Ray Zahab and Kevin Vallely have crossed Lake Baikal!
Running daily marathons would be incredible enough, but they've done it while toting provision-laden sleds through high winds; in arctic temperatures; across rugged frozen terrain. The Impossible2Possible team made the journey in just over 13 days, and in doing so, inspired thousands of students who followed the expedition.
In just a few weeks time, Ray will be joining us as a live speaker at TEDxOntarioEd. To say we're exited, would be an incredible understatement. To see what they endured, visit Impossible2Possible, or check out this video summary of the expedition:
If the ideas you are about to hear are new to you, it's only because you haven't been paying attention. Voices scattered across the edublogosphere have been saying these things for some time. Maybe it just rings more true when a youthful learner says it?
Did you catch the sheep doing cartwheels at the end of this video?
A few weeks ago, I received a collegial email from Alma Taawo alerting me to a newly published teachers' guide on Creative Commons. Not only had the Swedish National Agency for Education (Skolverket) published a reader-friendly manual for teachers, they had licensed it for use, re-use and sharing.
Cool! Except... I don't speak Swedish.
As luck would have it, within a few minutes of putting out a distress call via Twitter, I was introduced to a Alastair Creelman. Born in Scotland, Alastair has lived in Sweden since 1983, and had already forged connections with the authors of the original document. After a few brief emails, the text translation was underway.
By coincidence, this correspondence took place in between Skype conversations I was having with group of 6th graders from Lawfield Public School in Hamilton, Ontario. Following up on an invitation from Zoe Branigan-Pipe I was introducing students to the potential of Creative Commons.
Just prior to a return check-in with the class, I'd had the privilege of viewing a video clip of Zoe's students teaching adults about blogging, including why they were adding Creative Commons licenses to their blogs. Not only had they taken the lesson to heart, but they were teaching others about what they'd learned.
Even though it would be fairly easy for a tech-savvy educator to re-publish the Swedish CC document, I decided then and there, that it would provide a perfect opportunity for Zoe's students to further share their expertise by contributing to Creative Commons in the Classroom, a teaching resource. The invitation, and the class' enthusiastic response, is documented in a recent podcast:
Three Related News Items 1] You may be interested in visiting (or re-visiting) Creative Commons: What Every Educator Needs to Know, which was revised this winter. As proof that more people are learning about CC, the audio version has been viewed some 15,000 times! 2] I'm making plans to provide a workshop on Creative Commons in August at the ABEL Summer Institute in Toronto. Join us if you're able. ;-) 3] This past weekend at TEDxNYED, Creative Commons pioneer, Lawrence Lessig, implored those present, to consider teaching and learning in a world characterized by openness and sharing. You can learn lots about CC or about presenting in general by watching Lessig's presentations.
Last week, I had the good fortune of stumbling across 'The Essential Man' an Esquire article that reconnected me with storied film critic, Roger Ebert. The article prompted me to locate Roger Ebert's online journal, where he seems to be saying more than he ever did 'from the balcony'.
As much as I'm glad to see this man's passionate commentary in text, this morning, I learned that Roger Ebert can now communicate using synthesized audio built from samples of his own voice. To find out how this is possible, listen to Dr. Matthew Aylett, chief technical Officer at CereProc as he explains the technology on NPR's All Things Considered.
Voices in School While we don't have access to Ebert's voice, staff and students in my district are coming to realize that they can leverage a range of voice-augmented assistive technologies including a talking word processor. In a workshop today, for a combined group of staff and students, my colleague Pat Hammond, introduced many of these Premier literacy tools. My interview with Pat, is episode #219 of the Teacher 2.0 podcast:
I suspect it won't be long before we see personal digital language assistants adopted as universal designs for learning. Photo Credit: .m.e.c.
At the close of the Olympics, the chair of the Vancouver Organizing Committee (VANOC), John Furlong highlighted the fact that Canadians were united in experiencing the 2010 Winter Olympic Games “I believe we Canadians tonight are stronger, more united, more in love with our country, and more connected with each other than ever before. These Olympic Games have lifted us up. That quiet, humble national pride we were sometimes reluctant to acknowledge seemed to take to the streets as the most beautiful kind of patriotism broke out all across our country."
I believe that modern communications technologies played a pivotal role in bringing us together for the past 17 days. If you were on Twitter during the Men's Hockey Championship, you felt it first hand. In today's podcast, I consider our evolving use of communications technologies as 'digital pheromones'.
If you have the 30 minutes to spare, Jesse Schell's recent talk at DICE 2010, is quite a cage-rattler. The financial strategies that underpin many of today's games may be surprising, but there is no arguing the fact that today's games captivate an audience hungry for social play.
In 'Design Outside the Box' Jesse paints a future where point systems and emerging technologies form the scaffolding for an economy that is dependent upon gameplay.
Knowing such a world may be on the way: What role should gaming play in education?
A few weeks ago, I had a conversation with three students who created Facebook pages as a modern response to Shakespeare’s 'A Midsummer Night's Dream'.
Today, I’ve finally gotten around to sharing screen captures that act as exemplars of how Robin Goodfellow, Hermia and others might have experienced social networking.
If you’d like to see the lesson that spawned these pages, Dominic Dedato has agreed to share his differentiated lesson and rubric, suggesting that you are free to adopt, edit, or adapt it to suit your purposes.
How might your students demonstrate their knowledge of character development using modern tools? Would public Twitter feeds be preferred over a private collection of text messages? Might a collection of email correspondence from a bygone era be created? Maybe the characters would've maintained poster pages at ‘Glogster’?
Do you have similar projects or ideas to share? Perhaps our podcast interview will inspire you to consider providing your students with a similar experience...
Today at a meeting of department heads, we were asked to consider spending a few thousand dollars to gain access to the most popular plagiarism detection database: Turnitin.
In leveraging tools to teach learners about academic integrity, here are my recommended Terms of Use for Plagiarism Detection:
2] Teachers will overtly model academic integrity by attributing their sources for lessons, assignments, and coursework. (Where do your ideas, text, graphics come from?)
3] Conscientious attempts will be made by teachers to design authentic writing tasks that are resistant to copying. (via @sadone)
4] Students will be provided with opportunities to present their ideas in alternative ways including the use of emerging media tools.
5] It will be the norm for written assessments to be completed in the presence of the teacher.
6] Comprehensive training in the roll-out of digital detection software, will welcome the participation of interested students. (via @rivenhomewood)
7] Plagiarism detection will be used primarily by students as a way to gauge the integrity of their writing before submitting final drafts. (via @GDhuyvetter)
8] It will be the norm for students to use modern writing tools that track the 'history' of a document's development. (E.g., Google Documents)
9] Educators will learn (and teach students) how to use quoted text in a 'Google Search' as a way to validate suspicious strings of text.
10] Users will become familiar with the terms of the service agreement and will carefully consider the ethical consequences of submitting content to an online plagiarism service.
As a teacher who has used media and other communications technologies to connect with learners for more than 20 years, I'm looking for opportunities to engage in meaningful conversations with teachers who see themselves as learners.
