so before we get started, I just want to get a sense of how many of you actually have access to social media and collaborative tools in your schools. So if you wouldn’t mind and you’ll get more chances to do this throughout today’s presentation but if you wouldn’t mind on either texting to Tweeting or going to http://poll4.com to enter your keyword (your keyword is the number next to the answer that best describes your school/district) that would be great because at the end of this presentation will get to see the results so I’m putting it up here now and please respond thanks

Hello everyone this is a show little speaking to you from Ed Web. This is using emerging technology to improve your library program. The session 5, we will talk about communication collaboration and cloud computing today.

First we would like to thank our sponsor Follett software company. One of our community members Kathleen Schroeder and I presented a webinar a couple of weeks ago on destiny, the library management system. I posted the link in my November 2 blog post.

and of course we want to thank our host Ed Web.net. If you are new to the series welcome if you are new to add Web, I think you’re going to love it. We have had wonderful contributions from community members. We’ve been talking about cool tools for hybrid programming as a follow-up to last month webinar, and tools and strategies for measuring 21st-century learning in our schools.

Did you know we are up to 928 members as of last night at 10:30PM? We’re the biggest community in edWeb! How cool is that? If you are Tweeting, please put in the hash mark with edWebet, for edweb emerging tech OR edweb extra terrestrial, OR truncated feminine of edwebber – edwebbette? Whatever mnemonic works for you. Thanks to Gwyneth Jones for helping me reconnect with Twitter! I’d walked away for a bit.

For those of you who have been here since July, you may hear some reinforcement of ideas I presented earlier in the series. We have a lot of new participants, so I’ll probably review just a couple of things.

I can’t talk about the importance of cloud computing and collaboration without talking about 21st Century learning skills. According to the partnership for 21st Century learning, there are three different categories of 21st century learning skills. Because content teachers are often married to the content they so love and worked very hard to master, it falls on information and communications technology teachers including librarians to ensure that these skills are embedded throughout the curriculum. Embedding is essential, because it’s very hard, not to mention educationally unsound, to teach these skills in isolation. Let’s just talk about creativity for a minute. Without context, teaching creativity must feel ludicrously artificial to both the instructor and the learner. The same can be said for most of the skills. So let’s talk about the skills for a moment. We have life and career skills. These are the kinds of skills that will make our students a pleasure to hire. It will help them in their life relationships. It will make them resourceful citizens. I could read them to you but I’ve had this slide up for a very long time and I’m sure you’ve had a chance to read them all.

as you look at learning and innovation skills, it screams STEMs (science technology engineering and mathematics). The STEM education coalition, in their own words, “works aggressively to raise awareness in Congress, the Administration, and other organizations about the critical role that STEM education plays in enabling the U.S. to remain the economic and technological leader of the global marketplace of the 21st century. They are succeeding, as the acronym is becoming a hot one in educational communities, and therefore a growing priority for educational leaders and school administrators in the United States. But as a librarian, I see its place across disciplines not just the hard sciences. It’s certainly an integral to research, which, like other information and communication technology curriculum should be embedded across disciplines not just a select few. I created a tutorial this week on the benefits of encountering setbacks when doing research I’ll post it to the community Web links page after the webinar. setbacks are opportunities to reevaluate search strategies, provided that the researcher is creative, innovative, is a critical thinker, and problem solver. Otherwise a setback is an insurmountable obstacle.

talk about preaching to the converted. This is a no-brainer for us. This is what we do. But it is important to underscore that these skills constitute 15% of the delineated skills identified by the partnership for 21st Century learning Framework as critical to teaching in the new millennium.

just had to put it all together for you. Last year when I was at the Consortium of school networking, I was sitting in, I admit it, a fairly boring presentation. So I whipped out my computer, and started working on my upcoming presentation for the next day. And I was sitting next to a guy who apparently had the same exact thought process. So he whipped out his computer and started working on his upcoming presentation and we both looked at each other and laughed pretty hard which was embarrassing because we both had the same graphic in her presentation. This is it. That was possibly an unrelated anecdote but this is really at the crux of what we do. In order to not fuss over with all 19 skills today let’s focus on four these are the same for a reference in almost every webinar they are the four C’s.

This is tough. How do you teach creativity across the curriculum? How do you measure creativity? It is so subjective. I think I mentioned this way back in July, but we had a PhD candidate visit our school. Her dissertation was about how schools are embedding 21st century learning in their curriculum. And after doing all the research and writing and interviews, the one thing she walked away with the teachers do not see creativity as something that can be taught. it is part of our mission today to prove them wrong.

Teachers value collaboration. How many of you worked with classes that were working in collaborative groups this week? Assigning students to work in collaborative groups does not ensure that collaboration is happening, nor is it necessarily Helping students develop collaborative skills. Times all it means is that one kid is carrying the weight of the other students in the group. Assigning specific group roles helps. Following protocols helps. But that doesn’t necessarily engender a collaborative spirit. And that, I think, is what we need to foster among our students. The irony of course, and I have I said this before is that they have the collaborative spirit. It is a part of who they are, socially. Our job, is to have them apply their collaboration skills to academic productivity. They practice Collaboration almost religiously at home, just not in school. He more about that on the next C.

Our kids communicate. We know this.

do you see that number? Just in case you can’t, 3339 texts per month. not only are they communicating, but they are communicating more and more all the time. We might not like how they are communicating, we may think that there communications delivery leaves something to be desired, there is a growing sector of the publication industry dedicated to the concept that we are going to need to teach people how to communicate in the future. I can’t say that I agree. I think what we are going to need to do is teach people how to communicate traditionally which is Vastly different.

So creativity is tough to measure and teach, collaboration is happening, but not necessarily as a strategy towards productivity. Communication is exploding, but not necessarily in a way that is going to help students be Effective communicators in college, in the workplace and as citizens. So what of critical thinking? Critical thinking has been an educational priority for nearly 30 years now. Are we teaching it any better than we did 30 years ago? About 20 years ago? About 10 years ago? What are we doing differently, as educators, to help our students become critical thinkers in the 21st century-which, by the way, is vastly different than being a critical thinker in the 20th century..

So, that’s the four C’s. I think I’ve mentioned it in every one of these webinars.

So what are these clouds? Probably my least favorite cloud is MobileMe. That’s the Apple cloud. It’s my least favorite apple thing. It is an outsourced service, by the way. It’s not a legitimate Apple product. Microsoft has a cloud. Google has a cloud. Then there’s dropbox and box.net, which are pretty popular. I could go on and on. There are robots to expensive virtual services for the corporate world. There are free services fee-based services open source services proprietary services etc. But basically it’s virtual server space. It’s storage that is not on your local computer. chances are if you had a computer, you’ve used a cloud. EdWeb provides cloud space. We can store documents spreadsheets presentations Web links there. That’s the cloud. Why use a cloud? Really? Why not just store your stuff on your own computer?

if all of these kids have their work stored on their computers, and they need to share work or collaborate together, then they have to send it to the other people in their group, and they each work on it, then they have to save and send it to the other group members after they’ve worked on it, and there’s a really good chance that somewhere in the process someone is going to overwrite someone else’s edits. With cloud computing they open one common document invite other group members to work on it with them, and continually save as they go. When all the work is done and is ready for publication, it is truly a collaborative work. But just in case, one can track the history of edit in that document to ensure that everyone has put forth equal participation. For schools this is transformational. 10 minutes.

I am going to pause here for a moment to explain our direction for today. For those of you who are new to the series, this may seem like an unorthodox application for cloud computing and collaboration tools. So far in the series, we have talked a lot about cloud computing and collaborative tools already. We talked about best practices in September, and hybrid programming in October, our introduction included a lot on the subject as well. So for those who’ve been with us for all four months, we want to make sure that you have a fresh perspective. For those of you who are joining us for the very first time, please understand that there are three other webinars on our Ed web community homepage that further speak to this topic.

Did you know we are up to 928 members as of last night at 10:30PM? We’re the biggest community in edWeb! How cool is that? If you are Tweeting, please put in the hash mark with edWebet, for edweb emerging tech. Thanks to Gwyneth Jones for helping me reconnect with Twitter! I’d walked away for a bit.

yesterday I had the good fortune of listening to Buffy Hamill to speak at the preconference presentation. She gave us a whirlwind tour of all her uses of social media for program delivery 21st century learning for students. When I sat down with the group of colleagues at the reception afterwards they all said, what about time? where he does she find the time to do all this? let me draw an analogy about time. Like another resource that is scarce money. It requires an initial investment to begin accruing Time. For example last week, I sat down with my colleague and we created today’s lessons. They are accessible completely online. The lesson is embedded with basically a Pathfinder in our online course management system today, Classes without my being there. This happens every time I’m at a conference. And I do attend a fair number of conferences. Learning continues because the work has been frontloaded. So my point is that the daytime to do this stuff? Yes. Absolutely. But you buy time back by frontloading the work. The lesson that I would’ve done today, five years ago I would have had to repeat that less than 17 times for 350 freshmen. Now that lesson is delivered on an online course management system the checklist is made in Google forms. Students generate their work on Google sites, they generate a bibliography using an online bibliography tool, the lesson is delivered using slide share Moodle YouTube Google docs noodlebib

today I’m teaching right now I have classes and teaching a lesson to tree sections of freshman that I’ve never taught them before it is brand-new to them as we speak at a class that is in in the lab and they are doing their work and it requires instruction from a librarian and they are getting. As they work today they are completing a check sheet. They are completing it as they go so you can see where we have checkmarks there to go down the list check check check check

them when they get to the bottom they will submit

so we might ask how would they actually remember their section number and how would we count on her freshman to another section number they don’t but they do have a point of reference. We deliver all of our instruction through an online course management system. We use Moodle, but their gobs of others out there including blackboard, each talk, cognate, plus there’s an online of other open source ones That is not to say that we don’t teach face-to-face. But are face-to-face instruction is definitely a bridged at this point as opposed to what it was five years ago. We have what we call the seven minute rule. We will facilitate for an entire. Gladly. But we will not lecture for more than seven minutes. New car graph I’m sure you’ve heard this before but students process approximately 10% of what we say out loud on a good day. So it is our mission, to use cloud and collaborative tools to get kids to learn independently. I still haven’t answered the how do they know their section number question have I It’s in our online course management system. If they know their teachers name, and where they are at that particular moment in time they can tell if their section number

This Google calendar thing was born out of total necessity. You know what they say, necessity is the mother of invention?

we have an eight day rotating schedule and our school. Therefore very few Mondays Tuesdays Wednesdays Thursdays Fridays are alike. Our really know how to explain it unless you’ve lived it, but it is insane. My colleague Chris and I wanted to share a calendar so we both knew how to book the library in a way that was equitable, weeks where the content areas between us. I have English social studies world languages and visual performing arts, she has science math career and Tech Ed and copperheads of health. we needed to know what the other was doing so we wanted transparency. She was on a Windows computer. I was on a computer. At the time, and this is back in 2005, Outlook was not compatible with Mac. So we could use that. Because our schedule is so crazy, we couldn’t use a commercially generated calendar. The only other way we knew to import a calendar using a CSV file was to use Google calendar. So that’s what we do. We could share that calendar we could work on it simultaneously this was our first cloud computing experience and it was strictly between me and my colleague. Since then we learn to embed it in a number of places

As you just saw, it is on our online course management platform, and it is on our website.

thus this calendar was born now if you look on the left you will see that we have a plethora of other calendars listed there. We started out with just one we have since added since we went to Google apps at our school all of the computer on wheels the cows and any other labs that have any relationship to the library. This is great because it’s synced with my iPhone so every morning when I get up I can glance at my phone and it tells me what’s happening in every lab and the library throughout the school so if somebody has sneaked in a research project and not talk to me about it I know And then I can go talk to that person and say hey what’s going on what are you working on how can I help what can I put on the Moodle You can see that we are double-booked for most of tomorrow. That’s oK! We have a couple of options. One, we can go to one class at the beginning of the. Newer seven minutes there, and then visit the next class towards the end of that. In some cases tomorrow that’s exactly what we’re going to do but in other cases, we are going to let the teachers get them started with the online course management system have them watch the video that they need to see go through the steps and then we will check in with them 1015 minutes into the period after we visited the class. This works for kids because they are learning independently they are not sitting there is passive learners they are in gauge with the responsibility of learning something they have a task to accomplish they have to master the steps necessary to accomplish it and then they have to check off on it to make sure that we know where they are in the process It works for us because we can maximize their own productivity and be in many places at once so to speak It works for the teachers because they can schedule research lessons when they need them. It works for us, because we are not running around the building repeating the same thing 17 times in a row. The responsibility for instruction is not on acid as much as it is on the students. We are facilitators.

Did you know we are up to 928 members as of last night at 10:30PM? We’re the biggest community in edWeb! How cool is that? If you are Tweeting, please put in the hash mark with edWebet, for edweb emerging tech. Thanks to Gwyneth Jones for helping me reconnect with Twitter! I’d walked away for a bit.

So we wanted to have another visit. Back in 2003 when I first read the book feed, but okay sci-fi book, and I thought it was great, but I moved on read more put it away and didn’t think about it much for a while. But then, slowly, very slowly, I started to draw connections between the real world and anti-Anderson’s sci-fi world in feed. As the millennium evolved, I noticed that students were starting to take on some of the characteristics of the children in feed. The summer, when I was doing a lot of professional development reading about millennial’s, and the way they think as a result of their immersion in information and technology, it became very clear to me that there was a real prophetic quality to MT Anderson’s vision in the book. Maybe it was Nick Carr’s article is Google making a stupid which I’ve referenced a number of times in these talks. That really made me wonder about focus and imagination in the future. So in any event I’ve been thinking about this, and we have secured grant money for an author visit. So we decided to bring in MT Anderson. The problem is, and I’ve had this problem since I’ve been a librarian, that teacher is in our school are not always willing to relinquish instructional time for this kind of an event. So we really wanted to make sure that if we had Mr. Anderson coming he has won a national book award after all, that we would have a sizable audience, and that teachers would Celebrate, rather than shun, the event.

It started with my Kindle. I knew I needed to get the teachers a passage from the book for them to have their students read in class. So I bought the e-book version of feed, highlighted the sections I thought were relevant in terms of setting up the story, and downloaded my clip things from my computer. Where’s the cloud in this? Kindle syncs with my computer and my phone. So I was able to highlight no matter where I was, work on the project on the go. All my highlighting notes were stored on the Amazon cloud. When it was time to retrieve them I did so downloaded them as text files and transferred them to a Word document I crossed out curse words so as not to offend our more sensitive students. And we turned the document into a PDF file, which I uploaded to Google docs, making sure that only members of our Google apps domain had access to the document. That I e-mailed it to the English teachers in length it to our library website homepage. Remember, the passage was within compliance on copyright law, and only accessible to members of our Google apps domain, which is our high school. So what did the cloud do for us in this instance? For one thing it saved agreed to look paper and ink. As far as collaboration goes, I was able to vet the selection by the English Department rather handily, and by using a Google document, we were able to work on it together before finalizing the version we chose to use with students. From the students perspective, there wasn’t a whole lot of collaboration at this phase of the project.

Then we created the author visit page. Into that we link instructional materials for three disciplines: social studies, science and English. There was a reading for each. English was a 10 page passage from feed. IN science, we had a short passage from the book where two characters were out on a date at a filet mignon farm, which was where, in this dystopian society, beef was genetically manufactured. Below that passage, we included a recent article about the FDA’s approval of selling genetically manufactured salmon for human consumption. In the social studies, there is a passage about the protagonist’s misunderstanding of the word democracy, and his embarrassment about not being as smart as his girlfriend. To that we linked the now infamous Nick Carr article is Google making a stupid. All of these documents were uploaded as PDFs to Google docs, and links back to this page.

For each of the three disciplines we created an introductory video that teachers could stream before assigning the reading. Each video offered context to the reading and an introduction to the author that was unique for that discipline. Each of these was posted to YouTube, which is not quite a cloud, because participants can’t collaborate on the same project, but it is participatory as there are channels, subscribers, friends, comments, ratings. It is very social, thus engendering collaboration. The English video was about five minutes long. The science video and the social studies videos were roughly 2 minutes apiece. All of them took into account that there was a good possibility that students might see all three, so we made a point of making each one distinctive from the other. in each video students were asked to register for the event online, and if they were going to miss a specific class, to have the teacher Whose class they were going to miss sign off on the permission slip.

they are life form was critical. Over 350 students of the 500 participants filled out. Remember that all forms in Google applications become spreadsheets.

First name * Last name * An email address you check regularly * TheM.T. Anderson work you have read If you haven't read any of his work, that's fine, we just want to know if you have. Feed The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation Volume I: The Pox Party The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation Volume II: The Kingdom of the Waves Burger Wuss Thirsty Selection assigned by a teacher Other: Period you wish to attend the author visit 3 - 9:19 - 10:06 4 - 10:11 - 10:59 Are you interested in attending the special luncheon with the author? Application required - see author visit page at <http://tiny.cc/MTatNCHS> Have you had your permission slip... * Check all that apply signed by the teacher whose class you will miss? returned to the attendance office? No permission slip necessary. I have a free during the session I will attend. Anything you would like to say? Question for the author? Suggestions for future author visit events? Specific authors you would like to meet or activities that would make author vistit events more enjoyable.

So what did the cloud do for us in this instance? For one thing it saved agreed to look paper and ink. As far as collaboration goes, I was able to vet the selection by the English Department rather handily, and by using a Google document, we were able to work on it together before finalizing the version we chose to use with students.

let us stop here to recap where we are in this process. So far we’ve managed to reach the 775 students three times. Students have had a consistent introduction to the reading they know about the author and they’ve had an opportunity to reflect about the questions they will ask when the author comes. Students are responsible for obtaining permission from a teacher if they’re going to miss the class, and turning that slipped into the attendance office. If they fail to do that, the absence will be an excuse. It is on them to get this done. On our end, we have all the information we need for continued communication with students, we have concrete numbers as to how many students are going to come to which assembly, therefore we know which rooms to set up (Auditorium versus multipurpose room), we know who is interested in coming to lunch, how many kids for the book, etc.

What would it felt like to do this in flesh and blood? I think this is what it would feel like to try to physically do what collaborative and cloud-based tools have done for me at this point. But it’s not over yet.

Would’ve I had to do so far Meet with the English department Create a new page on our website Create a registration form Create a permission slip Does that sound like a whole lot of work? Not really the English department meeting, I was in and out of there in 10 minutes. The webpage I created it in Word but I saved it as a webpage, copied and pasted the HTML code and to our web service and it was done. The registration is nine questions long including the first and last name and two fields for e-mail addresses so basically five questions The permission slip? The school has a standard one, I just made a few modifications. All in all? We’re talking maybe 2 to ½ hours.

once we had the database of participating student e-mails in a spreadsheet, we were able to e-mail students the online book order form. In hindsight it would have been much more efficient to include this information in the registration form. But I didn’t think of it then. So some students pre-ordered their books. Since the order form included inscription requests, we simply inserted the forms into the books for the author to sign. And had everything ready when he arrived. For students who changed their mind during the event, we had paper copies for them to complete. Invariably students want to purchase books on the day of the author visit, but have no cash. Traditionally we’ve given out IOUs, but naturally does come back to bite us on many occasions. This year we instituted a new approach. Students authorized us with a release form to charge their books to their library account. This minimized the onerous issue of cream making change and counting cash. And it also gave far more students the opportunity to meet with the author and have their books signed. Here again, students are taking ownership of their role in this event. They have an option to charge the book knowing full well that they will be getting bumped parted by e-mails every single day until they pay up. With destiny, our new library management system, we e-mail overdue notices daily. We have learned that students hate this. It is so much more effective than snail mail. They will do anything to stop those e-mails from coming including return renew and pay up.

Tobin was great. Don’t you love how he managed to stand right in front of education of youth in our mural. Makes for wonderful photographs he looks so cerebral and this one. He was warm, friendly, funny. A little racy. The kids really really enjoyed it. Over 500 students attended. And another dozen or so came to the luncheon. but what really blew my mind, where the kids. We’ve done this before, and student engagement wasn’t always there. There was An unprecedented level of preparedness for this event. Students knew what to expect, they knew the baseline of the story, they knew why we had brought this author in as opposed to anybody else, they could relate this story to a to a real-life science development, and a growing cultural problem. They were familiar with his style of writing, so when he started to read from feed they were instantly engaged. When Mr. Anderson finished his sessions, students didn’t want to leave they were still asking questions. Usually there’s that awkward time when the author puts out the question option and there’s silence. In this event students had their hands up before he even asked the question. I have never seen anything like it before.

then came the luncheon. Our family and consumer sciences teacher has her classes prepare lunch for the faculty wants per quarter. Because she knew about this event, she scheduled what she calls the ram Café for that day. Naturally, knowing that we were having a luncheon somehow, I booked the whole event. So students and family and consumer sciences prepare the lunch for the event. Without the publicity associated with this author visit, we wouldn’t have had the fusion of activities that occurred and there is no way that that promotion could have happened without all of the Virtual communication and collaboration.

It’s free, it’s social, you don’t have to be there in real time to participate, and you can earn C.E.U.s!

I am going to pause here for a moment to explain our direction for today. For those of you who are new to the series, this may seem like an unorthodox application for cloud computing and collaboration tools. So far in the series, we have talked a lot about cloud computing and collaborative tools already. We talked about best practices in September, and hybrid programming in October, our introduction included a lot on the subject as well. So for those who’ve been with us for all four months, we want to make sure that you have a fresh perspective. For those of you who are joining us for the very first time, please understand that there are three other webinars on our Ed web community homepage that further speak to this topic.