Lots of great offerings at @Teach21c workshops in NY/SF this June

The School at Columbia University in New York City is hosting another week of workshops at Teach21 from June 16-19. The following week, Teach21 heads west to co-host a week of workshops at Teach21West from June 23-26 at The Hamlin School in San Francisco, CA.

Here are the courses I’m offering at Teach21 in NYC:
Monday, June 16, 2014
3D Designing and Printing (Grades 2-8)
Let’s talk about the basics of a variety of design thinking protocols and explore how to create 3D designs using Tinkercad, Sketchup, and other tools. These 3D files can be exported to a Makerbot Replicator 2 printer while discussing possible integrated project ideas in Math, Science, Art, Social Studies across Upper Elementary and Middle School grades. You’ll leave the workshop with more confidence about the 3D design landscape and how to build a network of teachers interested in designing and making.

Tuesday, June 17, 2014
DIY Learning and Professional Development Opportunities
Discover and experience a variety of models to actively take control of your professional development. Twitter chats, unconferences, webinars, PLNs, digital spaces, and Google Hangouts are just a few of the ways to propel and sustain your (and your faculty’s) personal growth and develop a participatory culture of learners. We invite teachers, curriculum developers, and administrators to come and personalize their learning at this workshop.
This is a half-day workshop from 9:00 – 11:30. Please stay and join us for lunch.

Wednesday, June 18, 2014
Our Portfolios, Ourselves: Crafting a Digital Portfolio of Your Work as an Educator
Curation is a 21st Century skill, so let’s show how to gather archival evidence of your professional endeavors and classroom projects in a digital portfolio. You’ll learn tips to get started: What to gather? Where to put it? How much will this cost? How to organize it? What settings to use? How to link or embed artifacts? How to connect with others?
This is a half-day workshop offered from 9:00 – 11:30. Please stay and join us for lunch.

There are lots of other great workshops being led by my colleagues about world languages, empathy, numeracy, literacy, blogging, wellness, iPads, lesson planning, maker spaces, and more. There’s even a session on how a 5th grade teacher is using our in-house Independent Reading Site — Marisa Guastaferro Mendez and I won an award for the original IRS which we co-created using Google Sites in 2007 and used for many years. Then, Cristina Martinez retooled the site with Drupal in 2013 to be more visually arresting and appealing. It’s awesome to know that this tool is still being actively used to build community and offer a space for collaborating and social networking about literacy.

Starting to gather summer PD opportunities on this GoogleCal:

I created this GoogleCal a couple of years ago when I was President of NYCIST to gather the various Professional Development (PD) opportunities that cross my radar. Many of these are in the New York City Metro area, though I included others that seemed interesting as well. Please feel free to alert me to additional events that could/should be included on the calendar.

“Social Networking and Literacy” at #Teach21c

http://teach21.theschool.columbia.edu/

http://twitter.com/teach21c

As I wrote in my last post, Teach21 was a professional development institute for 21st Century educators organized by faculty and administrators at The School at Columbia University. Every day there was a keynote speaker (Sree Sreenivasan, Howard Gardner, A.J. Jacobs, Karen Cator) and many half-day and full-day concurrent offerings.

Thursday, I offered a session about “Social Networking and Literacy.” We started the 2.5 hours together with a discussion about literacy. I used to think literacy was just the reading and writing of text. Nowadays literacy is about learning how to comprehend/research/navigate/communicate/cite/re-mix/share all sorts of media.

We started off the session with a conversation about the new literacies and looked at a couple of sources:

• Wikipedia page for “New Literacies”: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_literacies
• NCTE Position Statement: http://www.ncte.org/positions/statements/21stcentdefinition
• 21st Century Literacies: http://www.noodletools.com/debbie/literacies/
• Henry Jenkins’s “Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century”: http://www.newmedialiteracies.org/files/working/NMLWhitePaper.pdf

Then I showed a couple of projects where students publish individual and group work online and collaborate via shared access, commenting, hyperlinking, and other interactions. We looked at The Independent Reading Site that I set up with Marisa Guastaferro three years ago and the To Kill a Mockingbird book groups set up by Eve Becker for her 8th grade English classes. Both projects are described in this post: http://karenblumberg.com/social-networking-and-literacy-on-2511-at-600

Then we looked at ways to set up similar projects with other available technologies.

• You don’t have an in-house Drupal photo server? Use Flickr, Shutterfly, Picasa and work with privacy and permissions.
• You don’t have an in-house Drupal video server? Use YouTube and consider public/private settings.
• You don’t have an in-house Elgg social network? Use Edmodo, Schoology, Facebook, Ning, Moodle, Twitter  to set up gathering spaces online.
• You don’t have Google Apps? Use Shelfari or Goodreads to discuss literature.

Resources from this and other Teach21 sessions are here: https://sites.google.com/a/theschool.columbia.edu/teach21-resources/

Notes from “Collaborating with New Media” at Teach21

http://teach21.theschool.columbia.edu/

http://twitter.com/teach21c

Teach21 is a professional development institute for 21st Century educators organized by faculty and administrators at The School at Columbia University. Every day there is a keynote speaker (Sree Sreenivasan, Howard Gardner, A.J. Jacobs, Karen Cator) and many half-day and full-day concurrent offerings.

Today, I led a half-day (2.5 hours) with attendees showing ways we use a variety of New Media tools here at The School to collaborate and innovate. There is just too much to share, and now I belatedly wish I’d shown less stuff. Better to explain in depth a few key projects to examine their innovation, interest, usefullness, assessment, and/or literacy. Even better to have a conversation with participants. Now I know. It’s less effective to see products without the process, duh. Plus, there was little interaction and I talked to much and jumped around too much between websites to the point that it made sense only to me. The last time I received negative feedback was at ISTE 2010. I need to now get over it, move on, and make my next presentation better.

Here is my Google Site where I tried to gather info: https://sites.google.com/a/theschool.columbia.edu/teach21-resources/workshop-…

(Other resources from the day are shared here: https://sites.google.com/a/theschool.columbia.edu/teach21-resources/)

And here are my unfortunately incomplete notes from the session:

What I say to kids all day every day: Use our available tools academically/respectfully/responsibly and Everything you do online is public/permanent/traceable.

The School’s new media server: http://newmedia.theschool.columbia.edu

I collect and archive finished student projects here: http://theschool.columbia.edu/middle-division/student_work

“security by obscurity”

New Media server:

Wiki – powered by MediaWiki – sort of a dormant technology to us right now

The Tube – our YouTube – tagging, tag cloud, embed code, default versus user login, download 

The Gallery – our Flickr – tagging, shared albums, others can upload, default versus user login, download original 

The Social Network – our Facebook – other social networking tools: Elgg, Edmodo, Schoology, Ning, Facebook

A social network answers these 3 questions: Who you are, who you know, what you do?

Show: Independent Reading Site, 6th Digital Art Portfolios, 8th To Kill a Mockingbird project, 8th science current events, 7th great mathematicians profiles, 7th American revolutionaries, 4th grade colonial characters 

Google Apps
(An old presentation I put together on Collaborating with Google Apps: https://docs.google.com/a/theschool.columbia.edu/present/edit?id=dcpjh599_198…)

Show: Independent Reading Site, 7th online science journals, 5th Grade Science Quiz

Live Form: http://spreadsheets.google.com/a/theschool.columbia.edu/viewform?hl=en&fo…

Spreadsheet: http://spreadsheets.google.com/a/theschool.columbia.edu/ccc?key=0AvbfIbg3rb3-…

Also show archived class projects, class websites, The Source (administrative Google Site), shared calendars, “collection” of Google Docs, labels for sorting Gmail

Cite your work and your images (Obama Hope poster discussion and the Mona Lisa)

Use advanced image searching to look for images that are licensed for sharing.