Each year the K12OnlineConference provides tremendous professional development for free, and entirely online. This year, they have selected me as one of their keynote speakers. I am thrilled to have been chosen and look forward to participating in the conversation.

Read the full post announcing all the keynote speakers here.

I’ve become disillusioned with Moodle lately and this summer I made the decision to abandon it in favor of a new solution. Here is the process that I went through to make the decision.

1. Ever since I upgrade from Moodle 1.9.x to Moodle 2.0, I’ve been displeased. I was hoping for the new release to bring me new features and new ways of extending the learning into cyberspace. All it brought me was pain. The upgrade itself took hours, and required lengthy trips into the user support forum. I don’t mind that kind of work, but I have to wonder if my time isn’t better spent elsewhere.

2. Version 2.0 is a design nightmare. The collabsible menus are awful, and the site still feels like Web 1.0. The more I used it, the more I realized it was time for a new solution.

3. I had issues with the number of concurrent users. I moved from my shared hosting account to a virtual private server and still could not get any more than about 10 concurrent users. That is too few and was very frustrating. I was facing the need to upgrade further, which was not economically feasible.

So I went looking for something new. I looked at Instructure’s Canvas, but quickly figured out that it is not designed for students as young as mine (by their own admission). I also spoke to the kind folks at Schooltown, but by that time I had already settled into my new solution, which I am thus far quite pleased with.

But first, it’s worth noting that I wanted something not free. I want to pay for it. I want the right to call and fuss and get help from the folks who work there.

So let’s talk about my new solution

I’ve been using Haiku Learning for a month or now and have been pleased. It has some limitations that frustrate me but the folks there have been very open about their DNA.

And I’m paying for it. I’m paying a bit less than five US dollars per month and I get what I need. I like the features that it has, including

• automatically graded quizzes
• discussion forums (the Latin teacher in me wanted to put fora)
• snazzy polls
• easy embedding of outside content (they have something called embed the web which allows me to easily embed most anything)
• good support

We shall see what the future holds, especially as I begin to use it with kids. After all, they’re the ones who will help me really decide whether to continue to use Haiku or not.

Public replies to crafty184's post:

I've got a kid really interested in creating animations. Any help for him? Software?


• George_Haines: Simple and free: doink.com not very robust unless the student has a robust imagination though.
  2011.03.30, 11:56am
• Kdmiller4: Let me know if you have any questions about DoInk. Amazing to see what the kids can do with free software http://bit.ly/fBHGMT
  2011.03.30, 1:18pm
• aforgrave: Mac or PC ? Stop motion?
  2011.03.30, 11:56am
• atruger: Frames from T4L is VERY easy to use program its a fave of my spec needs students also look at http://t.co/EhOKajJ
  2011.03.30, 12:21pm
• Tech4Learning: definitely check out Frames. free trial http://www.tech4learning/frames we'd love to see what he creates!
  2011.03.30, 12:13pm
• pmcash: This site http://synfig.org/cms/ was in a set of links from @dougpete today. Coincidence?
  2011.03.30, 12:13pm
• theartguy: Otherwise, make stills in PowerPoint, export as .jpg files, import into iMovie, lower image duration as far as it will go.
  2011.03.30, 11:55am
• theartguy: Frames from Tech4Learning is very cool - I've had kids as young as 3rd grade make animations with it.
  2011.03.30, 11:54am

If you are interested in the motivational theory I often espouse, please visit this link for a great resource. Stay away from the wikipedia article on it, it stinks.

Comment here if you like, but I’d rather hear your voice on Bud’s blog.

Hi Bud,

Thanks for pinging me on this. While I am not terribly certain what I think about AR, I do have some thoughts about motivation.

However, I will keep them brief since your post is more about AR than about motivation. For what it’s worth, my school recently quit the formal AR program and has implemented something very similar. I am not sufficiently familiar with it to comment on its success or failure, nor am I qualified in that arena.

I want to hone in on what you said here..

“I know that motivation that springs from external sources isn’t terribly motivating when the external motivator is gone.  In fact, I know that such external motivation can decrease one’s intrinsic motivation for the thing that being fiddled with.”

This can be true, but depends entirely on the context. You brought about Deci’s work, he and a second author named Ryan went rounds about this very topic in a series of journal articles.

Suffice it to say, I’d argue motivation is more complex than simply a series of external or internal motivators. I’d posit that motivation is more related to the anticipated value of an activity. When I was growing up I can recall asking teachers when I’d need a particular math skill later in life. Subconsciously I was trying to justift the effort I was going to have to exert to understand/learn/demonstrate the skill.

When one expects little value from a task, one will likely exert little effort. This is precisely why many students abandon school or do only the bare minimum. They see no value in school. But that’s another comment, I suppose.

What I am positing is based on the Expectency-Value theory of motivation, made popular by Eccles and Wigfield.  I’d avoid the wikipedia article, it needs help.

EV theory boils down to two questions..

1. Can I do the task?
2. Do I want to do the task?

When it comes to AR, it may be that students anticipate recieving value from the prizes, etc they recieve for reading. I don’t know if that’s good or bad.

I doubt it is creating in them an expectency of value for reading itself.

Perhaps the incentives will help them realize they like reading? No clue.

Either way, EVT forms a nice framework for motivation and deserves a higher place in our discussion.

For more information on EVT, stay away from Wikipedia. Visit this link instead.

http://edurls.org/evt

Yours,

Chris Craft

They are looking for an online service (so they can show to the public as well) that would allow multiple users to add announcements. These may be as simple as a social event coming up or a congratulations for a student. They would also like to have curricular review mixed in.

I can’t think of a good way that would allow multiple users to add to the system. Do you know of a way to accomplish this?

Thanks in advance…

I responded by trying to find the answer myself. Having recently returned from the Google Teacher Academy in Washington, D.C. I sort of fancied myself a Google whiz.

I was wrong.

I simply could not find a ranking based on just our state. When I searched for various combinations (i.e. “economic impact” +industries +”south carolina”) I got all sorts of results, but no real way to rank them.

I tweeted back that Mandie should consider contacting a reference librarian.

Backstory

Here in Irmo, SC we have a little branch of the Richland County Public Library called The Link. It’s tiny, about the size of a small store. It has some comfy chairs, a bunch of books, and a few computers for use.

They do not, however, regularly staff a reference librarian. To overcome this, they have a video conference system set up and mounted on the wall. It’s a bit like a video phone, where you pick up the receiver and it connects you with the reference desk at the main branch down town. A few months ago while I was in the Link I joked with the ladies who worked there that I didn’t need a reference librarian, I had Google. They tried to convince me I should try it out but I just couldn’t come up with a question that Google couldn’t handle.

Until today.

So, I decided to try out the reference librarian. I hit up the Ask a Librarian page and fired off an email asking the question. I would have tried the IM, but whatever service they use was blocked at school. I wondered whether it would result in anything, and went about my day. A few short hours later, to my pleasant surprise, I received an email with not only the information, detailed instructions as to how s/he found it. It turns out the librarian used the Bureau of Economic Analysis at the US Dept of Commerce. With no further effort on my part, I had the answer to the question, with an entire table copied to me.

I was floored.

It’s not that I don’t have faith in librarians. In fact, this is the second time that the RCPL reference desk librarians have come to the rescue.

The truth is, I’m surrounded by wonderful librarians who are a credit to the profession. And this goes to show me that libraries are still as crucial as ever.

So thank you, RCPL reference desk, for showing me that there is still a need for information experts.

Embedded here please find the keynote address, in its entirety. Please understand this is my first keynote address, so that might explain my nervousness!

I want to thank Jeff McCoy, Tim Van Heule, Tim Cushman, Cathy Arnold, Kevin Merritt, Donna Goldsmith, and everyone who attended for your support.

A special thanks to MaryAnn Sansonetti and Cathy Nelson for their unwavering support in helping me so much over the years.

You can see the video on Blip.tv if you like, or click through and see it here.

With no further adieu…

Click To Play

I’m planning to make a few to embed in my Moodle site for my kids to use. I wanted to try it out here first.

A few weeks ago, a couple of my students were joking that there was YouTube, and we needed our own video sharing site! We discussed it a bit and SpanTube was born.

Now, before you jump all over me for creating a new site when there are ample good video sharing sites out there, i.e. YouTube/Vimeo/TeacherTube/SchoolTube, etc, I do not claim to replace them nor compete with them. This is different.

The goal of this site is to invite Spanish teachers, Spanish speakers, and anyone else with an interest in teaching Spanish to register and upload videos.

I do not have any ads on the site, and I am paying for this myself. This is (as of right now) not a profitable site, nor is that really the intent. I just wanted to have a space to put all my students’ work in one spot where folks could come.

So please, stop by, register, and comment on some of my student videos. They’d love to hear from you!

And if you know  a Spanish teacher, maybe let them know? We welcome new videos.

Now, there might be an easier way, but all I did was hunt for his code, and then copied it and pasted it. I then viewed the source of one of my pencasts and changed the relevant data. Let’s see if it works…

Update: Didn’t work, threw an error of being unable to connect to the Livescribe server. I’ll have to wait for Dr. Wesch to respond.

Update 2: I found code here to use, let’s see if it works. Sigh, nope.