NECC: Stories from the Worldwide Scratch Community

NECC Session: Stories from the Worldwide Scratch Community

Mitch Resnick of MIT discussed how teachers can help students learn to create, build, and invent in the digital world. Digital natives are comfortable with interacting with technology, but they tend to need support to create and build things with technology tools.

Scratch is a free download from the Internet where you use building blocks of programming to create stories, games, and animations and share them with the web. By utilizing the programming blocks, students do not spend weeks and weeks writing code. Instead, the focus of Scratch projects is on creating content instead of programming code. Most of the users are between 9 – 16 years of age and have uploaded a variety of projects to the Scratch website such as Barack vs. McCain games, advertisements, announcements, science simulations, birthday cards, games, and remixes of other scratch animations. But the best part of Scratch comes with the collaboration among users. By posting animations and creations to the Scratch website, users can take those animations and remix them into a new creation.

Before I attended this session, I toured different student Scratch projects in the Student Showcase section of the conference. I was amazed that I saw students as young as second grade explain how they create their projects in Scratch. The only disheartening piece that I heard from them is that most of these students learned about Scratch in after-school programs or Saturday school clubs. Ideally, I’d love to see Scratch integrated into the school day so that this program is available to all students.

Teachers: Be Very Afraid

There are teachers who are resisting technology integration in their classroom because they don't want to change their teaching style and see no need for it. However, there is no denying that today's generation of children are completely different from previous generations. Reluctant teachers do not want to admit this because if they acknowledge that students are different, that means they will have to change they way they teach. This site is for all of those teachers who think they can continue with paper and pencil activities and still reach today's youth. Reluctant Teachers: BE VERY AFRAID. This site is actually called "Be Very Afraid". To summarize the site, I have taken a quote directly from their home page:

• "Each year a selection of ingenious students - from primary to university age - are invited along to BAFTA in London's Piccadilly to show and talk about the extraordinary things they are doing with new technologies in their learning. During the day the students explain just what it is that they are doing. Each year is more ambitious; each year poses real questions for policymakers and parents as the ambitions of these 21st century learners, together with their ability to deliver on these ambitions, becomes apparent."

While browsing through some of the video clips from the conference, I saw some AMAZING examples of students using technology. A few things that I saw:

• Students from elementary school through college using technology
• Special needs students using technology (learning disabled, autistic, and MR)
• Movie Maker for student made videos
• Google Sketch Up for building design
• Cell Phones in education
• Satellite technology
• Clay animation
• Web Design in Flash, Director, Dream Weaver
• Gaming in education
• Pocket PCs

And this was just the first page!!

Is there really any argument for not using technology in the classroom? I think not.

"Web 3.0" by Kevin Kelly

It's coming - web 3.0. Are you feeling overwhelmed that you don't even know web 2.0 very well and now technology is moving on without you? It just might be! Kevin Kelly, from Wired magazine, talks about how the Internet will change over the next 5,000 days. It's worth pondering, especially if you are an educator resisting integrating technology into your classroom. It's painfully clear that teachers will be hard pressed to reach children coming into their classroom unless they adapt their teaching methods accordingly.




If YouTube is blocked at your school, copy and paste this video link and view it at home:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J132shgIiuY

Digital Avatars for Website: Oddcast PhotoFace

Oddcast PhotoFace is a website I came across the other day that allows you to upload a headshot of your face and it will turn it into a digital avatar for you that can be posted to Facebook, downloaded, or embedded into websites. Once the image is uploaded, you can change your race, facial expressions, hair color, and facial hair (for men). In addition, you can add audio with a microphones, text-to-speech, or call it in by phone.

The World Wide Web in Plain English

Another gem from Common Craft:


This is a YouTube video found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wZoMbBzqxyc

Related Post:

Wiki in Plain English
RSS in Plain English

Siftables: A New Way to Interact With Digital Content

According to the Siftable website, siftables "are cookie-sized computers with motion sensing, neighbor detection, graphical display, and wireless communication. They act in concert to form a single interface: users physically manipulate them - piling, grouping, sorting - to interact with digital information and media. Siftables provides a new platform on which to implement tangible, visual and mobile applications."

All I can say is - WOW! Where and when can I get some of these??

"Shift Happens": Remixed and Updated Again

I think I have posted all of the "Shift Happens" videos, originally created by Karl Fisch. Here is another remix that emphasizes the statistics that reinforce why we need to teach students 21st century skills. Everyone involved in education should watch this - teachers, parents, and administrators.

The History of the Internet

The blogs are abuzz today with a new video that came out on Vimeo on the "History of the Internet". I first saw this video mentioned in Learning and Teaching in the 21st Century and then again in Free Technology for Teachers. As part of the National Student Technology Standards, one of the objectives that students are expected to know is all about the history of the Internet. As a teacher, I would have a difficult time explaining this concept to my class. Not anymore! The video below was created by Melih Bilgil, a graphic designer in Germany.


History of the Internet from PICOL on Vimeo.

Hall Davidson Speaks at Frederick County Public Schools, MD

Today I had the privilege of listening to Hall Davidson, head of the Discovery Educator Network, speak on a topic entitled, “Revenge of the Digital Natives“. He spoke of how the digital natives (children growing up with technology) have the ability to multi-task unlike any generation before them. While the amount of time these students spend watching TV can increase their inability to attend, they can also multi-task with several different medias and expect to learn with several different medias. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Digital natives typically spend 2 seconds on a webpage before they decide whether or not the page will yield the information they are looking for. What does this mean for teachers? Think of the media you use in your class. Mr. Davidson gave the example of how the old way to show an education video in schools was to play the whole 30 minute video. Now with resources like United Streaming, teachers have the ability to download a short video segment that narrows in on their objective that they are teaching. No more wasted classroom time!
Mr. Davidson also shared some websites that can be used in a new way to engage students in the classroom:

• Google Lit Trips: Virtual field trips in Google Earth around famous works of literature
  
• Google Sketchup: Construct a 3D building
  
• Gcast: Call an online service, leave a message, and turn it into a podcast automatically
  
• Poll everywhere: Participate in a survey via your cell phone and results are displayed on the website live
  
• Jott: send yourself reminders via email by calling the Jott.com number
  

I have seen Mr. Davidson speak at the Day of Discovery in Silver Springs, MD back in August, and still find that he has new ideas to share with his audience. I hope to continue to be as motivated and excited about technology as he is!

RELATED POSTS:
MD, VA, DC Day of Discovery

Vision of College Students Today: Video

We talk a lot about elementary school students. What about the college students? The Digital Divide applies to them, too.

A Vision of K-12 Students Today: Video

Digital Environments Influencing Kids…

Photo by Jim Sneddon on Flickr

There is an interesting interview at ZDNet from Henry Jenkins, a media scholar at MIT, who is studying how digital environments influence children. Here is one of the thought-provoking quotes:

“(Research has shown) that 57 percent of teens online have produced media and about a third of them have produced media that they shared with people beyond their immediate friends and families. A good chunk of those produced media by remixing it, so this is a generation that is not just consuming media, but producing media.” ~ Henry Jenkins

This goes back to an earlier point that I made in a blog entry about the growing digital divide, not just between students, but between students AND teachers. What percentage of teachers can boast that they have produced media and posted it to the Internet? Created podcasts? Blogs? Incorporated any of these methods into the classroom?

Students are using the Internet to find information and to publish information that they have created, whether it’s at MySpace, YouTube, or Facebook. My sister, who was in 9th grade at the time, uploaded a video she created in school to YouTube. Uploading to YouTube was not part of the class assignment, although her group decided to do it on their own time.

My point is this: students are creating and publishing to the web all the time. How can educators take advantage of this in the classroom? How can we teach students to ethically be responsible for the material they post to the Internet? If kids are producing this kind of technology, how can we change the way we teach to motivate them further?

Shift Happens Update

In an earlier post, I wrote about the impact of Karl Fisch’s video “Did You Know?” (a.k.a. Shift Happens 2.0). You can also check out his blog while you’re at it. He updates the video with current statistics such as “there are 2.7 billion searches on Google every month,” and the “amount of technical terminology is doubling every 2 years; and by 2010 it is expected to double every 72 hours.”

Think: What are the implications for teaching students in this fast-paced, digital world? Do we have the resources, the money, the training, and the motivation to keep up?

Teachers, Pay Attention!

I stumbled upon a new blog by Darren Draper, a technology specialist in Utah. He had an entry featuring his new video (that is similar to Karl Fisch’s video “Did You Know?”) entitled “Pay Attention". Draper states that in addition to all of Gardner’s “multiple intelligences” that students can have, they can also be “digital”. He continues by citing the amount of time kids spend on the computer, playing video games, talking on cell phones, and text messaging their friends. He poses interesting ideas of using cell phones and iPods in the classroom using the mentality, "if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em”! For example, teachers understand how difficult it can be to reach your students using traditional lecture methods. What if you can reach them through podcasts?

My thoughts: there are free podcasts of all subject areas available on the Internet. Using podcasts can be one way to differentiate learning in the classroom. If students were able to listen to a podcast and follow along with it on the computer, they could pause the podcast as necessary until they completed the work on the screen. They can listen to the podcast multiple times to understand the material. Even if the podcast is not posted to the Internet, it can be housed on the school network for students to access via the student drive. The possibilities are endless!