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Hundreds of educational tech enthusiasts flocked to the annual CUE (computer using educators) conference this past weekend (March 15-17, 2012) in Palm Springs, California. A lot was learned over the 3 days at the conference and here are some of the highlights: Day 1 Chris Fitzgerald Walsh spoke about creativity in the classroom. Some myth’s of creativity were explored: -Must happen in isolation -Happens during random aha moments -It’s what artist do -It’s innate It makes sense that creativity can happen to and by anyone. You don’t have to be alone with your thoughts for something magical to happen, in fact, creating in a group setting is healthy and the people that you are working with can provide a stimulus to your thought process. Sure artists can be creative but anyone has the ability to create and and is not just reserved for those artistically inclined. Some conditions for creativity: -Playfulness (having FUN!) -You need time -Exploration -Failure -Variety Having fun and just being playful can become a catalyst for students trying to create. We as educators need to give students the time to explore and allow them to FAIL! We also should not place judgements on intermediary work during the exploration process. The students should feel secure in their ability to explore without the hinderance of evaluation, which can provide students with walls to overcome or roadblocks to think about instead of moving forward and allowing creativity and maturation to take place. In order to be creative you must have a passion, an attitude towards what really matters and thus will provide the spark! It is important for anyone who wants to create to internalize a sense of permission to create. More often than not, we stop our selves from following through on an idea or thought instead of permitting ourselves to succeed and move forward. Discipline and commitment are necessary to be creative and it is this type of attitude that cultivates the wonderful ideas that are created on a daily basis.is a model model promotes creativity and asks students to stay in the moment and commit to an idea. Design thinking is a mesh of many disciplines, such as math and science and allows students to broaden the mind. Technology needs to be at the forefront of an education so that problems can be solved now and in the future. The ability to allow students to apply what they are learning at an early age, exposes them to a glimpse into their future. Tom Van Ark - The Pivot to Personal Digital Learning In this session we discussed the value of blended learning, which is a combination of face-to-face instruction, along with computer mediated activities. According to Web Learning @ Penn State website, we should blend learning to allow advanced learning, interactively in the classroom and outside of it, there is access to quality multi-media content anytime of the day. Conversations are still happening about this topic and they need to continue. There are many school in America and abroad that have adopted this and similar models and have reported positive to amazing results. However, there are skeptics out there, that say any and all data can be skewed to present any school in a positive light. No matter what you think of these systems, we can always learn and take the best of what people are trying to do to make education a better place for students and gives them and advantage when they leave school. Here is an example of a school that is using the blended model approach: About Carpe Diem Schools Frank Guttler - Lights, Camera, Learn 10 lessons for better video in the classroom lightcameralearn.com A call sheet is the order of business for any production day. For any movie there is pre-production, production and post-production. Celtx is a free pre-production software download that allows a film maker to create story boards, scripts and much more. What is the difference between a shot and a scene? A shot is part of a film between two shots, where a scene is a series of shots to tell a story. The evolution of a movie goes something like this: Shot, Scene, Sequence, Movie When shooting a movie, think point of view of a shot. For example shooting from high or above, from down low or find different angles. Here is an example of a quick exercise you can do with your class: Show a segment of a movie and count shots by clapping every time there is a new shot. Claps will increase in frequency as the action increases. Lighting Basics: 3 Point Lighting (Key Light, Fill Light and Back light - Lighting Basics at Media College Below I have a video example of how you can introduce your students to the process of film making by learning through experience, story boarding and reflection. Check the video out and begin your film making experience. Other ideas to teach students film making: Have students study the elements of genre (classical, western, etc). Complete a scene study (check out the Ikea Lamp commercial) Use pictures to tell a story. Here is a link to Frank Guttler’s Thousand Words project. A great resource is the Library of Congress website. Check out the American Memory Photo Archive for images that can be used to build a photo video/movie.

Scheduling, planning and gathering trainees’ data is like taking out the garbage. You simply have no other option than to do it, or you will hear about it from your significant other. Or, your training sessions will run amok. Unfortunately, there are no household trash robots yet Unfortunately, there are no solutions. There is no household robot yet which can stuff your trash in a container and then move the container in the street at the exact right day. (Was this Monday or Tuesday? I always forget.) But wait! For organizing your training sessions there’s always the option to use a learning management system. A learning management system, or lms, offers several tools to alleviate the boredom of simple administrative tasks. These tools are: User profile Intake form Bulk email User Profile Every learning management system that I know offers a user profile where training participants specify their name, title, activities and introduce themselves with a little story. And maybe they even put a portrait online. All in all, this is information that is absolutely not specific to the training they are about to get. Which brings us to the intake form. Intake Form The intake form is used to gather data about the trainee which usually pertains to the training. Using an lms means you don’t have to scan, copy and paste or even type in the data yourself. What’s more, if you need to perform a simple statistical analysis (the median age or something like that), most learning management systems support that. Bulk Email Tedious manual data entry Once you’ve collected everybody’s email address (the user profile form has a field for that), you can send out an email message to everybody, or a selected group of training participants. This helps you communicate things like changed schedules and welcoming messages. Here’s how one training company, Reframe, used the tools mentioned above to remove a lot of tedious paperwork and manual data entry. Case: Self-Registration for Online Training Training company Reframe is specialized in aggression management. In preparation of their training sessions, they used to send out paper intake forms to the participants. The data was manually processed. At some point they started using the learning management system Moodle to put the intake forms online. But they still had a lot of manual operations: registering the training participant as a user in Moodle and adding them to the course containing the online form. There is, to be sure, always the option to have trainees self-register in Moodle. But this was not deemed secure because anybody who knows the internet address (the "url") can register, not just trainees. Also, once a user in Moodle, you still have to enroll in an online training (Moodle can hold multiple online training sessions at once). Reframe is using Moodle for many clients, so self enrollment in an online training was not an option. That would have meant that any client’s trainees would have been able to enroll in the training session for another client (using Moodle’s "enrollment key" would have been a solution for that). Voucher Based Registration We created a solution for Reframe based on the concept of vouchers. As a trainee, you get a voucher for a specific course. If you visit the Reframe learning management system for the first time, you use the voucher code to register as a new user. This simply means filling in the user profile form, including the username and password fields. Once you are registered as a user, you are automatically also enrolled into the correct online training sessions. Needless to say, this saves Reframe employees an enormous amount of time previously spent on peddling data. Not as great as a household robot but still tremendously useful.

Didn’t you know you can control one computer through another? Even through your mobile device! And even use your webcam to check a place!The funny thing is that setting your computers up is really straightforward. You just need a Google account, Chrome and the Chrome Remote Desktop app.First of all, sign in inside Chrome with your Google account. Then install the app. You should see something similar to this (except for My Computers, which you are going to set up in the following steps):Click on "Enable remote connections" (gray button in the bottom), and enter a PIN (you’ll need it to access the computer you're configuring from another one). Once you’ve done it you should see a list of "My Computers" with their names.When you click on the other computer’s name you’ll be prompted to enter the PIN, and if everything has gone appropriately then you should see the other device’s screen:The interesting point is that you can do it from your mobile device with this app: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.chromeremotedesktop&hl=enYou’ll automatically see all the computers linked to your Google account. Just click on a name, type the PIN and start sliding your finger to make the mouse pointer follow it.The uses for remote control are abundant:Laptop control inside the classroom (you’ll need different accounts, including a generic one for your classroom; remember you can quickly change accounts using the upper left head-like icon).CCTV: configure your vigilant laptop not to sleep or hibernate. Switch on your webcam (Yawcam is a free app for that), switch the screen off to save power and place the laptop in a strategic location to record that corner you are interested in. I did it when I went on vacation this summer, checking my house through my mobile device.Parental control.Server management.

A Fresno State student is interviewing me through Twitter! Below are the questions and my responses. The Interview was recorded over the course of a few days Question 1 by: Jessica Zendejas ‏ @jessica84011 @teachusingtech Hi Mr. Diaz, I am going to begin our interview.How have you used twitter in your professional development?Thankyou #ci100 Question 1 response: I use Twitter on a nightly basis to improve my skills as a teacher, stay current with ongoing education news and also to help where I can professionally. Twitter is an awesome tool that allows me to reach out to teaching professionals on a daily basis and ask questions and/or provide help to those in need. I primarily follow like minded people on Twitter. What I mean by that, is that I follow people in the area of education. This allows me to ready micro-blogs that are written specifically for my area of interest. Follow-up Question 1a: Jessica Zendejas ‏ @jessica84011 @teachusingtech and why twitter, when there are so many other social media sites out there? Thanks again for your help Question 1a response: You are right, there are a lot of choices when it comes to social media, including Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram and so on. However, it has been my experience that Twitter allows for the most convenient and densely populated center for the type of information I am looking for. You get to populate your Twitter feed with interests that fit your needs. My needs are in the area of education and more specifically education technology and I follow like minded educators. My Twitter feed is populated with links to articles and videos, as well as 142 characters of thought provoking statements and conversations. Question 2 by:Jessica Zendejas ‏ @jessica84011 @teachusingtech Thankyou. Second question:what suggestions do you have for educators who want to use twitter as an educational resource? Question 2 response: My number one suggestion would be to try it out and see if it fits your needs. I am a fan of Twitter but you may not be and that is okay. On the other hand, the education conversation needs to continue outside of the classroom and being a good educator, one who works on making a difference, takes time outside of the classroom. Therefore, some type of social media allows you to access the minds and thoughts of thousands of educators all around the world who have a similar mission. Okay back to Twitter as a resource. Another suggestion I have is to find a hash tag, which is a grouping of comments tied to a specific idea, and begin browsing through content and comment when you can to add to the discussion. You can only be better for it and you begin to form relationships with people you can count on. If you want to follow education technology conversations, a suggestion would be #edtech or if you are a new teacher #ntchat is great! One last suggestion would be to have parents, students and/or teachers create a hashtag, so that you can create a conversation about a particular topic. For example, I have started a hash tag on the greatness of #dchilders. Please go there and comment when you can. We will see how popular this topic is?

Google Classroom ( is available to schools with a Google Apps for Education (GAfE)domain. Classroom is a way to get all of your students in one place and allows you to easily assign work and for st… Source: www.alicekeeler.com See on Scoop.it - Educational News and Web Tools

How do you create your training programme in no time at all? Just buy the training materials and use them to compose your own online training sessions inside your learning management system. A scorm package is a container which facilitates sharing online training materials Every modern learning management system (lms) supports a universal standard for exchanging training materials: SCORM. Scorm stands for Shareable Content Object Reference Model, but you can forget about that (I always do). The really important thing about scorm is that you can create learning content or a training unit, package it in a scorm zip and export it to another lms. Of course, the reverse is also true: you can import somebody else’s scorm package as well. But what do these words mean, learning content, training unit? Most scorm packages I have encountered so far, consist of fifteen, thirty to 120 minute sessions about a specific topic. The training participant logs in to your lms, opens the scorm package (just like any other online training activity, usually by hitting a button or clicking a link), does whatever is inside the package and receives a score (or at the very least a "completed" check mark). Once the user clicks the link to the scorm unit, the scorm player takes over. The scorm player is the software inside the lms that "reads" the scorm package and "plays it back". In the background, it does the presentation, evaluates any answers the participant may enter and computes the final score (if there is one). The score is transmitted to the lms, which stores it together with the name of the user for future reference (e.g. to make it available in a grade book). How does this differ from using a training activity provided by the lms itself (e.g a quiz or test)? Well, it doesn’t until you would want to export the activity to another training platform. Okay, I told you to forget what scorm stands for, but one part is important: the shareable part. A scorm package can be shared across all e-learning systems which support the standard (and there are a lot of those out there). Practical Note on Using Scorm Your lms should already contain a scorm player, but I’m going to tell you to get another one. This way, in case of any problems with a scorm package you can always verify that the problem resides with the scorm package and not the settings of your lms. Simply try to play the scorm package in your standalone scorm player. If the problems persist, there’s probably nothing wrong with your lms’ settings. Download SCORM training materials So where do you find scorm trainings? Here are a few online markets where you can download scorm packages but also offer your own for sale. http://www.openelms.org/ http://www.skillsoft.com/catalog/default.asp https://www.opensesame.com/

There are a lot of easy to use QR code generators out there to be used in education. Some of them even create large batches of codes by simply cutting and pasting. There is one small problem with most of these generators if you are creating more than one, more often than not you lose track of which QR code belongs to whom. As a teacher, one way to double up on your productivity and create batch QR codes identified by a student name is to create them in a spreadsheet. Here is how: 1. Collect student’s digital projects via a Google form (optional) 2. The form that students fill out requests that students submit a link to their project which ends up on a spreadsheet. 3. Once in the spreadsheet, the teacher simply pastes the the following QR Code formula (not sure who created the formula but here is a link to where it is stored online: https://www.evernote.com/shard/s2/sh/bf44024f-837e-4fd3-8f0a-61089874ca8d/155aae1d8d6bb1a777dc79f8755d5ec8) in the last cell of the first row of cells. QR Code Formula =image("https://chart.googleapis.com/chart?chs=150×150&cht=qr&chl="&A2) 4. Look at the formula and notice that the last couple characters are A2, which refers to the cell that QR code will be made for. If the links that you want converted into QR codes are on column D2 for example, then change the last piece of code to D2. 5. Click on the cell that contains the formula. The cell will highlight and you will see a small blue box that you can click on, hold and drag down, making QR codes for every single student link just like that! 6. Lastly resize the cells horizontally and vertically to increase the size of the QR code and print. Screenshot aided directions to create batch QR Code     Watch how to copy QR Code: QR Code Formula Copy Down (43 seconds) Watch how to re-size QR Code: Re-size QR Code in Spreadsheet (1 minute 45 seconds)  

Increasingly, professional trainers and coaches are requested to deliver their training online, in part or even entirely. This post shows you how to fulfill that request by creating an online version of your training. What I cover here is relevant even if part of your training is delivered face-to-face, as is often the case. Use an LMS to Deliver Your Online Training Before we get started, let me give you some advice: don’t just digitize your existing training materials. Instead, familiarize yourself with a learning management system (lms). If you’re not a professional trainer or coach, you probably can make do with a bunch of powerpoint  presentations, pdf documents and so on, and put them on your website. An LMS is not an abstract futurist concept However, professionals in the field of training and coaching use a learning management system to deliver online training.  Yes, I know it has "learning" in the title, but don’t let that misguide you. An lms really is the natural environment for an online training. Moreover, it’s not an abstract futurist concept but a tool that’s being used by organizations big and small on a daily basis.   Preparing the Online Training In many ways, the preparation of an online training is not that different from preparing for delivering any other training. You should: Find out what the skill deficiencies are, compared to the goals the business or organization is trying to achieve Create the outlines of the training Get all stakeholders aligned (engage domain experts, get management buy-in, inform participants) This is your field of expertise, so I’m not going to dwell on this much longer. Just one more tip regarding the actual participants of your training. If online training is new in their organization and they’re skeptical, you need their buy-in as well. For instance, you should think about asking them what they think they need to learn for their job. Gathering and processing this kind of information is easily done through a survey on your lms. And it signals that online training offers added value to the recipients. Engaging the Stakeholders Create a role for each stakeholder. Typical roles are: trainer participant (trainee) domain expert (subject matter expert) participants’ manager The manager usually only gets to see the end results of the training (aggregated data for each participant). So let’s talk about the other roles. Trainer - Your role should be to guide the training, to respond to questions and to initiate discussion among participants. Participant - It’s important to have participants interact with each other. Consider creating discussion groups supported by forums. Ask all participants to create, in the lms, an online profile which includes their picture, job title, skills and interests. Domain Expert - If your training focuses on a specific domain, get the domain experts involved. I don’t mean just in the course of creating the training, but also as advisors who will chime in during the training. For instance, ask them to participate in forum discussions. Creating the Content Creating content for an online training is basically applied instructional design. Applied where? In a learning management system. An online training then, corresponds with what’s usually called a course in an lms. A course consists of smaller components called topics. A topic exists to fulfill a training need: it should address a specific (part of a) skill deficiency. Topics are composed of activities and (multimedia) sources. An example of an  activity might be an online assignment ("list your professional goals for the next five years") or a test or quiz. Here’s a simple format to create a topic in an lms: Goal: what skill deficiencies are we addressing in this topic, what is the topic about? Criteria for evaluation: how do we know that the participant has successfully tackled the topic? Time investment for the participant: how much time does the participant need to tackle the topic? Resources needed by the participant: what information does the participant need and in what shape do we offer that information (e.g. a text or a movie)? Activity type: what should the participant to do to alleviate the skill deficiency? Typically, each activity is designed to create a specific training experience. Do a Pilot First Once you have created the content, you should do a pilot first, especially if you are new to online training. If the organization has doubts about online training, establish credibility with a pilot. As a matter of fact, instructional designers I know who are working within large enterprises always test a new online training with a subgroup first. Evaluate After the pilot, and indeed at the end of each online training session, evaluate the results. A typical lms accumulates a wealth of data about the participant: Grading or scoring results (provided you’ve been using scored training activities of course) as a group average, for each participant, or for each activity. For each participant: total time spent in the lms, time spent on each training activity. Actual raw data such as test results, contributions to forum discussions, survey results. Of course, the results should ultimately always be evaluated against the goals of the organization or the business. More specifically: how does the training transfer to the workplace? Rinse and Repeat There is no reason to stop the training once the official course is over. Keep the LMS open and encourage all participants to share their experiences in putting the training to work. You can even reinforce the training at regular intervals (say, every two or three months) using micro-interventions. But that’s a topic for another post. Sources I found these sites of great value while writing this post: Don’t Convert! Redesign Instructor-Led Training for eLearning How to create interactivity in online training How to Create Online Training Modules

It’s kind of funny to me that I up and decided to write a post on how to blog efficiently, especially since I didn’t post but once last week. Ha! While I do get a lot of things done, other things u… Source: theturquoisehome.com See on Scoop.it - InformationCommunication (ICT)