Thumann Resources

21st Century ideas to help facilitate good teaching and learning.

Gearing up for the beginning of a journey…

Posted by lthumann on June 24, 2008

On Friday, June 27, teachers from four districts across New Jersey will gather at the Center for Mathematics, Science and Computer Education at Rutgers University to begin the first year of a new initiative I am pleased to be working on. These educators will spend the day getting to know each other and begin immersing themselves in online professional learning networks.

I’ve outlined the day as follows:

  • Topic 1: Why do we teach what we teach?
    • Grade levels
    • Subject areas
    • Areas of interests
  • Topic 2: Focus on the learning not on the tools
    • What skills do you need as an educator?
    • What skills do you need as an individual?
    • What skills will our students need to be successful in higher education and ultimately their careers?
  • Topic 3: Developing your professional learning network
    • Who do you want in your network? Why?
    • What will you offer to educators in your network?
    • What tool(s) do you want to use to develop your network?

I’ve collected some resources I’d like to share with the group:

Council of 21 Concludes its Year-long Study: Preparing Schools and School Systems for the 21st Century

You Tube - Did You Know 2.0 Video

Dangerously Irrelevant: Key Question

21st Century Learning: 9 Principles for Implementation

I’m very much looking forward to meeting everyone and participating in the discussion among this group of educators. Before we reconvene on July 28, participants will have a chance to communicate with each other via Twitter, Diigo and any other form of online networking they choose including Nings, wikis and blogs to define their vision for 21st Century Learning.

Posted in 21st_Century_Learning, CMSCE, PLN, web2.0 | Tagged: , , , , , , , | No Comments »

What’s New with iTunes U

Posted by lthumann on June 15, 2008

This past Friday I attended the end of the year monthly meeting for NJECC. Members are asked to bring guests with them to present success stories of technology integration from the school year. We saw some great projects spanning the WII Fit to Scratch to Tablet PCs to the folks I brought from North Plainfield School District who spoke about their iPod and Podcasting initiative.

I Tweeted some new links while I was there. But what I couldn’t summarize in 140 characters or less was what Dave Marra from Apple demonstrated for us.

Among some other amazing tips and tricks Dave shared, he took us through a tour of iTunes U. I admit that I wasn’t as familiar with it’s offerings as I thought I was because I couldn’t wait to get home to starting searching around.

When you get the chance, take a look at these areas in iTunes U to see if there’s anything you’d like to subscribe to and remember – it’s all free.

·         Under the Categories section on the left, you’ll find a link for “Teaching and Education”
Within this category you will find so many wonderful things to view and listen to as an educator.

1.    Teaching and Learning – UMBC’s Hybrid Teaching Workshop

2.     Educational Policy from Stanford University

3.     Duke’s Digital Initiative

4.     Tech-Ease: Classroom Tech Help includes video podcasts on Inspiration, Wikis, Blackboard, podcasting as well as many others.

·         Under the Categories section, you’ll find links for Science, Mathematics, History and Fine Arts as well as other areas of interest. Check them out too.

·         iTunes U is SEARCHABLE!! Try it. I typed “Twitter” in the search box and got back 50 related podcasts.

·         Scroll down to the bottom left and you’ll find a link for the “Beyond Campus” category. Take the time to check these out. Here’s a few.

1.     Little Kids Rock – nonprofit organization that provides it’s curriculum and musical instruments to schools in need. They have guitar and drum lessons posted in podcast format as well as other videocasts.

2.    The New York Public Library – provides literature podcasts from the author visits as well as a business series on credit management and marketing.  They even have a teen program called “Turn It Up @ The Library” which you can subscribe to.

3.     American Public Media – offers a podcasts on the 2008 Election Issues

Take some time to explore and sync some these podcasts to your iPod or MP3 player. Have fun.

 

Posted in CMSCE, iTouch | Tagged: , , , , , , | 1 Comment »

What are 2344 People Thinking?

Posted by lthumann on April 13, 2008

As more educators in New Jersey move from 1.0 to 2.0 methods of communication, I’m thinking the need for a newsletter may begin to fade. Not that I would stop e-mailing it to our some two-thousand subscribers anytime soon. But it’s time to offer some options and to hopefully start getting some answers.

Many teachers and administrators that I’ve met with over the last few months have started to follow me on Twitter and have signed up for Google Reader or Bloglines to organize the blogs that they have begun to read. They’re open to moving forward into the Web 2.0 world.

CMSCE April 2008 NewsletterThe Center has been using their Listserv to communicate with NJ educators for years now. We use it to send out notices of special events, upcoming workshops and when I joined the staff in 2004, I began to send a monthly newsletter to the ListServ’s subscribers.

According to L-soft the ListServ was invented in 1986. Just two years prior, the CMSCE at Rutgers University was established to contribute to the improvement of mathematics, science, and computer education programs in New Jersey schools and in schools throughout the nation.

Many of you know I abandoned what little blogging I had done at Blogger and decided many weeks ago to start from scratch with Thumann Resources. I gave some thought as to the benefits of the Center’s ListServ subscribers reading the information I present to them in newsletter form in the form of a blog post. Here is what I came up with:

If you click on the http://Bubbl.us image, you’ll see a full screen version of it.

The yellow bubbles represent anything that both the newsletter and blog have in common such as the fact that both are written in html and are best viewed in a browser (such as Internet Explorer, Firefox or Safari). Another commonality is that the ListServ will not allow any e-mails to go through with virus attachments and the moderator (that’s me) will not allow any comments to go through that are not approriate or related to the conversation.

The remaining bubbles focus on four major points:

  1. I have no idea how many of the 2,344 educators who subscribe to the Center’s ListServ or the additional thousands of educators who subscribe to NJSSI’s ListServ (who I also send the newsletter to each month) actually read the newsletter. On my blog I can see how many people visited each post.
  2. Not only can I see how many people visited each post, but I can see how many times each of the links in the post were clicked.
  3. I can track where my readers are coming from. Did they come to Thumann Resources from Google, Rutgers, Twitter, the DOE?
  4. The only person who gets to see the reponses that subscribers submit to the monthly newsletter is me. Many of them are kudos and many others are requests for “a site that can help me with…” and “when will you offer the…” and of course “please remove me from…”, but the blog opens the door to readers being able to leave comments that other readers can read and respond to.

My favorite is number 4. I’m hoping some of you will comment on this post letting me know your thoughts about what I’ve written, what you’d like to share with other educators, what you’d like to see in the newsletter, or anything else you’d like to share.

Posted in CMSCE, web2.0 | Tagged: , , , , | 5 Comments »

The Web 2.0 Whirlwind

Posted by lthumann on April 6, 2008

Someone said to me the other day, “A Web 2.0 workshop? You can teach that with your eyes closed.”

I know the comment didn’t come from someone truly immersed in Web 2.0 and I know they don’t have Go2WEB2O.net in their Google Reader or they would realize just how difficult it is to keep up with all the new 2.0 applications that come out on a weekly basis.

So, I took a look at the eBoard that I used the last time I taught Web 2.0 at the Center. eBoards has been how we’ve organized information for our workshops at the Center for many years now. We have a partnership with Seacliffe technologies and we give every workshop participant a free eBoard for a year when they attend one of our workshops.

So I took a look at my resource at http://web-two-point-o.cmsce.site.eboard.com. I wasn’t feeling the love. I had put a lot of time into it when I had used it last, but since then I had facilitated a half a dozen workshops in districts and a few presentations at conferences and had used various wikis and Twitter to provide the links to the sites.

Am I supposed to do a complete overhaul on this eBoard? For the teachers in NJ that have access to these resources – should I change the links or should I leave it so that they sign up for our summer workshops or again in the fall to update their web 2.0 toolbox.

I thought about it all day. I wrote my agenda, got together a few handouts (I try not to give paper in technology workshops, I prefer to give everything in digital form).

Here’s what I decided. Be honest. Tell me what you think and I’ll let you know how it goes.

I’m going to invite the (small) group of teachers to join me in a Google Doc as we create a list of web 2.0 tools we use during the day. This way they can make notes on each tool as we go.
Here’s the list of tools (I have 5 hours of professional development time)
1. Google Docs
2. iGoogle
2. Twitter
3. Skrbl
4. Del.icio.us
5. Bubbl.us
6. Tiny.url / moo url
7. Zamzar / converttube
8. VoiceThread

Posted in PLN, web2.0 | Tagged: , , , | 4 Comments »

Time for a new blog

Posted by lthumann on March 24, 2008

Having been an unofficial “blogger” for many years using Blogger to author subject specific blogs for my job at the Center at Rutgers and then abandoning them because I lost interest or just plain got too busy, this time I decided that I would make a commitment to blog for myself.

Back in 2005 I had used Blogger to house content for a couple of graduate courses I was teaching as well as using it as a tool to teach educators about blogging. You can see my old blogs at http://www.lthumann.blogspot.com/. Much of the information is outdated and many of the links may be broken. I remember about six months ago contacting Blogger because a couple of my blogs mysteriously dissapeared from my dashboard. They were never recovered.

There are so many things that I am interested in as an ed tech specialist and I post my opinions on Twitter and other social networks and people’s blogs on a regular basis, but here in the year 2008, I decided it was finally time to dedicate some space specifically for what I think works for good teaching and learning. I bring you Thumann Resources. 

Posted in web2.0 | Tagged: , , | 3 Comments »