Wordle creates word clouds based on word usage frequency in a body of text. All you need to do is paste in the text and click “Go” to create a beautiful and data rich graphic which can be used in multiple settings. I created the below for the Chumash (Five Books of Moses) and plan to use them in teaching these text. The visual representation of the text by word frequency allows students to easily identify most frequently used words and concepts.

Breishit

Shmot

Vayikra

Bamidbar

Devarim

Using Mechon Mamre and Hebrew Books, you can create word clouds for just about any Jewish text and allow students to build their own vocabulary study guides…let me know of any projects you come up with in the comments!

Until today…

The biggest problem with Second Life is the  fact the lack of privacy control and the lack of control for a teacher or parent. You are essentially handing students the keys to a world where they can go anywhere, meet anyone and do anything without leaving there bedroom. (I understand that this is essentially the same thing as the internet, but the nature of interaction and the fact that it runs through a separate client make it fundamentally different.) With this amazing opportunity for learning, also comes a tremendous dark side, and the current system doesn’t allow for much control and oversight.

OpenSim can potentially do for Virtual Worlds, what the Apache Server Software did for the internet; create an open network of worlds that anyone can host, operate and control. This type of environment allows for better focus and oversight in the educational application of this technology.

OpenSim, short for Open Simulator, is a platform built on the Second Life platform, which is open source. It runs on multiple Operating Systems and allows for import and export from Second Life and other Virtual Worlds. The goals being the creation of a “grid” of virtual world which avatars can pass between seamlessly much in the same way that we pass between websites today. This vision of the future is far more intriguing to me as an educator than the current model of Second Life and other exclusive Virtual Worlds. It allows for more control, age restricted access and private areas for work and simulation.

Imagine a virtual school built on OpenSim in which students and teachers from all over the world could collaborate to learn and virtualize educational concepts…

The standard application of the Wiki in education is that of a connector, allowing students to collaborate and experience the “Hive Mind” made up of their peers. It can be used to create study guides, show mastery of material, or just to bring large groups together on a specific topic. But there is another application in education that is rarely discussed, its value in terms of differentiated instruction, and this is the application that is valuable to small groups and large ones alike.

When you create a Wiki, you create a community and within any community there exist various responsibilities and jobs that must be accomplished for the community to thrive. In our case, we have contributors (those who write articles), editors (those who edit articles), formatters (those who make sure articles are properly formatted), fact checkers (those who verify articles for accuracy and add sources), administrators (those who supervise all aspects of the site and police activity), and I am sure you can come up with many more. Each of these roles carries with it certain strengths and foci, while at the same time they still interact directly with the content, making them perfect for an implementation of differentiated instruction.

A student who is a natural leader, can be made administrators, on who is very critical can be made editor (and the teacher can work with him to teach him how to be constructively critical), one who loves trivia can be a fact checker, and the student who has an eye for design can be formatter. Assigning student their roles based on their strengths allows each student to enjoy learning and feel a part of the team. Even putting personalities and strengths aside, this different roles also allow the teacher to vary the workload based on the student’s abilities without making that student seem like any less of a contributor, the editor may do far less work than a contributor, but will still interact with the material and learn from the experience, and not be made to feel any less a part of the team than his peers.

I will certainly be implementing a Wiki in my classroom this year to allow my students to shine, each in his own way, and I hope you will too!

There are two distinct words I would like to discuss today: amira and haggada. Each of these words, technically, means to tell or say, but their deeper meaning is very significant to attaining a better understanding of communication and education.

The word amira from the root אמר carries the connotation of assimilating speech, or combining divergent parts into an assimilated whole. This understanding is drawn from the word’s phonetic cognates: עמר – to collect and חמר/המר – to heap. This is very important type of communication and it is a very high level of understanding. A person, while learning must see all things they learn as part of a ‘big picture’ and assimilate all new facts into this picture.

The word haggada from the root הגד, on the other hand, carries the connotation of separating an assimilated whole into its individual components. This understanding is drawn from the word’s phonetic cognates: גדד – to cut and גדה – to separate. This is also a very important type of communication and is crucial to a basic understanding of anything one learns. A person, while teaching, must always break each concept down to its core components for his/her students.

While teaching it is crucial to constantly be breaking concepts down into their core components and then showing students how these core concepts fit into the ‘big picture’.

This is the main difference between Prezi and PowerPoint and once we look at these two tools from this perspective it become clear that one is much better for use in education.

Prezi allows a teacher to work on one big canvas, zooming in and out to show relationships between ideas and how they all fit into the ‘big picture’, while PowerPoint is just a series of slides that show no context and no relationship. PowerPoint does not allow an educator to break concepts down into their individual components and show their relationship with the assimilated whole as Prezi does and this leaves much to be desired for an educator.

PowerPoint does have some cool animations though…

This post was cross-posted on YU 2.0.

The first layer of its awesomeness comes as a function of its creator’s software-philosophy, namely the fact that it – and all the files a user creates and edits – live entirely in the cloud; this makes it accessible from anywhere with internet access (and hopefully soon, with the re-introduction of offline mode, just anywhere – hint hint, Google) and means that work is never lost to crashes, hardware damage or even the occasional ravenous canine.

The next layer of awesome comes in the form of Google Docs’ real-time collaboration, which means that students and teachers – whether they are sitting next to each other or half-way around the world – can work on a document at the same time, see each other’s work and chat using the in-document chat module. This is also an amazing tool for teachers to monitor student work and catch mistakes as they happen rather than only after the project has been turned in, it reduces the number of necessary revisions and allows students to learn in the moment – when they can actually make use of the lesson – rather than hours or days later, when the lesson may no longer be relevant to them and therefore may not  be internalized. This nifty feature also comes with an unexpected bonus, revision history, which allows users to see all the revisions made to a document by any of the users who are editing, this makes reverting back to an old version of the document a snap and allows teachers to see who has been logging the most hours on a given project and when those hours have been logged (“I know it looks like I just did it this morning, but I swear, I worked on it all weekend!”).

Finally, for the Judaic classroom, Google Docs has the best RTL and Hebrew support I have seen in a non-Israeli word processor. It always gets the orientation right from a copy-paste and nearly-always gets the nikud correct from copy-paste text. It is so good, that I often use it as a filter between Hebrew websites and other inputs (like Smart™ Boards or Powerpoint).

Using these and other awesome features of Google Docs, I have crafted three tools to be integrated into lessons for use in the classroom:

Beginner

By leveraging the collaboration and commenting features of Google Docs, I developed a lesson for teaching textual skills with a strong focus on root-word identification and sentence structure. I have implemented this lesson for teaching Chumash and Rashi skills to high-school freshman.

Goal: Get students to work together to translate texts and learn how to use root-words to aid their ability to do so.

Preparation:

• Identify the text you want to use and find it on mechon-mamre.org.
• Copy the block of text you want to use and insert it into a new documents. (Tip: hold down ctrl/cmd+shft+’v’ to insert text without any formatting)
• Divide the text up into logical sections based on the number of groups in your class. Insert page-breaks after each section, placing each section on its own page. Now title each section with the name of the group or students who will be working on each section.
• Make the document accessible to your students. You can either make the document open to anyone with a link (which means that some students may edit the document anonymously, but makes getting started easier) or share with students individually to their Google Account. See here: https://docs.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=180199 for more on sharing.

In The Classroom:

Once you have all the students in the classroom and logged in to the document, explain to them the basic premise of the exercise and how root-words can aid in translating texts. Now show them the three things which they will be required to do:

1. Locate the verbs in the text
2. Identify the root-word of those verbs and translate them using the comment feature (highlight the word and hit ctrl/cmd+alt+’m').
3. Translate the entirety of the text beneath the Hebrew.

These three things must be done in order and should be done as a team, the classroom should be loud and students should be arguing over what is and isn’t a verb, what the root-word is and what it means.

While the students are diligently working on their group’s section, you should be viewing the document as well. You should be keeping a careful eye on what they are doing and their comments, trying to catch incorrect work as it happens.

Being that student emails are used in this document, I will not post a link here. Please comment if you want access and I can share it with you.

Intermediate:

By using the same features as the above lesson, as well as hyper-links and nested comments, I was able to create a virtual chabura and hyper-text document for students to study together.

Goal: Create a document which would allow students to learn a text in context, to see the primary sources being quoted, and emulate a chabura learning environment virtually.

Preparation:

• Identify the text you want to study and enter it into the document. In this case we used Iggeret Ha’Ramban.
• Identify primary sources used in the text (eg. psukim, quotes from the talmud) and locate them online (good sources are http://mechon-mamre.org/ and http://hebrewbooks.org/shas.aspx).
• Link the quotes to their primary sources using hyper-links.
• Make the document accessible to your students (see above).

In The Classroom:

Once you have all the students in the classroom and logged in to the document, explain to them the basic premise of the exercise, and introduce the text. Show the students how to use the comments feature (see above) and instruct them to begin learning the text on their own, leaving comments where they feel appropriate, also encourage them to comment on each others comments and ask and answer questions in the comment section. This should lead to an organic conversation about the text.

As before, involve yourself in the conversation, but do not be as heavy-handed as the last lesson. This is a place for students to discuss and learn on their own to learn from each other, you can guide the conversation, but let them shine!

Being that student emails are used in this document, I will not post a link here. Please comment if you want access and I can share it with you.

Advanced:

The final lesson is actually fairly basic from a technological perspective, it doesn’t really use any of the advanced tools of Google Docs, outside of real-time collaboration, but it’s subject matter is more advanced than the previous two exercises. Based on Hirscian linguistic theory that words which share phonetic similarity (phonetic cognates) also share core meaning, I devised this lesson to visually show high-school seniors word structure based on phonetic linguistics.

Goal: To have students dissect a text collaboratively based on the phonetic breakdown of words and visually show them the connection between words.

Preparation:

• Identify the text you want to use, or list of Hebrew words. Enter it in to the document.
• Assign each student (or group of students) a category of Hebrew letter and color. The 5 categories are:
1. Gutturals: ע – ה – א – ח
2. Palatals: ג – י – כ – ק
3. Dentals: ד – ת – ט – ל – נ
4. Labials: ו – ב – פ – מ
5. Sibilants: ר – ז – ש – ס – צ
• Make the document accessible to the students (see above)

In The Classroom:
Once you have all the students in the classroom and logged in to the document, explain to them the basic premise of the exercise, and introduce the concept of phonetic cognates. An amazing resource in this area is The Etymological Dictionary of Biblical Hebrew: Based on the Commentaries of Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch.
Now, have the students begin highlighting their letters in the respective colors. Soon they will begin seeing patterns emerge from the text, encourage them to discuss these theories. Close the lesson with a discussion of the patterns they identified and the significance of core meanings and phonetic cognates.

Being that student emails are used in this document, I will not post a link here. Please comment if you want access and I can share it with you.

I hope this post opened you up to the possibilities of Google Docs in your Judaic classroom, please keep me posted with your innovations in using this phenomenal tool in the comments below!

This post was cross-posted on YU 2.0.

The Session – Show Me the Money: Learn the Tips and Tricks to Grant Funding

I got to this session early, expecting it be packed – being the only session offered on how to actually secure funding for EdTech, but there was plenty of room. Boy, did they miss out! This session, sponsored by MIMIO and presented by Magen McGahee, was, like the other MIMIO sponsored session I attended, was polished, well articulated and very informative. The content was relevant, helpful and resonated, not to mention that it was presented with confidence, expertise and poise. Magen not only presented participants with a number of resources for where to find grants for EdTech (she will be posting them online and I will add them to this post, so check back), she explained some of the complex details regarding government funding and also gave very practical grant-writing pointers and skills. Here are some of the highlights:

• There is difference between what we want and what we need. Don’t write a grant asking for what you want (like an interactive whiteboard) but for what you need (like improved student achievement).
• Always develop a plan first. Make sure the first step of your plan is identifying the need and make sure that everything goes back to that need.
• A good grant is Clear, Concise and Unique.
• Being unique is key, especially in the first 1-2 paragraph. 9/10 grants aren’t read all the way through because grant readers aren’t interested.
• How can you be unique? Don’t just talk about the short-term small picture impact, but rather show how this money will affect the community and the future of those involved.
• The first sentence should be your goal, stated clearly and eloquently. Make sure that the rest of the grant supports this first sentence.
• Always have only one person prepare the final copy, to avoid Frankenstein-style grants.

The most important message that was expressed in the session, however, was a the very end: don’t apply for grants that don’t fit! Grant writing takes time, maximize your time by find the right grants & writing them well.

I must say, MIMIO has certainly impressed me, the model they adopted to sell their products of showing educators how the products work in a real teaching environment, while teaching valuable information (and teaching it well!), as opposed to just displaying the technology while talking about the very same technology at an expo booth.

The Everything Else

I met and interacted with a lot of interesting people in the second half of my day, here are the highlights:

• Terry Shay of North Tama County Community School showed me a technique called “Transmedia Storytelling”, in which students tell different perspectives of a story using different mediums. So, for example, telling the story of a bank robbery, one group would make a video from the perspective of the security guard at the bank, a second group would make comic book from the perspective of the robbers, a third group would compose a song from the perspective of the teller, and a fourth group would create an audio story from the perspective of the police. Very cool!
• Intel has amazing FREE professional development tools for teachers, which are available at http://www.intel.com/teachers. The tools are really easy to use, intuitive and contain a tremendous amount of information. They also have an online community for teachers: http://engage.intel.com/.
• Cranium Core is a very cool social game-show which teaches literacy. I spoke to the creator about developing something similar for Jewish Education. Check it out here: http://www.craniumcore.com.
• Comic Life  by Plasq is a seriously awesome comic book creator and I definitely want to use it in my classroom instead of the current option. It is cross platform (even iPad), supports exporting to PDF and even to Facebook, allows for drag-and-drop content adding and has a range of art tools. It looks like a great product, even if I don’t win a free copy and an iPad…
• Thinkmap, makers of the Visual Thesaurus, have a whole host of awesome data visualization tools that can link in with a number of databases and even databases you/your school subscribe to (like encyclopedias, etc.).
• Desmos is the maker of the amazingly cool online graphing calculator that I posted on Facebook recently. I met the Founder and CEO, who is a super-nice guy and invited me and my students to come check out his new office in San Fransisco this summer!
• The last booth I visited (and I only did so because on my way out of the expo hall they threw a free t-shirt at me) was Spoon. Boy am I glad they threw that free shirt at me! Spoon is one of the cooler things that I saw while at the conference, it is basically like Dropbox but for applications. You install all your applications and licenses on their server and then you can run them from any computer in the world, without having to install! This is valuable for large schools because it helps them avoid having to install software on 100s of machines and updating those machines as new versions come out. It is also valuable because you can purchase fewer licenses for expensive software and only load them up on the machines being used, so if you have a 1:1 program and want to have students using Photoshop, you only need to buy 20 licenses for those who are in the class at the time, rather than a license for every machine. Also it is awesome for personal user (like myself) who want to be able to cut the cord and live in the cloud…

At some point, while walking the expo hall, I stopped off at the Google booth again for a tutorial on Android App Inventor. After having attended a session the day before on AgentSheets, I was intrigued by the idea of using Android apps as a way of teaching in the classroom and it seems that the App Inventor makes this a snap. I am definitely excited to try this out and explore the powerful features of this tool…to bad it isn’t entirely web-based!

The last, and probably most valuable part of the day (and each day of ISTE) was my conversations with fellow AVI CHAI cohorts. We talked about all sorts of things, like why interactive whiteboard are so popular, and a docucam is different from a webcam (I have no idea), and of particular interest, educational standards in Jewish Education…something which is sorely needed and I hope to help contribute to in the coming years.

All in all, the ISTE conference was an amazing opportunity, I learned a lot from the sessions, the exhibitors, my colleagues and everything else that went on there, but I have to say, I think the most valuable part of the conference is what is yet to come. The relationships that I built there and the tools that I learned about have yet to blossom into their full form, and I am very excited for the future! (not to mention the fact that next year’s conference is in San Diego)

To keep updated with what the future holds and for more EdTech resources, you should follow @theadamsimon on Twitter.

This post was cross-posted on AVI CHAI Educational Technology Blog and YU 2.0

Session 1 - Beyond Words: Using Infographics to Help Kids Grapple with Complexity

This Bring Your Own Laptop Session, led by Jane Krauss and Diana Laufenberg, was awesome and helped clarify lots of great design principles for communicating data visually, the presenters also gave very specific advice on how to implement, not just infographics, but infographic creation in the classroom. The session started off with a really cool exercise: we were all shown the following infographic and asked to identify what it was describing…in spite of the fact that it is not in English and over 150 years old.

Minard Map - Probably the First Ever Infographic

If you couldn’t figure it out, it is a map of Napolean’s Russian Conquest of 1812 and his “diminishing returns”. The key lesson this graphic shows us is that juxtaposing data and showing correlation visually is key to properly expressing data. By taking two data-sets, the location of the troop and the number of men, and juxtaposing them, the artist was able to illustrate the data in a way that encouraged us to learn and made it easy to visualize. These two data-sets could just as easily have been two columns in a spreadsheet, one containing long/lat coordinates and the other containing population data, by making that juxtaposition visual, the artist allows us to better understand the data at a glance.

Another valuable point about infographic creation, before I get to practical application in the classroom, is intuitiveness. If you can avoid a key, or anything which only serves the function of explaining your design or data, do so. Your design should speak for itself and shouldn’t need any outside help, not to mention the fact that often times extraneous elements or “chart junk” are not just neutral but make things more difficult understand and detract from your design .

Now onto the practical classroom applications! Although infographics serve as a great teaching tool on their own, by illustrating complex data-sets in an easy to understand and intuitive format, that is only a small part of their value in the classroom. By helping students to create their own infographics educators can encourage better research and comprehension and pique their curiosity.

Immigrants to the US by Decade

As mentioned above, the key to a quality infographic is juxtaposition of data, so if you give students half of the data you can pique their curiosity and encourage them to do research and create a graphic to explain the data. For example, the chart on the left represents a data-set of immigrants to the US by decade. What happened in the 1930s that caused that anomaly? What data could you juxtapose with this data to give context and explain the data better?

Finally, one of the greatest lessons I took from this session: Don’t use infographics at the end of your lesson to crown your teaching, use them at the beginning to engage students and pique their interest so they pay attention to what you have to say. If you lecture for two hours about WWII and then show them a graphic showing the correlation between the war, the economy and immigration, they will likely be asleep before you get there. However, if you show them the graphic to the left and get them asking questions, they will be listening for the answers and suddenly the correlation between WWII, the economy and immigration is fascinating (Side note: that is why the Haggada begins with the 4 questions, the best educational model is one in which all teaching is just an answer to a student’s question).

Here are some additional resources from this session:

• tinyurl.com/iste2011infographics
• http://www.ted.com/talks/david_mccandless_the_beauty_of_data_visualization.html
• http://www.gapminder.org/

Session 2 - Teach Your Students Game Design in One Week

This session, by Alexander Repenning, was awesome, not because of the content (although the content was mind-blowing, I’ll get there soon), but because of the ideas it got me thinking about and the potential cross-discipline lessons I now have in mind to create.

This session was a fairly nerdy one about how to use a graphical object oriented programming tool called AgentSheets to create your own version of Frogger in under an hour. It was one of the coolest and simplest things I have ever participated in and has shifted the way I think. Computers function through if/then statements and that is the basis of programming, tell the computer that if X happens it should do Y and you have written your first program. The first step to creating a program is to identify what it is going to do, for our purposes (creating a Frogger game) it was as follows:

You are a frog. Your task is simple: hop across a busy highway, dodging cars and trucks, until you get the to the edge of a river, where you must keep yourself from drowning by crossing safely to your grotto at the top of the screen by leaping across the backs of turtles and logs. But watch out for snakes and alligators! (Sega, 1980).

The first thing you have to do is identify the objects in this description (I have highlighted them in blue) and then the relationships (verbs) between these objects (I have highlighted them in green). This analytic skill, on its own, is a valuable tool for our students to develop. Not just for computer programming, but in all areas of learning, particularly Gemura learning and logic. After you have identified the objects and their relationships, creating if/then statements to reflect these relationships is easy, but also leads to divergent thinking. For example: if a frog gets hit by a car, then it dies, but how do we express this statement for the computer? If FROG OBJECT sees CAR OBJECT on left, then FROG OBJECT dies? If CAR OBJECT sees FROG OBJECT on right, then FROG OBJECT dies? Both answers are technically correct, but the fact that students can discuss and use logic to determine which one should be used is a tremendous skill to develop, again especially for Gemura learning.

After coming out of this session, I am will to put money on the idea that if we teach our students graphical object oriented programming at a young age, it will improve their Gemura and reasoning skills tremendously.

Here are some additional resources from the session:

• http://scalablegamedesign.cs.colorado.edu/
• http://www.agentsheets.com/

The Exhibits

I spent about 4 straight hours in the Exhibition Hall and only made it through about a quarter of what’s there. Granted, I did spend almost an hour at the Google booth talking to every Google employee there, and here is the run-down:

• Google Docs – Met a developer from the Google Docs team, who wanted to see how I am using Google Docs in the classroom. I showed him some of the things I have done (collaborative Chumash study, hyperlinked Jewish Philosophy text, etc.) and we talked about Hebrew support in Google Docs (which is amazing) and he let me in on a little secret about one of the Google Docs products being relaunched in a few months
• Chrome OS – This was obviously exciting for me, with my shiny new Chromebook and my time spent hacking around with the open-source code…We spoke about the potential of bringing a 1:1 Chromebook program to my school and he told me about a really cool feature that Citrix is developing to allow in-browser remote desktop from within Chrome OS, that is a game-changer.
• I also spoke to Google Apps guys, Google Earth and Maps guys (and discussed some lesson plans for Tanach using Google Earth and Maps), and a few Google Certified Teachers about some of their implementations in their classrooms.
• I hope to go back tomorrow to meet with one of the lead developers on Google’s App Inventor and get an inside look into using it create Android apps in the classroom.
• I got a free Google beachball and sunglasses! How did they know I’m from San Diego?

After Google, I wandered around the exhibits for a while, talking with different vendors about solutions for NCSY, JSU and SCY High until I overheard what definitely sounded like an Israeli accent…it was. I met Ami Dror, founder of a company with a really nifty idea for 3D implementations in the classroom. His technology allows students and teachers to easily create and share 3D content in the classroom, without the need for expensive equipment. His software works with existing tech and integrates with PowerPoint, all you need are his glasses and software plugins to make it work! I hope to meet up with him in Israel to get a better feel for the technology and perhaps bring some of the tech back to SCY High. He also has an online database of 3D presentations for the classroom, which teachers can upload/download lessons to/from and share content. He was very intrigued (having grown up daati) by the idea of Tanach, Gemara and other Jewish content being made 3D.

After that, I wandered around, entered lots of raffles, considered getting into the interactive whiteboard business and met a few more cool vendors, here are some highlights:

• Edistorm – a Canadian start-up that allows teachers and students to create collaborative work environments using virtual post-it notes, it also generate wicked reports about student interaction, visit http://www.edistorm.com/ISTE for a free account and 50% off sign up before September 15th.
• DYKNOW – Classroom management software for 1:1 school environment, very robust features, such as allowing teachers/admin to monitor all student monitors wirelessly or take control of the computer to regain focus, even restrict what windows can be opened…probably expensive. http://www.dyknow.com/
• ToonBoom – Very cool animation technologies for the classroom, they even have a free iOS application and different level of software from anyone from K-Graduate School. http://beta.toonboom.com/
• SparkFun – An awesome online electronic component shop for DIY projects. They have curricula for many of their projects, ranging from simple circuits to robotics…this is great for PBL and not just electronics classes. http://www.sparkfun.com/

At some point during my travels, I also ran into an old friend from Yeshiva, Harris Zvi Goodman, who is now a VP for an awesome company that makes virtual laboratories which I hope to bring home to SCY High. Check them out http://www.latenitelabs.com/.

Dinner and the End of the Night

Once again, AVI CHAI provided us with a fantastic dinner and a very well facilitated discussion amongst the cohorts. We discussed lots of things, but those which stood out to the me the most were our conversations on interactive whiteboards and getting around roadblocks to integration of EdTech in our schools and communities. Some great points were exchanged. I am of the opinion that interactive whiteboards will soon be a thing of the past, being replaced by personal learning devices (1:1 computers, tablets, etc.) and networked collaborative working spaces (Google Docs, SynchTube, etc.). In this type of environment all students can participate and the class can truly collaborate and learn as a group, it also allows more control over classroom mangement (contrary to what some might think) in that teachers can see what all the students are doing in one glance. I am also of the opinion that the best mode of attack to get past roadblocks is not a direct attack, but a flank. Don’t argue with people’s objections to EdTech, just show them the value of it and show them that it is the best solution to their teaching problems and their objections will melt away.

It was a great day and I am definitely looking forward to tomorrow!

For more updates on my time at ISTE, you should follow @theadamsimon on Twitter.

This post was cross-posted on AVI CHAI Educational Technology Blog and YU 2.0

Now on to the wrap up…

First Night

After watching a live-stream of the keynote speaker and throwing away a bunch of free junk from my ISTE registration bag, I headed out to grab dinner with my fellow AVI CHAI group members. It was great to meet and collaborate with everyone. After dinner I met up with Matt Barr of Bible Raps to discuss some collaboration ideas and future projects. What he does is cool, alive and engages teens in text-study, I loved it and hope to collaborate with him and his team soon.

First Session

The first session of the day which I attended was at 8:30am which means that I had to wake up fairly early in the morning (around 6:30am) to daven, grab a bowl of cereal (thanks to my lovely wife) and walk over the convention center. Having only gotten about an hour of sleep the night before, this was a fairly big deal, but I felt it was justified because this session was right up my alley and I hoped to gain a lot of valuable information from it. To be blunt, I was less than happy to have woken up early for this session. That isn’t to say I didn’t learn anything new, because I did, it was just more basic and introductory then I expected, especially for someone who has already integrated QR Codes into the classroom and was looking for new and different ways to do so…But, as I said before, I did learn a few things from this session:

The presenter broke down the “Allure of QR Codes” into 4 points:

1. Cannot be misinterpreted
2. Compact
3. Easy to use
4. Inherently Encrypted

The big “aha moment” for me was number 4, I never thought about using the QR Codes’ inherent encryption as an educational tool. One suggestion is to use this for differentiated instruction, students with different needs or at different levels can be given different reading assignments or quizes without anyone knowing that their work is not the same because the naked eye can’t interpret a QR Code. Another idea, which I brainstormed with Peter Eckstein after the session, is using QR Codes for peirush in a siddur or other text, keeping the content hidden until it is needed prevents the additional content from distracting from the main text.

Here is a link to the slides for a full overview of how to create and use QR Codes:
https://isteconference.org/conferences/ISTE/2011/handout_uploads/KEY_60757836/Tedesco_ISTEPresentationEmail.pdf

Second Session

The next session I attended was on “Teaching in the Interactive Classroom” sponsored by MIMIO, a company which makes EdTech hardware, and, in spite of the underlying pitch for their hardware, was actually very enjoyable. I found the presenter, Stevan Vigneaux, to be a very knowledgeable, thoughtful and engaging speaker, probably because he is a professional salesman (perhaps educators should take some tips from the sales world…), and his points well illustrated. One story which was particularly striking and inspiring was about an Army Colonel who was in charge of training new recruits on how to change tank treads. He was purchasing millions of dollars of video production software from the presenter, when asked why he needed the equipment he explained that he understood “that either I teach them the way they learn or they won’t learn”, the way they learned (having grown up on MTV) was through professional quality music videos, and that is just what he made to teach them how to change tank treads. The key is, although how to change a tank tread hasn’t changed, the way to teach it has to or no one will learn the information. That really resonated with me. I also raised the question of why we need specialized EdTech hardware and software instead of leveraging existing real-world tools, such as iPads, Twitter and Facebook. I didn’t really get a satisfactory answer, but I look forward to hearing anyone who has one (please comment on this post).

Third Session

The third session I attended was not at all what I expected, but incredible none-the-less. I was expecting a session on “Creating a Digital Culture”, ie. how to create a digital culture in the school, the community and beyond…what I got was “Creating Digital Culture” ie. creating culture (art, music, etc.) in the digital space…serves me right for not reading the description, but in the end, this was one of my favorite sessions of the day. The presenter was Roger Wagner, a San Diego local, and creator of an amazing software called HyperStudio. HyperStudio allows you and your students to create amazing rich-media content mashups easily by dragging content into the editor and manipulating it in tons of different ways. The key is that HyperStudio makes it easy to create projects because as the creator puts it, “Project creation should be simple, if they spend the whole time getting content into the project, when are they learning?” It has a host of really cool features and it seems the creator is actively involved in further development (like integration with Arduino boards to add robotics to projects and HTML 5 export to allow cross device use), not to mention that I got a free copy for attending the presentation. All in all, I was really impressed with the presentation and the software. One thought to leave this session with: 1 laptop is equal to 5000 pencils, we had better make sure that what we use technology for in the classroom is more valuable than 5000 pencils. I thought that concept was very cool and put things into perspective.

Fourth Session

Google to the Max: The Power Users Guide with Howie DiBlasi was my next session and although I learned a few new things from this session, it was definitely not a “Power Users Guide”. Did you know that the Google logo and simple homepage was originally a function of the fact that Google founders didn’t know how to code HTML? Neither did I! But that isn’t all I learned in this session…First cool thing was Google Science Fair, which I had no idea about and am excited to push my school to get involved in, second was a list of Google alternatives, not something I am ordinarily fond of [the author typed quickly on his Google Chromebook], but some of them actually offered some features which Google has yet to offer:

• FactBites.com – Pull search results from encyclopedia data, like Wikipedia and Encarta (it still exists!)
• Quintura.com – Presents search results in deep-linked wordclouds
• Clusty.com – Presents search results in hierarchical clusters

Finally, the presenter presented a Google Lab which I didn’t know about, Google City Tours, which creates tours of a given area and timeline for tourists. And yes, it does work in Jerusalem…

Bloggers’ Cafe and Impromptu Brainstorm/Workshop

After 4 straight sessions, I needed a little break and headed over to the Bloggers’ Cafe to recharge (electronically and emotionally) and connect with some of my fellow Jewish Educators (electronically and emotionally). I had an amazing impromptu session where I showed off some of the tech I use in the classroom and brainstormed some cool ideas with colleagues. Some of the resources we shared are below:

• http://qrcode.kaywa.com/ – A QR Code generator
  • Use bit.ly links to create QR Codes, this generates less ‘noisy’ codes and allows you to track scans
  • QR Codes have a 30% error correction built in, this means you can remove up to 30% of the code and it still scans, this makes for great custom codes and projects (use an image/vector editor)
  • Use QR Codes as a “poor man’s augmented reality” by embedding rich media into worksheets, bulletin boards and by allowing students to create projects to share their creations. More on my QR Code timeline project in a separate post.
• http://alternativeto.net/ – An amazing database with alternatives to popular software, a great way to find a free open source version of a commercial software or find a version supported by your platform (Mac, PC, etc.)
• http://issuu.com/ – Online PDF publisher/viewer used to create beautiful online books or magazines, see an example here: http://issuu.com/adamsimon/docs/melachim_aleph
• http://softwaretopic.informer.com/html-image-map-software-mac/ – a list of some Image Map editors
• http://www.w3schools.com/TAGS/tag_map.asp – W3Schools <map> tag page, learn to create Image Maps with HTML coding

This was a particularly enjoyable hour in that I had the opportunity to meet fellow Educators (not just Jewish ones) and interact, brainstorm and share.

Fifth and Final Session

The last presentation was probably the most enjoyable, Nancye Blair was engaging, entertaining and passionate. Her presentation on Engaging Education was enlightening and tremendously thought provoking, in spite of the fact that I came in only half-way through and it was geared to Elementary Education. She presented a number of tools, all of which can be found at her website: http://www.engagingeducation.net, many of which I have used, but was shown new ways in which to use them, and many of which I have never used before but am now planning on integrating into my lesson plans for the coming year. This was truly one of the most inspiring and passion driven presentations I have seen, to leave you with one remark from Nancye that struck me, “By creating live audiences for our kids we show them that what they are creating MATTERS!”

Birds of Feather Jewish Educators and Dinner

At the end of the day I had another tremendous opportunity to interact, network and share with my colleagues. First was the Birds of a Feather Workshop for Jewish Educators, facilitated by Phil Liff-Grieff, Associate Director of Builders of Jewish Education in Los Angeles , which was a phenomenal opportunity to share with and meet others in the field as well as supporters of our work. Some highlights included:

• http://lexicon.cet.ac.il/ – Great Hebrew resource
• http://www.mikledet.com/ – Online Hebrew keyboard
• https://docs.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=65166 – RTL Support in Google Docs
• A great back and forth with David Bryfman Ph.D of The Jewish Education Project about how to create more effective tools for Jewish educators. My take, cutting out the middle man and collaborating with developers and funders directly.

After the Birds of a Feather session, the AVI CHAI group headed over to our catered Kosher dinner where we exchanged ideas and shared our best (and worst) moments from the day. Here are some of my highlights:

• An educator must have 2 goals: 1. Make students passionate about learning 2. Teach them how to learn…that is all. Every project you do should be accomplishing one or both of those goals.
• Flip Thinking
  • Can an interactive Tanach or Gemara class ever be flipped? Don’t flip what doesn’t need to be flipped. Flipping is used to make sure that content which requires collaboration is done in a collaborative space and content which doesn’t require collaboration doesn’t eat up that valuable time.
• http://www.facebook.com/help/?faq=19793 - Moderate Facebook Pages to allow teachers and schools to use them more safely
• http://rubistar.4teachers.org/ – A rubric creator for PBL lessons

After the dinner and sharing was done, I got some one-on-one face-time with Dave Weinberg of Causil and FOJNP, which was tremendously enjoyable and enlightening. I hope it leads to future collaborations and conversations.

Today was a great day at the ISTE Conference and I am looking forward to another amazing day-and-a-half!

For more updates on my time at ISTE, you should follow @theadamsimon on Twitter.

This post was cross-posted on AVI CHAI Educational Technology Blog and YU 2.0

I often assign a video for students to watch at home, or an online article to read and reflect on. This can sometimes be difficult, it can be cumbersome for me to email students links to the posts or videos, as well this doesn’t lead to good discussion and collaboration.

I have found that using a platform like Twitter or even Facebook (which has elements of microblogging in its “Status” feature) can be a great way of assigning students (and remind them about) interactive or rich-media homework assignments. All you need to do is post a link to the service and instruct students to visit or subscribe to it. Now, every time there is content you want to “send home” it is already there, and students can publicly reflect online, right in the platform. The public nature of the response, raises interest from other students, forcing students to learn and teach each other, and fosters discussion amongst students. It also provides a central repository for all the student’s reflections for easy grading and to look back on over the year.

Here is an example of this: https://www.facebook.com/thesimons/posts/203821972989603

Using this platform is a great way of reaching students for rich-media assignments outside of school, without the cumbersome, closed infrastructure of email and a great way to foster discussion and student interest. Not to mention that this is the method they use to communicate with each other, so it is more organic and easily remembered than email or assignment books.

This post was cross-posted on YU 2.0

Step One: Getting a Domain and Hosting Service

The first step to setting up your self-hosted blog, is getting hosted! Hosting space means that your files and your data are in your control and can be made private or public at your discretion. It also means that you have full control over your data. Your school may already have hosting space (for their website, for example) which you can use for this purpose. However if they don’t you an easily register a domain name and buy some hosting space. There are a number of hosts out there, I personally recommend HostMonster to everyone I know. I am hosting over 20 different sites on their servers and even have a number of clients who are now using them as their host. Full disclosure: The link above is an affiliate link and I do get credit if you use it.

Once you have your host set up (or if you have gotten access to your school’s hosting) we are on to the next step.

Step Two: Installation

If you are using HostMonster, you can simply install WordPress using the built-in installer, Simple Scripts, which makes installing software on your server immensely easy. But even if you aren’t, you can have a WordPress install up and running in less than 5 minutes and with minimal technical experience.

You can find full instructions a the WordPress Codex, an amazing repository of everything you need to know about WordPress. Here is the short of it:

1. Download and unzip the WordPress package, if you haven’t already.
2. Create a database for WordPress on your web server, as well as a MySQL user who has all privileges for accessing and modifying it.
3. Rename the wp-config-sample.php file to wp-config.php.
4. Open wp-config.php in a text editor and fill in your database details as explained in Editing wp-config.php to generate and use your secret key password.
5. Place the WordPress files in the desired location on your web server:
   • If you want to integrate WordPress into the root of your domain (e.g. http://example.com/), move or upload all contents of the unzipped WordPress directory (but excluding the directory itself) into the root directory of your web server.
   • If you want to have your WordPress installation in its own subdirectory on your web site (e.g.http://example.com/blog/), rename the directory wordpress to the name you’d like the subdirectory to have and move or upload it to your web server. For example if you want the WordPress installation in a subdirectory called “blog”, you should rename the directory called “wordpress” to “blog” and upload it to the root directory of your web server.

     Hint: If your FTP transfer is too slow read how to avoid FTPing at : Step 1: Download and Extract.

6. Run the WordPress installation script by accessing wp-admin/install.php in a web browser.
   • If you installed WordPress in the root directory, you should visit: http://example.com/wp-admin/install.php
   • If you installed WordPress in its own subdirectory called blog, for example, you should visit:http://example.com/blog/wp-admin/install.php

Once you have WordPress installed, the fun can really begin!

Step Three: Setting Up and Customizing

When you login in to your new WordPress site, you will see the Dashboard. This is a place from which you can customize all parts of your blog and create special iterations for projects.

First thing’s first, your new blog needs a name. Go to the Settings section on the left hand side, toward the bottom and in the General Settings give your blog a name, and add a subtitle if you feel it necessary.

Next you want to decide on a commenting policy and set this up in the Discussion section of the Setting section.

Themes

The default WordPress is fairly bland. You can spice this up with the Appearance section. Here you can customize the blog’s “Themes” of which there are thousands to choose from, both from within the Dashboard and all over the internet. Do a Google search for “WordPress Theme for [insert anything here]” and you will find tons of beautiful themes to fit your needs. If you know some basic HTML, you can even roll your own.

There are also some specialized themes that can allow for special projects in the classroom for example:

• GuruQ – Allows you to set up a searchable question answer forum on your blog. This could be useful for student engagement, peer-to-peer learning, or even a student directed lesson plan.
• FacebookWB – Creates a Facebook-looking blog, which can allow you to create faux-facebook pages for your students to populate with historical characters, etc.
• AutoFocus – This is nice photoblogging theme, which allows you to create clean, dated collage of student art. Can be used to track class projects, etc.

Menus and Widgets

You can also customize the look, feel and functionality of your blog by using Menus and Widgets, which allow you to further control the content that appears on the blog. Take a look at these components, depending on your theme you may be able to use them to customize any number of pieces of your blog. In the next section (Plugins) we will discuss how to get more out of some of the Widget features.

Plugins

The next piece of WordPress customization comes by way of Plugins. Plugins allow you to do anything. If you want to add any functionality that you can imagine, you can do it by way of a plugin. Again, do a Google search or use the internal dashboard search and you can do just about anything. If you are familiar with PHP and HTML you can tweak and even write your own plugins.

There are few plugins that are good bets for classroom use:

• New User Approve - Allows you to approve user registration, which is crucial if you want to allow students to create accounts, but not other people.
• Avatars – Allows users to use custom avatars, a nice way of building community.
• User Role Editor – Allows you to customize what users are allows to do.
• Digress.it – Allows for paragraph by paragraph comments in the margin. Great for peer review or grading.
• mTouch Quiz – Allows you to add quizes to your blog.
• Grader – Allows you to grade posts.

The bottom line rule with plugins is, “If you can imagine it, it can be done.”
Pages

Pages are just that, static pages on your blog. They differ from posts in that they are static and are meant to hold site-wide data. Like an “About Us” page or something similar. Adding pages with rubrics, your syllabus, or other class-related info. will be very helpful to your students.

Step Four: Adding Users

Now that your blog is up and running and all purtied up, the next step is to get some people to use it! You can manually add users from the Users panel, or request that students sign up. I prefer to have students sign up themselves in order to allow them to learn how to use the platform on their and give them a level of control over their environment.

You will want to set up the new user role in the Settings panel.

Here is a basic outline of user types:

• Administrator – Somebody who has access to all the administration features
• Editor – Somebody who can publish and manage posts and pages as well as manage other users’ posts, etc.
• Author – Somebody who can publish and manage their own posts
• Contributor – Somebody who can write and manage their posts but not publish them
• Subscriber – Somebody who can only manage their profile

I like to use the Contributor level as default, this way I can see everything before it goes public.

Step Five: Adding Posts

Posts are added, as well as edited, in the Posts panel. Posts can be categorized and tagged (see here for a discussion of the difference) and these can also be managed from the Posts panel.

When creating a new post, you adjust the status, visibility and date/time posted of the post. This allows you to create private or password protected posts and create posts that are scheduled to post in the future, or appear to have been posted in the past. Posts can be edited in either HTML or WYSIWYG editor mode and by use of different plugins you can embed video and other rich media just by plugging in links or shortcodes. Media can be added/uploaded straight for the posts editor, which is a great feature.

The Excerpt is the short version of the post that may appear on the homepage or on other pages depending on your theme. This is, by default, the first chunk of text in the article, however you can override this by adding your own teaser text to the Excerpts box.

You can also control specific commenting policy for individual posts.