Happy 4th Mother's Day!

I've decided to seriously consider eliminating the space between "Amy" and "Hutton" and just make it one word: "AmyHutton."  That's how Deanna says my name anyway.   She says "AmyHutton" super quickly like it's just one short word.  Like Madonna. Or Bono. Or even Cher.  AmyHutton.  I like it. 



I realized yesterday that De and I will forever share the same Mother's Day anniversary.  Yesterday was our 4th Mother's Day together.  It's kind of cool to think that we both became mothers on the same day.  Isn't that a special and unique bond to share?  I only made this obvious realization as I opened the card that Deanna had made for me, and I saw that the front of the envelope said, "Happy 4th Mother's Day Amy Hutton!"  Has it really been 4 years already?   That I cannot believe.  



So how did I spend my Mother's Day?  Don, De, and Deanna stopped by my house yesterday for a quick visit (they were in town visiting Don's mom and dad this weekend).  Deanna hopped out of the car, performed an impressive display of gymnastics, and watered the flowers, plants, and large wooden swing in my front yard. (Apparently the swing still had some growing to do.)   Then we took some Mother's Day pictures, and Deanna gave me a card that she decorated especially for me.  It was really sweet.  



This Mother's Day wasn't nearly as tough as some of the previous ones I've experienced.  In the past, Mother's Day used to be a day filled with self-pity and sadness. Woe is me.  But yesterday was different from the others; I'm not sure why that is exactly, but I do know that I am feeling more at peace with my decision than I ever thought possible.  Not only that, but instead of feeling like a forgotten mother, I had a plethora of family and friends saying "Happy Mother's Day" to me. This was a small, simple gesture that really meant a lot.  It's nice to feel appreciated.  :)  Not that it's always going to be easy for me from now on, but at this point in my life, I am at a place of acceptance and complete faith in the Lord.  I know that I made the right decision.  I know that my life, Deanna's life, meeting the Dollars, were not merely accidents or coincidences.  And I know that God has amazing things in store for me.  I'm not sure exactly what yet, but I've got a great feeling about this upcoming year. 

 

3 Tools for Exploiting the Wifi During Presentations

Coming as I do from a background in language teaching that emphasises that the teacher should shut up and get the students to do the talking, I often feel uncomfortable doing conference presentations, many of which still follow the format of; speaker gets up in front of audience with presentation - does presentation - audience listen (try to stay awake) and desperately try to think of a few questions at the end to prove they were awake and listening.

One of the gifted- Jamie Keddie.

There are of course a few gifted speakers who can hold the audience’s attention for a full hour and keep most of them listening and awake. If like me you’re not one of those, then here are a few tools that, thanks to the increasing availability of wireless connectivity at conference centres these days, might help to turn your passive listeners into a bunch of multitasking audience collaborators.

Set up a backchannel
One of my favourite tools to use during presentations is Today’sMeet http://todaysmeet.com/ . It’s a great tool for setting up backchannels. A backchannel is basically what your students create when they talk among themselves or text each other during your lesson.

• The advantage of setting one of these up to allow your audience to do this is that you can capture and share what your audience is saying while they are listening to you and enable them to collaborate and share with each other what they know about the topic and links to any relevant resources.
  
• It can also help them to type in questions as they think of them rather than waiting for you to ask at the end, and for me it’s a great way to pass out URLs to interesting websites to give the audience some hands on participation during the presentation.
• It’s also a good way of getting the audience to brainstorm and do tasks together, just ask a few questions and get them to type in answers, and they’ll appear in the backchannel window for everyone to see.

Setting up a back channel with Today’s Meet takes about 60 seconds. You just type in a name for your channel and launch it. You can select how long you want the channel to be available (from two hours to a year) and if you have people in your audience posting updates to Twitter, you can select a hashtag (#) specific to your talk so that their ‘tweets’ appear alongside the backchannel chat window.

• You can read more about backchannels here ‘Tap into the Backchannel in Your Presentation’

Live polling
Getting audience response during presentations can be done quite easily by getting a show of hands, but I tend to find that pretty unsatisfying in terms of capturing and sharing data, so I’ve started using a polling / survey tool called Urtak http://urtak.com/ during presentations.

• With Urtak you can prepare a number of short online polls to to get your audience to do during the presentation.

• Just send the URL to them using your backchannel and then you can show and capture your audience response live during your session, as Urtak collects and shares results as soon as people vote.
• If you are logged in during your presentation it’s even quick and easy enough to create short polls on the fly and pass out the URL through your backchannel.

Here’s an example one I created for a presentation on digital teaching skills that you can look at: http://urtak.com/u/1826 . Urtak even enables the audience to add questions if they register and log in.

• You can read more about Urtak at ‘Creating Social Polls and Questionnaires Using Urtak’

Make note taking collaborative
Many listeners at presentations do their best to keep notes during presentations, so if your audience has wireless connectivity why not get them to do this collaboratively? A great tool for doing this is Sync.in http://sync.in/ .

• It has a desktop launcher that your simply click to create an online collaborative note taking pad. You then share the URL for each pad with your audience and they can then work in groups to assemble notes and comments on your presentation as you go or work on collaborative tasks that you can set them.
  
• The texts can then be saved by each person at the end of the presentation or they can even continue to refine the notes after the presentation is over. Sync.in also has a handy text chat room which runs alongside each document that’s created, so collaborators can discuss things and ask questions as they work. See Collaborative Text Editing Tool for more information on Sync.in.
  

Of course these tools aren’t just useful for conference presentations, but can be used for online training webinars as well as classroom teaching if you work in a wireless enabled classroom environment. Be sure to practice with them one at a time first for short tasks as you gradually build them in to your presentation skills repertoire.

Good luck and I hope you find these tools useful and soon have your audience multitasking as well as listening.

Related links:

• Let us Now Praise Famous Women
• The Web 2.0 School of the Present
• Social Networks and the Web 2.0 Revolution: Part 2
• Creating Social Polls and Questionnaires Using Urtak
• Survey Creation Tool for Students
• Create Quick Online Polls
• Create an ESL EFL Video Quiz
• Make your own chat room
• Express Your Opinions

Best

Nik Peachey

Yesterday Was The Day

Don Dollar says (via my facebook wall), "It's time for another blog post."  Don, you know how I hate to disappoint. :)  Conveniently, my Breaking Free bible study wrapped up this past week, and my plan is to ease back into the blogging world slowly and cautiously.  I'm ready to pick up where I left off, but instead of feeling an obligation to blog every (x) amount of days, I'm going to blog whenever and wherever I darn well please.



So yesterday was the day.  The day of the Second Empire 5K Classic in downtown Raleigh, of course.  If you don't remember from several of my previous blog posts, this was a 5K race in the heart of downtown Raleigh held by Second Empire Restaurant & Tavern owner, Kim Reynolds, to benefit Hopeful Parents, a nonprofit organization that assists prospective adoptive parents in preparing to adopt and provides community support to adoptive and birth families.  Kim and her husband, who adopted their son a few years ago, are active members of Hopeful Parents.  When they spotted the Mother's Day story in the News & Observer about my open adoption last May, Kim contacted me about helping to plan the race.  Jumping at the chance to promote adoption, I was so in.



Having the opportunity to be a part of the planning committee was nothing short of a privilege. I had the opportunity to work with so many great people who truly believe in celebrating, supporting and promoting adoption.   There were 500+ runners at the event, adoption agencies on-site to answer questions and provide resources, music, mascots, and spectators.  It was so neat to see how many people came out to support the event and celebrate adoption.  What I like best about Hopeful Parents is that the organization strives to provide continued support for adoptive parents, birthfamilies, and adopted children.  No member of the adoption triad left behind!  Which of course is not their slogan, but I'm thinking that it probably should be.



A particularly memorable moment (for me) was before the race began and one member of each side of the adoption triad (adoptive parent, birthmother, adoptee) addressed the crowd on stage.   First, Lea, a board member of Hopeful Parents who adopted her son a few years ago spoke about her experience as an adoptive mother and about Hopeful Parents.  Next, I hopped (literally) up on stage and spoke for a few minutes about my experience with open adoption and my goal to start a birthmother support group here in the Triangle.  (Here comes the memorable part) --> The adoptee, 10-year-old Allyson, spoke about how grateful she is that she was adopted.  It was precious.  I could see a few teary-eyed folks in the crowd as Allyson read from her hand-written list all of the things she has been able to do because of her adoption -- playing on a soccer team, learning to play the violin, having a little brother that she adores, etc, etc, etc.  She noted the fact that she would never have been able to have these things if she had not been adopted. 



I couldn't help but get a little misty-eyed myself, thinking about Deanna as Allyson spoke.  I hope that Deanna feels similarly about her adoption when she gets older.  I hope that she is able to understand how much she has been able to experience because of her adoption and how much she would have missed out on had she not been placed with Don and De. Things like playing soccer every week, being enrolled in a stellar gymnastics program, living at the beach, having a stay-at-home mom and a stable home life are just a few examples of the things that probably would not have been possible for Deanna if I had tried to do things on my own.   While I don't constantly dwell on Deanna's future adoption inquiries, these tough questions are something that I have tried to mentally prepare myself for.  Allyson's speech gave me hope for Deanna's acceptance someday. 



And then I ran the 5K.  I wasn't planning on running since I was speaking literally RIGHT before the race began, but I decided at the last minute that I would just do. Seriously, I almost died in the 90+ degree weather, but I actually ran the entire race without stopping and came in 5th in my age group.  I'm so glad that I decided to challenge myself.  Unfortunately, today I am dealing with the intense repercussions of 1) not stretching well before the race  2) not warming up before the race and 3) not lathering sunscreen on my shoulders/arms/back/chest. 



I'm beginning to realize more and more as I get older that my parents are always right.  Yeah, I admit it.  "Always wear sunscreen, stretch before you exercise, remember to say please and thank you, etc, etc, etc." And the list goes on.   My parents have drilled these concepts into my head time and time again, and it's sad to think that as a 23-year-old, I've only placed the utmost importance on the "remember to say please and thank you" part.   I'm finally beginning to realize that there is a logical explanation behind all of my parent's rules and advice.  But don't tell them I told you that. :)



Well aside from looking like a lobster and feeling the pain of sunburned skin and sore muscles, I am feeling pretty good about myself today.  Thank you to everyone who came out to the race!  

Check out the pictures from the event:

3D Computer Games with Young Learners: Spore

In a recent digital skills survey I carried out using Urtak I discovered that more than 50% of digitally skilled teachers don't feel able to utilise 2D and 3D computer games to achieve pedagogical goals (See survey), so I've been looking around and exploring some possibilities. The first of these is the Spore Creature Creator. Spore is a game which allows you to create creatures and evolve them along with their environment, all the way through to a space traveling society.

The free trial creature creator that we will be looking at allows you to create creatures, take snap shots of them and make videos of them to see how they move. Here's an example of a video I created to get students interested. I added the captions and text using i-Movie though you could just as easily use a free online video editor such as Video Toolbox or Windows Moviemaker if you are using a PC.



The creatures are very easy to create, you just drag and drop different features onto a body and the add colour and test them out to see how they move. These are some of the other creatures I created.




Once you have created your creatures you can either make videos of them, take snapshots, which you can either save or email to someone, or create an animated gif of your creature (I wasn't too impressed with the quality of the animated gifs)

Here' a tutorial showing you how it's done.



You can download a .mov version of the tutorial here or this pdf document has the main screen shots and instructions if you'd prefer to follow on paper.

You can download the Creature Creator from the Cnet website here. It's a big download (205MB), but once you have it, you don't need to have web access to do any of the tasks or create the movies and snapshots.

How do we use this with students?

• Create images of different creatures and get the students to create a story about them.
• Get the students to create descriptions of different creatures - This could include appearance, but also likes and dislikes, habits etc.
• Get students to match pictures to descriptions.
• Get students to create a creature based around your description.
• Create a creature and use a picture of it as a picture dictation with one student describing the picture while the other one recreates the creature using the software.
• Get students to create a short video of their creature and add a description and narrative below it as a video project.
  
• Ask students to create a creature suitable for a particular environment, or types of tasks, then get students to discuss which they think would be best adapted for the environment.
• Get the students to write instructions for how to create a creature.
• Use the creatures to demonstrate present continuous tenses ( sitting, running etc.)
  

What I like about it.

• It looks great on a data projector and if you work in a single computer classroom, you can get students up and dragging things around and creating in front of the class.
• The creatures are very colourful and in the environment mode they really start to take on character.
• You can use the tool to create versatile and stimulating materials.
• It's free and pretty easy to use once you get it installed.
• I like the integration with YouTube as it makes it very easy to get your videos online quite quickly.
• I like that they can produce a range of gestures and expressions.
  

What I'm not so sure about.

• It's a big download and will need to be installed on any computer it is used on, so if you want to use it in your school computer room, you'll need the help of a supportive IT manager to get it downloaded and installed on all the computers.
• The Gifs it creates aren't that good, but you don't really need to use them.
• You need a fairly good computer with a good graphics card for it to work well.

I hope you enjoy trying some of these ideas with your students.

Related links:

• Adventure Narratives for EFL ESL
• Educational Games That Really Are Fun
• Exploiting two computer-based RPGs
• Games With a Purpose and a Social Network
• 3B Village 3D browser
• Create your own game
• Online Water Conservation Game
• Wonderland Virtual World and MMORPG
• Google's Lively Competitor with Second Life?
• 3B Village 3D browser
• Machinima with
  

Best

Nik Peachey