Presented by Ryan Schaaf of Howard County.

The last time I attended a session on using games in education I was under whelmed, but I think that was more from the presenter than the subject.  I am cautiously optimistic.

• First paper handout I’ve seen this conference.  Printed PowerPoint slides.
• “Let’s start with your Door Prize!  … I left it at home.”  It was cards for a contest for a game called “Legend of Zork.”
• In games the teacher is the guide and students learn through exploration.
• “Mirrors how humans think and how the mind works.”
• His slides are walls of text.  I don’t think it’s hurting his presentation too much though.  He’s not just reading the slides, and paging through the handout shows that these are just to front-load background information.
• Gaming appeals to multiple intelligences. (Yay, Gardner!)
• “Teaches without its main purpose as teaching.”
• Can be used to train in low-risk environments. Military, Aviation, Medical, Financial, and so on.
• Motivation, Instructional Strategy, Closure, Assessment, Review, Reteach.
• Current slide is showing the cover of GTA4 (very violent, not for kids) and the hunting scene from Oregon Trail (with LOTS of dead animals).
• Gaming DOES NOT EQUAL babysitting.  (Same deal with TV, movies, Discovery Education Streaming, etc. – It needs a purpose!)
• “The teacher has to be there to guide and direct.”
• Use careful and deliberate search terms to find high quality educational games.
• Showing a sample game on composting from http://bravekidgames.com/
• Lore of the Labyrinth from Thinkport.  I think I’ve seen this game presented at this conference before.  It teaches math but not in a dry style.
• http://shodor.org/activities/ for High School students.
• Quia – pay to make games but play them for free.  I’ve toyed with this before.  They have a free trial.
• Thinkfinity.org – Engineering
• Showing data concerning gaming activity.  Students did not just enjoy it, they also spent more time engaged in the lesson.
• “I’m not saying it should always be used, I’m saying it’s a good tool and at least as effective as other strategies.”

Presented by Roxanne Dean & Linda Jones, both from Baltimore County.

• Honestly, could anyone who knows me expect me to attend any other session?  It’s Art! It’s Technology! This is what I do.
• Demonstrating Voicethread used to teach a lesson on drawing a human face.
• “At this point they haven’t thrown me out.” Said RE: How many Voicethread pages she has.
• 5th graders drew self portraits then turned them into contour line drawings and learned about Andy Worhol.
• “Why do you think we need to do this in contour?”
• They reproduced their drawings on the computer.  No scanning or photography?  Would be nice to have the time for that.  In my case I may have to use something like this to digitise student work.
• Showing Art Content Standards.  Yes, this is an art lesson!  It’s not just token “Let’s color something and say we did art!”
• Showing lots of Pop Art.  Comment about how things that Warhol thought were important are not recognised by today’s kids.  Interesting snapshots of the culture at the time.
• So apparently Voicethread lets you record video with your voice.  That could be helpful for students who are ESOL or have certain disabilities.  Seeing someone’s lips move as they talk can certainly help to aid comprehension in some cases.  (It helped me in college, especially with some professors who had strong accents.)
• A cow is used to signal clean-up time.  Students expect it and are used to the routine.  Makes me wonder how I might implement a similar strategy – perhaps with a school mascot?
• Students used the paint brush tool in Pixie to redraw their line drawings.
• Copy/paste used to get 4 identical panels, then the panels were colored separately with the paint bucket.  (Watch out for cracks!  The colors will leak through!)
• While this was done with Pixie, I see how this could be done with other art programs.  GIMP, SUMOPaint, TuxPaint, Frames, even!  … Am I starting to sound like a broken record?
• “Zoho” used to embed art on a site for parents to see progress.
• Showing an example made starting with a photo.  Apparently the photo needs to be “glued” to keep it from fading.  I imagine layer settings could protect it in GIMP/Photoshop/SUMOPaint.
• “Photoshop is a little advanced for 5th grade.”  Not if my 3rd graders are making vector graphics in Frames.  Give me a day or two and they can do it.
• A conference is not worthwhile if you don’t find something you can take with you and use the next school day.  This presentation is all I need for MSET to be worth it, and it’s only the 2nd session!  Can we say this is an awesome conference? Yes we can!

Presented by Diane Boarman, Howard County

This is possibly one of the smallest rooms I’ve ever been in, and there are few if any empty chairs.  Meanwhile the walls are doing little to block out the noise of convention center staff moving things around.  Nevertheless, the show must go on.

• Created her first animation using Layers in Photoshop, but her school didn’t have Photoshop.
• Switched to placing images in PowerPoint.
• Suggests PlayDoh for claymation.  If the lesson takes a while the PlayDoh can dry out, even with sealing it regularly though.  Parafin based clays can be purchased at craft stores and never dry out.
• Make sure slides are imported in order – some programs have a fit and put slide 10 in front of slide 2 because 1 is more than 2, right?  Watch for that.
• Still suggesting Photoshop or Photoshop Elements.  On a shoestring budget I’ll use GIMP.org or SUMOPaint.com.
• Images not in the rectangle for a PowerPoint slide will not show up.  GREAT way to organise elements that will be moving in or out of the frame later.
• “Insert -> Duplicate Slide, then move something.” Repeat ad nausium, but it WORKS and students can understand it.
• What’s also good about this is if students make the switch to Frames these skills should carry over.  Frames is more powerful than PowerPoint but PowerPoint will get the job done with most of the tools you need.
• PowerPoint 2008 no longer supports photo editing?  Ugh, didn’t they learn when Apple cut features out of iMovie?  Hm, apparently they did but they learned the wrong lesson.
• Word Art to make titles for your animation – more flexibility than using the built in title generator in iMovie or MovieMaker.
• “Save As -> Select JPEG.”  Check “Save All” and change the name to prevent overwriting.  A simple “ver1,ver2, ver3″ is enough.
• “Save often.”  Good advice for almost any lesson.
• When you import your slides in set the timing for as short as possible and turn Ken Burns Effect off!  Honestly, that effect is overused and makes your animation into an earthquake simulation.
• You don’t need to use clip art – you can draw things with Autoshapes, also.
• Animations imported into PowerPoint will not be animated when exported as JPEG files.  Don’t bother playing with transitions in PowerPoint.
• “Do we have enough time?” We have 20 minutes left.  She breezed through.
• The video she’s showing is very amusing and a mix of live action and animation.
• Did she just call GIMP “Free shareware?”  She did.  It’s not shareware.  It’s just free.

Today an email started floating around amongst various fellow employees of my school district.  It contained a link to a particular YouTube video along with the caption “This video needs to be shown to teachers!”

I thought it was worth tweeting, and apparently I think it’s worth a blog post as well because here we are.

On the surface it’s a very upbeat video.  “I can do this!”  “You can do this!”  The part that’s left out is the part that belongs to the viewer.

Each of us brings to every new experience all of our baggage.  Our previous education, experiences, likes, dislikes, and so on all flavor how we react to something new.  This can make us more or less inclined to enjoy the new things we encounter.

Having grown up with the idea of a particular type of vampire, for example, I am less inclined to enjoy the concept of vampires introduced in a certain popular series of books and movies.  (I still maintain that Vampire + Sunlight = Charcoal.  Glitter is not in the equation.)

A student introduced to a certain author or story genre in an academic setting may become soured towards those things if they dislike that classroom environment.

A teacher may avoid technology integration in their classroom if the examples they see implemented are too complex to understand, require too much additional work to pull off, or (in a worst case scenario) involve someone getting punished in some way for implementing the integration incorrectly.

And I begin to get to my point.

When I was a traveling visual arts teacher, I enjoyed the fact that I was not only demonstrating easy ways to integrate the arts but also easy ways to integrate technology. Slideshows, DE Streaming, audio, video, document cameras, and more were thrown in whenever I could do it quickly and easily.  In some cases I – the itinerant – was using equipment that the teachers based in those buildings never touched, because they didn’t know it was there or didn’t think it would be better than the old way of doing things.

Now that I am in the same computer lab for the entire day I’m actually much more isolated than I was before, but I can still get a sense of what’s going on.  Now, as before, I enter classrooms to see computers collecting dust or surrounded by enough books and boxes to make it obvious they haven’t been used in a while.  I see SMART Boards and document cameras pushed aside in the corner of a room.  I see LCD projectors that have been used more often to show movies during indoor recess than to actively engage students in learning activities.

On the other hand, there are also plenty of teachers in my building that enjoy using their SMART Boards on a daily basis and are having their students use them, too.  There are teachers that encourage their students to use online resources both in and outside of the classroom.  There are teachers that frantically contact me when their LCD projectors are not working properly, because their lessons depend on them.  There are teachers coming to me and asking for advice on how to get their students blogging, how to create online quizzes, and how to have students submit assignments digitally.  And the number of teachers who are like this is growing.

Why?  Because the teachers in my building are sharing with each other.  They attend their collaborative planning meetings every week and talk about how useful these tools are, and the other teachers decide to give it a try for themselves.

No one day professional development session that I’ve seen will make as much of a difference as one impassioned person who likes to show off what they can do with these awesome tools on a frequent basis.  They are enough to get others to try it, and from there it spreads exponentially.

This is a far cry from a former principal of mine (whom I will not name) who attended a MICCA (now MSET) conference only to say “It’s a shame we can’t do any of that here.”  (As someone who has presented at MICCA for years on what I’d been doing with my own classes I wondered what sessions she attended.)

So what are you doing?  Are you trying new things? Bragging about what works? Trying to fix what doesn’t work?  Showing others how the costs of integration are far outweighed by the benefits?  If you’re not letting others know how technology works for you, you’re not doing enough to help the next generation.

We all bring our prior experiences with us.  At your next collaborative planning, bring some good ones.

This post has been brewing for a while. What’s finally gotten me to write it down is the recent spread of compromised Twitter accounts. Teachers – DEN Stars and more – are falling for phishing scams because they don’t recognize the warning signs.  If this post prevents just one person from having an account compromised, I will consider it worth writing.

Definition

Phishing involves tricking people into lowering their guard and giving up something.  It could be a Twitter account info or your online bank login.  Whatever it is, the phisher has conned you into doing something.

That’s right, the people who do phishing scams are con artists.  Only instead of convincing your grandmother to invest your inheritance in a nonexistent company they’re convincing hundreds (or thousands) of people to type their PayPal information into a site that looks just like PayPal … only it isn’t.  Phishing isn’t one guy with a pole, hook, and a worm, it’s a fleet of ships with nets that stretch for miles.

And once you get phished, in most cases you unwittingly join that fleet.  Compromised Twitter accounts send out messages to other people encouraging them to go to the same sites and enter the same information that doomed them.  The same behavior can be seen in email and even online video games like World of Warcraft.

Oh, and phishing is NOT hacking.  I’ve a friend or two that foam at the mouth when they hear the words used interchangeably, so this paragraph is for them.  In some cases I’ve heard it called “social hacking,” which is at the same time a better and worse description of what’s taking place.  There is no teenager with more piercings than a pincushion hanging out in his mom’s basement typing zeroes and ones into a terminal to get into your Facebook account.  More likely it’s someone with ties to organized crime thinking up emails that would convince your mother that her bank has asked her to log in and verify her identity.

Prevention

I’ve divided anti-phishing techniques into three categories: Hardware, Software, and Social.

Social

Biggest category first.  Get the best hardware and software together and someone can still convince my mother to disable all the safeguards and let in the troublemakers.  Sorry, Mom.  I love you, but it’s true.

1. Trust nobody. Just because the email header says its from your best friend does not mean they wrote it.  Just because your sister sent you a Direct Message in Twitter does not mean she found a picture of you that will require you to log into Twitter – again.  Email headers have been getting spoofed for years, and anyone who has been successfully phished will usually have their compromised account sending out the same message that tricked them to all their friends/followers/contacts.  When in doubt, contact them through another media and ask them if they really sent you that message.

2. Look at links. PayPal’s web address is “PayPal.com,” not “PayPaI.com.”  Look the same?  One ends in a lower case “L” while the other ends in an upper case “i.”  You’ll also find wider variations like “Paypal.ohcomeonyoucantrustusreally.com”  Replace PayPal with essentially any web based service you can possibly think of.  The more popular it is, the more likely someone out there has made a phishing scam for it.

Why does this matter?  If you go to the wrong address and enter your login and password, you’re not actually logging in.  You’re giving your information to the scammer.  Now they’re logging in as you and doing whatever they want – usually by changing your password first.

3. If you can’t find it after typing the site address in manually and logging in, then it isn’t true either. This relates to #2.  I’m constantly getting emails telling me my PayPal account has been compromised and I need to click on a link in the email and verify my settings or I will lose everything oh no!  (Of course I don’t have a PayPal account so I wasn’t phased by this at all, but plenty of others do.)  If you get an email like that for any service and you think it MIGHT be legitimate, type the web address in by hand.  In this example, I would go to PayPal.com and log in.  If I can’t find the same notice on that site, then I just avoided getting phished.

4. If it sounds too good to be true, then it usually is.  You did not win the lottery in London.  (Protip: you have to buy a ticket first.)  No one in Nigeria wants you to help funnel money out of their Country.  Blizzard is not giving out exclusive in-game mounts to select World of Warcraft players.  I’ve had people trying to scam me with each of these.  Report them if you have that option, delete and forget the messages if you don’t.

5. Change your password – often.  This won’t exactly prevent phishing but it’s a good security tip nonetheless so I’m throwing it in here.  While you’re at it, make it a password that’s hard to guess.  “12345,” “qwerty,” the name or birthday of someone close to you, and (for the love of all that is holy please not this one) “password” are all horrible passwords and should never be used.

Software

There really isn’t any software that will 100% prevent you from getting phished.  There IS, however, software that will lessen the blow should you happen to get tricked.

1. Firefox.  If you’re running a Windows based computer, there are some things you just have to use Internet Explorer for.  At work, I use IE to add networked printers to the computers in my building and install certain software packages.

For everything else, use Firefox.  It is more secure than Internet Explorer has ever been and when security holes ARE found they get fixed FAST.  I’ve heard some people tell me how slick Google’s Chrome browser is, but it still doesn’t compete with Firefox for security.

2. NoScript.  Firefox is awesome in part because it allows you to install different addons to give you different features that aren’t available out of the box.  I’m not too crazy about installing every useful addon I find, but I simply LOVE NoScript.  In a nutshell, it blocks all javascript, java, cookies, flash, and anything else that can potentially be used to compromise your system.  You can add sites that you trust to NoScript’s white list of allowed URLs to enable things from those domains on a permanent or temporary basis as you see fit, so sites broken by having their flash based content blocked won’t stay broken if you really need to see that dancing monkey.

As an extra bonus: By its very nature, NoScript blocks the more annoying ads that you see on various web sites.

3.  Antivirus.  Find a good one and keep it updated.  Do not install any “antivirus” that you see in a pop-up ad, as many of those are in fact spyware.

Also, only use ONE antivirus.  Antivirus programs have recognized each other as viruses in the past.  You don’t want them trying to remove each other on you.

4. Anti-Spyware Same as Antivirus except Spyware programs will often play nice with each other.  Get at least two and run scans frequently.  Many phishing sites will attempt to install keyloggers on your computer.  These particular spyware programs will remember everything you type (as in – your passwords) and send that information back home.  Countless people have been phished once and recovered just in time to have another account compromised because the first attempt opened up a back door.  A good anti-spyware program can help prevent that.  AVG is free and not bad, and Microsoft has released their own as well.

5. Another OS.  Most of the world may run on Windows, but that doesn’t mean WE have to.  Linux and Mac OS X are both operating systems that are frequently ignored by people who write spyware and/or viruses.  Using them isn’t a substitute for paying attention to the things under the “Social” section, but it DOES add an additional layer of protection.  Linux is often free and can run off of something as simple as a thumb drive, so if you’re curious you may want to download a version and try it out with no risk whatsoever.  Currently Ubuntu is one of the more popular flavors of Linux – I have a whole post about that brewing for later.

Hardware

I saved this one for last because there’s not a lot to it.  People have ignored these facets for years and still avoided phishing attempts.  That being said, I think both points in this section are at the very least worth consideration.

1. Get an authenticator.  These devices are not widely used yet, but they add a layer of complexity to logging in to services that most phishing scams have yet to take into account.  World of Warcraft – arguably one of the most popular video games ever – has been publicizing its authenticator for some time now.  Other services, like PayPal, are compatible with authenticators as well.  This episode of the Security Now podcast is a little dated, but offers a decent description of how they work.

2. Get a Mac.  I’m not going to set myself up for a fall by saying Macs are invincible.  Any time something is made to be foolproof someone goes and builds a better fool, after all.  However, as Macs are a much smaller portion of the market they tend to be overlooked by some aspects of phishing scams.  Spyware made to run on a Windows machine is not going to run on my Mac.  Does this make me safe?  No.  Does this make me safer than if I used a computer running Windows?  Potentially yes.

Security should not be your only incentive for getting a Mac, but if you’re already thinking about it this is something that could be an additional point in Mac’s favor.

Who moved my cheese? [ 0:01 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (726)

I’m at a Clay Animation training session sponsored by my employer.  I’ve done stop motion animation before, but not with Frames.

I’m really liking Frames.  My previous animations have all been compiled in iMovie or (against my will) MovieMaker.  Those programs work, and are often pre-installed on computers, but Frames was designed specifically for stop-motion animation.  Most of the concerns I had going in were resolved in an “Oh, so it can do that” way, followed by an “Oh, you mean it can also do this?!” moment.

I’d write more about it, but I have to go back to playing … er, I mean learning how to use this software.

(Oh, and if you liked the music, Bre Pettis made it.)

So I submitted a proposal for this year’s MICCA MSET conference, and since I’m under the delusion that I might actually have my proposal accepted I’m researching even more web based tools that could be used to enhance classroom instruction.  This is one of them.

I withhold my opinion on it until I’ve had a chance to kick the tires a bit, and I’d like your help with that if possible.

So go ahead.

Ask me anything.

I’m at the PUWT conference again, and it’s awesome as usual.

That being said, here’s some things that I’ve encountered at every conference I’ve ever attended (click to make it bigger):

There’s some good and bad in there – there always is – but if you look you’ll see the good vastly outweighs the bad.

And that’s something that helps make it awesome.

1. Start Monday. (Woohoo!)
2. Use no textbooks.  Textbooks, especially ones about technology, seem like they’re out of date before they’re shipped.
3. Avoid handouts whenever possible.  Papers have an annoying habit of getting lost, “lost,” or simply ignored.  Also, I’ve never seen a school copier go more than 4 weeks without having a spectacular meltdown.  Handouts have their uses, but I refuse to be one of the teachers staring at a copier exuding the magic blue smoke 5 minutes before class and wondering what I’ll do now that my entire day’s lesson plans are shot.
4. Avoid paper whenever possible.  When I first played with the form feature in Google Docs, my initial thought was “I could use this to build a test!”  I don’t think I’ll be using Google Docs for everything, but I will find ways for students to hand their work into me digitally.  I’m looking at a Drupal installation for this at the moment, though I might play with Moodle if Drupal doesn’t fit the bill.
5. Use wikis.  They’re easy to update, tamper resistant, and can replace textbooks and handouts in my classroom.  The best part is I expect my students to have a sense of ownership if they know that they helped make the class “textbook.”
6. Tie art in with everything.  It’s an art class.  It’s a computer class.  It’s both.  I intend to keep it that way.  The technology aspect is hard to avoid when teaching in a computer lab, but one can lose sight of the art when dealing with MS Word.
7. Avoid busywork.  As any former substitute will tell you, a class can sense fear.  They can also sense when you’re wasting their time.  Every lesson I plan will have me asking “When will they need to know this?”  I’ll ask, because my students will be asking as well.
8. Have students blog.  Maybe not every day.  Maybe not every class.  Maybe not in a way that allows the whole world to see everything they write, but every day people are using social networking platforms in ways that will hurt them in the long run.  One of my goals is to teach them how to do it responsibly.
9. Blog more.  This is a new position with a very open curriculum.  There are frameworks in place, of course, but I have a lot of freedom and that means I’ll be trying a lot of new ideas.  I intend to share what does and doesn’t work.

Made some origami for his kids a few years back, actually…  In any case, here he is speaking in front of the U.S. House of Representatives.

Scott Kinney, Vice President at Discovery Education, at a hearing regarding the Future of Learning: How Technology is Transforming Public Schools on June 16, 2009.