Always wanted to publish that book?

With Issuu, you can upload a PDF file and quickly turn it into an ebook (for free), including embedding it into a website. Wouldn't this be a cool way to publish student work in a way that is elegant and visible to their peers and parents?  Sure beats the heck out of printing student papers and sending them home.  Visit http://issuu.com to find out more.

How Online Learning Impacts Music Instruction

It's amazing how technology is transforming education...maybe not so much in our actual classrooms (yet?) but in the many and diverse ways we and our students can now learn.  Check out this post on online piano lessons.  Bottom line:  There is no reason you can't learn something if and whenever you want.

iPad Communities

Over the past term and a half, Instructional Technology at Exeter has hosted bi-weekly Lunch & Learn sessions to share our experiences, app discoveries and excitement about our iPad initiative. With the investment of a decent wifi hotspot, it's proven to be a great opportunity for our faculty to get together in a casual atmosphere to hear and see what our students and teachers are doing. There's always that great moment when a Music teacher says to a History teacher, "Wow, I could use that in my class!" or vice versa.

This week, we hear from an Art teacher whose students have been drawing and painting on the iPad. She's used VoiceThread to record their work and play it back, stroke by stroke. Fascinating stuff. Next term we hope to broaden the Lunch & Learn series to look at other technologies beyond, and perhaps still linked to, the iPad program.

I've also begun a program I have nostalgically named iPad Show & Tell (I really liked Show & Tell in kindergarten). Its premise and investment are simple: I plug my iPad into the projector in the lobby of our "commons"--which is located between the teachers' coffee and mailboxes--and "play" with a different iPad app each time. I chose an hour when students are in Assembly and two thirds of our faculty are free. I've already had a couple of teachers show up to market their own favorite apps; I just plug their iPad into the connector and they're on the big screen. Easy.

The best ideas are the simple ones. Maybe Robert Fulghum was right: you do learn everything you need to know in kindergarten.

Quizlet

Cool study/flashcard tool available across platforms (Win/Mac/iOS/Android)

http://youtu.be/n7QgCZAkIk8

iPads lead to Web2.0 discoveries

As our iPad initiative evolves, we're finding teachers are now asking for collaborative tools that may have been around in the past, but now have applicability on our new mobile devices. Thanks to the person(s) who put this comprehensive list of collaborative tools together:

http://cooltoolsforschools.wikispaces.com/Collaborative+Tools

The iPads are coming! The iPads are here!

Through a generous gift of the Trustees of Phillips Exeter Academy, full time faculty will begin their teaching year with an iPad2 in hand. About two thirds of them have already been picked up by faculty over the summer. The agenda for Faculty Week will include an iPad training session later this month to give all of our teachers a jumpstart on using these handy devices. In addition to the faculty devices, two sets of iPads will be circulated to classes this term to give teachers a chance to test the merits of the iPad in class and to give students a chance to put them through their paces as a course tool for texts, research and project creation. The Academy Library has also purchased eight iPads to use in the pursuit of bibliographic research. It will be great to see what this creative community does with such an innovative tool readily available. Check out the Exeter iPad cover below:

Summer Fun

Now that Summer is coming to a close (a moment that makes me simultaneously sad to see the daylight hours shortening and excited to see colleagues and students returning again soon), I've finally set aside a moment to write a post about how we began summer this year at the Academy: Tech Camp!

Formally called the Technology Workshop, "tech camp" was a three-day event, organized by a group of faculty and ITS staff chaired by Director of Studies Laura Marshall. The agenda included workshops taught or facilitated by our own faculty on topics including Skype and other video, Blogs and Wikis at School, iPad and Digital Readers, and Facebook and other social media. The series included a fascinating (both technically and with regard to content) Skype conference with W. Brian Arthur, author of The Nature of Technology: What it is and how it evolves. The culminating event was an open discussion on Harkness Teaching in the 21st Century, to which we invited via videoconference Howard Levin, Director of Educational Innovation and Informational Services at San Francisco's Convent and Stuart Hall Schools of the Sacred Heart. Mr. Levin will make a return appearance in person at our opening of school faculty workshops.

The workshop series came together quickly under Ms. Marshall's guidance, and through a significant amount of collegial collaboration at a very busy time of year by faculty who have been innovators in their use of emerging technologies. Susan Keeble, Eimer Page, Johathan Wang, Tom Seidenberg, Lundy Smith, Elena Gosalves-Blanco, Brian Sea, John Blackwell and I co-taught sessions, under the helpful support of ITS instructional tech staff Marilee Tuomanen and director Shelley Nason. It was GREAT to hear how colleagues used these tools, how enthused students have been about them, and to think about how they might be applied across the curriculum. And, of course, the rare opportunity to spend three days with faculty from various departments was priceless. Thanks to Kathleen Curwen (former Dean of Faculty) for conceptualizing this fun workshop. About 30 people participated in the workshop series this June.

iPad Adventures

Having recently spent a week at home recuperating from a back injury, I found the iPad extremely convenient! First of all, it lasted three days before I had to recharge it. Second, I could read and respond to all of my email conveniently. Of course I could search the web to my heart's content. And, finally, I played around with my favorite apps and added a few more.

Our other iPad "piloteers" (is that a word?) are having equal fun. This week at our iPad meeting we learned how to take a screenshot (hold down power and home buttons until the screen flashes, then look in Photos for the screenshot). A swimming coach, Lundy Smith, shared how he's capturing video on a camera and then uploading the videos to the iPad, which he described as a very convenient and timely way to review swimming form and progress with students poolside rather than waiting until later. Since the kids are at the pool, they can immediately take note of suggestions and apply them to the rest of their practice.

At the iPad meeting, we also took a look at some of the great resources available on iTunesU: archival film, audio, lectures, performances of every kind, arts. Wow. So much to explore. I almost wish I had another week of recuperation (not really). :)

eReaders

Here's a very interesting post on how to use (mostly free) software with a Kindle for organizing and reading professional digital materials. I agree with the author: my eyes sting after a whole day of reading my computer screen, so I may check this out. If you read the comments section, you'll also find some iPad tips for doing the same thing.

http://chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/integrating-an-e-reader-into-your-workflow/30668

iPads at Exeter

Watch this blog for more on our iPad experiments

Cartooning Software as Educational Tool

Here's an interesting article in The Chronicle on the use of Cartooning sites in academia.

eBook readers

Well, we broke down and bought a Nook for Christmas, so I've been thinking about how I would create my class materials for students who have an eBook reader to prevent their having to carry around a messy, spiral-bound paper copy that falls apart regularly. Probably wouldn't be hard to make a PDF of the whole thing on our snazzy multifunction copier that scans to PDF.

So that got me to thinking how great it would be for publishers to turn those ginormous science books that cripple the kids into ebooks. And how less expensive distribution and order processing would be for the publishers.

Today I came across this article on a listserv:

Where are all the ebooks?

Happenings

Wow, it's been a long time since I posted here. What's been happening at Exeter? I spent about a year writing a document that describes our first few years of tablet adoption by our faculty. We have deployed 80 tablets so far in various academic departments. We have also updated many classrooms to include projection of one kind or another. The tablet study was an attempt to capture a snapshot in time of the project to move to mobile devices, of which the tablets are a large part.

We've implemented a new tracking system, so community members can now submit a "case" directly into our system via email. That's been an interesting tool to see where our support time is spent and to track trends so that we can better anticipate support needs.

I am also in the throes of coordinating the selection of our next LMS after surveying our faculty on their use of our current LMS. We are down to the actual selection, a detailed look at tools, demos to faculty, and those worries that wake you in the middle of the night, like "I have to remember to check if product X does feature Y?"

We're also piloting technology to conduct 360-degree audio and video recording of class discussions (available to teachers who wish to self-evaluate), which ought to be an interesting and revealing documentation of what "Harkness" really is, one teacher and one class at a time.

iPhone article

Interesting article on the iPhone in education on the Gadgetlab page of Wired.

Flipping Over This Camera

This past fall my son, then a college student in NH, was contacted by a TV news program with a nice deal: go to see presidential candidates and film them and the news program would supply a free video camera that he could keep. What college student wouldn't take that deal? So for the price of admission to one event, he got a cool little Flip video camera.

I dusted around the camera once in a while but never really looked at it until I needed to film something. I borrowed his camera and, voila, a whole new world of video filming, editing, and publishing came alive in my hands, all contained in a device not much larger than a deck of cards.

The model of FlipCam I used stores up to an hour of video. When you get done recording, you take it to your computer and pull a little lever on it that "flips" out a USB connector, which you plug into your computer. Upon doing so, my computer prompted me to install the software that transfers the video from camera to computer, which installed easily and quickly. Then, literally, with a single click I downloaded all the video from the camera and began picking and choosing scenes.

A cool feature of the software is that you can pick any frame in your video and make it a still image (jpg). When graduation day came along, we took the video camera, even though we only wanted stills. That way, if your subject blinks or moves, you have the previous and next frames to choose from, which, with my amateur photography skills, significantly raises the success rate.

In just a few minutes, I learned to love this little camera. This summer when we hosted the 25th Annual Anja S. Greer Conference on Secondary School Mathematics, Science and Technology, one of our presenters forgot his video camera, so I just loaned him the FlipCam for the week. No training, no handholding. It just worked. He paid me back in new batteries.

This summer I've been thinking a little about how one could use this type of camera in the classroom. Certainly, it would be great for recording skits or for students to prepare video for a project. I bet there are a million other uses. It's not a lot different than using your cell phone camera, but, for my carrier at least, it is much easier to access and work with the recorded video.

The only problem with this sweet little portable device is that it is so easy to take anywhere that my son has taken it with him to grad school, so now I think I'm going to have to go buy one myself. The company even lets you buy a branded one that supports a good cause. Now I just have to figure out how to choose among them.

Tweet Deal

The microblogging tool, Twitter, is becoming increasingly visible. Twitter allows you to publish short posts, or "tweets" to a list of "followers," those who subscribe to your Twitter identity. I found out recently that our astronomy teacher, John Blackwell, director of Grainger Observatory, is now using Twitter to keep his students apprised of the weather so they'll know whether to come out to the observatory. How convenient! John has integrated his tweets into the observatory website (see image at right) but chose Twitter because students could subscribe to it on various media (phone, web, email). Stellar use of a new web 2.0 tool (pun intended).

Mobility and Convergence

Today I played with my friend's new Dell Mini 9, a netbook (little, light, and, well, incredibly inexpensive laptop) that is about 2 pounds and runs a Linux Ubuntu Operating System. It is small and light and the battery lasts over 5 hours and it is reasonably easy to type on and the screen is great. I am thinking of getting one of these netbooks just for the convenience of having a laptop with me wherever I go. It is really most useful for using the Internet, although it has OpenOffice on it, so I could certainly do some of my "productivity" work, like writing documents and using spreadsheets, but I still couldn't run my calendar, except by using the web client. Experience may prove that for 99% of what I do, I will only need the Internet, but I'm not sure. In the meantime, it is fun to try these new devices.

I'm still waiting for the "perfect" device, though. Initially I thought that it was going to be an iPhone-like device that would run the Office productivity suite I need to use for my work but still let me have all the creature comforts I would like (such as the ability to plug in to a projector or external monitor, and to use a keyboard and/or mouse for those big document edits or for when I'm grading papers). Now, I'm not so sure. I would like a tablet version of the mini, something that I could write on with a pen for the times I want to grade papers or use to take less conspicuous electronic notes in a meeting. Somehow the noiseless pen doesn't bother people in meetings, but the clicking of the keyboard does, and now that I work out of three different buildings, I've made a real commitment to taking all of my notes electronically so I'll have them wherever I am. I also love having my music with me, but since there are now many Internet radio services (like Pandora and Last.FM), that is less of an issue now, although I try not to use it at work so I'm not hogging the bandwidth for my personal enjoyment.

I had hoped I'd be able to carry one device in my pocket that was phone, camera, document editor, music player, and presenter. The mini is getting very close to that, although I still can't carry it in my pocket (but I could put it in a purse or backpack very easily). As for the camera, I could pay a few more dollars for an integrated webcam (I would probably do that) or connect a little camera/webcam, and as for the phone, Skype is now providing an application that I could use to place Internet calls as long as I was in a WiFi hotspot.

Things are converging. We are moving into a new era where devices are getting much more portable and access to services is almost entirely web-based, so we're no longer tethered to offices and classrooms and desks and the equipment sitting on them (see The Netbook article below). That is good, since I'm finding myself a mobile worker right now. It is also an interesting time to find out what software and hardware we can't live without and how those amagingly creative engineers out there can figure out how to integrate those still-must-have tools and services into our mobile devices.

Cool Conference Opportunity

I attended this conference last year and found it valuable, first to learn a little more about what's out there for Web 2.0 tools, but mostly to meet other instructional technology afficionados.

http://www.iste-community.org/events/teaching-with-new-and-emerging

Citrix

Here at Exeter we use a number of applications to expand what students learn in the classroom. into their homework time. Examples include Fathom and Graphical Analysis and Mathematica. So that students (and teachers) can access this software from anywhere, we host many applications that are used in the classroom on our Citrix applications server. This way, students can use them whenever they need them, from the dorm, from home, or anywhere they can get an Internet connection. No excuses that they couldn't get to the computer lab! And teachers who live on campus and off, or who need to travel, can also access these programs remotely. Pretty neat.

The Netbook

Interesting article. I might just have to shell out a couple of bucks to get one of these cute little netbooks. :)

The Netbook Effect: How Cheap Little Laptops Hit the Big Time

Posted using ShareThis

Document Camera Showcase

On February 24, ITS hosted a Document Camera Showcase to give faculty a chance to play around with four different camera models. A new device about to make it into the classroom standard at Exeter, a document camera is like an overhead projector, but it project much more than transparencies. One can display, for example, text, art, homework, peer edited writing, maps or a 3-D object on a projection device. We, in ITS, wanted to know what features and functionality our teachers thought were most important. We also wanted to know where teachers might like the camera to be located in their classrooms.

With the enticement of homemade chocolate chip cookies, we had a dozen and a half teachers walk through the showcase and try their hand at projecting student math work, Japanese exercises, maps, 3-D objects, and, sometimes, well, just their hand.

We also demonstrated how each camera recorded still images and video (and in some cases audio), and we gave teachers the opportunity to see how the camera might interact with the TabletPC.

Since the focus of a Harkness classroom is the table, the document camera can help keep everyone seated and still allow everyone in the room access to the same material when that material is not digital (yet). We see great potential for use of document cameras in programs in mathematics, the visual arts, modern languages, history, and other areas.

TabletPCs Outside the Classroom

In a school with a "triple threat" (teaching, coaching, and dorm residence), it's not surprising that our teachers have found innovative uses for the TabletPC outside the classroom. In our TabletPC Users Group meeting this past week, Math instructor Karen Geary showed us how she uses the TabletPC to coach field hockey. She has found it indispensible for preparing for practices and maintaining "institutional" coaching knowledge, such as the routes for practice runs. See an image at left that Karen created just using OneNote. Keeping track of what her team did in practice last season has been very helpful this season!

Karen also used GoogleEarth to create practice run routes and posted them for new kids (and new coaches) so they'd know where to go when she called for a particular run. See below for an example.

As a dorm affiliate, I can also think of ways I might use the tablet to do check in, to run dorm meetings, room selection, proctor selection and so much more. I think that flexibility to environment is one of the strengths of mobile computing in general and the tablet platform in particular. I also know I've started to find a million ways to use my tablet for all the areas of my life. It seems silly not to take advantage of the ease of use for doing research (URL is pasted in along with the text you copy in OneNote), compiling notes for a piece of writing, and searchability and convenience of having everything in one place. Now how exactly did I get along without this little device before? My only wish: somehow make it run all day on battery, let it be light enough to hold in one hand comfortably, and configure it so that it is small enough to fit in my pocket, but so my old eyes can still read it. A design challenge?

Siftables

Check out this cool demo on TED.

Mathematica

A few of our math teachers attended a conference recently to refine their use of Mathematica, a Wolfram product, that offers a wealth of opportunities for classroom use, both in the Math and Science departments. Here are a few comments from one of the attendees, Math instructor Masami Stahr:

I was a novice user to Mathematica, and I am not quite efficient using it yet,
but I started using the software to integrate problem-solving skill with
visualization, especially 3-D graphs. Students generally understand better
when they can see the problems. The Mathematica website has a lot of
demo projects that I can download and then modify them to suit my
usage. This can be done without extensive knowledge of Mathematica.
To get more proficient, I will try to spend more time on Mathematica next
summer in hopes of further incorporating this software into the Exeter
Math curriculum. I am quite excited to use this flexible software in my
classroom and look forward to finding more creative ways to enhance student
learning.

Update on Tablet Program

Well, Winter term has officially begun, despite, or perhaps because of sleet, snow, ice, power outages, and all sorts of other gifts from Mother Nature in the past few weeks. As of this term, we have deployed about 70 tablets to our teachers (about 50% of the faculty) with generally satisfactory--and sometime extremely satisfactory--reception.

I have continued using my tablet, this time to teach web design. There are a few wrinkles: to figure out the most efficient way to access some things across the wireless network, how to show students what they need to do from an environment that is different, for starters. But it is already clear to me that the advantages thoroughly outweigh the disadvantages.

Here's today's epiphany: I am in a new classroom now that is equipped with a wireless projector, and today, as I began to stand to write something on the board, it occurred to me that I could just project it from the tablet without moving, and "voilà" there it was. At first, I asked myself, "Why does it matter if I use the tablet instead of the board?" But then I realized that if a student misses a class, I will have a record of what we covered in OneNote and can pretty easily replicate the missed class with the student. Very cool.

Tools, Tools, And More Tools

As I begin the task of trying to decide which tools to explore for possible inclusion into our Emerging Technologies course (to debut Spring term 2009), I am feeling simultaneously excited and overwhelmed. There is so much out there! (Check out our blog's sidebar for some of them.)

So, I'm thinking I will need to decide what media types/communication channels I want our students to experience (and I'm sure they'll have some I've not yet discovered), to try to narrow down the list to put together a cohesive syllabus.

In the mean time, I'm having fun playing with GoogleMaps, Twitter, ClustrMaps, Zamzar, and literally scores of other tools, looking for information on what appears to be moving to the mainstream (read: being offered on iGoogle or Facebook, for instance) and which are less well known. Although some of the less well known tools are innovative, I am reluctant to have a class of students add content on which they are dependent for a grade, as these types of tools may well evaporate overnight. Sounds like a call for a "data retention policy" for anything stored on a web 2.0 app, doesn't it?

Professional Development

A group of Exeter instructional technofolk and I attended a professional development workshop yesterday at Nobles and Greenough School and it was a very exciting day. We caught up with IT friends from other schools, met some we only knew by screenname, and learned more (there's always more) about Web 2.0, useful tools, and teaching that had us all chatting in the car all the way home. Most thought-provoking for me, though, was Will Richardson's comment that we need to transform our own personal learning strategies before we can transform our teaching.

That comment had me thinking about all the time I spend researching on the web for my vocational and avocational activities. Yesterday we were treated to a great presentation on RSS. Although I understood before the talk the concept of Real Simple Syndication that uses a "reader" (such as GoogleReader, BlogLines, or others) to collect, or "aggregate" postings from the websites you frequent, I didn't understand the power of the reader to conduct searches for me, to organize my materials, to track what I'm reading and what others are reading.

I have spent a bit of time this afternoon setting up a reader and a few feeds to get my head around RSS. I have also explored a few of the new tools that we saw yesterday. More on that later...It's so nice to come away from a day of professional development energized and not exhausted. Thanks to Tom Daccord for organizing a great day!

How do I start?

David Warlick, an educator/author in North Carolina, has posted a concise and encouraging item on his blog that offers concrete advice and suggestions for sticking one's toe into the Web 2.0 water. Since I'm in the process of writing a new curriculum for an emerging technologies course I'll be offering next spring, I found this particularly interesting. He also offers excellent resources to learn more. (Thanks David!) Happy reading....

http://davidwarlick.com/2cents/archives/1355

MindMapping

I just came across this cool freeware that might be a good tool for project management as well as the more traditional mapping tasks. I might try it out on my tablet when I get the chance.

http://freemind.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Main_Page

Engage Me!

At our school, learning is student-centered, but this video still challenged me.

The Play's the Thing

Apparently the play is the thing this week. The English department has been here by storm, sometimes two classes to a room, to watch scenes from Hamlet. There was a celebratory air to the room (and not too much fresh air) when two classes met together in F format to watch the play in preparation for analysing it carefully after the Thanksgiving break.

Classes end Friday for the week, and then they resume November 27. Judging by the constant traffic down here, I think the quote I heard yesterday that this is "the busiest week of the term" is probably true.

Internet Services

If you have not yet read The World is Flat, by Thomas L. Friedman, you may be surprised by this NY Times article describing how, in addition to business services, the Internet is now providing personal services, like math tutoring. The article also describes a service provider whom you can ask to do personal tasks, like making reservations, buying gifts, and so forth. A $50 fee/month gets you 49 tasks. Sign me up.

Academy Building Classroom - Testing

While we wait for small items to be completed in the experimental classroom, the technology is undergoing rigorous testing. The teachers' requirements for the room are:

1. 1. to enhance Harkness teaching by not dominating the room,

2. to be easy to use, and

3. to allow the teacher to use technology without "breaking the Harkness circle," which means to get up from the table and shift the focus from the student conversation onto the teacher.

The technology in the room includes a projector and screen with an AV rack with DVD/VCR, cable tuner, document camera, VGA and various video and audio connectors. The entire system is managed through a Crestron controller. This configuration allows the teacher to sit at the table with the students and navigate among the various sources through a web page.

The picture above shows the web page used to control the devices on a TabletPC. Through it I am able to turn on and manage what I want to present. The picture depicts the "remote" for a DVD/VCR and a movie is being displayed through the projector to the screen. Note - no ugly cables with which to contend!

Document Camera

Today in my Junior Studies class (which meets in the experimental classroom) I fired up the document camera and moved through a book of old Exeter photos. The students have been reading meditations and essays from and about Exonians of the past, and they are about to move further back in Exeter time in their upcoming assignments. The old photographs allowed them to see Exeter with a different perspective than their own 2007 view. The images were a big hit with the kids, as was the document camera, which resulted in a few spontaneous outbursts of "sweet!".

Audacity is Awesome

I have a language teacher who came to me with a question: isn't there some technology that can help one of my students practice listening to, imitating, and perfecting his second language? This particular student just needed additional reinforcement to hear the differences between his speech and that of a native speaker.

I set the student up with a microphone/headset and helped him learn how to use Audacity (great shareware program if you don't know about it) such that he can listen to snippets of a dialogue, then mute the native speaker's voice and add his own on a separate soundtrack. Then he can compare the two, either by listening to them one at a time or simultaneously. In addition to the auditory reinforcement, Audacity provides a spectrogram of the audio, kind of a voiceprint waveform of the speech sound, which is another cue from which the student can learn.

Through a little practice time, I showed the student that the more closely his spectrogram matches that of the native speaker, the more "correct" his speech is going to be. As a fledgling linguist, I learned how to "read" a spectogram and could identify vowels, consonants, fricatives, and so on by sight, rather than by sound. Audacity has many great features that let you stretch out or slow down the audio, and its visual representation, to help kids who may be more visual than auditory learners improve language acquisition.

At the end of a 15-minute session (much of which was spent just figuring out our approach), the teacher told the student he could already hear a difference in his pronunciation! Such a small investment of time and equipment made such a great difference. The student's face beamed with the encouragement from the teacher and we sent him on his way, headset in hand. Pretty exciting.

Academy Building Experimental Classroom Update

It is so exciting to see that the technology in the Academy Building experimental classroom is finally in place and tested. The wiring for the projection screen was completed today and whiteboards are on order. Although room construction was completed in early September, supporting the start of school redirected ITS resources, delaying the project a bit.

To get a sense of our excitement, take a look at the before and (almost) after pictures.

Before picture:

The work in progress:

The next steps will be to introduce the room to the disciplines located in the building: classics, history, mathematics and religion. Department chairs will determine how the room will be scheduled. A few faculty members have discovered this room, which is located on the lower level. Pictures of the finished room will be posted when available.

In Full Swing

Well, fall is upon us, school is in full swing, and teachers have reserved the lab and classroom for 18 classes so far this week. Uses ranged from classes writing in our computer lab to teachers presenting various pieces of art for student critique. Some teachers used discussion boards and others played with a wiki for the first time.

In the evenings, proctoring has resumed. Through the creative time-management skills of our 30 student workers who juggle class, athletics, homework, social lives, and proctoring, the labs remain open for student use until 10 pm.

Faculty Workshops

This is a post from our blogging workshop! In this workshop we defined blogs and wikis, created a few blogs and wikis, and played with them individually and as a group. Here's what else happened that day.

We began school this year with a faculty workshop centering on technology. The morning included a presentation by Dr. Barbara Ganley of Middlebury College. Dr. Ganley, who grew up on the Exeter campus as the child of a teacher, shared her experience of returning to Exeter to speak to the faculty and chronicled it on her own blog.

After the talk, we broke into small groups and attended one of about a dozen workshops taught by our own faculty. It was pretty amazing to hear from our colleagues who have taken the plunge into integrating some sort of technology into the Harkness classroom. There's no formula for that exploration that we can follow from other schools. Our teachers are inventing it daily for the Harkness student and teacher. Presentations covered topics from blogs to podcasts, tablets to YouTube, movie-making to Google Earth.

Some teachers have (some might say wisely) just dipped a toe into the waters, taking one small step at a time. Others have plunged in splashingly. Both styles are great and each has risks. Technology issues often manifest themselves at the least convenient moments, and no teacher that I know wants to look foolish in front of a class of students, especially when one may already feel that the students are ahead of the teachers in this area. Having a Plan B when you work with technology for class or homework is a very good idea. So is harnessing the knowledge and lack of fear the kids already have by letting them run the show. That is very "Harkness," very student-led, which we embrace wholeheartedly around here. Technology need be no exception.

Last term I watched a teacher (who is a self-proclaimed tech newbie) let her students use whatever technology they wished to do their final presentations. There were moments when we weren't sure how we would accomplish some of the students' goals, but we persevered and the young ladies and men came in with interesting, varied approaches--all of them as rich as or richer than an oral presentation without a video component. I was excited, but not surprised, by the variety of tools and technologies the students chose. Some felt most comfortable with an outline in PowerPoint. Others fluently integrated videos into their talks. Still others adeptly moved from DVD to computer to text. All were rich examples of the wisdom of our students.

Very Cool Imaging/Social Software

Imagine what we could do with this in classes!

Academy Building Work Begins

Once again our Facilities department is going to make some magic and transform an old space in the basement of one of our classroom buildings on a very tight deadline. Then our ITS department swarm in and lay the technological foundation that will make this new technology-equipped learning and teaching space a functioning entity.

Magic or not, it is still amazing to see a new space be born out of an old one. I am one of those people who can look at plans and understand the way a space will flow, but I can never envision it in 3D until I actually stand in it. Then, with awe, the 2D plan connects to my 3D visual and it comes together (this is why I'm a teacher/tech support person and not an architect).

I'm looking forward to seeing this technology-equipped learning space and also to the additional technology-enhanced classrooms that will also be completed this summer and early fall on campus. Teachers and students will benefit from having additional distributed support in the academy building. It's very exciting to move even these few steps forward with integrating technology appropriately into the Harkness classroom. Since our manner of teaching and learning is pretty unique at Exeter, it's inspiring to see our teachers invent new ways of learning and teaching that are both engaging technology in a contemporary sense and yet remaining faithful to the Harkness tradition.

Pictures to come soon...

Last Week of School

Ah, another year comes to a close. This week has been busy in the experimental classroom and lab of Phillips Hall. Religion and Contemporary Society students, under the direction of Kathy Brownback, have used the lab several times this week to present their final projects. Students brought in PowerPoint presentations, Internet reference materials, DVDs and video clips from YouTube on everything from The Simpsons and South Park to The Passion of the Christ and The Life of Brian. One student discussed the religious context of the movie Field of Dreams and showed relevant clips. It was interesting to hear the students' interpretations of religious references in contemporary media. But what I found most astounding as I was sitting among the students was the realization that just one year ago--before YouTube--viewing these clips in class would have been an arduous task that would have involved taping, clipping, and retaping these scenes, winding and rewinding tape. Now, they're one click away from anywhere with an Internet connection. The video really enhanced the discussion and I can't imagine how the students would have made their presentations without them.

Speaking of videos, in the classroom this week film-making instructor Brad Seymour's students presented their completed films. How exciting for the students to see the videos they've been working on all term on the big screen! We just should have had a red carpet and some paparazzi for opening night.

The lab has also been hopping with kids writing and printing final papers, so much so that we had to guard the door to have them not interrupt constantly the classes that were using the rooms. The students are feeling the loss of the open lab in this building but we also realize that the renovation plans will be better developed by our experiences bringing classes to the lab for some of the periods of the day. We hope to put a print station down the hall this summer to alleviate that problem for students who just need to print a paper.

And speaking of summer, trainers, committees, conference personnel and summer school faculty are already lining up to use these spaces over the summer. It doesn't look like there will be any idle time, even though the regular session ends tomorrow--just a short break to get the air conditioning going, which is great because it was a muggy, mosquito-y 85 degrees down there by end of day today.

iBT AP Exams

Hooray! We completed the iBT Chinese and Japanese AP exams--unscathed. Wow, what a lot of preparatory work, but thanks to our amazing tech staff, our students had a successful experience.

It was stressful to have the students file in and wait for the test to progress. Just at the very beginning of the exam, we had a power blip that caused the lights to go out momentarily. I thought for sure we were done for, but, again, our great tech folks had supplied UPS power strips and none of the computers hiccupped.

It was hot in the lab with 14 students and 3 adults laboring through the test, but we made it. We are looking forward to hearing the scores for the exams and to having the air conditioning completed. Both should be refreshing.

Teacher Comments

Johnny Griffith: Experimental classroom is nice and neat, and the equipment works very well. Easy to operate. The sound in the classroom is absolutely terrific. The class was watching portions of Macbeth, and we all felt we could hear individual rain drops and horse hooves as they fell. A great experience.

Charlie Terry: Wonderful space; great balance/blend of a Harkness setting and a spacious and convenient room. Plenty of room, but cozy space as well.

Kayoko Tazawa: It is great that multiple students can record their speech at the same time. We can be very efficient.

Christine Robinson: The big screen is like having the "Little Theater" back - i.e., it's close by and provides great viewing & with the table right there, we can move directly to discussion when/if that's part of the class. Thumbs up!

Michelle Dionne: The students seemed to me less stressed about writing on a computer (vs. in-class booklets). Comparing the writing to the in-class work done in Winter term (not on computers), I'd say the students wrote more and the papers are more organized, and certainly easier to read.

Becky Moore: I have tried the computer lab twice. Once I had 330s write English translations of poems in languages that they lived in at home or studied here at school. They saved these to LionsDen and then came into the lab and sent them to the computer. I was logged onto that was attached to the big tv screen. Vi was there the whole time to be sure all technology worked. We sat around the big table and faced the screen where we looked at various translations and I moused changes on my computer that the students were making. I could have had one of them running the mouse and another time I might. I wanted the screen to have the option of hanging vertically instead of horizontally so that we could see more of the text at once. I also was quite aware of the attention that we were all paying to the screen rather than to each other's faces -- a structure that I still wonder about in this arrangement.

For a second class I reserved fat block, assigned re-reading the 40 pages of TRANSLATIONS that the 330s had done so far, and then had them write on the computers for the full fat block. They had open books, notes, electronic data bases for o.e.d. and the Bible, as well as spell and grammar check. They had to think for 15 minutes before they could start writing and then wrote a p.s. in the last five minutes as well as printed out their pieces -- automatically double sided on the lab printer. I was pleased to see the level of specific writing that cited text well and posed questions and explored them. Several students commented that they had never done an in-class and that they found it hard while others said they had done some before and liked the intensity of focus.

This Week Down Under

Things are hopping down under the Elting Room. I've started calling the basement "Down Under," a much nicer term, and more Continental moniker for a Languages building, if you ask me. This week we saw visits from:

• Our principal, who showed snippets of hobbits for his Lewis/Tolkien course
• Christine Robinson, whose students viewed and discussed Kandahar
• Johnny Griffith, who held a writing workshop in the lab and watched Macbeth in the classroom (see Teacher Comments post for more about this)
• Eimer Page's class--they conversed about a film
• Temple Jordan's class practiced writing, speaking, and recording in Japanese
• Becky Moore's English writing students did some Internet research and then wrote
• Mario Alvarez and his French and Spanish classes watched digital Internet video and DVDs

The teachers tell me there is significant value in having a Harkness table at the ready so they can quickly move from activity to discussion without losing precious class time, something I was grateful for in my Phelps Science classroom.

In addition, the lab functions as a work and writing space for students all throughout the day and into the evening until 10 pm. My only regret is that I regularly have to kick students out who are working during their free periods if a class has signed up. For some students, who call this their primary workplace, that has been difficult and goes against the grain of my educator's cloth, since we teach them to find and stick with a place where they can be productive. Perhaps we'll eventually have sufficient space for both classes and students who (wisely) choose to use their frees to get some work done. Of course, there are also a few who are watching YouTube episodes of Lost to relax for a few minutes!

Symbolism

Evelyn Christoph's French class returned today for more experimentation with projection and the TabletPC. As part of the class on poetry, she brought up a picture of a painting to discuss its symbology. Immediately, the students responded by asking "can we just draw on it?" and they got up to the whiteboard and identified with markers the symbols it contained. Then they went back to the poem and used the same technique to locate its symbols. Evelyn described this great teaching moment as a fortunate accident of using the projector to bring richer meaning to the classroom discussion and to provide for greater involvement from the students.

Students Too

Today a student came to see me to ask if she could use the big screen to show a PowerPoint she had created for her English class. After a bit of technical difficulty we finally got it to play. Creative interpretation of literature, creative use of PowerPoint, and a little creative tech support.

This Week in Phillips Hall

• French classes watching French TV news over the Internet on the big screen.
• English classes viewing Shakespeare videos.
• AP Exam preparation and practice.
• Peer-editing of grammar and vocabulary on the projector.
• Japanese class recording audio and comparing it to native speaker audio.
• Spanish class Internet research on vocabulary and current events.

The Beats

The Beats class watches Kerouac et al. on the new plasma screen.

Japanese and Chinese AP Exams

Teachers and students prepare for the first-ever Internet-based AP exams in Chinese and Japanese.

Tablet PC Pilot Group

The TabletPC pilot group meets in the experimental classroom for their weekly meeting. The Academy is testing out a few mobile computing devices to see how well they integrate with the Harkness classroom. Here are some of the pilot participants, all on wireless connection, taking notes on their Tablets.

Instructional Technology Moments

Evelyn Christoph, technology committee representative for the Modern Languages department, has been testing out the "experimental" classroom this week with her French classes. The experiment involves trying out some new equipment now, since Phillips Hall is slated for a major renovation in Summer of 2009. It doesn't seem so, but that date is just around the corner and we need to get teacher/student input now to help inform choices of design and technology for the renovation.

This term, teachers will have access to plasma displays, projectors, TabletPCs, document cameras, and various room control systems.

Evelyn had what I described as an "Instructional Technology Moment" when she projected a drawing of a figure on the whiteboard and invited her students to come to the board and label the figure. The class came alive!

Open for Business!

We have recovered from the floods of last summer in the basement of Phillips Hall and have just opened a new lab and experimental classroom space. It is a very popular location for students, teachers, and classes. Here instructor Becky Moore holds a writing workshop with her English students.