Ryan Collins

šŸ•¹ļø Do Something Great! šŸ˜„

Author: ryan

  • 2 nerds and 700 girls with Chromebook #oetc14

    • Double wrap
    • St. Joseph Academy
    • All girls catholic school
    • Four principals in 5 years
    • 5 year plan, limited tech use at the beginning
    • Helps to have Someone who is knowledgable and flexible.
    • Techretary
    • MCPc helped set it up
    • Analyzed current group of equipment reservations
    • Worked with Higher Ground to print logo on bags
    • Alright, what are you doing?
    • $100 tech fee per year (not a Chromebook fee)
    • It changes the way a classroom works.
    • Special loaner bags
    • Worth Ave. for insurance. $30-$34 per year
    • CPR Charge, plug it in, restart

    Thanks! Shameless plug – look at our article in the WSJ! http://t.co/QD4XbRKYMK
    about a minute ago by Kyle Laauser

  • Kevin Honeycutt’s Keynote #oetc14

    • Do you want to find the best teacher in a school? Find the one that’s in trouble.
    • “I don’t like laptops…I don’t know what the kids in the back are doing”…”Well get up!”
    • “Why don’t you give up? It’s too late for them, teach the younger students. NO!”
    • “Are we killing the next Steve Jobs?”
    • “You don’t learn unless you do something!”
    • Empowerment comes from being trusted to attack learning according to your own strengths.
    • Cereal box presenter. Amazing.
    • Killing education by the process of il-lamination.
    • Kids should be sharks, not filter feeders
    • Fixed action patterns
    • The Coming Jobs War Jim Clifton
    • The first thing we do is amputate their digital limbs at the door.
    • I teach kids, do you have a product?
    • What is the Clovis point today?
    • Shapeways,com
    • Maker movement
    • Open World Project
    • Our Open World Project
    • Dad, kids are going to judge this project by what they google of me.
    • Music on iOS
    • Stop judging kids on what they can’t do.

  • Stop just talking about 21st century skills, it is time to be doing #oetc14

    My random notes from Stop just talking about 21st century skills, it is time to be doing.

    • Presentation
    • Ditch the ā€œturn in the assignment product & get a final gradeā€ model and move to a ā€œcontinuous collaborative, editing, improving processā€ model.
    • Itā€™s not cheating itā€™s collaboration; almost everywhere, except schools, will expect them to work with others- to solve problems, brainstorm, create opportunities, edit & proofread, share and instruct & learn from one another.
    • Tons of links for using search engines and teaching how to search.
      • Use the first search to find keywords that will help you narrow
        your search
      • Use control (command on Macs) F to search for words on a page.
    • Media literacy – Evaluate sources
    • SearchFindKnow.com
    • Moving toward flipping/blending/hybrid class.
    • Teach above your head
      • You you feel you are completely comfortable and in control, you
        are preparing your students for your past and not their future.
      • Go outside your comfort zone
      • Independent study with Arduinos
      • Self directed learning
    • personal.psu.edu

  • How to differentiate using Screencasting in a flipped classroom! #oetc14

    Presentation link

    Introduction

    • Usually used at the high school
    • Equipment
      • iOS, PC, Mac, etc.
      • Microphone
      • Topic: script or keywords
      • Media
    • Options to record
      • Screencast-o-Mac
      • Jing
      • Screenr
      • EduCanon
      • Educreations
      • Teach by Knowmia
      • Camtasia ($)
      • Snag it ($)
    • Combining technology
      • Younger students, watch videos at school while teacher works with other students
      • different types of media: pictures, videos, PDFs, etc.
    • Put the video on an iPad, place the iPad at the back of the room
    • students create own screencasts
    • distribution
      • Twitter, shortened links, qr codes, LMS

    MS examples

    • 8-12 min
    • Paper and pencil only
    • Put little secrets into the audio that the student needs to know so you can verify they watched.
    • Help when students are absent
    • Homework is not a grade; it’s a behavior.
    • Students lost lunch with their friends if they hadn’t watched videos
    • Be consistant
    • Short 3-6 question formative assessment
    • Put into one of three groups based on assessment: relearn, practice, enrich
    • “I want to know what they know right now”
    • Asked principal to co-teach by having all the students with IEPs in the grade level
    • Or use centers
    • Or team with another classroom

    Differentiated assessments

    • same standards, different levels
    • Every page is a different standard
    • five levels of questions
    • low: 1-3, middle: 2-4, high: 3-5
    • “The definition of teaching is to ensure learning.” Jim Connell
    • Don’t let students off the hook, 81% on a test means they don’t know 19%
    • students like to hear their own teacher’s voice. Can be tailored to their needs
    • Very good for students on IEPs, able to watch at their pace
    • Good for parents

    What would I do different?

    • embed video in Google form for easy formative assessment
    • Sophia – create lessons/tutorials
    • Complete Chrome lesson, get a free tshirt
    • Flipped classroom and ipad certification available

    Pitfalls

    • stick with it. There is a learning curve for everyone
    • Create a system that works for you and your students when they don’t do it

    Results

    • Teachers have started at the high school
    • satisfaction, doing the right thing every day
    • more time in class to teach and troubleshoot
    • Actually took less time

  • Getting ready for the Ohio Educational Technology Conference #oetc14

    My presentations are…. Well, let’s say there are slides and an outline, but they will never be finished. I will be constantly tweaking until I present, and then I’ll have presenters remorse afterwards of missed opportunities. šŸ™‚

    Monday I will be presenting Teach Like a Hacker in room C213-C214 at 2:15. You too can hack, come! For those that can’t attend, I’ll be posting my slides tomorrow and the chat room will be open the entire conference (chat room is also accessible over IRC, server is talk.eduk8.me, channel is #tlah).

    Tuesday is a big day with the ALTconference, OETCx. Come and watch the keynote with your fellow OETC participants. It’s a different experience being able to hold conversations while watching the keynote. I’ll be presenting an Ignite style FRED talk that afternoon which will be exciting since it involves Star Wars.

    Join 1,486 others that follow my tweets @mr_rcollins. Other important accounts are the @oetcx, the @OhEdTech Twitter account, my website, the OETCx website. The conference hashtags #oetc14, #oetcx, and my session hashtag #tlah.

    If you see me, be sure to stop and say hi!

  • No software, no registration video conferencing

    appear.in is a video conferencing platform for up to 8
    people. It doesn’t require any registration or software installation. The
    organizer visits the site, creates a room (without needing a registration), and
    shares the link with participants.

    Looks pretty cool!

    via: MacDrifter

  • The loopback interface is very important

    This is more of a note to remind me how to fix it next time, but it could come
    in handy for others in the same situation.

    I restarted my virtual private server this morning, and after it came back up I
    noticed none of the websites would load. The server runs
    Varnish as a front end to all the websites,
    and all it was doing was throwing up 503 errors and guru meditations. This means
    that varnish can’t connect to any web server. The websites on the host are
    served by nginx and apache. I double checked that they were running and that
    they were on their correct ports with netstat -tulpn:

    tcp        0      0 0.0.0.0:8008            0.0.0.0:*               LISTEN      391/apache2
tcp        0      0 0.0.0.0:88              0.0.0.0:*               LISTEN      12365/nginx.conf

    Ok, everything is running, why won’t it work!! Next is to try to telnet to the
    servers:

    telnet localhost 8008

    That’s odd, it never connects. Let me try it from my computer (IP address
    obscured. Why? I don’t know, it seems like a good idea :-).

    telnet 75.255.255.255 8008

    It connects right away. So for some reason, the server can’t connect to other
    services on itself, even localhost. After some searching I came across a post
    that mentions that sometimes the loopback interface doesn’t come up. I check:

    root@vps:~# ifconfig
venet0    Link encap:UNSPEC  HWaddr 00-00-00-00-00-00-00-00-00-00-00-00-00-00-00-00
          inet addr:127.0.0.2  P-t-P:127.0.0.2  Bcast:0.0.0.0  Mask:255.255.255.255
          UP BROADCAST POINTOPOINT RUNNING NOARP  MTU:1500  Metric:1
          RX packets:32802 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:35269 errors:0 dropped:52 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:0
          RX bytes:10716892 (10.7 MB)  TX bytes:25360227 (25.3 MB)

venet0:0  Link encap:UNSPEC  HWaddr 00-00-00-00-00-00-00-00-00-00-00-00-00-00-00-00
          inet addr:75.255.255.255  P-t-P:75.127.3.166  Bcast:0.0.0.0  Mask:255.255.255.255
          UP BROADCAST POINTOPOINT RUNNING NOARP  MTU:1500  Metric:1

    I’ll be a monkey’s uncle, the loopback interface isn’t up! A quick sudo
    ifconfig lo up     and I am back in business!

  • Don’t wait for the New Year

    It’s the last day of the year, when a lot of people contemplate the previous year. This is also the time when many start planning on new beginnings in the new year. I say, why do we wait? Shouldn’t we be planning on new beginnings throughout the year?

    So many times when starting new initiatives at school we have this urge to wait until natural breaks, such as the start of a new school year. It feels totally natural in a school setting since we have such distinct starts and stops, unlike a lot of occupations. After college I worked a couple of years at a computer store and bank. It was weird not have such breaks. To start something new, you set the date as soon as possible.

    Unfortunately, this doesn’t happen nearly enough in a school setting.

    I came here tonight because when you realize you want to spend the rest of your life with somebody, you want the rest of your life to start as soon as possible. –Harry (When Harry Met Sally)

    When I want to incorporate something new, I want it to start as soon as possible. Don’t make me wait for some arbitrary date just because we’ve always done it that way. I want the rest of my life start as soon as possible.

    Happy New Year everybody!!!

  • What a disappointing article, tablets vs. laptops

    Scholastic has posted a versus article, Laptop Vs
    Tablet    , where Gary
    Stager and Dan Brenner duel over what is the best. Both arguments are very weak.
    Mr. Stager takes the old arugment that the iPad is a consumption
    device    :

    The iPad is a consumption device. Sure, you can use it for Web browsing, video-watching, or note-taking, but the laptop affords a much greater range of expressive possibilities. Appleā€™s embrace of digital textbooks reinforces a quaint view of education that transfers agency from learners to publishers. The tools for creating e-books, such as iBooks Author, require Macs, but the laptop cannot read the books it creates, forcing schools to choose between textbooks and computing. Apple has made it clear that education is about content delivery and testing, no longer about the power to be your best.

    The argument is no long valid. Creation apps that I have used on my iPad include
    Codea, Pythonista, iMovie, Garageband, Elements, iA Writer, Google Drive, and
    QuickOffice. Instead of telling us why an iPad isn’t the right tool, tell us why
    a laptop is.

    On the other hand, Mr. Brenner tells us what they do on the
    iPad    . Paperless
    workflows, email, textbooks, these are some of the things they do on the
    tablets. I didn’t see anything in the list that you can’t also do on laptops. In
    fact, he ends the column with “P.S. I wrote this article on my laptop computer
    at work. It seemed like the right tool for the job!”.

    The final decision in these discussions usually boil down to:

    1. What can we afford?
    2. What can we support?
    3. What supports our teaching?

    How did your district decide?

  • Gadgets and coding core to schools

    Geeking out young: gadgets and coding need to be core in US schools

    Though many feel that there are already too many gadgets and too much internet in kids’ lives, Arboleda and One Laptop per Child have the opposite viewpoint. He said that a laptop could become a precious, transformational object for a child, taking them to new places in their personal development — especially if coupled with internet access. As for the sorry state of computer science in schools stateside, Yongpradit emphasized the need for teacher certification programs in computing, building a curriculum the same way math and sciences were: one block at a time. Arboleda took it a step further, saying that access to digital tools and internet has become “a basic human right” — severely disadvantaging those who lack them.