Jul

1

NECC Day Three Live Blog

July 1, 2009 |  Tagged , , | Leave a Comment

NECC Schedule

Jun

30

NECC 2009 Day 2 Live Blogging

June 30, 2009 |  Tagged , , | Leave a Comment

My NECC Schedule

Jun

27

EdubloggerCon at NECC Live Blog

June 27, 2009 |  Tagged , , , , | Leave a Comment

Jun

22

My NECC Schedule

June 22, 2009 |  Tagged , , | 4 Comments

Below is my calendar for NECC 2009 | National Educational Computing Conference put on by ISTE which will be starting next week. I will begin my travels to Washington, D.C. on Thursday afternoon with a train ride down to the San Francisco Bay area to spend the night there  before leaving by plane for the Capitol.

I will be live blogging many of the events I attend. The blog will appear at http://inpractice.edublogs.org, but I will likely mirror it at http://mizmercer.edublogs.org and http://mercertraining.edublogs.org.

I will be spending most of Tuesday on Capitol Hill as part of a lobbying effort by ISTE. I will be communicating solely by cell phone that day, so you can follow me at http://twitter.com/alicemercer or http://www.plurk.com/mizmercer.

Other places to find me and my media:

Jun

18

Looking backwards…

June 18, 2009 |  Tagged , , , | 2 Comments

What went well…

VoiceThread

VoiceThread has really become my go to for building background or schema with my students, and I think it’s about the easiest tool for doing this.  Others have derided VoiceThread as unaesthetic, but unless you are trained in Waldorf you would be hard pressed to come up with better looking K-W-L charts (which is essentially what I’m using them for). My “best” VoiceThread was “picked” for inclusion in the new VoiceThread education library as an example of what can be done.  You can see another example of my students’ work below:

After-school video documentary projects

I’ve added a sideline training students how to make documentaries. This is through my husband’s work making roads more walkable and bike-able. They do what are called “walk audits” around schools noting the problems that prevent walking, biking and ADA accessibility. Rather than simply doing a paper report with a bunch of numbers, in their last grant (Federal Safe Routes), they said they would have students at the schools audited document the audit. When I pointed out that Filp video cameras were as cheap as digital stills, we opted to go with moving pictures. Below is the first video we did:

Discover Simple, Private Sharing at Drop.io

Building and deepening my online networks

While I spent last year and last summer going global, meeting up with folks from around the world and this country at NECC, and online at Ed Tech Talk, this year was about going local. I built a small following at my district Ed Tech trainings, I presented at my state ed tech conference CUE, and I made local connections through CTAP: Region 3: ETLN, my regional state ed tech consortium, and met with local educators at Classroom2dot0 - Sacramento 2009 in April.

What did not go so well…

Collaboration with peers at my site

This is not as seamless as I would like. I want what I’m doing in the lab to be part of what’s going on in the class, but still have my own mark on it. I have that with some teachers, but not all. I’m still trying to migrate the teaching staff from emails and verbal requests, over to my planning wiki.

I feel really over-stretched

I don’t know how long this can go on. Some of it won’t as I likely will drop some of my extra-curriculars, but if I lose my job (see below) or get my hours cut…all bets are off.

What I’m looking forward to…

Doing more of the after-school video documentary projects

I only did two walk audit documentaries this spring, there will be five schools to do next autumn, so that should keep me busy!

Working on the state web portal

While times are definitely tough in the state, CTAP is making an effort to create a statewide web portal for educators, and I’ll be part of that effort. There will be a single ning social network for the state, California Technology Assistance Project Community, and there will be Web site full of resources for teachers, My CTAP. I’ll be providing content about Web 2.0 applications.

EETT grant for upper grade Math and Science

I will be working on writing an EETT grant for my district and school site. I have high hopes for this grant which will focus on math and science skills in upper elementary and middle school, and includes implementing a Gen Yes program. Hopefully, this will get computers for teachers which I think is a pre-requisite for getting them to use technology and the Internet ubiquitously in their teaching.

Doing a non-tech conference

I will definitely be returning to CUE next year, and have already submitted a session proposal with Larry Ferlazzo for March 2010, but I want to try to get down to the  CABE (California Association of Bilingual Education) conference in San Jose in March 2010, to try to expand my influences beyond technology.

Doing more with Edublogs

Looking forward to do even more with more Edublogs and working with more of the advanced features. I’ve been really happy with the threaded comments, this really makes a class blog work. I didn’t get around to introducing individual blogs to students this last school year, but that should definitely happen in the coming school year.

Research projects

I’ve been working on research projects with students this past year. The first thing I’m going is shortening the amount of “fact” based questions, and requiring students create and answer a higher-order thinking question. I’m also explicitly teaching them how to format PowerPoint, that goes beyond templates, and themes. I want to explore this more in the coming year. If it works in PowerPoint, this should carry over to videos, VoiceThread, etc.

What worries me…

Getting laid off, or having my time cut

By now, everyone knows about the mess that is the California state budget. Around a quarter of the current state budget is not covered by revenue. Keep in mind this is the about the eighth largest economy in the world.

This is how it looks where I work. The district needs to close an $8.4M budget gap (in a district serving ~50,000 students with 3, 000 students). Three hundred teacher layoffs (10%) were already planned for the coming year. Now, the almost complete elimination of primary class-size reduction (which limits classes in K-3 to 20 students per teacher) is being proposed, with classes going up to 30 to 1, and no summer school at elementary and middle school levels. Larger classes, mean fewer classes at my school site, which means fewer for me to service, and may lead to my hours being cut.

At the state, Dems would like to raid the reserve fund, and raise taxes. This is unrealistic given the recent budget votes. A big part of the problem is that most voters don’t realize how bad the budget situation is, and the level of cuts that are required. I think until the public “sees” how painful these cuts need to be, this is a non-starter.

Reps, as befits their lack of power, can afford to make their ridiculous proposals which includes refusing to do early release of prisoners, even though many are in their on pot charges, and we have a disproportionate % of our population incarcerated (that’s compared to other states).

Tonight, there is another school board meeting, I’ll be listening to see if my seniority date comes up. Wish me, and my fellow teachers luck!

New Staff

With all of these layoffs, I’ll be working with new teachers. What if they don’t want to collaborate or do the EETT grant work.

I worry that the combination of all of these will result in my being too busy.

Jun

17

Schedule Change/Reminder

June 17, 2009 | | Leave a Comment

The Edublogs Live! session I am doing on VoiceThread: A 21st Century K-W-L has been changed from Thursday 6/18 to Friday 6/19 at 7 p.m. PDT. Hope to see you then!

Jun

7

Have you no shame?

June 7, 2009 |  Tagged , , , | 3 Comments

I love getting and reading the Sacramento Bee, and love being able to read it online. The comments however are a real mix of the bitter and the sweet. I hate how the limited space in the print version constricts representations of different points of view. If that is the problem in the print paper, the online version is like a polar opposite. To be frank, it’s embarrassing. Many commenters think nothing of making racist comments, ad hominum attacks, or weaving entire backgrounds for stories that have little to do with reality.

A recent Sacramento News and Review (our independent weekly) had this to say:

“If you are someone who leaves comments below news stories on the Sac Bee’s web site, chances are your politics are reactionary and inhumane and your heart flinty and cold.
Under a story about a child who drowned in the river, you might write, ‘Kids drown all the time. Why is this news? And Rodriguez? Was the kid even here legally?

Like a piece in the Onion it is funny and sad, because you could literally find comments that read almost exactly like that in the comments section in any given week. It’s like all the happiness and joy has been sucked out of the comments section. Instead of the milk of human kindness, they’ve reverted to the poison of reptilian bitterness.

My husband follows transportation articles as part of his job, and shares the story about a woman who was forced off the road by a driver enraged truck driver who felt she had taken too long in a drive-through line where he had been stuck behind her. The commenters all came up with reasons why this must have occurred: texting, using a cell phone, putting on makeup, including elaborate descriptions of what she was doing. All of this with no facts to back up any of their suppositions, but it obviously filled their preconceptions.

The comments on recent story on burn victims from the daycare fire in Mexico coming up to Shriners International Hospital here in Sacramento was the most recent example of this combination of ignorance and meanness. Commenters were angry that we were taking care of non-Americans showing their ignorance that other commenters were fortunately quick to address; services are not paid for by taxpayers by the international efforts of Shriners and the hospital is part of a network which includes a hospital in Mexico. The response? One commenter vowed not to contribute any longer to Shriners because he only wanted to help American kids. Local columnist, Marcos Breton, has weighed in on the ugly nativism that paints all folks from South of the U.S. who have a Spanish speaking ancestor as illegal (and squares off on the reality of “illegals” as well).

My maternal grandfather was a proud Shriner for years who collected his own spare change and stood in front of grocery stores raising money. It was to help sick children. Period. I could resort to terms like, ignorant, racist, etc. but the one that really fits is small. We Americans like to think of ourselves as generous people, and we are, those comments were not from that America.

There is another more general concern that I have about the online comments. I teach in Sac City in an elementary, but one of my colleagues is Larry Ferlazzo, who teaches at Luther Burbank. We both have large immigrant populations from Mexico and SE Asia. Our problem is that we rely on using links to stories to help teach our students about their culture and how it intersects with mainstream society, which can expose them to the comments section.

A few months ago Larry pointed out a story on traditional conflict resolution methods in the Hmong community in light of the recent murder that had it’s roots in an extra-marital affair. The comments were the usually blend of sanctimony and bigoted opinions that have marked the online comments.

I wondered, what will students make of this? Most of the commenters probably don’t consider the students important enough to worry about it, but they should. Proposition 13 passed around the time I was 13 years old. In the flurry of threatened closures of libraries and other services Howard Jarvis opined that it didn’t matter if libraries closed because none of these ignorant kids read anyway. That was my political crucible and I have never and will never find anything that Howard Jarvis or his taxpayers association has to say to be credible.

I have to think that some of Larry’s students might be coming to the same conclusion about folks in the Bee comment section that I once came to about Howard Jarvis and his ilk. I once was 13 and powerless, but now I am 44, vote in every election in an electorate where my views are shared by a majority. Someday many of Larry’s and my students may be too, demographics is on their side. Meanwhile, those commenters will still be trolls.

Photo Credit: Dirty Troll Revue on Flickr

Jun

2

My Upcoming Events for June 2009

June 2, 2009 |  Tagged , , , | Leave a Comment

As part of my promise to do a better job of sharing upcoming events more than 24 hours before they occur, here is my list of online “events” that I’ll be doing this month.

Monday June 8th at 6 p.m. PDT: It’s Elementary:Reflecting on the School Year Ending

It’s Elementary
Link to show

Wednesday June 17th at 9 a.m. PDT: Follow up to Classroom 2.0 Meetup

This is an in-person event. Details can be found here.

Thursday 6/18 at 7 p.m. PDT: Edublogs Live! VoiceThread: A 21st Century KWL

Monday 6/22 at 9 a.m. PDT: Fear Not the Code which is about using embed code and not freaking out…