeting dialogues online.
   
3. Add all Staff Meetings, Inservice, Early Releases dates, or other important dates to the "course" calendar.


4. Add handy staff resources such as PDF copies of parent or staff handbooks and frequently used forms.


5. Create a quick poll to gather staff input about an important topic in your school.

These 5 simple ways to use Moodle with your staff will provide an authentic opportunity for learning to use a 21st century tool, generate ideas, build confience, and start dialogues that encourage teachers to start using a tool like Moodle to build learning communities with their students.

The fact that Moodle can be set up as an Intranet might make some teachers feel more comfortable participating. If you don't have the school resources to set it up on your school server (did I mention it was free?), there are many resonably priced hosting solutions for Moodle such as http://www.siteground.com/ that will do all the legwork for you. Teachers can also reserve free Moodle classroom through Global Classroom, which also includes a free skillbuilder course.

Peter Senge was asked (O'Neil, 1995) what he would do, if he were a principal of
a school, to transform the school into a learning organization. Senge
replied that initially he would find the teachers who were interested in doing
things differently, who have 'some real commitment and passion to do it,' and
get them to talking to each other. Pulling a core group together is a strategy
frequently used for mobilizing and moving people in an organization. ~Dr. Shirely M. Hord

One of the biggest obstacles to doing this in schools is the lack of common time. Why not try one of the many technology tools available to start collaborating online about practical issues, then move into the ongoing visioning process of a real learning community.

Big Questions About Web 2.0 in Education

Thursday, September 6th, at the Office 2.0 Conference in San Francisco, there will be a panel discussion on "Classroom 2.0" and the use of Web 2.0 software in education. A wiki with the panel members and more information is here.

As preparation for the panel, an Office 2.0 Conference group in our Classroom 2.0 social network has been formed to allow for the discussion of ten possible panel topics. We will be encouraging the Office 2.0 Conference attendees to join the group and participate in the discussions during and after the conference. We believe that some in the edublogosphere will be interested as well, and hope you will contribute your wisdom! The discussions have been placed in a group in order not to overwhelm the regular Classroom 2.0 dialog.

Here are links to the forum discussions in that group:
1. Is Web 2.0 a good fit for education?
2. Is Web 2.0 significant to future student achievement, workplace skills, information literacy, and digital citizenship?
3. Do we need to start teaching "digital citizenship?"
4. Are the formal structure of education changing because of online learning, and what roles can Web 2.0 software play in those changes?
5. Technology decision-making in schools: The divide between IT and the classroom, and why is it so hard to implement new technologies in education?
6. How much commercialization should be allowed in the classroom and in the school?
7. The conflict between school security issues and the innovative technologies of Web 2.0
8. Publicly shared lives: how transparent should students lives be, and is it appropriate for students to be "clickable?"
9. The training gap: professional development and rapid technological change. How do we train a huge workforce in skills that are just being understood?
10. How important is equitable access to technology, and do the tools of Web 2.0 change that?

(cross-posted from www.SteveHargadon.com)

The Infinite Linking Machine: Post of The Month (August 2007)

I've wanted for some time to introduce a more participatory element into the experience of reading the Infinite Thinking Machine. Any reader can comment on any post, which is fantastic, and we've seen some great discussion on the blog lately. Consider the 18 comments in response to Wes Fryer's recent post for example. In that case, the conversation even extended to other educators' blogs. Vicky Davis, for instance, argued against Wes' call for a moratorium on textbook purchasing. (And you'll find another 11 comments on Vicky's blog.)

However, I'd like to see more reader contributions make it into the actual posts here, too. And as wonderful as the original content created by my fellow ITM bloggers is, it would be great to see this blog linking out to other blogs more often. After all, linking to others' contributions and making connections with others online are both an important part of the blogging process.

With these goals in mind, this post marks the beginning of a new series, The Infinite Linking Machine. Each month I will post a brief topic or question and ask readers to submit relevant links to other blogs in the comments. The following month I'll select one of these to be the Post of The Month. The following guidelines will help you choose a post to submit.

Post Of The Month Guidelines

1. Leave a comment including the following:
   
   • The address of another blog post relevant to the month's topic. (Please use the permalink for the particular post you are linking to so that the post is always easily accessible in the future.)
     
   • A brief annotation of the post so that we know why it is relevant and important.
     
   • Your name (and webpage) so we can give you credit for your find. :)
2. Submit links to blog posts that you think make a contribution to the edublogosphere (the world of educational blogs) by offering good advice, resources, or discussion that can benefit a wide variety of teachers around the world. (We're not necessarily looking for tech gurus here.)
   
3. Submit links to blog posts that you think make connections between ideas and others' work online.
   
4. Avoid posting a link to your own blog and avoid any conflict of interest. (For instance, do not submit posts about products or services in which you have a financial interest.)
   
5. Most importantly, submit posts that make us feel good about being educators - even if the posts are dealing with difficult questions or issues. And be sure to have fun with it.
   

August Link of The Month

By way of example, I'll post a link of the month for August. Obviously this doesn't carry as much weight as a post culled from reader submissions and there were certainly many other amazing posts written in August. However, this is something that caught my eye, especially because I've been doing a lot of work related to Internet Awareness, Ethics, and Safety (which we can consider the topic for August):

Changing my Tune - Internet Safety for Students (Via Multi-faceted Refractions.) This is a great approach to Internet safety for students from Vinnie Vrotny, inspired by Steve Dembo. I love the questions Vinnie asks instead of providing students with a list of things they can't do online. His approach also has the advantage of encouraging rather than squelching discussion.

Topic For September

There are already some fantastic posts out there about the start of the school year. Please submit your favorites over the next couple of weeks. If we've got great response, I'll post a winner in early September and start the next contest right away. Note that every submission will be available in the comments to this post, even if it isn't chosen as the Post of The Month. I can't wait to read what you all submit. :)

I apologize in advance to our colleagues in the Southern hemisphere, who may be in the middle of their school year, and to our colleagues on year round schedules. I hope you'll participate and submit your favorite start of the year posts as well, even if they were written months ago.

Image: Educators making connections at edubloggercon 2007. (By Janice Stearns)

What's Your Mindset?

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Greetings from near the Mammoth Caves National Park in Kentucky! I'm winding up a much needed vacation with my family, and starting to gear up for the start of school next week. My thoughts are wandering to how I can best serve teachers and students in my new position as Lead Technology Coach at the Center for Urban School Improvement at the University of Chicago.

About this time every year, my alma mater, Beloit College, reminds me that I need to be thinking about students in a more thoughtful way. For the past ten years, the college developed a list of cultural events that possibly shaped the "worldview" of its incoming freshman class. As the list developers Ron Nief and Tom McBride note in their introduction, this is not a list of events that happened the year these kids were born or intended to serve as commentary about the class's pre-collegiate education. It simply is encouragement for Beloit's faculty to think about the perspectives their new students will bring to learning.

As a person interested in educational technology, one item on this year's compilation particularly jumped out at me, "Thanks to MySpace and Facebook, autobiography can happen in real time." I think it's fair to say that there has been a fair amount of skepticism about these social networking sites, and it's interesting how this statement frames their uses. Our kids are writing their own stories and the writing process has been democratized. This is something we cannot ignore.

As this school year begins for me, one of my goals will be to think more about the set of experiences my students are bringing to learning and to consider this information throughout lesson planning and interactions with students and colleagues. The learning process is not only just about objectives, standards, and tests; it's about making learning personal and relevant to our students. So, I hope you will join me in contemplating our mindsets in the K-12 realm. A few questions come to mind: What do you need to know about your students in order to step into their mindsets? How important to the educational process is understanding your students' perspectives ? How do you go about getting to know your students? Post your ideas in the comments section of this post and let's have a conversation!

By the way, you may have noticed my map image in the this post. You can now embed Google Maps into web pages, just like you can with videos from Google Video and You Tube.