A new project by the authors of Tech-N-TuIt introduces The Digital Sandbox. The Digital Sandbox explores the future of learning through the recreation of 21st Century learning environments. Investigate all new instructional technology topics like;
About This Project
This Website is designed as an inquiry-oriented format which will provide you the viewer with information on Web 2.0 digital tools that will enable you to create 21st century learning environments. The creator of this portal hopes that the results of this project will inspire many educators to create social networks of learning for classrooms across the globe. Whether you're a teacher or student new to the topic of Web 2.0 or an experienced educator looking for Web 2.0 materials, I hope that you will find something here to meet your needs.
“If it were possible to define generally the mission of education, it could be said that its fundamental purpose is to ensure that all students benefit from learning in ways that allow them to participate fully in public, community, [Creative] and economic life.”— New London Group (2000, p. 9)
In-service References
Creating Social Bookmarks
Delicious is a free social bookmarking service that allows users to tag, save, manage and share web pages from a centralized source. With emphasis on the power of the community, Delicious greatly improves how people discover, remember and share on the Internet. Store your bookmarks online, tag them and share them with your colleagues and students. Delicious is easy to use when searching for other bookmarking resources. This presentation by Jesse West offers background information on social book-marking and aggregators, followed by a presentation from Mike King with practical examples to support the professional learning of busy teachers and principals. We invite and encourage you to ask questions or share experience in the Wiki forum.
“While to adults the Internet primarily means the world wide web, for children it means email, chat, games— and here they are already content producers. Too often neglected, except as a source of risk, these communication and entertainment focused activities, by contrast with the information-focused uses at the centre of public and policy agendas, are driving emerging media literacy. Through such uses, children are most engaged— multi-tasking, becoming proficient at navigation and manoeuvre so as to win, judging their participation and that of others, etc.... In terms of personal development, identity, expression and their social consequences—participation, social capital, civic culture- these are the activities that serve to network today’s younger generation.”—Livingstone, 2003, pp.15-16).
Creating A Digital Lesson
The tutorials presented in this mini session by Mike King will demonstrate how to design a digital lesson using a media kit. In each of the tutorial sessions, explanations will be provided to expand ideas and strategies for integrating technology-based, multi-media resources into the design of a digital lesson. The focus of the prentation will allow teachers to see, use, and understand the educational benefits of integrating technology into a well designed digital lesson.
"The culturally constructed spheres of knowledge must bear some kind of relation to the kinds of brains and minds that human beings have, and the ways that those brains and minds grow and develop in different cultural settings. How does the human mind deal with interdisciplinary studies—are they natural or unnatural cognitive activities?" Howard Gardner
Creating A Digital Story
Historically, we have valued creative writing or art classes because they help to identify and train future writers and artists, but also because the creative process is valuable on its own; every child deserves the chance to express him- or herself through words, sounds, and images, even if most will never write, perform, or draw professionally. Having these experiences, we believe, changes the way youth think about themselves and alters the way they look at work created by others. In this session Mike King and Jesse West will present the art of digital storytelling as it applies to the formative writing process. Participants will learn how to create digital mash-ups in a storyboard through the use of creative common picture searches, recording written narratives in audacity and develop a digital story in moviemaker, photostory3 and or imovie.
Creating A Podcast Using Audacity and RSS Feeds
This session of the Technology Summer Institute provides an overview of podcasting and how it can benefit students. Mike King and Jesse West will focus on the basics of finding, subscribing, downloading and listening to or watching a podcast. You will also learn how podcasts can be applicable to education. We’ll take a look at the best podcast directories, some podcasts you may find interesting, and the software and hardware needed to enjoy podcasts.
Creating Interactive Lessons, Explore the Possibilities, and Lesson Designs
Creating interactive lesson activities will allow you to create engaging, interactive and dynamic classroom lesson activities. In these five sessions, presented by Kim VanNahmen, you will discover why and when you would use the interactive whiteboard in your classroom. You will be able to target student age and ability by including different levels and styles of learning within one presentation. Students will be able to actively participate in each lesson, thus involving the entire class.
Creating Digital Differentiated Lessons and Plans
In this mini session Mike King will give an overview of Lessonwriter, YakItToMe and ShareBox, combining all three software applications into an online lesson. Participants will learn the simplicity of creating a differentiated lesson plan using the various components of Lessonwriter, record text on YakItToMe and store the digital recording on a ShareBox widget.
Literacy 2.0
Today a new age is evolving, a newly formed conceptual age; an age and time when people collaborate to expand disciplines. A discipline is a developmental path for acquiring certain skills or competencies. In the past we have individually mastered our own proficiencies as we explored our world from one perspective, our own. Now with collaboration technologies such as Literacy 2.0 individuals are enlightened by becoming aware of individual perspective by exposing one’s own knowledge to the outside world. In this mini session a new age of publication and collaboration referred to as Web 2.0 and the Read/Write Web, will be defined as an educational tool of the future. In this mini session, presented by Mike King and Jesse West, participants will be introduced to Web 2.0 and many of its available tools called widgets. This presentation includes the construction of a thematic PBWorks wiki that will support ongoing learning beyond the classroom and into the 21st Century.
We are moving away from a world in which some produce and many consume media, toward one in which everyone has a more active stake in the culture that is produced.
Creative Commons
Creative Commons (http://creativecommons.org) is a nonprofit organization providing free legal mechanisms for learners inside and outside schools to share and remix content. A creative commons environment allows for an expanded range of creative work to be available for others to legally build upon and share. Once the Creative Commons domain has been developed it will enable content creators to grant some or all of their rights to the exclusive domain through open content licensing terms. The intention of the exclusive Creative Commons domain is to avoid the problems current copyright laws create for the sharing of information. External links with elements digital content library can then be used as live events as they are tied to a presentation to bring depth and dimension to a lesson.
"One important goal of media education should be to encourage young people to become more reflective about the ethical choices they make as participants and communicators and the impact they have on others. We may, in the short run, have to accept that cyberspace’s ethical norms are in flux: we are taking part in a prolonged experiment in what happens when one lowers the barriers of entry into a communication landscape. For the present moment, asking and working through questions of ethical practices may be more valuable than the answers produced because the process will help everyone to recognize and articulate the different assumptions that guide their behavior."
Avatars In Education
Avatars can be used by classroom teachers when designing digital stories or delivering content. Avatars can represent a tour guide explaining travels along the Silk Road, or represent real life characters like Mark Twain giving a lecture on his home or Einstein introducing the solar system. Most avatars are known as “bots” and are powered by Natural Language Processing. Some avatars like Crazy Talk allows users to record natural voiceovers along with secondary sound recording like music. Avatars like MASH (Microsoft Agent Scripting Helper) allows the user to program several characters within a single lesson narrative. When incorporating avatars into a lesson they can be used to define terms, give directions to an activities or reinforced content. Avatars can also be integrated into a PowerPoint presentation as they are incorporated into an interactive whiteboard lesson. In this mini session Mike King will provide tutorials on how to create Crazy Talk avatar characters through content expressionism.
New SchoolNotes
In this mini session, Jesse West will guide you through creating a New SchoolNotes account. New SchoolNotes is an online posting website for teachers to post information for students including lessons, objectives (the SIOP model), assignments, and more. The features include creating and editing multiple pages, organizing hyperlinks, uploading files, and storing assignments in the calendar feature.
The Implications of Distant Learning
The management skills required of today's educators and curriculum developers will include the ability to assess the importance of distant learning courses, and to develop policies that support the integration of these new instructional delivery formats within the given standards of the required curriculum. In this short session participants will be introduced to new aspects of distant learning and how it can enhance classroom experiences into real world applications. This short thirty minute session will be conducted via distant learning by Kevin Honeycutt. Kevin will join us on Wednesday, July 15th at 11:30 A.M.
Discovery Education
Dodge City Public Schools holds a District License for Discovery Education Streaming. This is for our staff and students. Discovery EducationTM streaming is a comprehensive K-12 library of digital resources that enables seamless integration of standards-based videos into classroom lessons. Discovery EducationTM streaming offers videos and resources from award-winning producers such as Discovery Education, Discovery School, Standard Deviants, Weston Woods, Sunburst Technology, ASCD and more!
Movie Maker 2 and Photo Story 3
Learn how to use Windows Movie Maker 2: lets you create, edit, and share your movies right on your PC. It's easy to use, yet it provides powerful capabilities that rival those of expensive computer editing packages. You can download the software FREE from Microsoft. It works with both Windows XP Home Edition and Windows XP Professional Edition. You can also store your video and create links to your Wiki or embed HTML codes to play right off your web site.
Learn how to use Photo Story 3 for Windows: Create slideshows using your digital photos. With a single click, you can touch-up, crop, or rotate pictures. It’s that easy! Add stunning special effects, soundtracks, and your own voice narration to your photo stories. Then, personalize them with titles and captions. Store your productions on Vimeo and use embed codes to store your photo creations on your website with ease.
Google Earth Resources
A Round Trip Ticket has been created as a guide for Google Earth. This web portal includes all the major Google Earth tools including introductory videos. Visitors will learn how to create narratives, and embed video hyperlinks within a place mark window as well as create virtual trip through the Halliburton Project. A special section has been provided for creating image layers through creative commons searches. Tutorials are available on how to navigate, measure, search, set layers, create scripts with hyperlinks, save a tour as a kmz file, resize overlays with links, and embed kmz files into a presentation.
The web portal also provides a short tour of Rome in 3D along with Google Earths new venture called Google Sky and Ocean. The new features allow users to get close views to 100 million galaxies and dive into the ocean. To view these new features, download the recent version Google earth 5.0 software.
- See Reference Page: Google Earth
- See Reference Page: Halliburton Project
Daniel Pink and the Conceptual Age
Pink has created a reference for us to consider right brain activities. Design, story, symphony, empathy, play and meaning. He says we should be more in tune with understanding Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs (survival, security, belonging, ego, spirit). According to Pink, “Artists, inventors, designers, storytellers, caregivers, consolers, big-picture thinkers – will reap society’s richest rewards and share its greatest joys”. Pink claims that we are in a “conceptual age."
About this Project
This project will include the following topics: Digital Tools that allow students and teachers to;
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Articulate Stories that support concepts;
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Be a Symphony in synthesizing and comparing strands of ideas to create new elements of thought;
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Understanding Meaning and opportunities to learn collaboratively through social networks;
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Play through creativity;
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and understanding the importance of ethics and empathy when learning in a literacy 2.0 environment.
Production Resources
Production Resources is designed to help digital developers with a plethora of websites that support free media sources for sound, digital imaging, editors, clip art, and video resources. Users entering this website must abide by copyright policy as requested by the web host. Please read each copyright resource header before activating a link to ensure that you have full understanding of requirements prior to using digital media in a production.
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