Middle of Nowhere... Still a Teacher

Photo credit: http://www.southportlander.com/images/uploads/bobcrowley.jpg
I haven't blogged here for awhile since I've done most of my sharing on my podcast at Wicked Decent Learning, however, I find myself in need of a platform and no one is awake at home tonight so here I am.


Tonight Physics teacher Robert Crowley from our small state of Maine, became the million dollar winner on the CBS reality series "Survivor Gabon". Much of his victory can be directly attributed to some of the very intelligent moves he made in the game (including crafting a fake immunity idol from bits and pieces of things he found around camp).

Bob was helpful around camp (building furniture and bolstering the shelter) and credits his parents with his moral compass and ingenuity.

I'm not just writing about Bob because he's from Maine, or just because it's great to see a teacher win some notoriety and cash, I'm writing about Bob because of his ability to see a learning opportunity even in the unlikely setting of a reality TV series. Bob has created classroom physics problems for his students to solve that are drawn from challenges on the show. He used his head to win several challenges by using his head. I think Bob presents educators and more importantly learners in a terrific, positive light.

Bravo Bob. I hope the you continue to inspire your students as you have inspired many watching around the world.

High Tech Humanitarianism

Recently there has been a lot of excitement at my school around the website Freerice.com. Our school's Civil Rights Team has sponsored a school wide competition on the site. The website has two simple goals.
1. Create a SAT type vocabulary practice for students.
2. Raise money to donate rice to starving countries.


For every right answer a student provides, Freerice donates 20 grains of rice to the UN World Food Program. The money comes from advertisers running ads on the bottom of the site. I have had several conversations with students trying to explain the concept of ad-supported services recently. They seem totally unaware that their myspace, facebook, Gmail, or even their local TV are supported by the advertisers.

The site lets you remember your previous total on that machine without having to log in and adjusts your questions to a difficulty level you are comfortable with.

Our Civil Rights Team is providing prizes to the individual and the homeroom with the highest amount of rice donated. The competition for our school will end on May 15th, when we will tally up the totals and award the prizes.

It has been a great motivator for students and since we have a 1-to-1 laptop initiative for our whole high school, it is being played by most students several times a day. This is a good thing since I heard a news story on NPR recently that the world food market for rice has been disastrous. Apparently the price of rice per ton has gone from $250 USD to $860 USD in just a short time. Click below to listen to a news report about the food market pressures.

Who would have thought that laptops could feed people? If you'd like more information about how we started this competition so that you could sponsor one, send me a comment or email.

Default setting: Change the Policy

I was in a teacher's meeting today which was basically an outlet for staff members to express their troubles with a district policy that allows students to retake assessments. The typical arguments arose "We are enabling them to be irresponsible" "Why should they get more than one chance, I never did?" "Kids aren't doing homework to prepare for assessments, we need to return to the practice of grading homework"

I understand the frustrations of my fellow staff members and I am not blogging this to mock them. But I see an unfortunate trend when it comes to trying to make change happen in my school. The policy change. For some reason the major push always seems to be to create a new policy or take out and old one. Apparently, that is change. If it's posted on the wall, in a handbook, or just plain written down, it's change. This seems a little cynical, sorry.

But I struggle why we never look at the underlying issues of these symptoms.
Symptom: Students aren't doing homework, or adequately preparing for tests and assessments. Root cause? Who knows, because we don't discuss that part. Worse yet, we forgot to ask the patient-- the student.

One of my colleagues did just that after the meeting today. One answer, "the homework we are given doesn't help us on the assessment, it's just given to us in a packet that we are not taught about, just handed out." I'm not saying that teenagers' words aren't often designed to get to the path of least resistance for them, I'm just saying that we have not started to truly reflect on the way we run our classes to expect real learning from our students.

We never want to start in a teacher's class room when it comes to changes in a school, we always push the mark as far away from the teacher as possible. Maybe because hard working teachers put a lot of effort into their work and any questioning is a sign of a dissatisfaction with the staff member.

I know I am kind of rambling on tonight but I just hope that our conversations can morph into examining the underlying issues of student motivation, relevance of our curriculum, learning strategies (not teaching strategies) and the use of assessments for diagnostics, not just summative evaluations.

Going Live

I spent most of this evening trying to figure out how to do a live interactive show for my podcast Wicked Decent Learning. After looking over some tools, we chose to give Skype a try with an added call recorder called PowerGramo. The call recorder will probably cost us about $15.00 USD but if it works the way we are hoping it will be worthwhile.

So here's an open invitation to educators. On April 11th, 2008 at 8:OO PM EST we will be asking for feedback from folks on the topic "What do you think is Wicked Decent" in education. Basically it's a chance to see what ideas people have seen in the classroom lately that are positive, exciting or innovative... you know Wicked Decent.

If you have never used Skype before, it's free, easy to set up, and worth downloading. Even if you don't have a computer microphone, you can text chat during the show with it. Our screen name for Skype is WickedDecentLearning.

Hope to see you there.

Is Competition a good thing?

When I was going to college at UMF, (which by the way has a new Master's Program in Education) we had a guest speaker in our Philosophy of Education class. He made the assertion that we need to take the competition out of education. That had me thinking recently. Would this be a good idea or not?

In the classroom, competition has the potential to be unifying and motivating. Think of the kind of solidarity and loyalty that builds in team or group activities like sports and clubs. The rivalries between school teams often bring in the community and sometimes even draw larger attention. In the classroom, at least at the high school level. Students seem to be driven by the sense of competition.

The flip-side, however is nasty. Some high school students define their academic successes by how many people are below them academically-- class rank, test scores, GPAs. What's really disturbing is to see some students with less concern about how they are doing and improving, and more concerned with making sure the rules of the game are designed in such a way that the competition stays down. For example, when our school changed grading systems, there was a major outcry from some parents and students. They were concerned that the grading system was going to make it harder to receive the top grades their students were used to achieving. They seemed a lot less interested in the question, "What are you learning, and are you growing as a learner?" and wanted to know how this would effect GPA, honor roll and class rank. These are the types of competition that I think deserve close scrutiny. I know that class rank is important to college admissions counselors because it provides some measure for comparing students within the environment in which they were educated, and therefore, it does serve a purpose. The larger question seems to be how we foster an importance on learning... not on grades and ranks, but on learning itself.

Of the public meetings I attended, I rarely saw parents of students who were not "winning at the game of school" probably because those parents feel isolated, left out or disaffected by schools. I think that schools face many challenges, but the highest among them is involving students and their parents (and sometimes even teachers) in the process of learning. It seems like such an obvious statement, but next time you are talking with a teacher or administrator, student or parent, ask them when the last time is that they talked about how we learn, why we learn and what's important to learn. In this time of year we worry about calendars, committees, budgets and graduation plans but it should always be about learning. When we get to that point in the schools, competition will not be as relevant an argument because then, everyone truly wins.

Scheduling Priorities

It's March and the discussions of how next year's schedule will come together has already started. Our principal has asked for use to balance out some priorities and I think hitting all of them would be impossible. So where do you make the trade offs? Here are some of the examples of conflicting factions.

We have been running an alternating block schedule for years now (approximately 90 minute classes that meet every other day), however some subjects and teachers feel that the 45 minute everyday class is better for reinforcing lessons and information (mostly in math, foreign language and freshmen courses). The problem? Introducing even one everyday period makes it harder to schedule upperclassmen in our regional vocational center because they have to attend for an entire day. So which takes priority?

The past few years, we have had common planning time in departments and a personal preparation period. In next year's schedule, it looks like we will have to alternate them (can't have both) because of declining enrollments.

Study halls. I have a personal disdain for them in general. Why should a structured educational environment have a "place holder" in the schedule where 90% of the students in the study hall socialize, skip or just goof off? Is it the job of the school to educate or herd people like cattle? However, if you ban study hall in your schedule, where do the students who have no class go? For seniors and juniors, you could have an open campus, but for sophomores and freshmen transportation and responsibility are reasons to this wouldn't work. Do we just make all students take a full load? What about students that struggle with the classes they already take?

These are only a handful of the issues we are dealing with in creating our schedule for next year. I didn't even get into the numbers games (how many courses each staff member has to prep for, how many kids in each classroom, how many AP course sections to offer).

Good news though, we did decide to drop a "remedial" set of courses that we had going this year which were really unsuccessful.

In a future blog post maybe I'll brainstorm some ideas where technology could help solve some of these issues.

Wiki's and Whatnot

Recently in a podcast episode, I introduced some wiki tools and promised to elaborate on my blog. Well, I finally got around to it...

What's a wiki and why would I care?

The best teaching analogy would be to envision a whiteboard... not hard so far right? Well, in a classroom, you'd have a whiteboard where everyone could see it. There are many ways to use it. The teacher can write on it so the students could read it. The teacher could hand out markers and erasers so the students could write on the whiteboard for all to see as well. When I say everybody, in this case I mean everyone who had access to the room.


So far you follow, right? Well, there are some differences between your whiteboard and a wiki, but only a few.

1. Instead of a whiteboard, it's a web page (don't get worried, it's almost as easy as writing on a whiteboard). Of course with a web page you can provide links, pictures, and even video and animation.

2. Instead of the audience being the classroom, it can be the world (or only those in the world you let read it).

3. Each person you let write, edit, or erase on the wiki can be tracked to see what changes he/she made--Kind of like assigning each student their own unique colored marker.

4. The last major difference is that you have the ability to turn back the clock. That means that if some student in your class were to change your great example from "The Great Depression" into a "yo mama" joke, you push a button and relive your pre-momma depression era.

5. Time and space are not an obstacle. Don't need a custodian to open up the room at 9:30 pm to get the notes off of the board if you were sick, just log on at your convenience, any time, any where.

So, why would someone want to use a wiki? (Here's a long list of valid uses in education but here's a quick guide.)

Instant, simple, publishing. It is an easy way to get online and communicate. Here's an example of a math wiki that is basically a web page. It is authored only by the teacher and is a way to include lessons, Power points, worksheets, a class calendar and homework. It is essentially being used in place of a textbook for the class.

It's a great streamlined way to collaborate. We are always looking for ways to get students to work together and take ownership. With a wiki, you can track who contributes what, and lets them do so in a common format without regard for time and space constraints. A great example of students collaborating for a real purpose is at this AP World History Review wiki--students created a collaborative study guide.

Wider audience, possibly interactive. For authentic assessment purposes, a wiki is a great way to open up student work to the public. When students perform/write for an audience larger than their teacher alone, they concern themselves more with accuracy, effort, and overall quality. You can even open up the forum to others to write in. Here's a world-wide student collaborative story writing wiki.

So as you can see, there are plenty of great reasons to use a wiki in the classroom. Here are some other great resources to check out for wikis:

Wikis in Plain English- Quick video explanation of wikis.
Wiki Matrix- An online wiki comparison tool.
Curriki- The wiki for collaborating on curriculum.
Wikispaces- A popular free wiki.
Wetpaint- Another free wiki with a video explanation.
PBwiki- Offers ad-free wikis for educators.
Wikis in the Classroom- The "one stop workshop" for wikis in education.

Flickr Photo Credit: Sam Pullara

Survey tools

In my last post I planned to link to another blog post I wrote about free online survey tools. There was only one problem, I hadn't written it! I thought I had but I realized I discussed it on my podcast.

Well, if you don't feel like listening to the whole thing, here's a brief look at how some survey tools stack up with an extra thrown in since the podcast.

http://Surveygizmo.com
No limits on the number of surveys or survey questions, however you do have the limit of 250 TOTAL responses per month. Create surveys and polls but NOT self-correcting quizzes. Spell check included. Not a bad place to start out.

http://Surveymonkey.com
Only 100 responses allowed with only 10 questions allowed per survey. 15 types of questions. There you can invite or take the survey via email or web link. Make some questions required, customized reports and live results available too. Some other features like randomizable multiple choice answers are also included for free.

http://Zoomerang.com
Polls, surveys and quizzes available. Limited to 100 responses per survey but unlimited surveys. Results are not available after 10 days. 15 types of questions, templates are helpful and spellcheck is enabled. View results online and deploy survey on web or email.

Google Docs Spreadsheet/Forms- This is a great and simple tool if you have a Google Account (which is free). First you make a spreadsheet on the service and then when you publish it, you have the option of making it a web form. You send out the link and then people just see a form to fill out. Their responses are then entered into your spreadsheet which can be graphed out like any other spreadsheet.

Technology Professional Development Brainstorming.

This semester, our librarian and I get the opportunity to offer a technology-based professional development group a couple of times a month on late arrival Wednesdays. When we were trying to plan how we would conduct these sessions we were running into a couple of challenges.

1. People want training relevant to their own work. They want what they want. If we do a training too focused on one or two technology tools, some participants many not see technology as useful to their content area.

2. If we do too many tools, we run the risk of persisting the myth that technology in education is a fad: A shiny new toy with the lasting power of a K-Fed music career. It's not about the glitz, it's not about the glare, it's about the learning. How will technology add value to the unit, transform it or change it in some way that really changes the game.

We decided to review a model presented to us at the high school MLTI teacher leader training presented by Ruben R. Puentedura, Ph.D. I modified the model below for a training this fall to staff and changed the tech-heavy descriptions in the third column to an analogy of a caveman hunting with a rock. The hope is that we could frame our conversations about which technology tools to explore and possibly adopt based on what lasting effect it would have on a student's learning in the class.


Now for the really hard part. We were trying to figure out what technologies people were interested in learning about so we came up with a list of technologies and skills or instructional components that teachers felt like they might need in order to improve a unit.

The hope here is that we can address at least a majority of people's needs by having them do some guided exploration of technology that can be matched to that need. It feels like the right way to go, but seems like a tall order to fulfill. We might luck out and get a lot of overlap. We might even try to use an online survey tool to aggregate the data from these participants as well. (More about that in another post). I'll check in and update on how things are going (as soon as Old Man Winter lets us go to school).

No iMovie? No problem...

If you teach middle school students in Maine, or if you are lucky enough to have some good technology in your school, you might be lucky enough to have iMovie or Windows Movie Maker at your disposal to edit videos. I do know, however, that there are many teachers and students who don't have access to these two programs and also don't have permission to load programs on their machines. Well, there are some online video editing tools that offer some solutions. I don't see them as a substitute for something like iMovie, but if you'd like to get into simple video editing on the cheap (as in free) here are some suggestions. One note of caution, you should ALWAYS review a site personally for appropriateness before using it with a class since it is created by users even though the sites below don't allow adult content to be posted.

http://www.jumpcut.com This is the best one I found and if you have a Yahoo account (free), you can merge it with Jumpcut and share that login. Jumpcut lets you use your own video and audio. You upload them to the site from your computer, a cell phone or even by emailing the files as attachments to a personalize address setup in your Jumpcut account. It also lets you bring in video and pictures from Flickr directly. You can also explore publicly available video and pictures on Jumpcut and add them to your shelf using the simple "grab" button when you are logged in. After you have your video, audio and pictures, you can do some common editing tasks like cropping, cutting, and adding title screens right on the site mostly by dragging and dropping. Jumpcut also lets you add some effects and transitions. Videos can be shared publicly shared privately with only the people you invite to view the video. You can share videos easily by embedding them into other types of sites (blogs, facebook, myspace) or by emailing a link to someone. People can rate your video and even leave you comments if you'd like. All in all, this is a great place to start playing around. Here is a link to short funny video I made with it awhile back starring friends of ours and their son.

http://eyespot.com This website has many of the same features as Jumpcut but not quite as many. You can upload you're own video but not audio. You can "remix" other people's publicly available movies. You can also trim a movie but there aren't any other editing features (no titles, transitions, effects or music). It's a good service to use if you just need to share a video and want to narrow it down to the clip you want shared. Sharing options on the service are good. It integrates with several online blog services and sites and even lets you download the video to several formats and devices, including iPods. Public/private sharing allowed and comments and ratings are here too as well as mobile phone and email uploading of files. Here's a sample video of my daughter two summers ago.

http://Motionbox.com - Looks good. You can upload from your computer, cell phone or by email. You can edit original videos, join video files together, share by email or embed. The only editing it lets you do is just really trimming video, but it does let you select a part of your video to send or save by itself (effectively cropping it). There are the same private/public sharing and commenting options as the rest as well and it lets you save up to 300MB of video on the site for free. Here's another sample video to show you.

http://photobucket.com This lets you add video and pictures with some editing (mostly cropping). They have borders and transitions to use but the audio available is from their library and you can't add your own audio. Embeddable and sharable. You can make photo slideshows very easily here. Photobucket lets you mix multiple videos together as well. My major problem with the site is that it asks for a lot of personal information (including cell number), although it let me register without providing some of it. I feel like this site is more distracting and commercial oriented than the others, so I didn't really like the feel of it by comparison. Still, worth a cautious look. Here's a sample video of my daughter ice skating this winter.

Honorable mentions

Viddler.com- This site doesn't let you edit your video but if you want to let people comment on specific points within the video, it gives users a "+" button on the timeline where they can leave a text comment at that point. You can get notified by RSS of new comments on the video. Also, when you share the link to the video, you can share the whole video or jump right to the current frame. Good way to have a discussion around a video clip. See a sample here (not my video) hover over the timeline on the bottom to see comments.

Kaltura- This site aims to have people work together to add short video clips to a common film. I found a good example of how this might be done with drumming, however I found the pop-up ads on the video window very distracting. Still, it's a neat model to think about how to collaborate easily with video.

Alternate Reality Games and Education

I have recently been reading WIRED magazine thanks to my Coke Rewards points cash in and found a really interesting article in January's edition called And Now a Game from our Sponsors. The article explores a new type of marketing technique called alternate reality games. Basically this is kind of a world-wide scavenger hunt with clues that, when sown together tell a story. It seems that these games aren't meant to be solved individually, but rather in a collaborative sense with the web being a key component to help in sharing clues and information. This is not really a "Virtual" reality game since it rarely involves being in one computerized world as some avatar, but involves using real world and web based clues to tell a story. Some examples they gave in the article involved a concert goer finding a disk-on-key in a bathroom that contained an unreleased song with the coded message. The message, once decoded indicated a cellphone number that, when called played wiretapped voice message giving the next clue. Without going into detail you can see how complex but engaging a game like this might be.

The reason I have blogged about it here is because of two factors: the engaging aspect of the game and it's collaborative nature. I wonder, as educators how we can harness that kind of enthusiasm to encourage our students to "find the story" in our work. For example, instead of the chronological march through the Revolutionary War, why not present students with the story of those revolutionaries by asking them to follow their story or to uncover findings? I know that teachers don't have the resources to make the games in the scope of those in the article, but I think there could be possibilities here.

Another thought I had was about using this ARG idea to explore characters in a novel. What if the students created their own kind of ARG/alternate story for a subordinate character in a work? Would that allow them to engage more in the text? Understand the characters better? Gain an insight into the author's purpose? Maybe.

I've often heard education technology gurus talk about using games in education (mostly in terms of simulation games) which I think have some merit. But I wondered how realistic it was to expect a software developer to create that Romeo and Juliet Simulation for the X-Box. With technology specific simulations, we are bound to what ever is being brought to market for the technology we have. However, if teachers could do more to create the game mindset in their classrooms, I think we would find student interest skyrocketing.

For example, I work with a colleague who, for many years, has taught Macbeth and Lord of the Flies by doing competitive group competitions. Students who otherwise could care less about Shakespeare or Golding thrive in these activities as they try to win "blood points" from rival "clans" to prove their knowledge and meet the challenges before them. (Thanks Meg for the ideas)

At any rate, I think this type of game model opens up something for educators to consider beyond the "lets play hangman with vocabulary terms" type of game. That's why I'm trying to play one of these games myself. I hope to be able to understand how they work and design a small one for the fun in hopes that I could effectively develop one for a specific educational purpose. If I ever get there, I'll invite you all along.

Kicking the tires of Technology

So if you have my blog on an RSS reader, you probably got a cryptic post that said this:

"Blog about alternative reality aiming(?), featured in this week-- this month's Wired Magazine. Mentions student engagement and understand ways that students could be engaged history social(?) studies, English language art and someone using this model. listen
Powered by Jott"

Sorry about that. I was trying to use a service called Jott to blog using my cell phone. It's a great free service to use to send yourself reminders, contact a person or group of people with a voice message or email someone just by speaking into your cell phone. The problem here was that I thought I had this service set to save my blog message for me to review and not to publish it directly but I think I'd overlooked that apparently. Should be fixed now. By the way if you want to know what this message was about, stay tuned to the blog. I was going to write about alternate reality gaming (not aiming). I should have that post up next week minus the hieroglyphics.

Flickr Photo Credit thanks to RHTRAVELER

Learning: a risky business

I was in a great discussion the other day with a colleague about the idea of curiosity. We were doing our usual toiling with the question of why students aren't motivated to learn; they don't seem to pick up skills from the classroom or the world around them. We came to the point wishing we could have students who were more curious. We, both of us being high school teachers, wondered what happens to students between that time in elementary school where curiosity is abound, and the time they enroll in our classes.

I wonder what approaches foster curiosity and which approaches stifle it. I wonder what curiosity has to do with brain development and social development of teenagers. I think it warrants some reflection and not just empty questioning so I'll give it a shot.

What makes someone curious?

Well, I think, in order to feel curious, you have to feel that there is something worth discovering. For example, you aren't going to lift every rug in your house unless there's an expectation that something might be under it (say a quarter or that CD you've been looking for). You have to have some sort of reward occasionally in order to make it worth while.

I also think to be curious you can't be scared something awful will happen. If you lift that rug and find a killer dust bunny, then you're likely not to go lifting rugs in the future.

You also have to feel some ownership and permission. We don't often go lifting rugs at a neighbor's house, because it's not ours, and we are not typically encouraged to.

So how does that translate into education terms? Well, I look at it this way. How often do we encourage risk taking? Think about it. In most high school classrooms, exploration is not an option. You read, write, add and subtract what you're told to. You even ask permission to use that bathroom. Yes, I know that we have to be responsible for the supervision of students, but when will we start to encourage kids to take a risk in learning?

What could we do to encourage this? Well, for one, why not allowing students more practice with a set of skills that we expect them to achieve, and provide them with some meaningful feedback? Is everything graded and a "one and done" assessment? If so, why would students try to take that risk. We should reward students for taking reasonable risks in learning: ask and seek answers to their own questions, make predictions and, above all be reflective about their process. If we want students to be able to leave us, life-long, independent learners, we can't ignore this. How often do we ask students to reflect not just on what they learned, but how they learned it. If you had to do it over again, how would you go about it differently?

I know this post is kind of a rambling and it doesn't really give a definitive answer, but isn't that what life is about: the questions and the search for the answers?

Technorati Tags: maine education teaching learning reflection risktaking

Books and Technology

Though many of my posts deal with technology tools, you might think I have an aversion to books-- not true. If you are looking for books to read, there are many technology tools for bibliophiles.

One of my favorites is Bookmooch. Bookmooch is a site that lets you list books you'd like to give away through the mail, and in return, you can "mooch" books from others in the community. There is no money involved except the shipping cost to send books out when someone requests them. For every book you agree to ship out, you get a point credited to you, for every book you list to give away, you earn 1/10th of a point. It usually takes only one point to request a book from someone (sometimes more if it's from overseas). It's really been a great place for me to get free books for my classroom. I've even scored a really nice box set of Maus I & II, and a hardcover copy of Twisted signed by the author Laurie Halse Anderson. There is even an area for recommending books based on your past mooching.

Other book services online I've seen or played with include Good Reads and Library Thing. Both of these are like a social network around books. They have discussion areas, you can make friends and let everyone know what you are reading, have read, and plan to read. You can rate books, and recommend them to others. What's nice is these sites often integrate with other services. For example, you can get widgets for you blog or web page that show people what books you are reading, what you like to read or what books you are looking for.

In addition, Amazon lets you sell your used books through them and friends of mine had great luck with that. You can buy used books there as well (they are listed along with the new ones for sale in your search results).

If audio books are more your style, try librivox. This is a community, volunteer-driven, that is dedicated to creating free audio files of literature, non-fiction, drama and poetry. They only have works that are no longer under copyright protection, but it's a great way to hear some great writing, and you can volunteer to record a work yourself. I contributed a small poem about a year ago, "How Doth the Little Crocodile" by Lewis Carroll and it was fairly easy to do. A great way for kids to practice public speaking... to a real public.

Technorati Tags: librivox goodreads librarything books teaching technology onlinetools amazon

Video Voicethread...

Just a quick post to share an update of a Voicethread feature that I think it new. You can now add video to VC and also pause the video, rewind it, play it back, draw on it, audio and video comment yourself on the video playing. This is really amazing to see. If you'd like to check out how it works, this is a great demo that you can add to using the Roadrunner and Coyote--classic.

Technorati Tags: voicethread video tool education

Do you see what I see?

As one of the staff members in my building that has the unofficial responsibility of supporting technology integration I am constantly re-explaining how to set up, configure, build or find things for teachers. We recently changed our web publishing tool in district and somehow I got tagged with the responsibility of training anyone who was interested in how to make and maintain their web page on the school server. I could already see the 40 separate one-on-one sessions I was going to have to have to explain the nuances of the process and I wondered how I would survive. As in most cases, I was able to find a technology tool that would help me be more productive.

A screen cast when you use a program to record what is happening on your computer screen. Most of these tools let you include audio (usually your voice) from your computer's microphone. This is perfect for those of you who have to explain things on a computer screen often. Screen capture is similar but only takes a still image of your screen and some screen capture programs let you draw on, circle and type on top of the image to point things out or give direction. Surprisingly, many of these tools, which used to cost money, are free! Here are some I've played with.

Jing. This is the best one I have used so far. It is a program that you will need to download from their web page, but it is free. It's available for PC and Mac, and can be running in the background until you need it. It does video, audio, screen cast, screen capture and lets you edit the pictures you take. Additionally, it has some great sharing features that let you save the file on your machine, on your free screencast.com account (comes with the program), ftp, or even embed the code into a blog or web page. You can even share on Flickr. Great tools and really helpful tech support (I ran into a small snag with installing but the staff responded quickly and efficiently).

Camtasia. This is downloadable software that offers a 30-day free trial (after that it's quite pricey). But, for 30 days you get the fully functional version that lets you do basically all that Jing does more smoothly and integrates with PowerPoint, lets you add audio during recording or after and even has an editing function that lets you fine tune your screen cast. This is great if you want to make a really powerful presentation and you can do it in the 30 day window. It appears to be a PC product only. This blogger says you can get a free older version of Camtasia until January 7th, 2008. So if you like this tool, get it now.

For those of you who are not allowed to add programs to your school computer, there is an online tool alternative to these. Screencast-o-matic.com is an online, free screen casting tool. It lets you define the area of the screen you'd like recorded, lets you choose to use audio and will let you download the finished file or share it on their website. It's honestly a little murky in terms of the screen clarity, and sometimes the audio skips a bit, but as far as a free way to try out screen casting, this is a great place to start. No need to install software, but you'll want a high speed connection to work with, and you might need to update your Java (the site links to Java's update page to see if you have the right one so it's a free easy fix if you don't). Works with Mac or PC. The nice part about this site though, is that you can look for screen casts others have done in a searchable database (why reinvent the wheel when someone already has the definitive "How to use Screencast-o-matic Screen cast").

So what would a teacher in a classroom use these tools for? They have many implications beyond technology training. For example, imagine a writing teacher recording his/her writing and thought process in a video file to share with students how they plan, draft and edit. Imagine taking students on a tour of a website like Wikipedia and pointing out want makes it a credible source and what to look for when doing research citations. Or making a screen cast or capture of your class or school website for as a tour for parents and community.

Even better yet, why not have students make screen casts to edit each others papers (think aloud peer editing), review websites, teach how to use a program, or voice over in a foreign language. Why not have students make screen casts teaching staff how to use technology tools? There are all kinds of possibilities here when you start sharing what you see with others.

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