1. Screencasting -
1. Screencasting is also called screencapture. The idea is to record your computer screen and your voice to demonstrate something. but instead of trying to hold a video camera while running your computer the computer does the recording for you.  - example http://www.screenr.com/Jj8s
2. why-
1. make a screencast (sc) explaining the basic guidelines of class.
2. if you already have a sc for insturctions on assignments or procedures when you get new students or students who forgot or were gone, – send them to the computers to watch the screencast.
3. Make a sc to show how to turn stuff in.
4. Make a sc for re-occuring assignments and ec opportunities.
5. Make a sc for computer assignments – explain and demo the computer project
6. When you are having a tech issue and need help to figure it out. Rather than trying to type out the details of your situation, you can screencast it and send the link to your friend or tech help.
3. Suggestions -
1. If you don’t like your voice – GET OVER IT. The tool is to valuable and effective to let the sound of your voice get in the way. The people who will be watching your screencast already know your voice anyway.
2. The screencast doesn’t need to be perfect! Just because you miss-pronounce a word doesn’t mean you need to re-record. People will understand what you are trying to say.
4. Different screencasting programs
1. www.screencast-o-matic.com Screencast-o-matic
2. www.screenr.com Screenr
3. http://www.techsmith.com/jing/ Jing
4. Jing requires a download. The other 2 are internet based.
2. Google Docs
1. What is the basic idea of google docs? http://www1.teachertube.com/viewVideo.php?title=Google_Docs_in_Plain_English&video_id=9618
2. Why
1. Paperless assignments https://sites.google.com/a/googleapps.com/edu-training-center/Training-Home/module-4-docs/chapter-3/9-1
2. Students collaborate together on assignments. How to share a google doc. https://docs.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=86152
3. collaborate with teachers on the same document without emailing
4. google forms surveys and quizzes.
1. google forms allows you to make surveys like this. https://spreadsheets0.google.com/spreadsheet/viewform?formkey=dExDZERUNU1mNnlGN2dDTm5uWW9yYkE6MQ
2. And get results like this – https://spreadsheets.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AkkZb3JUuzBcdExDZERUNU1mNnlGN2dDTm5uWW9yYkE&hl=en_US
3. You can insert a question asking the name of the people who responded.
4. Google forms are great because all the answers of the responders are stored on one spreadsheet.
5. Google forms can also be used to create a selfgrading quiz. – Meaning the quiz grades itself.
1. method 1 http://www.robinstechtips.com/?p=394
2. method 2 http://tinyurl.com/4yv6zdl
3. method 3 http://rpollack.net/2008/09/self-grading-multiple-choice-tests-with-google-docs/

3. World Educators Collaboration Network (WECN)
1. WECN is an internet based tool that has the ability to connect with educators across the planet.
1. you can connect with just a few or thousands it is up to you
2. collaboration can be cross curricular or just your area of interest.
3. you can get sameday feed back on ideas.
4. you can get new ideas coming in every hour for ways to improve your classroom or teaching methods, as well as great tech tools for teachers and students
5. There are daily and weekly discussions with 100s of different educators about real education topics or problems giving educators many opportunities to give or receive help.
6. Students can also use the WECN to connect with other students in other classrooms across the world.
2. Watch video to learn how to use the WECN http://screencast-o-matic.com/watch/cXf1byoNZ
3. How can the WECN help students?
1. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JkwDHcGscnM
2. http://www.cnn.com/2011/TECH/social.media/06/08/twitter.school/index.html?hpt=hp_bn7
4. Educators guide to WECN http://livebinders.com/play/play/34291

4. Other education tools – in mindmap form.
1. This site has many web2.0 tools that can be used in education. So explore and have fun. http://www.mindomo.com/view?m=48511abbfb7e4145a33dbe6453d0f8af

Yes, I’m a twistian or twuslum or twindu, whatever you want to call it. I like, love, need, and rely on twitter. But not for the reason you are thinking!
Who do I “follow” that makes me need twitter? Not Ke$ha or Ashton or Anderson Cooper or Beiber. I follow Nancy Blair, Steve Anderson, Jason Bedell, Jerry Blumengarten. “I’ve never heard of any of those people” you say. That is exactly my point. I don’t follow celebrities, I follow educators. “Why do you care about what educators are eating for breakfast?” You ask. I grin and say “you have hit it again” I don’t care what the had for breakfast. I care about their ideas as educators. I follow almost 1000 different educators that I collaborate with daily on education standards, classroom ideas, education reform, feedback on lesson plans, and how to become more effective as an educator.
I realize that doesn’t sound like the twitter you know. I agree. That is why I say twitter needs a new name. Like the World Educators Collaboration Network ( WECN) or Twitter For Education TFE.
Imagine, while at the next faculty meeting and you are talking to a colleague and they ask where you found that new site you are using with students.You say “I found out about it from the World Educators Collaboration Network.” Are their eyes going to roll and dissolve in their sockets then drain onto the floor as their ears burst into flames? NO. They are going say “WOW, what is WECN?” Then begins the teaching moment of the year and their conversion to the WECN. I know for me the WECN has been the single best learning tool, PD tool, collaboration tool, and social tool ever. Personally I think twitter, oops, I mean WECN, is the best thing to happen to education! Even if all the computers were removed from the school and my students never had phones, I would still be a more effective teacher because of the things I learn from my peers on twitter!
Help your friends get connected to the World Educators Collaboration Network.-Send them this link. http://bit.ly/lgRXeZ
Thanks -
Please comment

What does this mean? Could mean several things, 1. Students intuition is better than they think. 2. Student are over-reading or over-thinking the text and questions. 3. Students are not think, instead they are searching for answers. The list goes on in my head.

Anyway, here is Frank’s thoughts on reading comprehension and testing. Powerful stuff.

The single biggest factor in reading with comprehension is reading speed.  Blatantly, this strikes at the very core of all reading instruction.  However, the science is clear. The question that arises is how to make readers improve cognition.  Included is a great deal of research in this summary.  The remarkable conclusions are that we have been totally wrong in how we teach people to read.

Basically, eye movements are a behavior that can be measured and their measurement provides a sensitive means of learning about cognitive and visual processing. Although eye movements have been examined for some time, it has only been in the last few decades that their measurement has led to important discoveries about psychological processes that occur during such tasks as reading, visual search, and scene perception.  Additionally educators have seen research showing which regions of the brain are involved in reading. Some research explains that if the wrong parts are involved, or the right parts just are not dominate enough, then reading problems can occur.  “One of the most interesting studies is one that was published in the November 2001 issue of the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition. Debra Long from the University of California- Davis and Jennifer Chong from Johns Hopkins University were the co-authors of the study. They looked at comprehension problems among students. They hypothesized that a person who struggles comprehending the story, actually has problems with memory storage and retrieval.” (Nunnally) Another important characteristic of eye movements while reading is that about 10-15% of the time readers move their eyes (regress) back to previously read material in the text. These regressions, as they are called, tend to depend on the difficulty of the text.  As would be expected, saccade size and fixation duration are also both modulated by text difficulty: as the text becomes more difficult, saccade size decreases, fixation durations increase, and regressions increase.  From these measures alone, it is very clear that global properties of the text influence eye movements greatly. In addition, these three main global measures (saccade size, fixation duration and number of regressions) are also influenced by the type of material being read and the reader’s goals in reading (Rayner & Pollatsek, 1989). For instance, reading a text for understanding produces a very different pattern of eye movement measures when compared to skimming a text while proofreading.

A very important issue in reading is how much information is the reader able to process and use during a single fixation. This measure is referred to as the perceptual span (also called the functional field of view or, to a lesser degree, the region of effective vision). Although most people have the impression that readers can see an entire line of text or even an entire page of text, this is an illusion. This fact has been clearly demonstrated in a number of studies over the years that use a “gaze-contingent moving window paradigm”, introduced by McConkie and Rayner (1975; Rayner & Bertera, 1979). Studies have demonstrated that English readers acquire useful information from an asymmetrical region around the fixation point (extending 3-4 character spaces to the left of fixation and about 14-15 character spaces to the right). Research has also found that readers do not utilize information from the words on the line below the currently fixated line (Pollatsek, Raney, LaGasse, & Rayner, 1993).

To comprehend whether a story makes sense, the reader has to remember previous information from the story, keep it stored and accessible, so that new information can be compared and integrated into previous information – that’s what makes the story.  What would happen if there was a limit as to how often (or if ever) you accessed previous information? Long and Chong thought that was what was causing poor comprehension and set out to prove it. They took “poor” readers with very low retention and comprehension and compared them to “good” readers with significant retention and comprehension.  In the study the groups were required to read stories, one sentence at a time. They timed their reading speed of each sentence.  In the first story a character named Mary was described as a strict vegetarian. Several passages later, the story described Mary going into a restaurant with a friend and ordering a cheeseburger and fries.  In the students with good reading comprehension, their reading speed slowed down considerably when they read the sentence about Mary ordering a cheeseburger, indicating a conflict and confusion over what they had been previously led to believe about Mary. This would require that they remembered the information in the earlier passages and were comparing new information to this old information.

The poor readers did not identify this conflict because they read through the sentence about Mary ordering a cheeseburger, at the same rate they’d been reading all along. This indicates that they were not comparing this new information to the previous information as they read. Perhaps they just did not understand.  In a second test, they presented the same basic story in the same manner. But now, they separated the original information from the conflicting information by only one sentence, a reading time of just a couple of seconds. In this second test, the poor readers slowed down their reading to below average speeds because they could not justify the context.  Apparently poor readers will not access this stored information while reading. They will make comparisons if the information is in their working memory, but apparently do not make the continuing access to long term memory that good readers do automatically.

What can teachers do with this information? How can teachers best help the struggling reader with comprehension? Can poor readers be trained to access stored information better? Teachers can do much to help poor readers at all grade levels. It is important to remember that poor reading is not the result of low IQ. In fact, intelligence and reading ability have never correlated. Even the most brilliant child may have difficulty reading. The easiest and most accessible tool to reduce the number of regressions is to require readers to underline the sentences with their index finger, at a constant speed and encourage the students to just focus on the point of the finger.  As the research indicates, many areas of the brain are engaged in the reading process, as the brain desperately seeks context.  By utilizing the physical touching of the page; by engaging visual acuity (by reducing regressions), and by engaging the internal cognitive “voice”, a reader will activate multiple areas of synaptic activity, thus improving retention, memory, comprehension.  Never let a child think his or her struggles with reading are a reflection of overall ability or intelligence. There is a reader in every child.  Subsequently, it is vital that encouraging “instinctive” retention (accessing stored memory) will enhance reading comprehension.  If students do not fear that they misread, and instead apply no judgment, they will recall greater material, and will retain that information for longer periods of time.  Exact reading of questions before reading the passage will in essence program increased regressions to find that specific concept or term. The increased regressions will inhibit comprehension, and will put undue emphasis on the “previewed” words or concepts.

Here is a brief summary of the actual science:

Although we have the impression that we can process the entire visual field in a single fixation, in reality we would be unable to fully process the information outside of foveal vision if we were unable to move our eyes (Rayner, 1978, 1998).

Because of acuity limitations in the retina, eye movements are necessary for processing the details of the array. Our ability to discriminate fine detail drops off markedly outside of the fovea in the parafovea (extending out to about 5 degrees on either side of fixation) and in the periphery (everything beyond the parafovea). (See Figure1).

While we are reading or searching a visual array for a target or simply looking at a new scene, our eyes move every 200-350 ms. These eye movements serve to move the fovea (the high resolution part of the retina encompassing 2 degrees at the center of the visual field) to an area of interest in order to process it in greater detail.

During the actual eye movement (or saccade), vision is suppressed and new information is acquired only during the fixation (the period of time when the eyes remain relatively still).

While it is true that we can move our attention independently of where the eyes are fixated, it does not seem to be the case in everyday viewing. The separation between attention and fixation is often attained in very simple tasks (Posner, 1980); however, in tasks like reading, visual search, and scene perception, covert attention and overt attention (the exact eye location) are tightly linked.

Because eye movements are essentially motor movements, it takes time to plan and execute a saccade. In addition, the end-point is pre-selected before the beginning of the movement.

While it has generally been assumed that the two eyes move in synchrony and that they fixate the same point in space, recent research clearly demonstrates that this is not the case and the two eyes are frequently deviated from each other (Liversedge, Rayner, White, Findlay, & McSorley, 2006; Liversedge, White, Findlay, & Rayner, 2006).

There is considerable evidence that the nature of the task influences eye movements. A summary of the average amount of time spent on each fixation and the average distance the eyes move in reading, visual search, and scene perception are shown in Table 1.

From this table, it is immediately apparent that while the values presented in the table are quite representative of the different tasks, they show a range of average fixation durations and for each of the tasks there is considerable variability both in terms of fixation durations and saccade lengths.

Sources:

Sources:

Kathie F. Nunley is an educational psychologist, author, researcher and speaker living in southern New Hampshire. Developer of the Layered Curriculum™ method of instruction, Dr. Nunley has authored several books and articles on teaching in mixed-ability classrooms and other problems facing today’s teachers. Full references and additional teaching and parental tips are available at: http://Help4Teachers.com Email her:
Kathie (at) brains.org

• Applied Psycholinguistics. 2000 Vol 21(2) 229-241.
• Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry. 2000 Vol 39(7) 859-867.
• Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition. 2001 Vol 27, (6), 1424-1429.
• Learning & Individual Differences. 1999 Vol 11(4) 377-400.
• Reading & Writing. 2000 Vol 12(1-2) 129-142.
• Reading & Writing. 2000 Vol 13(1-2) 81-103
• Reading Psychology. 2000 Vol 21(3) 195-215.

• Andrews, S., Miller, B., & Rayner, K. (2004). Eye movements and morphological segmentation of compound words: There is a mouse in mousetrap. European Journal of Cognitive Psychology, 16, 285-311.
• Archibald, J. (2005). Second language phonology as redeployment of L1 phonological knowledge. The Canadian Journal of Linguistics, 50, 285-314.
• Bai, X., Yan, G., Liversedge, S. P., Zang, C., & Rayner, K. (2008). Reading spaced and unspaced Chinese text: Evidence from eye movements. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 34, 1277-1287.
• Bertram, R., & Hyönä, J. (2003). The length of a complex word modifies the role of morphological structure: Evidence from eye movements when reading short and long English compounds. Journal of Memory & Language, 48, 615-634.
• Bertram, R., Hyönä, J., & Laine, M. (2000). The role of context in morphological processing: Evidence from Finnish. Language and Cognitive Processes, 15, 367-388.
• Bertram, R., Pollatsek, A., & Hyönä, J. (2004). Morphological parsing and the use of segmentation cues in reading language compounds. Journal of Memory and Language, 51, 325-345.
• Burton, C., & Daneman, M. (2007). Compensating for a limited working memory capacity during reading: Evidence from eye movements. Reading Psychology, 28, 163-186.
• Camblin, C.C., Gordon, P.C., & Swaab, T.Y. (2007). The interplay of discourse congruence and lexical association during sentence processing: Evidence from ERPs and eye tracking. Journal of Memory & Language, 56, 103-128.
• Caplan, D. (2010). Task effects on BOLD signal correlates of implicit syntactic processing. Language and Cognitive Processes, 25, 866-890.
• Chincotta, D., Hyönä, J., & Underwood, G. (1997). Eye fixations, speech rate and bilingual digit span: Numeral reading indexes fluency not word length. Acta Psychologica, 97, 253-275.

***
@tjhouston and I ran into each other on twitter and TJ built a site to help with the pursuit of online class to class discussions.  http://c2ctweetup.com/. Contact us with questions @tjhouston and @2footgiraffe.

Twitter resources -
http://screenr.com/Kcz – Twitter basics.
http://prezi.com/8swscbqifpg3/twitter-and-how-it-works/ Prezi of how Twitter works.
http://screenr.com/dyu You don’t have to tweet to use Twitter.
http://chronicle.com/blogPost/Practical-Advice/26416 Great advice for using Twitter in education.
http://www.cybraryman.com/twitter.html Be all end all of Twitter links.

Comments encouraged.

Snow Day PD,

A “big storm” came Sunday night and dumped enough snow to cancel school for Monday. After building an igloo with the kids I realized most of the snow would still be hanging around on Tuesday. As a result, school for Tuesday would likely be cancelled.
I am always looking for opportunities to share tech with other teachers. I got the idea to do a Ustream broadcast to share tech with teachers.

I had a little experience using Ustream with students for evening test review sessions. A friend of mine Brian Caine @brian_caine showed me a feature called Ustream Producer that allows the user to show their screen as well as their face. This option was perfect for conducting an online pd for teachers. Dean Mantz @dmantz7 made a screencast demonstrating how to use Ustream Producer that was very usefully in my preparations for the snow day PD broadcast. http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/4412063
Monday evening when it was announced school would be closed. To get the word out I sent an email to the principals in the district.

Day 1 Tuesday, we shared diigo.com typewithme, and Google Docs . It went 30 min or so and we had 10-12 participants.  http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/11956537. Tuesday night school closed for Wednesday because roads are not clear yet. So again, an email went out to the principals. (Schools were closed the rest of the week because of ice on the roads.)

Day 2 Wednesday we shared mindmaps and screencasting 12-15 participants. http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/11975209

By Wednesday afternoon, some of the higher-ups in the district got wind of what we were doing and said the sessions could count as district PD. Fortunately, we had been using a g-form to list participants and their emails. This allowed us to give credit for sessions on Wednesday and Tuesday.
Wednesday afternoon, Steve Anderson @web20classroom, suggested using ustream to teach students online on snow days. Almost immediately I tweeted a message to all my students that we would have class online Thursday. (Most of my students have accounts they use for my classes.) Joe Bass and Noelle Mashburn in the communications department for MNPS liked snow day class idea so they called the media.

Day 3 Thursday we discussed wallwisher, google forms and quizlet.com. http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/11993031 54 participants. Again found out school is cancelled for Friday.

Day 4  Friday we talked about the amazing WECN (World Educators Collaboration Network) Aka Twitter. http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/12010557 30 participants – Not sure why we didn’t meet the same numbers as the day before but we will had a great time.
I use the name WECN because so many people role their eyes and shut down before you can share the benefits of the wonderful tool of twitter.
That morning before broadcast time I got a call from Rodney Dunigan of Nashville’s Channel 5 News. Rodney and his crew came down right before the teacher tech broadcast to do an interview for the news that night. They also recorded part of the broadcast. Bit.ly/2011Taylor

Since then our school has decided to use Ustream to broadcast school events. This is great because we have many students with family across the country and the globe. Now, those same families can watch live during the event or watch the recording later. The school Ustream recordings also help to build a positive digital footprint for students who participate.

Side notes

The idea for using Ustream for broadcasting with students and teachers came from two sources. The first answer is TeachMeet. What is a TeachMeet? TeachMeets are a type of Un-conference which are free and informal. Typically sessions at a TeachMeet consist of 15-20 minute presentations. The first TeachMeet I went to was run by Jason Bedell @jasontbedell at the Nashville downtown library. By the way Jason is hosting TeachMeet New Jersey March 5th http://tmnj.org/ and is the brain power that brought TeachMeets to the US. Check out his story behind TeachMeet http://bit.ly/hJuxDe.

There are other un-cons as well, ex. Edcamp. These un-cons broadcast the presentations live via Ustream or other online streaming programs allowing some in another part of the country to participate. I realized I could use this with my students in the evenings for test review. And so I did.
The second answer to the question is WECN aka Twitter. With out twitter I would never have known about TeachMeets. If you do not know the power of twitter as a personal PD tool then you must learn now. Check out –    Twitter is the best tool for keeping up with the changes in tech and education!

By the way, there is going to be another TeachMeet Nashville June 7th and 8th. Here is the participant sign-up and presenter sign-up. Participant form http://bit.ly/eGGJrB Presenter form http://bit.ly/eYhELl

If any one reading this would be willing to help me edit grammar for my future posts I would be very grateful. Obviously my writing is not a skill of mine.

Comments are welcome

* Quotes from Jeff Liebermann – His website – http://bea.st/
** Quote from Dav Pilkey’s book Captain Underpants and the Perilous Plot of Porfessor Poopypants. pg 17.
- please forgive grammar errors.

If they will not or cannot come to a review session how can we take the session to them?

While watching parts of EdcampKC on ustream the realization came to use ustream.tv as a method for test reviews. I had seen ustream used before, so I’m not sure what was different this time.

So I announced the review sessions to my students. I ran two broadcasts on two different days at two different times. Hoping the different times and days would accommodated more students. Interestingly the same 10-15 students showed up on both days.

Once students signup they are able to backchannel in a text box to the right while seeing and hearing the instructor (me) on the left. When I asked questions they would type in responses. I was also able to request they search for certain images or concepts online. They would then post the link in the “chat” text box and everyone would go to the link and we would discuss it. Also, ustream can record the broadcast for later playback. Students not able to join the live session are able to watch a recording the broadcast later. Ustream only records the video. Chats are lost.

One of my favorite parts is when students were asking questions and other students were answering with comments or website related to the question. I would love for this to turn into students organizing and running their own study sessions. Not sure how to light that spark yet.

It was also exciting to find out parents and even some families were watching the stream. Who knows, they might learn something or more importantly they might gain a stronger interest for the student’s learning or school environment, thus becoming more engaged parents.

Other ideas:

• run broadcast during class time for students in in-school-suspension to watch real-time.
• students at home because of out-of-school-suspension to watch
• students at home because of illness
• students gone on family vacations (as you know some parents do not plan around school schedules)
• parent able to watch what happens in class and how their students might be doing. (there might be legal issues, need to research this option)
• online chat with parents to start the year and through out the year.

Anyway – the quest continues to increase student engagement.

Here is a quick screencast of the most recent review we did for Verts and Inverts class. The audio is a few seconds ahead of the video because of the screencast. The students on the other end see it synced. http://screenr.com/2zc Check back in a couple of days and I hope to have a screencast showing how to use ustream.tv

This link is for video of an entire session with biology students.  http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/10792736 – it takes a couple of minutes before we start rolling.

Adam Taylor – @2footgiraffe

So how do you make it happen?
1. Use a screen capturing tool like Camtasia Studio there are free sites like Screencast-o-matic. There are many other cheep or free screencasting tools. Just make sure they can record the length you will need for your lecture. I recommend keeping it under 15 min.
2.  Post the video on youtube or another video sharing site.
save the link and put it on your website or some other portal. Diigo, delicious etc. This will make it easier for students to access the vid while creating a database of your #revlearn files.

3. What about students who do not have Internet at home?
I used audacity to simultaneously record an audio file. I saved it as an mp3 file, burned to a CD then gave it to the students without internet. I also provided them with handouts of the notes because some pics were involved. Might try the dvd next time around.

What did the students think? Well most were bored. I’ll fix that for next time. However, they were able to pause the vid and move at their own pace, re-watch parts, or watch the whole thing again if they needed.
Other resources for reverse learning. http://electriceducator.blogspot.com/2010/09/flip-your-classroom-through-reverse.html?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter
Twitter hashtag #revlearn
Tweeps who revlearn @jonbergmann @mrtrice_science
http://learning4mastery.com/
Thanks for reading.
Comments are encouraged.
Adam Taylor
@2footgiraffe