Class+Email+Archive

Hi everyone,
 * Email #12 - 7/7/2013 **

Hopefully, you have decided which final assignment to try - the online learning space or the UBD unit. Choose the one that feels like the best fit for your situation and for what you want to accomplish with students. Both options should incorporate student use of technology (though not every lesson needs to use tech) as well as what the Parallel Curriculum refers to as "ascending levels of intellectual demand" - a fancy name for differentiation.

Nothing is formally due by the end of today other than participation in the Blog Reading Reaction discussion board and a self-reflection for your work by end of tomorrow. In order to pace your work, however, you may want to check in with me or turn in parts of your final project. Officially, our class ends Friday, July 12th. Grades are not due until after Monday, July 15th. If you will not be able to get all work to me by Sunday the 14th, then let's make a plan of what seems like a reasonable date. I will post your grade as an incomplete until the work is finished and then can change your grade later. If you have already contacted me to send an alternative "end date", you're good - just keep moving forward :).

It would be great if you could post an overview of what you are working on for your final project (a couple of sentences) in edmodo so we can take advantage of our online community and see what everyone else is doing.

I have been so pleased with your online interactions and the resources you have found and provided for one another. I'm still trying to figure out the best way to capture all of your great ideas but know that the discussion board, edmodo, and our class wiki will stay open and available to you throughout next school year.

Everyone who has gotten in touch with me about the final project seems to be right on track, so I am expecting all of us to finish the course with A's provided all assignments are turned in. Edmodo is a good place to check and see what might still be outstanding. I have some grading yet to do for the past week or so. As long as you see that you have turned things in, know that I will get to these as I can. If you need a question answered and I am not getting feedback on work to you quickly enough, send an email.

Keep up the great work!


 * Email #11 - 7/2/2012 **

Hi everyone,

At this point (as of 1:00 pm on 7/2/2012), I think I have put grades into edmodo for all items turned in or otherwise completed. If I have missed something of yours, would you be kind enough to reply to this email and remind me where I can find your work? I want to make sure I keep up with evaluating all of the great learning you are doing so that you can ensure you are on the right track. Additionally, any outstanding assignments from week #2 or earlier have been marked in edmodo with 0 points. This is just here so that I know at this point you have not yet turned something in. As soon as 0 assignments are turned in, I will look them over and give you credit in edmodo's gradebook.

Responses to Week #3's tech tool posts are due by Wednesday of this week. Remember to respond to two people's posts.

Be seeing you online! Enjoy your "independence" on the 4th!
 * Email #10 - 7/1/2013**

Hi everyone,

Today marks the beginning of the end of our course. Over the next two weeks, you'll be working on your final assignments which should be the culmination of your learning from previous weeks and the most practical portion of our time. In assignment #4, you have a choice of creating an online learning space or a unit of study for your own students in your own setting. No matter which option you choose, there shouls be evidence of differentiation and "room" for gifted learners to deepen and expand thinking and knowledge coupled with uses of technology to deepen and expand thinking and learning.

Many of you are trying to balance a lack of technology access in your schools with the requirements of our project. I would rather you create lessons for students that you will actually plan to use this school year. Consider shared use (group work around one device), home use (what can you incorporate that most or all students will be able to "plug in" from home), lab time (if you can schedule one day in a lab, what work can you do before and after that day to make the technology use "count"), and/or technology applications as resources and extensions (optional use).

Remember that assignment #3, your annotated list of resources related to gifted learners is also due at the end of week #5 and could be incorporated into your online space or unit of study.

Readings this week will be from blogs of your choosing. I've posted some resources as a place to start on our week #4 page.

Screen casts and details of the work for weeks 4 & 5 can be found on our wiki. You'll notice that the week #5 page refers back to week #4. Since we have the same themes and assignments for the rest of our course, I blended our final assignments on one page. There are suggested things to complete by the end of week #4, but as long as all work is turned in by July 12th, you will not need to ask for a formal extension of the course.

I will be giving feedback on recently completed work throughout today. I anticipate that a large amount of your work will be turned in on July 12th or close to that date. I will be continuing to update and grade assignments into the following week. Stay tuned to edmodo for feedback.

As always, keep in touch and let me know if you have questions.

http://edsp583.wikispaces.com/Week+4

Hi everyone - we are just a little over our halfway point for our course. How is your work coming? Hopefully you are finding some good tech tools for students.
 * Email #9 - 6/27/2013 **

The technology exploration this week should yield some tools you can implement in your final project - an online learning space or UBD unit of lessons. Perhaps your lesson you critiqued last week may also be something you can incorporate. The idea is that you time is spent with your end goal in mind - creating differentiated lessons for gifted learners which incorporate student use of technology.

I should be finishing up feedback on Internet Lesson Critiques today. Remember that grades and comments are posted in edmodo. When something new is posted for you, there is an "alert" listed on the top right of your screen to let you know what's there.

Week 4 and 5 wiill kind of merge together for our course since we spend that time developing our final projects. Screencasts for the week overview and our final project options and are posted on our wiki.

Let me know if you are having trouble findng resources, or are anticipating you might need to extend your course work time beyond our current July 12th end date.


 * Email #8 - 6/24/2013 **

Hi everyone and happy Monday!

Again, another week of great conversation! If you haven't already, make sure you have responded to at least two peers in our reading reaction space for Week #2. I posted some thoughts which might have answered (or provided my opinion) on questions related to:
 * clarifying Web 2.0,
 * using and setting up blogs for students,
 * parent communication
 * push vs. pull technologies,
 * access concerns,
 * responsible use, and
 * eReader citations.

You all really don't mess around. As you continue to reflect upon and explore your philosophy about how technology fits in with teaching and learning, keep bringing up these same questions or new ones that occur so that we can keep the conversation and thinking going!

**Quick tip:** Trying to keep track of whether you have responded enough times in our boards? On any webpage, you can do a control-F or a command-F to open a small box and do a search for keywords. For example, if I hold down the control key and type the letter F (for find) at the same time, I get a box and can search for K. Given (my username in Collaborize Classroom). This would show how many times the term appears on the page, highlights those instances, have provides arrows for me to quickly get to each use. Our discussions are lengthy - you would need to do this on both pages of the discussion to search the entire thread.

**Internet Lesson Critique:** I will make sure all lesson critiques posted only in the "assignment" in edmodo get in the class feed so we can all view them later today (and as they come in). By the end of the week, choose two of these to review and comment upon. Your comments will be posted in edmodo under where the lesson critique is posted. As in our discussion board, try to choose lessons that seem relevant or interesting to you, but also try to make sure everyone gets feedback on their hard work.

**Tech Tool Week!** This is my favorite week of our class - well, all of them are good, but this one is really great :). This is your 'play' week. You'll be choosing three tools (or apps) to explore and "review" for our class as your 'reading'. Since you need maximum exploration time, this post will not be due until Sunday, rather than our traditional Wednesday post time. What you could do, though, is post in edmodo which tools look promising earlier in the week in case you want to know if others are exploring the same tool (which is fine - you might want to collaborate and/or compare notes on what you find out!). Don't forget about chapters in Will Richardson's book that we haven't had time to explore yet - if you choose a tool that falls under one of his later chapters, you might want to skim it.

**Gifted Resources Project** - You will be starting an annotated list of websites devoted to better serving and understanding students identified as gifted this week. More detail can be found on our wiki. It is not due until the end of our course and could be incorporated into your online learning space project you might be doing as your final work.

You'll find screencast overviews of our assignments and the week's work on our wiki. Remember to turn in your reflection today for last week's work. Check edmodo for grade updates and assignment comments. I will be grading your Internet Lesson Critiques throughout this week.

Thanks!


 * Email #7 - 6/19/2013 **

It’s Wednesday of Week #2 in our course. If you can, try to post your reading reactions to the Week #2 Reading Reactions board in Collaborize Classroom. Each week I will post a separate discussion for our readings to help us focus on the latest info. Some new postings were made in our other boards, Getting to Know You and Week #1 Reading Reactions. If you get some time, go in and read those and post a comment to let our newer folks get to know you.

I've posted a screencast giving an overview of Edmodo from the student perspective. You can find it on edmodo and on our wiki on a page entitled Edmodo. Do a search or use the side menu to find the page. There is also an overview of Week #2 linked on the Week #2 wiki page as well as an overview of our assignment this week posted near the top of the Internet Lesson Critique page.

I've really enjoyed reading your autobiographies, reflections, and comments. This is a talented and thoughtful group. Thank you for continuing to exhibit a courteous and professional tone throughout all of your work. A couple of people have asked about expectations around writing style for the course. I've posted a page in our wiki here: http://edsp583.wikispaces.com/Writing+Expectations to help define what good writing in a graduate level course looks like as well as a connection to our discussion board rubric.

Now that the first assignments have been graded, a few comments. Any assignment that scores less than 100% is open for you to revise for full credit. I will make sure my comments are specific to help you see what can be added or changed to earn more points. I anticipate that there will be a little over 100 points total for all of our assignments - that should help you gauge where to spend your time in order for you to earn the grade you would like for the course.

When I assess participant work, I refer to the checklists or rubrics which are posted for each assignment. I keep an open mind to allow you to express your thinking in a way that works for you. Finally, this is balanced that against some minimal expectations to help you ground your thinking to external standards that are a part of our professional collective knowledge. It's not always a perfect match which is why an open revision policy can help to relieve some stress and make sure we both get what we need out of the assignments. Please know that I appreciate and honor all of the hard work you are doing and any critique comes from a place meant to help you improve or to think more deeply about your growth and practice.

In prioritizing your work, my suggestion is that you do current assignments by the due date and take care of revisions second. Final grades probably need to be posted by July 17th or so. If you are working on a longer timeline for the course or if you turn in significant revisions late in the game, I can always submit a grade change form later in the summer. That being said, early and frequent communication about deviating from our current plan is always helpful and lets me know you're not off alone in the online desert somewhere :).

Finally, I’ll be sending out a weekly check-in to let people know if I am missing any assignments. If you think you have posted your work and I have yet to grade it, know that I am getting to it as I can and will let you know if I can’t find something.

Keep up the excellent engagement and reflection! Let me know how I can help!


 * Email #6 - 6/15/2013 **

Hi everyone, I hope you have found some time to enjoy the weather we've been having! How is it that we've only just started our class and I am already behind in grading? I think I should not have started looking at the discussion board first! Such excellent conversation, I kept wanting to comment on everything, but realize that I also need to provide you with some feedback and evaluation. If you have an edmodo account, that is where you will find your grades. I'll work on a screencast to demonstrate where you will find them after I finish posting grades for discussion and technology autobiographies. As we go into discussion for next week, consider adding in some quotes to better support your connections with what you are reading. Another way to better clarify our posts and to be good discussionists is to embed hyperlinks where appropriate. I've done this in a few of my responses to comments but they can be hard to see. The hyperlink in Collaborize Classroom is orange text and is not underlined. Overall, the content of the posts and the reactions confirms my assumption that you are all caring and committed educators! And that I will learn as much from you as I hope you are learning from one another and from engaging in our course. I've posted an overview of Week #2 in our wiki and an overview of our second assignment when you are ready to tackle these items. As always, let me know your questions or concerns. Email is the most efficient way to get answers from me, though I will certainly address questions I find in the other [|fora] we use.


 * Email #5 - 6/13/2013 **

Hi everyone, I'm seeing some excellent discussion happening on our Collaborize Classroom boards. Great commentary on the readings, some fun summer plans, and the beginnings of a thoughtful, humorous, and caring community! Thank you for engaging! Online discussion is the way we will get to know one another, reflect on our learning, and gain new insights and ideas from all participants. I am learning Collaborize Classroom along with you. Having participated in online discussions on a number of platforms (Blackboard, [|Moodle], Edmodo, Wikispaces as well as others I can't think of right now), I am finding some aspects I like and others I find clunky. I like that the site is based for educators - ad free, easy for students to sign up, management built in - reports of participation and options for assigning groups and discussions to particular students. I don't love that you can't seem to reply to a reply someone has made to an original post. If you want to reply to what someone has said about your original post, or to another comment on someone's post, there is no direct reply option. My suggestion for a work-around is to reply to the original post but put a 'marker' at the beginning to address who you want your comment to be for - And maybe incorporate a version of RSQ (restate the question). For example - in Twitter, we use the @ symbol to include/direct info toward a particular person. **Discussion Expectations:** I love that people have posted their thoughts on the readings (and high quality stuff, to be sure) or have let me know when they plan to get to the posting. The expectation is that you skim all responses. By the end of the week, make sure you respond to at least two other people about their reading posts. If you want to engage more, GREAT! I understand some weeks will be busier for us than others, so engage as much as you can. **Feedback:** As we go through our course, my communication with you will shift from daily group emails to individual comments in the discussion board and feedback on assignments through edmodo. You can expect for me to get back to you within 24 hours when you send a direct email and within the week when you post in discussion and turn in assignments. Remember, this course was designed for you to make choices within assignments in order for your product to be useful for you, your students, and your context. Worry more about meeting your own expectations than meeting mine - at the same time - we all get better from input, feedback, and critical friends. We will work together to help everyone to create the best products we can using everyone's collective knowledge and experience. **Next Week:** Next week, we will move from curriculum models to model uses of technology. As we start thinking about week #2, I will again have some Jing screencasts with an overview and some other, hopefully helpful, instruction and details posted on Saturday. I am still in the process of cleaning up resources for future weeks' work. If you find dead or irrelevant links, let me know and I will address it. If you find better options, you can post on our course pages in the wiki (if you sign up for an account with wikispaces) or edmodo is a great place to do some quick sharing with the group. ** Where Does Technology Fit In? The Big Picture **

So, what is our big picture from Week #2? I would like for you to understand the following from the assigned readings:

As always, let me know if you have questions or concerns. Be seeing you online! Kim Given Adjunct Faculty Xavier University & Gifted Intervention Specialist Indian Hill Middle School
 * What are the basic componenents of good uses of technology in the classroom?
 * What are the benefits of using technology that paper and pencil can't provide?
 * What is the difference from Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 and how will it affect my students?
 * How can technology help me to differentiate instruction and content for students?
 * How can technology help me to better manage student information and progress?
 * How can technology help me to better communicate with the families of my students?
 * How can I recognize a quality lesson incorporating technology?
 * What are my next steps in raising the "level of use" of technology in the classroom?


 * Email #4 - Send 6/11/2013 **

Hi everyone! It's only the second day of our course and already we've done a great job so far of taking the introductory questionnaire, signing up for [|edmodo], signing up for [|Collaborize Classroom], and checking in via email to make sure I have the right addresses for everyone.

While we are still getting used to the format of our online spaces, **this is a friendly reminder to start doing your reading and to try and post in the discussion boards in Collaborize Classroom by the end of the day tomorrow**. I understand if you need more time - just do your best to do the readings and post earlier rather than later so we will be able to get to know one another and so we can comment on one another's posts before the end of the week.

Remember that the wiki has descriptions and the resources of all of our work we will do together. Click on the link for Week #1 to see the detailed listing for this week and to find the readings, a to-do checklist, and links to the resources we will be using. If you are having trouble navigating the wiki, here is the week #1 screen cast to help explain - An overview of week #1: @http://www.screencast.com/t/w1zNyQqx0J

We will not be using Blackboard or Xavier's site since many of you have yet to create/connect to Xavier online. The tools we will be using are online, free, and may be great options for you to use with your own students. It can be hard to know whether they will work without playing around/participating in them. I appreciate that having multiple places to 'go' online increases the complexity and confusion for our course - stick with me. I promise it will get easier and I welcome your suggestions about how to better organize our course.

Finally, I have really enjoyed getting to learn a little about each of you through the intro questionnaire and through other emails and postings. We have 15 people participating in our course and I know we will learn a great deal with one another.

Helpful Links:

Our class materials are on Wikispaces: http://edsp583.wikispaces.com/home

Our discussion board is on Collaborize Classroom: [|http://edsp583.collaborizeclassroom.com]

About our discussion board: http://www.screencast.com/t/lsM5ApSDqPX

A summary of our four major assignments for the course: http://www.screencast.com/t/XtWt7oK1QSe

About edmodo: http://www.screencast.com/t/8i388aYW4A


 * Email #3 - Sent 6/10/2013 **


 * Trouble Signing Up for Edmodo?**

Hi everyone,

Hope you had a great Monday.

If you had trouble signing up for an edmodo account, try signing up with this new group code: **dz8h0k** **Go to:** https://www.edmodo.com/

Choose "I'm a Student" under the "Sign up now." caption. Put group code in the first line. Choose a username and password. Email address is optional (nice for those working with younger students). First and Last name option means the teacher sees real student name when the student posts vs. the student username, which may not be recognizable.

If you haven't yet signed up for a Collaborize Classroom account, do that soon as well. You'll need to wait for me to "approve" your membership request before you will be able to post to our boards. I am in meetings at my school this week but I will check in periodically throughout the day tomorrow to approve request and answer questions posed through email.

 http://edsp583.collaborizeclassroom.com Both edmodo and Collaborize Classroom have iOS apps. Edmodo is free and Collaborize is .99. Not sure yet if it is worth a dollar - I'll know more once people start posting stuff :).

If you have finished the introductory questionnaire and have signed up for an edmodo account, you have your first 'grade' for our class :).

Finally, I received a few positive comments on the mini-lectures I posted using Jing - a program that allows the user to film their computer screen as they narrate. This is a great tool to use if you are considering expanding the resources you have online for your own classes. Imagine having a set of directions audio recorded or maybe a set of mini-lectures that students could view at home, before coming to class, or re-visit, if they needed to hear the info more than once, or to be there, archived, when students were ready for that content!

I'll try to post more of these screencasts throughout our course, but will definitely have them for each week's overview. The free version of Jing limits the videos to 5 minutes or less - which in my opinion, is a good thing! More content, less rambling should be the focus - you may have noticed that I am still trying to work on that goal ;).

http://www.techsmith.com/jing.html


 * Email #2 - Sent 6/09/2013 **

Hi everyone,

I am looking forward to getting to know everyone through our time together this summer in EDSP 583 - Resource Materials and Technology for G/T. Our goal for our time together is to learn more about exemplary curricular design; integration of technology for access to resources, instruction, and differentiation; and ultimately developing awareness and creation of resources that will meet the needs of the students identified as gifted and talented that you work with in your current setting.

**Basic expectations:** I realize that people are coming to this course with varying levels of comfort and experience with technology. We are adult learners, so I expect that you will self-differentiate, where appropriate - set goals that seem reasonable but that allow for you to grow, be open to trying new things and getting out of your current comfort zone, but temper that with what your own tolerance for frustration might be, and finally, if you feel lost, are looking for specific resources, or are ready for something beyond what we are currently covering, communicate with me and with our class participants to get the most of our learning time together. **Key Dates:** This course is arranged to be taken in five weeks beginning June 10th. Some of you will be going on vacation within our time span and/or will have general life details that may get in the way of completing assignments by listed due dates. This course is meant to be very flexible, however, since we will be participating in discussion, some assignments and work will be more time sensitive than others.

**Prioritize:** Feel free to skim selected resources but remember, you'll get more out of our course if you devote some significant time to reading posted resources and engaging in the discussion board. We all need fresh, external input in order to create new works of awesomeness. Post initial responses in Discussion Boards early in each week (by Wednesdays) in order to get the most from the valuable feedback and advice we can offer one another. Do shared work (Discussions or other assignments requiring peer feedback) as close to the original schedule as possible before completing individual assignments. If you are going to be 'offline' for more than three or four days, do the current posting first, then go back and make up anything missed in order to keep us as together as we can be.

**Be a good participant-citizen:** Contribute to our resources and ideas to make us all better Let me know when you notice dead links on our site so I can fix them Be patient with yourself and with one another **Some helpful links include:** The site of our course overview, map, and details of assignments http://edsp583.wikispaces.com/

Some quick overviews of our course and the tools we will be using -

A summary of our four major assignments: http://www.screencast.com/t/XtWt7oK1QSe An overview of week #1: http://www.screencast.com/t/w1zNyQqx0J  About our discussion board: http://www.screencast.com/t/lsM5ApSDqPX  About edmodo: http://www.screencast.com/t/8i388aYW4A

Our class text can be found on Amazon: Richardson, W. (2010). //Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms // (Third Edition ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press.

This is the third email I have sent to class participants. If you joined the class more recently or do not have access to your Xavier email, you can find the content of those emails on our course wiki - http://edsp583.wikispaces.com/ If you are not receiving emails at your preferred email address, please reply with your preferred address included.

Looking forward to learning with all of you! \

Email #1 - Sent 6/4/2013

<span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #000000; display: block; font-family: Tahoma; font-size: 10pt;"> Hi everyone,

Our online course, EDSP 583 - Resource Materials & Technology for G/T, begins next Monday, June 10th and runs through July 12th. You can find the course overview and materials at http://edsp583.wikispaces.com/home.

We'll begin week one with some sharing some info about ourselves and our current level of comfort with technology use. We'll also be looking at different models of curriculum and instructional design to remind ourselves of good practices we will want to use when designing our own units and online spaces later in our course.

Remember that the beauty of doing an online course is that there is more flexibility with when you do assignments. We will be working on a week by week basis, so find the times that work best for you, understanding that there will usually be check in points at the middle and the end of each week to keep discussion flowing and assignments on track. If an emergency arises and we need to adjust dates - the earlier I know, the easier it is to allow for flexibility of timelines. If you know ahead of time that you will not have access to the internet for longer than 3 or 4 days at any given time during the course, let's work to figure out a reasonable adjusted timeline now.

For those of you who I had the pleasure of meeting with earlier in the spring, I mentioned that we will be designing activities and resources appropriate for your current role in your school. Hopefully, you have an idea or two in mind of where you would like to focus your work for the course - as in, choosing an area of your curriculum (or something related to the services you provide in your school) that could use a little TLC - technologically speaking. You don't have time to waste on stuff you can't use. Make sure that the focus of your work this summer makes sense for your setting, students, and the resources that are available to you. That being said, remember that great technology use is no longer limited to monthly jaunts to the computer lab (if that exists where you are). There are many exciting ways to use mobile web enabled devices as well as creative opportunities for the one computer classroom. Balance your reality with an openness to looking at current barriers from a different perspective.

Sorry! This email is already too long! If you have a different email address you prefer that I use to stay in touch during our course, please respond to this message with your alternate address. I will be checking in with you again Monday, June 10th. In the meantime, please feel free to contact me about any questions you have.