Until now, Disney’s Planet Challenge was available in the United States only to schools in California and Florida, but the program has been expanded to school districts nationwide this year to address growing demand.

Hailed as an empowering, one-of-a-kind experience by participating educators from previous years, this is one of the most significant initiatives of its kind ever to be offered to K12 schools. My colleagues at District Administration and I are proud to be working with Disney on this project, helping to inform school leaders like yourself about this valuable program. In fact, you may already have seen information about Disney’s Planet Challenge in the pages of our magazine and on our Web site. I encourage you to get involved with this important program. To learn more, visit www.districtadministration.com/disney

Recently, I wrote a post about social bookmarking in the classroom, and focused on a tool called Diigo.  This post is a followup.

After seeing the education community embrace Diigo with so much excitement, the good folks that run it decided to create an educator-specific incantation of the popular tool.  They listened to what teachers had to say- what special features they’d like to see in order to better use Diigo with their students- and recently introduced Diigo Educator Accounts.

These are special, FREE premium accounts provided, specifically to K-12 & higher-ed educators. Once your Diigo Educator application is approved, your regular Diigo account will be upgraded to have additional features.  So, you need to create a basic Diigo account first, then upgrade to the free education account after wards.  The upgraded educational features include:

Here’s a link to the offical Diigo Educator Account FAQ Sheet.  You’ll find loads of valuable information there to help you set up your educator account, get your students registered, and get started digging with Diigo!

Here’s an example of what I plan on doing with my Diigo Educator account (I’ll let you know how it goes )

• Every week, I have one student choose a current event article & pose a question about it.  It started out great, but after a while, everyone just started reading previous posts & trying to mimic them instead of thinking critically on their own.  I am going to shake things up a bit by using a  Diigo Education account for our current event conversations.
• Every week, I will choose a current event article and begin marking it up in Diigo with a question (bubble annotation).  My students will have to choose segments of the article to annotate themselves.  They must make a statement AND ask a question in their annotation.
• I’m just fleshing this out now, so any feedback you can provide is GREATLY appreciated!

While doing some research for this post, I can across an interesting article by Miguel Guhlin that I think does a really great job of explaining the rationale for this post.  In his article, “Spending that Internet Gold”, Guhlin makes a good argument for effective website searching by quoting Dr. Judi Harris:

1. We all begin on the Web by “telegathering” (surfing) and “telehunting” (searching. This we can do pretty well. What we don’t do very well yet is to take educationally sound steps beyond telegathering and telehunting).
2. We need to help our students and ourselves “teleharvest” (sift through, cogitate, comprehend, etc.) the information that we find, and “telepackage” the knowledge that results from active interaction (application, synthesis, evaluation, etc.) with the information.
3. Then, we need to “teleplant” (telepublish, telecollaborate, etc.) these telepackages by sharing them with others…who use them as information in their…
4. …telegathering & telehunting, and the process cycles back around again.
Most of us are at the tele-gathering and hunting stage, finding and collecting web sites that we believe are useful. How many educational web sites do you visit that have a list of lists, collections of fantastic sites on the web? Impossible to keep track of and maintain, these lists are just more information that each of us has to wade through, each time creating our own links. The pack mules can’t carry all the gold that we’ve found out there. Maybe, now that we’ve accumulated the gold, it’s time to do more than look at it. To do that, we have to know what’s valuable, what’s not. According to Jim McNamara (jmcn@tenet.edu), evaluating something means being able to extract the value out of it.

QUESTION: “How do we help out students determine and extract the value of web resources?” or as Guhlin puts it, “pan for internet gold”.  How do we help our students to think critically in such a fast-paced, multi-tasking culture, when they typically have ten internet tabs open at once, an IM’ing window open as well, a Youtube video streaming AND their iPod playing in the background?

ANSWER: The best way to help our students better evaluate internet resources is to get them (students) to interact with them (websites).  That’s what Web 2.0 is all about-Collaboration, Evaluation & Synthesis

TOOL: A great way to harness the power of Web 2.0  and interact with websites is Social Bookmarking

DIIGO.com is my favorite social bookmarking tool because it has AMAZING educational possibilities. The social aspect of learning is important, especially with our increasing focus on conversations that add value to what we are learning! What sets Diigo apart from other social bookmarkers is that Diigo not only lets you bookmark Web sites but also have online conversations about them… on the actual sites themselves!.

• If you have students posting their own work online (ex. Literary students writing their own blogs), you can use highlighting & sticky notes (annotations) to leave public feedback of their work with invisible ink.  A wonderful modeling tool for your students to learn how to appropriately & meaningfully comment on each others work.

Clay Burell: 3 Uses of Diigo in the Classroom

Innovative teachers all over the world are constantly discovering new ways to use Diigo with their students.  If your interest is peeked,  check out some of the following videos:

• Emily Barney: Making the Web Work for You
• Highlight & Share the Web
• Improving how we Find, Share & Save Information
• Diigo’s Web Slides Feature
• Kristin Hokanson: How to Diigo
  
• Key Features of Diigo
• Jen Dorman: Dig Deeper with Diigo

As you begin to use Diigo & develop your own educational uses, join the conversation and share your ideas with the rest of us

• Why would teachers use Diigo? (Thanks, Clif Mims for starting this conversation!)

Now that you know about Diigo, you can help your students evolve from Internet Cavemen, hunting & gathering information that can sometimes be harmful and can often be useless, into modern Digital Citizens, harvesting information in a safe & sustainable manner, which includes contributing their own thoughts and ideas to online conversations.  Sure that takes more work, and the results may seem slower to realize, but as any responsible farmer will tell you, it’s the only way to ensure that future generations will also be able to reap the benefits of the seeds we plant now…

Ok. Some of you might be tired of hearing me say it, but I’ll say it again anyway.  One of the best ways to learn is through stories.  Stories help us put facts in context and allow us to apply more of our senses to the learning experience.  That’s why I’m so excited about the new, free, curriculum recently released by Microsoft that uses realistic storytelling to help students learn about intellectual property rights and how to be responsible digital citizens.

Here’s the essential thinking behind the curriculum:  Students interact with music, movies, software, and other digital content every day. But, do they really understand the rules that dictate the ethical use of these digital files, and, more importantly, do they understand why these issues are relevant?

The goal of the Digital Citizenship and Creative Content program is to create an awareness of the rights connected with creative content. Because only through education can students gain an understanding of the relevance of and a personal respect for creative rights and grow to become good digital citizens.

Through the Microsoft Innovative Teachers Program, Microsoft reached out to teachers across the country to test the curriculum materials and provide feedback over the past year.  As a member of the program (FYI- any educator can apply ) I was able to take part in that “testing” phase.  Along with 93% of the other teachers who participated, I highly recommend the materials and plan on using them again.  Here are a few of the top reasons I think you should check out the curriculum:

• The program focuses on creative rights in the world of digital citizenship so it’s excellent for raising student awareness about proper behavior with technology.     

• It’s relevant and fun for students because it enables them to have the experience of creating their own digital property in the form of a ring tone on the student Web site (MyBytes.com). In addition, the curriculum explores the topic using examples like Facebook and MySpace.

• The program focuses on the positive aspects of the creative process and is not enforcement-based like other programs on the same topic.

• The program supports differentiated and cross-curricular instruction

The Digital Citizenship and Creative Content program was designed for students in grades 8-10 but can certainly be adapted for 6th-12th graders. It’s organized into four thematic units that include the following subject areas: Civics, Computer Science, Debate, Economics, Fine Arts, Government, Journalism, Language Arts, Drama, and Video Production.

Each unit has a set of standalone, yet complimentary project-oriented activities that play off a creative rights scenario presented through a case study. There are guiding questions to help focus students learning, and pre/post assessments to establish baseline knowledge and gauge student learning. There are also suggestions and tips for engaging parents and peers outside of the classroom.  Here’s part of the basic scenario- one that I think our students can definately relate to:

A high school sponsors a school-wide Battle of the Bands. A student not involved in the production decides to videotape and sell copies of the show to students and family members. Later, one of the performers (“Johnny”) learns his image has been co-opted by the maker of a video game without his permission. Students research intellectual property laws to see who owns the “rights” to the Battle of the Bands as a whole, as well as the rights of individual performers, to determine three or four steps that Johnny can take.

Sounds interesting & engaging, right?  Check out the materials & share your thoughts with the rest of us

What comes to mind when you hear the phrase “21^st Century Schools”?

I immediately think of the following quote (often attributed to a variety of people):

21st Century Schools strive to prepare students for their future, not our past.

So, what kind of “skills” do we still insist (some of us fighting tooth & nail in the process) need to be “taught”, but in reality, are not helping to prepare our students for their fast-paced, information-driven, digital lives?  Here are a few that come to mind:

• Cursive handwriting
• Rote/repetitive memorization
• Memorizing historical facts/figures
• Memorizing just about anything for that matter!
• Pencil & paper note-taking
• Outlining text book chapters
• Sitting still at a desk by yourself for 45 minutes
• Keeping you work to yourself
• Running from classroom to classroom on  a “bell schedule”

I could go on, but in the interest of moving this conversation in a more positive direction, I’ll stop the “old-school” list here. 

Now, on to a fresher list.  A list of skills/attributes that actually FIT our modern students.  The following is a list of what Don Tapscott refers to as the “Eight Norms of the Net Generation”:

• Collaboration
• Innovation
• Scrutiny
• Flexibility
• Freedom
• Customization
• Integrity
• Speed

What do you think are “old-school skills” that we need to stop “teaching”, or at least stop emphasizing so much?  More importantly, what skills do you think we need to START “teaching” more of? Please comment

Many educators across the country and around the world used today’s Presidential Inauguration of Barak Obama as a teachable moment.  But just because the inauguration itself is over, that doesn’t mean the teaching opportunities attached to it have expired as well.

Here are a couple of quick ideas for how to use free, online tools to talk with your students about the Inauguration of January 20th, 2009 as well as Obama’s impending presidency:

• Create a Word Cloud.
  • Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends.

Obama’s “Inaugural Speech” Word Cloud
http://www.wordle.net/

Barak Obama’s Complete Inaugural Speech

Alexander’s Inaugural Poem Word Cloud

http://www.wordle.net/

Elizabeth Alexander’s Poem for Barak Obama’s Presidential Inauguration

• Create/Add to a Voicethread
  • What’s a VoiceThread Anyway?

Ok, Ok, I know that title is a bit harsh, but it got your attention, right

Responsible 21st Century Teaching requires us to ask ourselves:

Are we preparing our students for their future or our past?

In an earlier post, I discussed the Nine Elements of Digital Citizenship and how, as educators, we must help students move toward appropriate, effective use of technology at school and at home, as these elements set the stage for how students will work with each other in a global, digital society.  In the past, we were given information and encouraged to memorize it.  In other words, education of the past focused on Information Acquisition. Education of the future (and remember, the future is NOW), needs to primarily be concerned with Information Management.

With that in mind, I thought it timely to share a video that I just came across on YouTube: “The Networked Student”.  I hope you enjoy the video and that it encourages you to think about the many different ways your students can collaborate online.  Below the video I’ve listed the different tools it mentions so you can explore them further.  In upcoming posts, I’ll discuss each of those tools seperately, as they are each POWERFUL tools for learning.

Collaborative Tools Discussed in the Video:

• Google Scholar
• Social Bookmarking (Diigo)
• Google Reader (RSS Reader)
  
• Educational Blogging
  
• ITunes University
• Video Conferencing
• Wiki
• Voicethread

The DuPont Challenge© Science Essay Competition is one of the foremost student science and technology prize programs in the U.S. and Canada. Now in its 23rd year, The DuPont Challenge© has two primary objectives:

1. Help increase science literacy among students
2. Motivate students to excel at communicating scientific ideas

THE CHALLENGE:

• Write a 700-1000 word essay discussing a scientific discovery, theory, event, or technological application that has captured their interest.

HOW STUDENTS APPLY:

• All student essays must meet the requirements and follow the official competition rules.
• To enter, have each student complete the Official Entry Form. All essays must be submitted electronically. No essays submitted in hard copy via mail or any other carrier or courier service will be accepted.
• All essays must be submitted by midnight January 31, 2009.

Official Rules regarding entries from children under 13 years of age.

TEACHERS WIN TOO!

• sponsoring teachers of the First, Second, and Third-place winners in each division will receive an expenses-paid trip with their student to THE WALT DISNEY WORLD^® RESORT in Orlando, Florida and the Kennedy Space Center in Spring, 2009!
• Here’s a detailed list of Teacher Awards.

Last year, more than 11,000 essays were submitted in the competition. So, to be sure that your students’ essays have the best chances of reaching the later stages of judging, The Challenge Team says “it’s essential that students adhere to the correct rules of grammar, syntax, mechanics, and of proofreading and editing.”

Why not encourage your students to take the challenge?  You could even work the challeng onto your curriculum plans & have ALL of your students write an essay…

Good Luck & don’t forget to let us know, by commenting on this post, if you decide to take The Challenge

Picnik is a free, online tool that makes photo-editing fun and easy.  Picnik began its life with one purpose: To bring photo editing awesomeness to everyone!

Picnik is the default editor on Flickr and also integrates seamlessly with a variety of websites including Facebook, MySpace, Picasa Web Albums, Photobucket, Webshots, Lexmark and Box.net. In December, 2007, Picnik won the Macworld Editors’ Choice Award in the Web category.

Picnik is very user friendly, quick & clean, and you don’t even need to register to use the free, basic editing tools.  They do offer a premium version of their editing tool that will give you more advanced features for around $25 a year and they are adding new features at a rate of about one/month.

To get started, you just have to click the “Get started” button, then you’re off to the races!

1. Go to Picnik.com & click “Get started”

2. Click on the Library Tab

3. Choose where you want to upload your photo from- the possibilities are virtually endless!  I am choosing Picasa for this demo.  Picnik will now access my Picasa account so I can view all of my Picasa pictures and before you can say “Picnik Rules!”, I’m able to edit any of the pictures I have stored on my Picasa account.  Here’s my Holiday card from last year:

and here’s a picture I made after my son’s 1st swim meet this past summer:

After you create you edited picture you can save it to your computer AND to the photo site of your choice.  So now, I have the original swimming picture AND the edited version on my Picasa account.  Disclaimer:  My son, Connor, didn’t want me to use the swimming picture because he said there’s no way he could ever be as good at swimming as Michael Phelps is..I twisted his arm to let me use it anyway

I cannot express how easy Picnik is to use.  If you try it once, I promise you’ll be hooked AND you’ll find one-thousand and one ways to use it with your students.

The following information is brought to you via Grantsalert.com, whose focus “is on helping teachers, administrators and counselors find the resources they need to educate our children.”  For more complete information on all these and more funding and grant opportunities please visit: www.grantsalert.com.