Google Wave

UPDATE: Google has just announced (as in like… 3 hours ago) that Google Wave will no longer be a supported product. They will be keeping the website up until the end of the year (at least) and their code will remain open source, but they just didn’t see the user adoption they hoped for. Hear it straight from the horse’s mouth here. Just wish I knew that before I wrote this post! Ha Oh well!

Google wave is nothing new at this point in time, however now that it has gone public it has become a little more reasonable for educators to start using it. Previously if you were lucky enough to receive an invitation you were only gifted with about 8 invitations, clearly not enough to invite your students with! Now anyone with a google account has access to google wave and you are given 50 invitations. Additionally, you can also add any email address to a wave, effectively bringing in any new collaborator you need.

So beyond just the fact that you now have lots more invites to bring your students in on the game, there are many other reasons that I can think of that make this a useful educational tool. First of all there are a ton of extensions that are available now which can help make wave more functional. Wait, you want to know what they are… okay okay here’s a quick rundown:

1. IFRAME gadget – not the most flashy but probably one of the most functional gadgets on the list. Wondering what an IFrame is? An IFrame allows you embed pretty much any online content into a box on the wave. For example, if you have a wave about Australian Terriers you could embed the AKC breed page for the official breed standards in one IFrame, and another IFrame can house your Flickr slideshow of your precious pooch.

2. Image Gadget – this one is pretty straightforward – allows you to add images, resize, or annotate any image from the world wide web.

3. List Gadget – insert lists into the wave (tables)

4. Twitter Search – shows a list of all twitter results for any search term. So many educators are using Twitter these days, if you have a wave with other educators about say… educational technology you could search for the hashtag #edtech (don’t know what a hashtag is you say… well that is for another blog entry) and viola you get a real-time list of tweets that are using that hashtag.

5. MindMeister Gadget – allows all of the participants of the wave to create a mind map – sort of like inspiration – which is embedded in the wave. (another similar extension is yourbrainstormer 2.0 – difference being appearance and the ability let your participants rate each idea on the mindmap with a thumbs up or thumbs down)

6. Deadline Gadget – You create an event and it will place a countdown on the wave that tells how many hours/minutes until the event starts. You can use this to remind students of an assignment deadline, an online discussion, or deadline to turn something else in like field trip money. The great thing about this extension is that it just gives you the amount of time left until the deadline, and doesn’t give a time (as in 5:00 pm) which is helpful if you have students or wave participants in other timezones. (Remaining Time is a similar app)

7. Ferry Gadget – This app allows you to export your wave as a google doc. You can tell the app to copy a single blip or the entire wave, and you can also set it to update the google doc automatically or manually when the wave updates. From google docs you can export the wave in many different formats, including PDF.

There are currently over 70 extensions that are available on wave, and there’s no way that I can discuss them all in one post (and no way you would read that!) so I’m going to call it a post with these seven. I think they will get you off to a good start with Google Wave. I think the educational uses of wave are definitely there, you can have students collaborate on an assignment such as a lab report – they could incorporate web resources in an IFRAME, use the list gadget to create their data tables, and use the mindmeister to brainstorm for their conclusion. The teacher could add the deadline gadget to give them a reminder of when their assignment is due, and the students could export the final lab report to google docs using the ferry.

I’m interested in what your ideas are for the uses of Wave so go ahead and leave your ideas in the comments box below!

Webspiration

If you are a fan of the program Inspiration (a concept map creating software) you are going to love my newest discovery. If you aren’t already a fan, don’t worry you soon will become one.

For years the only way to get this software was to pay for it and install it on your computer. One of the problems that I ran into was that in order for my students to use the software at home they had to download the limited-time trial, unfortunately it was a different version from the one we had at school and there were compatibility issues.

Easy access to all your documents

All of this has been solved with the introduction of webspiration – their online version of the software. There is nothing to download, nothing to install. You simply need to create a (free) account and then you are ready to go! Your account comes with access to your “documents” which looks familiar to users of google documents – except that all of your documents will be inspiration concept maps/outlines. You can also prioritize documents to help you keep track of what you need to do, what is done, etc.

With the beta version of this new online program you can easily collaborate and share your creations with other users, making group work quick and easy. Collaborators can easily chat with each other or leave comments for future review. A feature that teachers and students will enjoy is the “Submit Work” and

“Return Work” tools. Students can easily turn in work created on their profile to their teacher and then the teacher can grade/leave comments and return the work to the student. All work is time-stamped so if you want to give students a deadline you can easily hold them to it. Also if you have your students create a category like the yellow category to the right your students can easily access all their graded work. So not only will this feature allow you to stay more organized, but you can also teach your students critical organizational skills as well. Also, much like a wiki, webspiration keeps track of all changes made to each document and by whom, so you can easily see who is doing what and when.

A couple of ideas to help get you started on ways to utilize this tool in your course.

1. Post discussion questions in the outline form and then share it with your class. Each student will be responsible for their own answers, students can discuss. (This would work a lot like a message forum). The great thing about this particular software is that you can easily make identical copies of a document – so set up your questions, make a copy for every class, or every group – however you want to set it up – and then share the appropriate copy with the members of the class or group.
2. Have students create their own topic outlines or concept maps and then submit their work to you. You can allow them to do it individually or with partners, and then they submit their work to you when they are finished. You can then grade it and return it through the program.
3. You can easily create and save templates (or use pre-provided ones from webspiration) to create assignments that you can then distribute to your students to complete and return to you. One that I found particularly interesting (and easily modifiable) was the web page wireframe – this isn’t available as a template however it would be simple enough to make one relevant to your situation. In the diagram view portion of the creator screen you can set up boxes for content and save it as a template for your students to fill in. At that point they could either submit it to you digitally or print it off. One idea that I heard recently from Nik K. was to create a facebook page template and have the students fill in the information. He used it in a history class and had the students create pages for historical figures like Hitler, Mussolini, etc. but I could envision this also working for concepts that are linked, for example the idea I am going to use is to have students create facebook pages for parts of the cell, and body systems. Friends would be organelles or body parts/systems that work with the “person” the facebook page is for, and the profile would explain the likes/dislikes, hobbies, activities, etc of the organelle or body system. We will then create a large biology “network” and hopefully the visual modality of the project will help students retain the information. I may even make them friend each other by having to explain to each other why they should be friends (how are they connected) and then having the class vote on it haha. It’s still a work in progress. Perhaps by the end of the year our facebook network of biology will cover more than that.

Well I’ve given you three ideas – take them and do with them as you please. If you come up with anything better than that please post your ideas in the comments box!

Wikispaces (part 1)

I have used wikispaces for three years running to serve as my class website. This year I slowly migrated away from the wikispace as I was trying out new tools (wordpress blog, google site, and most recently ning – though that didn’t last long.. more on this later) to try to find one that worked best with my students and with me, and I wasn’t using the wiki to it’s fullest potential.

I created my wikispace before I actually began teaching; it was the summer before I started and I was living in my boyfriend’s parent’s living room until I started getting paid and could afford an apartment of my own. My boyfriend was working a full time job and since it was summer I had a lot of free time on my hands, so I hit the proverbial streets – digitally. I was combing the internet for things to help make me a better teacher and I managed to stumble onto wikispaces. I will say that I tried out both pbwiki and wikispaces before deciding that I preferred the format of wikispaces, and so I stuck with them.

The things I liked about wikispaces were many: the fact that they would provide me with a site ad free since it would be used for educational purposes (many sites do this by the way, all you have to do is ask), the wysiwyg (what you see is what you get) editor, the easy integration of media, files and widgets onto pages, the ability to bulk add student accounts to your site, the ability to make it private (to keep out the pervs), the ability to restore pages that were screwed up (common to all wikis), the ease of editing pages and overall management of the site, I could go on.

Needless to say, it worked beautifully for what I wanted to do with it the first year. My first year teaching I had a class of AP Environmental Science students, 12 to start out with which dwindled to 8 by the end of the year. Environmental science is a very timely subject and part of our class was a recurring assignment in which the students had to find a current event and create a page summarizing the article, including a picture and giving their commentary. The wiki was great for this as it was easy to edit for the students, recorded who created the page, any edits to the page, and the time stamp for those edits. I was also able to easily create a table of contents page in which the students could add their listings so that anyone could browse the articles. Looking back I would also add to the assignment that the week following turning in the assignment the students should go back to their peers pages, read and comment on them (you can add a forum like comment widget to pages) in order to promote student discourse on the subjects and get them thinking and expressing themselves. There are lots of other things that I could have done in addition to this, which I’m sure you, my lovely reader, could probably come up with (feel free to leave your ideas in the comments below for the enjoyment of the rest of us), but I do ask that you don’t judge me too harshly (it was my first year teaching after all).

I was also able to embed a google calendar onto the pages of the wiki, and since you can create multiple google calendars under one google account, I created a calendar for each class I taught and posted them separately. This helped to prevent the inevitable “but you never told us it was due that day” argument. Very handy.

This year, as I said, I moved away from the wiki as my main source for students, however I did have my AP Biology students complete one assignment on the wiki. The students were assigned to create an interactive tutorial using the web 2.0 technology of their choice, and then the assignments were posted to a page I created for them on the wiki. After that I took my Pre-AP students to the library and allowed them to view and rate the tutorials as a part of the senior’s grades. I was able to embed a google spreadsheet into the project page for the seniors to see exactly how the freshmen rated their projects so that they were given pretty instantaneous feedback. Again there are tweaks that I would make to this assignment in hindsight, but I feel that the wiki was very useful overall.

I have lots more to say about wikispaces and wikis in general, but if I write too much more no one will finish reading. SO with that said, dear reader (that is, if you made it this far!), thanks for stopping by, and leave a message sharing your ideas for using wikispaces in your classroom.

MyStuDIYo

If I can say one thing about my virtual instructor training course it is that I have found a ton of resources just for the fact that I’m participating in the program. The latest one I found as I was creating a collaborative online lesson with my good buddy Colleen. Our project would be for the students to create a virtual poster on glogster.com about an invasive species. In order to open the lesson I wanted to have the students watch a short video about invasive species so naturally I went to youtube. I found a video on the Snakehead Invasion and then decided that in order to determine if the students actually watched the video I wanted them to take a short quiz with it. So I went to google and searched for something along the lines of “embeddable quiz” .. I think. ANYWAYS I ended up finding this site called mystuDIYo.

It allows you to create your own multiple choice or scored questions, add text, video, image, etc to an intro and to each question and allows you to set up the end screen as well. Students can be asked to create a login which will then be tracked to your account when they take the quiz so you can see what score they get. It also creates a scoreboard so students will hopefully be encouraged to compete against one another. You can also choose the skin that you want the quiz to use.
All in all its pretty cool – you can even embed the quiz on your website – unfortunately wordpress won’t allow me to do that so here is a link to a little quiz I put together just for you

Virtual Instructor Quiz

BrainHoney

ok stop the press

I have found it… my true online classroom love. It’s called BrainHoney. I’m such a stickler for how I want my websites to look and personally I cannot stand moodle. It’s so blah and not aesthetically pleasing and just not good. Sure you can upload classes and what not but it is not as future-forward as you would hope.

So I was reading an article from my RSS reader (if you don’t have it, get it… google offers one that’s really easy to use… and subscribe to my blog while you are at it) about the future of education and open source classes and etc. The article is, coincidentally enough, the one referenced in the post just previous to this one. In the article this one fellow talks about the free, completely online highschool he has created in Utah called Open High School of Utah (OHSU) and so I went to check out the website. I was looking at their information and saw a screenshot of the virtual classroom software that they used. It’s nice. I like the format and the flow.

So you’re thinking.. great.. Utah has a good format. Big Deal. Well as I continued to browse their site (and wonder if I could teach there without actually having to move to Utah) I found that they listed the company who they got thier software from. So I went to that website (www.agilix.com btw). This is where the exciting part comes in.

THE SOFTWARE IS FREE! AHHH I’m so excited. You just have to register. And that’s free too! And not only that.. they have the TEKS already in thier system! I didn’t even have to sift through them. I just selected “create a new course”, picked my grade level (it already had my school from when I registered), picked “Science” from the categories of Social Studies, English, Math or Science… and BAM the teks were right there!

From this site you can manage your gradebook, assign work, email students, conference with students, create modules, you name it. They even have the option (probably have to purchase it I would imagine) for the students to be able to work on the program offline and upload assignments when they get to internet (great for rural students who may or may not have consistent internet access). It is the coolest program ever and you should all go sign up.

The end.

Long Live Edupunk

I’ve decided that I’m an Edupunk. Why you ask?

Well… one it sounds cool. Like a really crazy, lives on the edge, has lots of tattoos and a wicked haircut smart person…. who doesn’t care what people think. Maybe I’m not even doing the word justice. Probably not. Hanging out with teenagers all day is like an atomic bomb on your vocabulary.

The other reason is because I think it accurately describes a portion of my educational philosophy. I mean… I’m really irritated that I spent 60,000 dollars to get a degree from a public university. My husband’s not too happy he’s living with that debt either. The man who coined the term ‘”edupunk” [did so] to describe the growing movement toward high-tech do-it-yourself education.” He describes it as being catalyzed by “the utter irresponsibility and lethargy of educational institutions and the means by which they are financially cannibalizing their own mission.”

This movement towards self-directed instruction is being called “education 2.0″ which you probably know is a spinoff of web 2.0.

You can read the full text of the article here

Second Life

Various prokaryotic genomes that give you information about the microorganism and a picture when you click on them!

Ok so for the longest time I thought that Second Life was for dorkons who didn’t live in the real world – but the program has come a long way since then. Not to say that I didn’t get hit on my some loser-dude within my first 5 minutes in Second Life. (Don’t worry I told him it was weird to hit on people you don’t know in virtual reality)

There are several SLURLS (second life urls for the uninitiated.. ha ha) that are of interest for the biology virtual classroom. The first of these is Genome Island. There is lots of genetics resources on this island and they have lots of pictures and information on all different kinds of stuff. When you arrive at the island you will get a notecard telling you what is going on on the island so I would strongly suggest reading that first. One cool thing that I did find is that you get t-shirts on this island and they seem to be banded in accordance with different chromosomes!

I’m not going to pretend that I know exactly what I’m doing on Second Life at this point. For example, I have already somehow deleted all my clothes, and my hair, attempted to put it back on only to not have it fit properly and parts of it disappear into my body while other parts stick out of my head that shouldnt…. curious. Anyways I’m working on it and think its worth taking a look at.

Voice Thread

With VoiceThread, group conversations are collected and shared in one place from anywhere in the world. All with no software to install.

A VoiceThread is a collaborative, multimedia slide show that holds images, documents, and videos and allows people to navigate pages and leave comments in 5 ways – using voice (with a mic or telephone), text, audio file, or video (via a webcam). Share a VoiceThread with friends, students, and colleagues for them to record comments too.

Users can doodle while commenting, use multiple identities, and pick which comments are shown through moderation. VoiceThreads can even be embedded to show and receive comments on other websites and exported to MP3 players or DVDs to play as archival movies.

This program would be useful for the virtual classroom because you can post various assignments (documents, images, whatever) and have the students comment on them in a variety of ways. Very Interactive.

There is a fee associated with this service – $60/year or $10/month (if you want it for less then 6 months I assume) which allows you to sign up up to 100 students. You can also try to talk your school into getting a license – it is $1/person/year or they have special bulk discounts if you can get your entire district to sign up for it so talk to your district curriculum coordinator.

You can have your own educator membership for free which is pretty basic it seems (haven’t tried it out yet personally) but if you wanted to do something like this guy then the free version should work just fine.

Some of the voicethread’s that I recommend to check out for guidance:

An Egg-cellent Experiment!

How to Blog

Also if you just search “biology” there are lots of great voicethreads to watch from other teachers and students.