What Can You Find Online for Your Gifted/Talented Middle Schoolers? A Lot.

Often, slower or needier learners get the focus of teachers' and school districts' interventions and budgets while gifted and talented students are overlooked, to the detriment of those easily-bored students and their teachers. Rachele Hall and Wendy Meunier write in techLearning about online resources that offer differentiated learning and more challenge and stimulation for your G/T middle schoolers.

Hall and Meunier divide the available resources into three categories: WebQuests, online projects, and virtual field trips. WebQuests offer real-world problems that require higher order thinking to solve and can be individual or group projects. Five links are provided that give details about WebQuests in general and how to incorporate them into your teaching. There are also lists of available WebQuests divided by grade level and subject. The site WebQuests seems to be the most comprehensive and may be the best place to start your search.

Virtual field trips are easy to incorporate into a curriculum for the whole class or a few select learners. Hall and Meunier provide a great list of links to start your search, including Tramline, which has resources, a book on virtual field trips, and a for-fee software that lets users build their own virtual field trips, which could be a great capstone project for a student or group. Other links provide lesson plans and links to museums. You can also find more virtual field trips in this post from April.

Online projects are also great for differentiated learning. Hall and Meunier describe the best online projects as beginning with a question that leads students "through a series of steps using the Internet to find answers." That search for answers should also offer "opportunities to communicate with students and professionals from other parts of the world." The culminating multimedia project can be presented to parents, peers and/or teachers or published on a website for general viewing. Six of the links lead to more information on how to use or find projects and to lists of available projects and their sponsors. Two of the best known hosts of online projects are iEARN and GlobalSchoolNet. iEARN has been at it 20 years and has projects that focus on science, the environment, and social studies.

The brief descriptions under the links make it easy to narrow in on a few links per category worth investigating. There's also a great list of online resources for teachers, parents and G/T students themselves that offer activities, details on state laws, camps, organizations for the gifted, and the California Virtual Academies, a public, free, online distance-learning program for K-12 students.

SOURCE: "Resources for Teaching the Gifted and Talented" 06/01/08
photo courtesy of http://flickr.com/photos/lorelei-ranveig/2294885580/, used under this Creative Commons license

Still More Ways to Connect: Talkshoe, Wimba, and Zimbra

Previous posts have looked at some of the programs and options teachers can use to connect their students with the world outside the classroom walls, such as MeBeam, Moodle, Coccinella, WebEx, WiZiQ and others. A few other options are worth mentioning, like Talkshoe, Wimba, and Zimbra.

Talkshoe offers community calls that can be joined in by phone or computer, allowing synchronous discussions. These discussions are automatically archived as podcasts that can be listened to later or downloaded and edited. Users can also use text-only synchronous chats. It wasn't clear from the FAQs if voice and chat can be used together, as in MeBeam and some other tools.

Talkshoe provides the software, Shoe Phone, chat rooms, players for podcasts, widgets, storage, bandwidth, directory listing and technical support all for free. If you have previous podcasts from a collaboration, those can be uploaded. There's no limit on recording. Talkshoe Live! Pro software can be downloaded and offers more options like community call host control of the users, see-who's-talking indicators, access through Skype or VOIP, and the ability to handle up to 250 talkers in a call with the potential for thousands to listen.

If you have a class Ning or blog, a Talkshoe embed code can be placed on it. Community calls can be public or unlisted. Unlisted Group Calls only allow invited users to participate or listen, a good feature for teachers concerned about privacy or potential distractions. As a host, you can also control who gets to chat or talk and you can even remove users from the Request-to-talk queue.

Wimba Collaboration Suite can stand alone or be integrated into a course management system (CMS) like Blackboard, Moodle or WebCT. The Suite adds collaborative tools to CMS that do not have them or have limited tools. The Suite offers:

• Wimba Classroom, a live virtual classroom that incorporates video, audio, and application sharing.
• Wimba Pronto, an instant messaging system and voice chat tool for synchronous communication. If you are using it with a CMS, Pronto will automatically add students in a class to a joint list that they can access with ease.
• Wimba Voice which allows live discussions between teachers and students. It is promoted as a great tool for language instruction because it combines oral and written work like an in-the-flesh learning environment.
• Wimba Create, a tool that converts Microsoft Word documents into online content and includes interactive features for the online content like hyperlinks, self-test questions, tables of content and streaming of audio and video.

Wimba is not free but if a school or district is already using a CMS, Wimba can extend the uses of that system to allow more and broader collaboration.

Zimbra offers a Collaboration Suite for educators, too. The Suite includes email, address books, calendars, document sharing and other collaborative tools like VOIP, tags and RSS in an easy-to-use system. Documents can be collaboratively written and edited. Another great feature of Zimbra is its adaptability; it can be used with email programs teachers and schools may already be using like Outlook, Eudora, Apple Mail or Thunderbird. An open source edition is available, as is a version for Blackberries. Zimbra allows administrators to customize the Suite, control spam and viruses, store information more efficiently and economically, and has "favorable educational pricing."

At the Zimbra site, you can find Flash tours of the features. The Flash demos mostly point out business uses, like incorporating orders and meetings via email and a shared calendar. A PDF lists all available options and the packages in which they come.

So what tools do you use with your students?

SOURCE: "Frequently Asked Questions" 2008
SOURCE: "New to Talkshoe?" 2008
SOURCE: "Wimba Collaboration Suite" 2008
SOURCE: "Zimbra Collaboration Suite 5.0" 2008
SOURCE: "Zimbra for Education" 2008

photo courtesy of Larsz, used under this Creative Commons license

How to Flatten a Classroom

Vicki Davis and Julie Lindsay started the Flat Classroom Project profiled in our blog entry
"Taking Down the Classroom Walls: The Flat Classroom and Horizons Projects" last week. In a recent post at the Techlearning blog, Davis outlines the phases teachers and students need to go through to achieve a Flat Classroom project or similar beyond-the-classroom collaboration. At each phase, critical online skills are modeled and taught, which contribute to the success of the Flat Classroom Project, the Horizons Project and similar online collaborative projects and programs.

The first two phases Davis outlines connect students at a school to prepare them for online collaboration. The first phase, "The INTRA-connected Classroom," connects the students in a single classroom with each other. Davis uses a Ning or other "walled" or private blog, instant messaging and Skype within the class, and a wiki for "intraclass collaboration." In this phase, Davis uses a backchannel to "teach appropriate behavior and what it means to be a professional student." She adds that using the technology is easy but "the behavior takes time and vigilance." The second phase, "The INTERconnected Classroom," links classes within a school or site to each other with a Ning or walled blog, interclass projects (good for cross-grade and cross-age collaboration), a wiki, and asynchronous communication through blogs, videos, photos and other non-real-time online sharing and collaborating. This phase, Davis writes, "helps you pick up on potentially troublesome habits of students while ALL students are still under your direction and policies."

The third and fourth phases connect a class to off-site experts and groups. "Flat Classroom: Many to One Connections AND One to Many Connections with Teacher Direction," phase three, connects a class to one person or a single group, like another class. This phase also helps guide and model appropriate behavior. In this phase, a class presents to another class or individual (Davis seems to prefer Skype), interacts with an expert through videosharing or a wiki, and uses public/anonymous blogs (but only for students with parental permission). Phase four, "Flat Classroom: Many to Many with Teacher Management," brings many students together collaborating on a digital project. The teacher still guides group behavior and interactions as needed and is also available to help with technical or project issues. Students write and edit collaboratively and engage in digital storytelling. Experts and other teachers are used to widen the range of experiences and voices heard. RSS readers are used for self-directed student research and learning and to access assignments on a group wiki. Davis writes that this phase can be "overwhelming" but I think her phases are great preparation for the challenge.

"Flat Classroom: Many to Many Connections with STUDENT Management" is the fifth phase and brings teacher and students to the Horizons project level, combining the Flat Classroom with student management of the project and learning teams. Davis emphasizes the need to move through phases to give teachers time to learn and contemplate the process. At Davis' Cool Cat Teacher blog (the Techlearning post is simulposted here), Davis writes about her current classes' progress through Horizons 2008. She has a "Most Valuable Posts" category with useful information for all kinds of online teaching and collaboration. There are also links to wikis and Davis' Cool Cat Teacher podcast for more information and updates.

SOURCE: "The Five Phases of Flattening a Classroom" 3/28/08
photo courtesy of JohnLeGear, used under this Creative Commons license