This podcast is a recording of a presentation by Karen Fasimpaur about OER (Open Educational Resources) and open content licensing options at the NCCE 2008 conference in Seattle, Washington. The program description of Karen's session was: Learning should be free and accessible to everyone! Come learn about how the Open Educational Resources movement is reshaping education. We'll look at Open Source tools, repositories of free textbooks, images, videos, music, lessons, and more. You'll learn how to access these and contribute your own resources so others can benefit.

Posted: February 29th, 2008 under Education.
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This podcast is a recording from Thursday, February 21, 2008, on day two of a three day workshop shared as part of the Celebrate Oklahoma Voices project at the University of Central Oklahoma in Edmond. Participants had just spent an hour using their Olympus WS-110 portable digital audio recorders, Switch software, and Audacity software to create recorded interviews with each other about a variety of topics. We spent about twenty minutes discussing the challenges, obstacles, roadblocks, work-arounds, and learning points they encountered during their work time together. Celebrate Oklahoma Voices is a statewide digital storytelling project empowering learners to become digital witnesses, archiving local oral history and sharing that history safely on the global stage of the Internet. More information is available on our main project website celebrateoklahoma.us.

Posted: February 23rd, 2008 under Education.
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Posted: February 17th, 2008 under Education.
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Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs indicates the perception of a safe environment, along with basic physiological needs, are pre-requisites for the development of higher order needs eventually culminating in self-actualization. This podcast focuses on our ethical obligations as moral educators to speak out and take action when pedagogic crimes are taking place in our schools against students. The specific pedagogic crimes I address in this podcast include verbally threating elementary school children with the loss of their entire summer vacation if they don’t work harder and score better on high stakes tests, and the departmentalization of students in first grade. Neither of these actions are supported by educational research as ways to enhance student achievement or promote the sort of school culture in which learners of any age can thrive. Both of these actions have been and are being taken in a Texas elementary school, whose identity I am not disclosing for reasons I explain in the podcast. These reprehensible actions are NOT taking place everywhere in all our schools, and I am not wanting to further erode public perceptions of teachers and our schools in general by sharing these stories and ideas. I do believe, however, that cultures of fear are more prevalent than ever in many of our public schools today because of NCLB and our predominant, destructive political culture emphasizing high stakes accountability. As moral human beings in our communities, we have obligations to speak out when children are being harmed both physically and verbally, even if those actions are being taken in the name of “raising student achievement,” “improving test scores,” or “getting our kids ready for high school.”

Posted: February 12th, 2008 under Education.
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This podcast is a recording of a wonderful presentation by 4th grade teacher Christy Paradise at the Oklahoma State Department of Education's annual Social Studies and Fine Arts conference on Saturday, February 2, 2008, at the Moore-Norman Technology Center just south of Oklahoma City. Christy applied and was selected to participate last fall in a special digital centennial project in Mid-Del Public Schools. Along with 8 other teachers, she received her own Macbook laptop computer, a digital camera, an iPod Nano, and an iMic which permitted the iPod to be used as a mobile digital recorder. The iPod and iMic were added to the library inventory at Christy's school so students could check them out and take them home to use in digital storytelling projects. Christy permits students to regularly use the digital camera during the day to capture non-linguistic representations of concepts and ideas they are studying in the formal curriculum, and also create images which serve as story prompts for writing activities.

Posted: February 8th, 2008 under Education.
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This podcast is a recording of a session which I co-presented with Dr. Dana Owens, Dr. Don Wilson, and Whitney Allen at the 2008 Oklahoma Technology Association's annual conference on February 6, 2008 in Oklahoma City. The program description was: The Celebrate Oklahoma Voices Project seeks to equip and empower Oklahomans to record and share oral history interviews and other digital stories relating to the history and people of Oklahoma with the world. Our project is currently focused on providing three day professional development workshops for Oklahoma educators. The workshop cost is $150, but thanks to supplementary grant funding each participant receives over $500 of equipment including a mobile digital audio recorder, a digital camera, a USB headset/microphone, and more. Come learn about our workshop curriculum and scheduled dates for 2007 sessions!

Posted: February 8th, 2008 under Education.
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ATutor has been named as one of the finalists in the IMS Learning Impact Awards. The Awards recognize high impact use of technology in support of learning. Judging will take place at this year's Learning Impact Conference, being held in Austin Texas May 12 to 15.

Posted: February 7th, 2008 under Education.
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This podcast is a recording of my spotlight presentation at the Oklahoma Technology Association's annual conference on February 5, 2008, about the K-12 Online Conference. The program description for this session stated: The K-12 Online Conference offers a fantastic, free opportunity for educators around the world to learn together about innovative and effective ways web 2.0 (read/write web) technologies are and can be used to engage students as well as improve opportunities for learning. Each October, over 40 free presentations created by teachers around the world are posted on the k12onlineconference.org website. Over 50,000 educators from around the world participated in the conference in 2007. A series of live events as well as asynchronous interaction options are available during and after the conference. Learn how you can participate, AND earn professional development credit.

Posted: February 7th, 2008 under Education.
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Dean Shareski blogged a case study for the use of mobile phones in school teaching, with some good insights into the proportion of grade 8/9 children with cellphones at school, how they used their cellphones, and how learners without cellphones were considered.

Dean documented engagement, responsibility, and innovation/problem solving amongst the students; and also comments about the class teacher as a learner in this situation, and how it challenges educators and institutions to reflect on their own policy and practice when it comes to mobile devices in educational settings.

Tags: school, secondary, high, middle, education, mobile, cellphone, cell, phone, m-learning, mlearning, mobilelearning, mobile-learning, mobile learning, teaching, students, policy, professional, development

Authored by Leonard Low. Hosted by Edublogs.

Posted: February 5th, 2008 under Education.
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ATutor 1.6 is now available. The most significant change in this release is the conversion from old language character sets to a single character set, UTF-8, which provides universal language support. The other significant change is a new look-and-feel, updating the default themes with a new DIV based layout, and a new appearance for the 1.6 series releases of ATutor. Visit the ATutor 1.6 Demo to try out new features in 1.6 and download ATutor 1.6 to install a version of your own.

Posted: February 5th, 2008 under Education.
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