Author Archive
“I just want mustard.”
One weekend, my grandmother asked me to go to the store and get some mustard for her. I wanted to get the best mustard for her, so I tried to clarify what exactly she meant by mustard. “Mammaw, do you want coarse ground, spicy brown, Cajun-style, Creole, Dijon? What kind of mustard do you want? [...]
Organizing Instruction To Improve Learning
As I am working on program documents and teacher materials, I am analyzing all of it through the lens of best practice and research supported strategies. I continue to maintain that the “cool” and “wow” factors only get technologists so far with classroom teachers. When we can support what they are required to teach with [...]
“They Won’t Sit Still!”
One of my core beliefs about learning is that we learn by doing. I prefer active video conference sessions where students are interacting with the content or another class and I think this list would be helpful to content providers and teachers to engage the students more. Remember, all learning structures do not work for [...]
SIG IVC Twitterfountatin
Be patient. This little widget is working hard to grab all the tweets and pics from our first IVC Playground. We had a great time sharing our enthusiasm and passion for video conferencing. Many thanks to all the helping hands and staff from zoos, museums, and other organizations that made this a smashing success. We [...]
ISTE Workshop: A Novel Hour
I began ISTE on Sunday teaching a 3-hour workshop on our “Novel in an Hour” project. Christina and Rich Hum from Kigluait Educational Adventures in Talkeetna, Alaska co-taught the session with me. The goals of the session were for participants to experience Skype and H.323 video conferencing and learn how to use a wiki and [...]
Video Conference Playground at ISTE10
This year, I had the opportunity to lead the team to develop and manage the Interactive Video Conference Playground at ISTE10 in Denver. It was a great honor for me. The Pirate Crew was Janine Lim, Audra May, Lori Colwill, and Anne Marie Millar with the superb technical support from Paul Heironymus, Shane Howard, and [...]
My Learning Journey
I wrote the following in response to a request that I received. Well, I misunderstood what was wanted. The book is about collaborative technologies and creating global citizens. I thought I was supposed to share my journey, but really they wanted a story about students today. I spent a couple of days thinking about this [...]
Louisiana DLA
Thank you for joining me today for our “Teaching Teachers Through Student Projects” session. Here are all the links that I referenced today. Project Links Shane Sings Monster Mayhem Read Around the Planet Mystery Quest USA Resource Sites Whirlidurb Video Conference Projects Memberships available for schools with IP-based H.323 systems Blog: VC Rox Blog: VC [...]
Making Learning Whole
I recently finished Making Learning Whole by David Perkins. I am going to share my notes about how to apply it to what we are doing in video conferencing. I am looking at this book through the lens of “What can we do to increase the learning and interactions in our video conferencing student projects?’ [...]
MACUL 2010
This afternoon, I presented a session at MACUL 2010 about the classic matching project used by so many in videoconferencing. It goes by many names: Monster Exchange, Monster Trade, Monster Match. Thank you to Janine Lim for being an excellent facilitator. The basics of the project. Find a partner. Create a monster. Write a description. [...]