SMART Notebook 11 Review

 

Here are some of the changes you’ll find with SMART Notebook 11, and my first impressions of them.

When you open the notebook, you’ll notice that, unfortunately it takes as long as ever to load the program.  The tools across the top of Notebook 10 would sometimes fill the toolbar and you’d need to pull down some extra ones along the side.  SMART Technologies has addressed this by giving the ribbon across the top greater height –now there are two rows of icons—this created enough additional space that it allows for contextual buttons to appear.  With Notebook 10 you would click on the corner of a tool and some choices would drop down—for the pen you could choose from a number of colors, for the shapes tool you could choose between squares, circles, etc., With Notebook 11 all that is handled by having the “contextual tools” appear on the right side of the ribbon.  As with the Office applications (Word, etc.) the new ways of doing things are often added as another option, and the old procedures are still available.  That’s fine, if you’ve been using the program right along.  However, to a new user, all these options can be a bit overwhelming.

Okay, let’s talk about the changes I see as really significant.

 Activity Builder – Having been given a brief introduction to the activity builder at the EdTech conference in March, I was really looking forward to all I imagined it might do.  Therefore, my initial reaction to it was one of disappointment that it didn’t do more.  However, after looking at it further, I’m impressed with its possible uses.  Basically, it makes it easy for the teacher to create an activity where if the student drags an object or word into the correct spot, it will snap into place, fade away, spin, or in some way celebrate the fact that the student found the right spot.  If, however, it is misplaced, it snaps back to where it started and gives the student the opportunity to try again. 

After looking at the examples I began to see just how very useful this type of activity might be.  It can be used for categorizing, filling in the blank, true/false, ordering, labeling, sorting, and they even provide an example of “free form”. 

Although it didn’t really occur to me until I read it in a Notebook 11 review by Mike McGowan,  this is a step toward more fully integrating the Notebook software with the SMART Table—any of the activities will work equally well on the SMART Board and a SMART Table.  As such this feature will surely be welcome by our Special Education teachers. 

Reset Page option—this is such an obvious improvement that I’m surprised SMART Technologies didn’t think of it long ago.  How many times have you had students make changes in a Notebook page and then wanted to have another student try the same exercise?  In the past you would either have to manually put everything back where it started, or close and reopen the file (and lose any changes you did want to save.)  Now, you can just use the “reset page” option (which pulls down under the “edit” menu) and the page goes back to the way it was when the file was first opened.

Sound Recording- I initially listed this as a “minor” change.  But, upon reflection, I can think of a couple of teachers who might make real use of this feature.  I’ve had teachers who wanted to include their own voice, pronouncing words or letters of the alphabet. I’ve helped some do this, but found that the teacher  may or may not remembered how to do it the next time the need arose.  Now it is so easy that anyone can do it and I’m thinking a lot of teachers may really want to make use of this possibility. 

Speaking for all the ITRTs, just let us know if you’d like us to come around and install Notebook  11 for you—or download and install it yourself by clicking here.  Also, let us know if you’d like some help becoming familiar with any of it’s features.

In my next posting I’ll discuss some of the less significant changes found in Notebook 11.  Until then, have a great day.

Copyright in the Classroom

“Criminal or Inventive:  Dispelling Myths About Using Copyright Materials”  One of the more interesting workshops I attended last spring, was this presentation by Michael George, an ITRT from Fredericksburg Public Schools    One great resource from this session was the film;  A Fair(y) Use Tale, which Disney doesn’t like, but you will enjoy, if you watch it in the player below.  Disney lost their suit against its creator—read the following session summary to find out why.  The video below, doesn't seem to show up in Firefox--it does work in Internet Explorer, for Firefox users, click here.  In Internet Explorer, it loads slowly, so be patient.

 

Most teachers deal with copyright laws either by crossing their fingers and doing things secretively, or by toting the line and complying with “guidelines” such as, “use no more than 10 % of….no more than 30 seconds of a song,”  etc.  Often we are governed by ignorance and fear when it comes to copyright laws

The “guidelines” alluded to above sound very authoritative and specific.  However, these guidelines are basically put out by the publishing industry itself (what does that tell you?)   “In fact the guidelines bear little relationship, if any, to the law of fair use.”  The fair use concept itself, enshrined in the law through judicial interpretation, is not nearly so specific.  The fair use doctrine lays out four factors the courts consider when deciding whether a copyright violation has occurred.  They are:

o   The Nature of the Use

o   The Nature of the Work Used

o   The Extent of the Use

o   Its Economic Impact 

The key to understanding “the nature of the use” seems to be an understanding of the term “transformativeness.”   -- has the original been changed in some way so that value is added?  For example, does the inclusion of the picture add value to the PowerPoint the student is creating—if so, its use is permissible—as is the use of all the Disney material in the video above. 

Surprisingly, Michael George has been unable to find ANY instance in which a school system lost a copyright infringement case and he stated that if a school system should lose, the laws are written in such a way as to shield both them and school employees from financial penalties (that’s a relief). 

The presentation concluded by stating that the best educational practices include two basic considerations:

1. Is the use of the copyrighted work transformative?

2. Are the kind and the amount of the copyrighted work used appropriate to accomplish the legitimate purpose?  

Of course, the author of the copyrighted work should be cited, whenever possible. 

These considerations apply to all forms of media: print, images, websites, moving image media, sound media, analog, paper, and digital.  It doesn’t matter as long as the material was obtained legally.  If some nefarious person benefitted monetarily from an image a teacher posted on the Internet, THEY would be violating the law, NOT the teacher.    

Mr.  George recommended that those seeking further information on this topic consult the book Copyright Clarity by Renee Hobbs. 

Here is a link to the slide show used for this presentation—just skip the first five or so slides., there are additional resources listed at the end of the presentation.

More information from Michael George is available at www.cityschools.com/copyright   

In a future post I plan to address Creative Commons licensing.

Engage Your Class With Socrative

High School students at NHS complete a quiz using iPads and Socrative.

At the EdTech conference several months ago, I attended a session which demonstrated how Socrative can be used for assessing student achievement.  We used a variety of mobile devices, and being the geek that I am, I tried it out on both my iPad and my Android smart phone.  I was very impressed with the service, particularly how quick and easy it was to set up compared to Turning Point.  I liked the fact that it is something that is immediately usable in a computer lab setting, without even the need for purchasing licenses.  The interface appeared distraction-free, and intuitive for both teachers and students.  This felt like the future.

Socrative is an online testing platform similar to Turning Point, with a few key differences.  Unlike Turning Point, there are no clickers.  Students use an internet-connected device to answer multiple-choice, short answer, fill-in-the-blank or essay questions.  Any device can be used with Socrative, from desktop computers to laptops to tablets and even smart phones or iPods.  In fact, with its simple interface, Socrative really shines on mobile devices.

Here's a brief outline explaining how it works:
1. The teacher creates an account with Socrative.  This account generates a "room number" that students will use when they go to the Socrative website.  Students do not need their own account.
2. Assignments are created by the teacher.  As mentioned above, the flexibility of the platform allows for multiple types of questions.
3. Students navigate to the Socrative website, and use the number provided by the teacher to join in.  The teacher can set individual assignments so that they are teacher-paced or student-paced.
4. At the conclusion of the assignment, the teacher receives an Excel spreadsheet in their email inbox, with the responses, and, if applicable, a grade report.

The Socrative service is free (for now), and extremely easy to set up and manage.  It is entirely web-based.  For more details, check it out here.

Edmodo – Classroom Management under the guise of Social Networking

Here is a site where you can create polls, quizzes and assignments. You can create a library of handouts accessible by the students, and students can turn in assignments. You can do all this in an environment that simulates that in which students spend much of their non-school time.

Edmodo has a “Facebook” look to it. It uses the Facebook colors, and layout. In addition it incorporates profile pictures, etc. However, I view it as primarily a class management tool. I’m also aware that the minute (second) you hear “facebook” red flags may go up. Let me assure you that the teacher is in control, and the real purpose is to facilitate classroom management and (if so desired) social interaction with an educational purpose.

When the teacher initially creates their account they begin by setting up a “group” or “groups”—I’m tempted to call them classes, but, you might use this capacity to set up reading groups, groups assigned to report on different subjects, etc. After this, students can log on and join the group by using the “group code” (no need to fear some child predator stalking the group.) Once all the students are enrolled, the teacher can lock the code so no one else can attempt to join. (Although you can arrange to have new students join at any time.) Additional settings available to the teacher include the ability to make all new members “read only” or to moderate all discussion. These policies can be set either by individual student or by the group—or some combination thereof. To put this into plain English, the teacher has about three layers of control here—at their option NO discussion can be posted, only approved discussion can be posted, or discussion can be posted without being previewed by the teacher—and these controls can be applied to the class as a whole, or to individual students. However, at no point can the students “message” individual students—they CAN send a private message to the class as a whole (if the teacher has enabled that option –in which case the teacher may still opt to approve or edit each individual comment or reply before they are posted). Students can also send a private comment to the teacher.

So, that sort of describes the Social Networking part of it….nothing for a teacher to panic over, students will not get involved in distracting private chats, bullying, etc…it just can’t happen.
But why SHOULD you use Edmodo? Well, here are some of the things you can do…
1.) Add Resources—you can add print documents, links, images, and videos available to students. --students can also add resources—they can attach them to wall postings, or add them to their “backpack.”
2.) Make and collect assignments—teachers can make assignments either as a wall post or on a pdf document which the student can open and read. Students can then turn in assignments by uploading a file, by selecting a file previously added to their backpack.
3.) Create and assign quizzes. Teachers can create quizzes at the Edmodo site. When the student goes to the site the “take quiz” post pops up and the student can then take a quiz on line—at the teacher’s option they may or may not see the result of that quiz upon completion.
4.) Grade the assignments, send comments on them privately to students, and have the grades attomatically recorded and averaged in an online gradebook—where grades can be weighted by point value, or all weighted the same.
5.) Create polls. Students can log on and see a question. After the student answers the a bar graph appears showing the results of the poll in real time.
6.) Parents can log on and see their students grades, see which assignments are missing, view the comments you have written about the various graded assignments, new assignments, upcoming events,. In addition they can exchange messages with the teacher. However they can not see the “wall” where the classroom interaction takes place.
7.) Above I mentioned “upcoming events”—a calendar is built into Edmodo and only the teacher can post events/due dates on the calendar.
8.) Above I mentioned “awards.” Edmodo makes it easy for the teacher to assign “award badges.”

To see an assortment of videos on Edmodo in action, go to their channel on SchoolTube.

To check out Edmodo for yourself, go to http://www.edmodo.com/

If you go to the Arcadia High School website, you’ll see a link to an online poll. From the polls results so far it looks like parents feel one area we are not doing an adequate job of is preparing our students for online classroom environments. Using Edmodo would help to address that deficiency.

To learn all of this, I’ve been experimenting with Edmodo. In so doing I’ve created a class called “make believe students.’ If you’d like to join the class and see how it looks, go to edmodo.com, click on “I’m a student” and use the group code “pcyo8f”

If I don't post anything more before the end of the year, have a nice summer.

Today's Meet

On the afternoon of March 14th I attended an EdTech session entitled “High Tech History”  conducted by Aaron Dodge a middle school social studies teacher, and Jennifer Richardson an ITRT, both of Charles City. As it turns out, the websites are ones which Aaron has used in his history class, but, aren't at all specific to history.

I don’t have a lot of notes from the session, but, here are some brief remarks on some of the websites they mentioned.

First on the list is Today’s Meet, which was discribed as similar to Twitter. Today’s meet is an elegantly simple site…with some drawbacks. It is premised on the supposition that there is backchannel discussion” going on in your classroom. A backchannel discussion is “everything going on in the room that isn’t coming from the presenter”—things like; “What are your doing after school tonight?” Here is a quote from their website:

“The backchannel is where people ask each other questions, pass notes, get distracted, and give you the most immediate feedback you'll ever get.
Instead of ignoring the backchannel, TodaysMeet helps you leverage its power.
Tapping into the backchannel lets you tailor and direct your presentation to the audience in front of you, and unifying the backchannel means the audience can share insights, questions and answers like never before.”

You simply go to the site, create a “room” and decide how long you want it to be active—from a couple of hours to a year. Once the room is created, you have a short URL which anyone can go to and contribute to the discussion. If someone wants to contribute to the discussion, they type in their name and a message (of 140 characters or less), and click on “say” The message then appears on the screen of anyone else who is at that website. The obvious drawback is that the teacher cannot moderate the discussion. In fact, the creator of the class room is at the same level as everyone else, they can contribute messages, but so can anyone. Any student could make up a bogus name and enter a distracting, disruptive, or obscene remark.

The teacher can switch to a “projector” mode showing only the discussion …or on “transcript” and get a printable copy of the discussion.

The next website they mentioned was Edmodo.com. After writing the draft for the text above, I spent a couple of hours investigating Edmodo. I’m really excited about Edmodo and want to give it its own posting, so I’ll save that for just a bit.

The ITRTs of ACPS were already well aware of a couple of additional
sites mentioned in the session:

GoAnimate—for making animated videos. We’ll have to do some future blogs on all the sites similar to this one.

Blabberize--for producing talking, embeddable avatars from photos. That is, taking a photo of someone’s face, uploading it, and making the mouth move up and down as a voice (yours or a digitally produced one) speaks from a script you’ve written.

Vocaroo--"The premier voice recording service"  At this site, in theory, you can click and record a message (our firewall seems to prevent this from working at school) or upload a message you recorded on your laptop recorder (this worked).  A link is then generated which displays a media player that will play back the recording.  Embed code is also produced allowing  you to post the player in a webpage.  There are also sharing options tailored to twitter, facebook, wordpress, etc.

That’s it for this entry, but, I promise, it won’t be long before I create another post dealing with Edmodo.

Keynote Take-A-Ways

As previously stated, many of these early postings are likely to be drawn from the technology conference the Accomack ITRTs attended in April. This posting falls in to that category.

Looking over my notes from the keynote address by Dr. Pamela Moran, Superintendent of Albemarle County Public Schools (ACPS) I’ve decided just to make note of a few of my “take-a-ways” from this address.

She stated that there is an unfortunate tendency for schools to have “test prep curriculums”. On that subject she quoted Albert Einstein as saying “Not everything that counts can be counted. Not everything that can be counted counts.” She went on to ask; “What if ‘Attention’ didn’t mean gaze?”

Dr. Moran pointed out that college drop outs, are, for the most part, not content incompetent, but process incompetent. Employers looking for employees are looking for thinkers, team workers, people with good work ethics and good citizens—qualities not necessarily found in students who have only been taught to select the correct choice. We need to produce students who are “process competent.”

She told the story of a teacher who gave an economically disadvantaged child a cell phone. The student filled out here FASFA form, collge admission applications, and scholarship applications using that phone. Yet, she noted, we treat cell phones as if they are gum.

Doctor Moran went on to compare technology to a playground. When children are small, she noted, we go to the playground with them, supervise them carefully, teach them to go down the slide (not up,) and other important playground protocols. However, too often parents and achers just turn kids loose on the technology playground, rather than accompanying them into this big world.

She offered multiple evidences of how pro-technolgy Albemarle Count y Schools are; they’ve built a cell tower, they have embraced BYOT (bring your own technology) and have student ip addresses registered with the school, and on their county web page they invite you to follow them on Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube.

I’m finding the process of reviewing my notes and storing important observations, points, links, and other resources to be a gratifying experience, and, if someone out there on the cyber playground can benefit as well, that is even more gratifying.
Have a nice afternoon.
Larry

Classroom Polling on the Net

One of the better sessions I attended at the EdTech conference was presented by Jeff Nugent of a Commonwealth University. It was on classroom polling. Jeff was concerned with showing us the uses of polling and not merely how to do it. To do this he had us become students in order to demonstrate how polling makes student’s thinking visible, and therefore can be used for formative assessments. We also experienced how it could be used for peer instruction and mass
collaboration.

We each came into the classroom with a mobile pad, laptop, or cellphone with texting capacity. We went to the website polleverywhere.com. Jeff had the following question displayed: If two glasses of water are filled to the same level, but, one has ice cubes in it, which glass of water will have a higher level once the ice melts? We clicked on our responses (or texted in a response) and as we did a bar graph appeared—responding to each answer as it came in. The next question we responded to was; “How confident are you of your answer?” After giving us a moment to respond, Jeff asked us to “convince your neighbor.” Following which we were polled again on the original question.

This was a quick way to get us thinking about a science lesson, not just listening to a teacher explain the answer, but doing some analysis, building arguments, listening to others, reasoning, etc. It really made for a high interest lesson. If you're interested in using something like this, let your friendly ITRT know, or simply go to "polleverywhere.com" and create a poll for yourself.

There are several other similar sites I’ve looked at this school year, some of which also enable a teacher to have a “backchannel discussion” going on during class. But, I’ll tell you more about those sites in some future blog.

On March 14 and 15, 2012 three of the county's ITRTs attended the EdTech 2012 conference held at Virginia State University.  The conference was organized by Community Idea Stations, a division of WCVE Public Radio/Television in central Virginia. Each day of the conference offered numerous sessions in four time slots.  Some sessions provided attendees with various resources, some sessions were "how-to" sessions while others were demonstrations.  Many of the first posts to this blog will be information from sessions at that conference.

Welcome to the Accomack County Public Schools ITRT blog.  The intention is to blog about tools and resources teachers can use in their classrooms.  The plan is to provide at least one tool or resource per week, along with ideas for their use and/or examples from education.