K12 Online Conference - Audio

Launch your students into developing space and science vocabulary and concepts as they follow current events of The Curiosity Rover landing on Mars AND design, build, and launch their very own rubber band powered rovers. Mission: Design and construct a rubber band powered rover with lander that will carry a raw egg as a payload and does not weigh more than 300 grams. It must be launched from 5 meters high, land safely without damage to the payload, and automatically engage rubber band powered wheels to move forward 3 – 5 meters. Mission: Design and construct a rubber band powered rover with lander that will carry a raw egg as a payload and does not weigh more than 300 grams. It must be launched from 5 meters high, land safely without damage to the payload, and automatically engage rubber band powered wheels to move forward 3 – 5 meters. Through this project based lesson students engage higher level skills incorporating the scientific method with research, engineering, writing, math, vocabulary, and team work to successfully complete their mission.

Some students enjoy speaking up in class while others don’t. This is a potential situation in many classrooms. In what ways then, can we promote more students to share their ideas? This presentation will briefly introduce research undertaken on face-to-face and virtual discussions and discuss some of the literature involved. Based on the findings, I will also highlight some of the benefits of virtual discussions and provide links for experiment in your classrooms.

Come learn about and listen to student voices highlighted on Authentic Voices (http://authentic-voices.wikispaces.com/) a wiki co-developed with a Language Arts teacher and a Technology Integration Specialist at an alternative setting. Authentic Voices is a place where students upload original pieces of writing along with an audio file of them reading their piece. Listen to at least three of the pieces students have composed and learn how students begin to authentically revise their work when creating an audio file of their work. Consider how students begin to see themselves differently as a result of publishing their work online. While Authentic Voices has a global audience (over 60 countries), we do not yet have another classroom that regularly comments on our students’ writing or posts their own writing on this site. Ponder efforts and challenges to finding collaborative classrooms.

How does your school community learn about events, announcements & celebrations of learning? How does the public view your school? The students in this presentation are part of school programs that put them in control of these stories! By using whatever technology tools available, educators from a variety of schools are giving students opportunities to practice 21st Century skills while taking part in meaningful multimedia projects. Listen to them describe their experiences and get inspired to start your own News Team!

Learn to use free and user friendly digital tools to design and implement student driven learning experiences that facilitate the acquisition of deep knowledge about vocabulary. Build a tech toolkit of resources and effective instructional practices to provide students with flexible learning paths to meet a variety of diverse learning needs. Develop innovative ways to use multimedia supported tools for vocabulary instruction. Learn to create interactive graphics, design digital word walls, and explore some 10 minute tech tools for use right away.

Scott Merrick has been exploring virtual worlds, a.k.a. 3D online environments, for years and has focused for the past half decade on their potentials for extending learning and teaching onto the global stage. He has been known to mashup technologies in order to get a point, or points, across. This session utilizes a live exploration of a custom-built Wallwisher.com webpage with voice narration created in Audacity. Learn a little bit about several more or less randomly selected (from hundreds existing) examples of the power of virtual environments to help establish “sense of place at a distance.” Then visit the wall itself in order to fully explore resources which a 20 minute recorded session can only overview.

Minecraft is a game and virtual world you may have heard about but not know a lot about. I created this presentation to show adults what students are doing in minecraft, some basics of the game, and how people (even adults) are using Minecraft in creative, fun and interactive ways. In this presentation I share some of the worlds I’ve created in Minecraft, describe how I’ve learned about Minecraft primarily using the Minecraft Wiki and YouTube videos created by other users, and show some clips from videos demonstrating some of the possibilities of Minecraft. I hope this presentation inspires you to learn more and ask your students about what they have created in Minecraft. Links to the resources I discuss and videos I share are available on learningsigns.speedofcreativity.org/minecraft.

This presentation is about the year-long process that my math students undertook to create independent research assignments. Their projects unlocked their creativity, either artistic or mathematical, and the final products were as much about the students as they were about math.

What does recent research say about teaching and learning with technology? What are some of the generalizations we can make about the climate and culture in effective technology rich learning environments? In this presenation I’ll share some generalizations I found in researching this topic and explore some of the factors that support technology integration. Identifying generalizations can affirm the hunches we have and provides evidence to support our initiatives to upgrade and transform teaching and learning. All of this suggests the importance of teachers creating activities that exploit the affordances of iOS apps in the classroom to foster literacy learning.

Do you sometimes struggle to provide meaningful professional development opportunities to inspire your teachers? The capabilities of educational technology has the potential to radically change instructional strategies to bring about socially meaningful learning. This online webinar will showcase how an organization can move to deeper and more creative staff development practices through a kaleidoscope of blended learning opportunities. Join Naomi Harm as she explains the potential of seven online highly collaborative tools and how you can model the use of these reflective tools and resources to build and sustain creative and meaningful staff development experiences. She will cover how to develop a vision of Web 2.0 for achieving your district’s technology literacy goals, as well as how to provide support for an online community-based reflection portal for educators to share their collective wisdom and voice, and just in-time learning for educational uses of Web 2.0.

Traditional story problems are dull. They're usually disconnected from real world scenarios and learner's experiences, and are presented in an artificial manner. Through the use of video, students and teachers can capture genuine moments of curiosity and real world examples for use in the classroom. Aren't ready to start filming yourself in the aisles of your local grocery store or park to point out interesting problems? You can easily use video to produce more scripted variations of traditional story problems, provide many open ended questions all tied to a common concept, or start to your flip your classroom with a blending of both teacher and learner voices. I wanted to provide a mixture of both student examples, teacher examples, and a bit of my thought process for creating this story problems. It's certainly not limited to Math, as video story problems would work very well for exploring conceptual science problems and reflective language arts of social studies learning. As we all struggle to adopt the Common Core State Standards here in the United States, it's important to remember that publishing, collaborating, and sharing with other learners online is now a requirement at almost all levels of K-12 education. Giving students a way to share their voice while connecting real world situations to classroom studies is a positive step towards a more student-centered classroom where exploration and curiosity is encouraged!

Learn how you can kick it up a notch by adapting a blended online learning system. Through incorporating an online Learning Management System to organize content and engage students in class, see how I have been able to differentiate instruction and meet students’ needs. In this presentation you will see how using a blended method of instruction where traditional and digital tools combine improve productivity and solve issues that have long plagued classrooms.

Learn how you can kick it up a notch by adapting a blended online learning system. Through incorporating an online Learning Management System to organize content and engage students in class, see how I have been able to differentiate instruction and meet students’ needs. In this presentation you will see how using a blended method of instruction where traditional and digital tools combine improve productivity and solve issues that have long plagued classrooms.

Students in the inaugural Quest Atlantis Student Congress worked to design, plan, program and build virtual worlds missions, games and activities to support the learning of peers around the globe. Much of Quest Atlantis is managed content and curriculum but in the Student Congress it is the students who design the curriculum based on their passions and interests. The teachers role is to support, scaffold and most of the time get out of the way and stop drawing boundaries to limit student creativity and learning :-) This video shows how kids built virtual world environments and activities to demonstrate their knowledge and skills and to support the learning of their peers.Your school can readily be part of this exciting program as any student can level up in the game and community to be part of this supportive and creative space. Digital citizenship IS a lived curriculum and activities like these in QA offer opportunities for leadership, mentoring, collaboration and healthy competition.

17 year old student from Santa Monica, Tiana Kadkhoda, shares stories and experiences about how student-created videos and media can transform learning and equip students with digital literacy skills alongside traditional curriculum skills. She will also explain why student and teacher collaboration is the foundation to a productive classroom environment.

Integrating technology, web 2.0, and interactive tools in the art room gives students the opportunity to enhance their 21st-century learning skills, practice creative problem-solving, and develop higher-level thinking as they create art. Showcasing student work through online venues opens your art room doors to an authentic global audience, connect students with others in collaborations, and enriches learning for all. I will share stories and examples from my technology rich elementary art room and how our online connections have enthralled, enriched and engaged my students.

As mobile devices take over we have to decide between replicating traditional classroom work with digital flashcards or infusing our classrooms with creativity. Mathew Needleman describes how taking pictures with an iPhone sparked a personal creative renaissance and how this might occur in our classrooms.

Project based learning can sometimes be recipe-like, leading to predictable, “cookie-cutter” results. I want to help people reimagine PBL and set up better investigations so students truly construct new meaning. It starts with posing a compelling question and then setting kids loose with tools like Wolfram Alpha, the “Computational Knowledge” engine. In this session we look at the kinds of learning activity that lead to knowledge construction (predicting, comparing, making judgements and more) and take a tour of Wolfram Alpha. To wrap things up we’ll take a quick peek at ManyEyes and Tableau Public, two tools for creating visualizations or info graphics from data derived from Wolfram Alpha and other sources.

Mobile learning has transformed the way we learn. The features and apps allow learners to move around the classroom, which helps spark creativity and imagination. Let's explore activities that get learners on their feet exploring, analyzing, and engaging with the concepts they are learning.

The Center for Make/Hack/Play grew out of a system asking itself questions about the purpose and role of schools as institutions of learning. In this presentation, In this presentation Bud Hunt unpacks the terms that guide his inquiry about and work within schools.