Lance is a dynamic speaker, and so excited about what he is doing with his students, that you can’t help catching his excitement! Many of the tools he discussed I was already aware of…this is not intended as a negative comment, because there were many people in the audience for whom they were new, so it was great that he talked about them.

Tools discussed:
GCast, Skype, iChatAV, Marratech

More on Marratech–purchased 6 months ago by Google, so could really take off. Client is free. Ability for h.264; Can connect to h.323 units, but needs the server-side software.

He is looking for collaborative partners for classroom VC opportunities.

Lance quote: “When you get the vision of what you want, don’t limit yourself to technology grants. ” They used a historical building grant to gut and remodel their school.

Alan started with a fun story:

In 1990, 28% of students who had graduated from college lived with their parents
Last reports show that 69% of students who had graduated from college now live with their parents
Since most of these kids are the offspring of Baby Boomers, this leads to the conclusion that should be called “Boomerangs”.

Alan was at the school claiming to be the #1 school in the country in getting their students into Ivy League schools. He asked to meet with the top 25 of these students. Here is the discussion:

Question: “Do you ever ask yourself what just happened…what was just taught…in your classroom?”

Answer: “Yes, in every class with every teacher.”

Question: “Do you ask for extra help?”

Answer: “No.”

Question: “What do you do?”

Answer: “We work together on the weekend, figure out what each one knows, and helps each other catch up.”

Educators must learn that kids are social by nature.

Lots of kids are walking out of our classrooms every day needing extra help. We HAVE to pay attention to the social way they learn. We must teach children to have a global voice…there is authentic audience around the world.

When students lived on farms and helped their parents on farms, they all had jobs. They were contributing to their community. Psychologically, there is a need to contribute to community. Students need to have “jobs” again, and Alan suggests the following:

Seven jobs for kids (keep in mind, not every child does every job):1. Curriculum review team: students produce content that benefits all and creates a review for all

2. Tutorial design team: Nothing better than kids creating help for other kids.
Alan showed a screencast of “Bob and Paul”, 12 year olds who create tutorials
Suggestion: Every kid on this tutorial design team creates a DVD, mp3, or podcast for other students

3. Official Scribe: have students work together to make meaning of their class work.
“We do not have a culture that values the success of the group over the work of the individual.”
Suggestion: Google Docs allows students from anywhere to revise docs/presentations. Teacher can view revisions and see which students contributed, the flow of the revisions, and how learning takes place.
Perspective…most of our resources are from the American point of view. Example…read about the American Revolution from the British point of view…search “host: ac.uk (academic in Britain) ‘General Gage’” (ac is academic content, uk is British country code)

4. Global communication team:
Suggestions: Find 3 schools in England who are studying the American Revolution who will debate us; Record and create a podcast for iTunes and the teacher’s blog site

Alan’s four rules for designing an assignment:

• authentic audience
• archive (iTunes, blog, etc.) because you want people to comment for a very long time (past the grade).
• assessment is moved across the web…teams of teachers across the web assessing each other’s classes.
• collaborate whenever possible…who “on the planet” can add value to your assignment (local police, other classes across the world, grandmother network, etc.)

5. Official researcher: answer questions by going to the web, continuously, all class long. All resources go into the class search engine.

6. Legacy team: these students do whatever it takes to bring added value to the lesson

7. Resource Builder: this job is for the whole class, as well as other teachers, classes, etc.
Suggestion: Google custom search: google.com–>more–>even more. 100 people can build a search engine together, anywhere in the world! Contribute all the resources they find to one search engine. The person who started it can see exactly who contributed.