Distinguished Colleagues

What happens when you cram a posh hotel conference room with sixty Apple Distinguished Educators for a week of geeking out on their MacBooks? Add to that Singapore's lovely sights and soothing sun rays and you can expect some exciting results.

I was fortunate to spend a majority of the time collaborating on a project with Amanda DeCardy and Jonathan Chambers, two of my colleagues from Shanghai American School. You would think that during the course of the school year we have several opportunities for professional development, but for technology PD we are often the ones providing the workshops, leaving little time for us to get together and pool our many talents, resources and ideas. We meet on a monthly basis and swap dozens of emails yet this is not the same as collaborating on a project that is meant for teachers to actually use with their students.

For several years, Apple has held week long institutes that provide invaluable opportunities for Mac-savvy educators to network, discuss educational technology challenges and often produce a project that showcases effective technology integration. I pitched the idea of having students collect stories from elders in their communities about how their city has changed. Amanda coined the project's title of "Wisdom Lost, Wisdom Found" and that really provided the context for the project. With any digital storytelling project, providing a clear purpose for why you're creating stories always helps. We were off and running from there. In the solution section of my thesis on digital storytelling, I suggested that providing teachers and students with a digital story template will improve the story teaching part of the project. Teachers and students need more than a few video tutorials on the technical side of creating a digital story. It only took me three years to finally follow through on this idea. In our project, we provide director's cut style videos that help teachers and students prepare for the field interview. We created a scaffolded approach to the editing process, detailing three options (quick and simple, moderate editing, advanced editing) for creating the final digital story. Check out the project: Wisdom Lost, Wisdom Found. See also iTooth by David Gran and Mikey McKillip.

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With all of those MacBooks in one room, you can bet there were many resources that people wanted to share. Below is a quick list shared by the group. Thanks to David Gran for his descriptions of each resource. I've reordered the list ranking them according to my preference. See his post about the conference here.

1. ClassTools - Free Flash-based games that you can modify for your lessons.
2. iTunes U - geared for higher ed. These are the type of schools we're preparing students for!
3. Sokoban game - best simple game that really challenges students' logic/spatial skills.
4. Skitch screen capture and manipulation, not sure how it works here in Asia, but I love the idea.
5. Planbook is web based planner that allows you to attach document. Throw away those paper calendars!
6. 30 Second Bunny Theater teaches students about story structure (it really does).
7. CosmoPod allows you to download and convert online movies from almost any set, similar to TubeTV.
8. Little Geometry - like most items on this list, it's Mac-only, but a very powerful little set of tools
9. Sailling Software provides applications that let you use your mobile phone to access and control your iTunes libraries, and even work as a remote control for your computer.
10. The Voices of Asia is a new blog authored by Apple Distinguished Educators in Asia.
11. Picture Sync allows you to upload your pictures to multiple online sites at once (i.e. Flickr, Picasa, Facebook, Bubbleshare, Photobucket).
12. Mousepose - allows your keyboard to show up on the screen.
13. Xtranormal - create your own animations just by typing in text.
14. Diigo, the social bookmarking tool, can be used to correct student text through highlights and sticky notes.
15. ...and it's about holiday time, don't forget to go elf yourself.
16. Virtual Box allows you to run Windows or Linux on your mac (if that's your thing).