1. Our COV learning community: celebrateoklahoma.ning.com
2. Our COV project wiki: sites.google.com/site/covsite/

We apologize for this inconvenience and have made the required requests with our Internet hosting provider / domain registrar to get this situation fixed ASAP. Once our domain renewal is processed, these sites will remain accessible from the above addresses but will ALSO be accessible from lc.celebrateoklahoma.us and wiki.celebrateoklahoma.us.

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Celebrate Kansas Voices is a statewide digital storytelling project empowering learners to become digital witnesses, archiving local oral history and sharing that history safely on the global stage of the Internet. Our project is starting in 2010, based on the successful Celebrate Oklahoma Voices project which started in 2006.

Visit Celebrate Kansas Voices

Cyndi Danner-Kuhn (K-State College of Education) and Dean Mantz (director of technology, Sterling, Kansas) presented this week at the Mid-America Association for Computers in Education (MACE) conference in Manhattan, Kansas, with me about CKV. The start of this pilot project, following the model of our successful (and ongoing) Celebrate Oklahoma Voices project, is well timed. In 2011, Kansas will celebrate its Sesquicentennial for 150 years of statehood. At MACE this year we were able to connect with Mary Madden, Director of Education and Outreach for the Kansas Historical Society, along with other staff members. Yesterday I heard KSHS staff member Michael Church present on “Kansas Memory: Real Stories, Real People” about their phenomenal Kansas Memory website.

The presentation we shared yesterday and today here at MACE is available as a Google presentation.

Dean also put together a great collection of digital storytelling links and resources using Livebinders, which is a free tool similar to ShareTabs.

We are tentatively (with 95% certainly) planning on conducting a 2.5 day Celebrate Kansas Voices workshop at the KSU College of Education in Manhattan this summer on August 4, 5 and 6, 2010. To stay updated about available workshops and the continuing development of this pilot initiative, please join our Celebrate Kansas Voices learning community.

Sharing the launch of this project at MACE has been wonderful not only to share this idea and opportunity with Kansas teachers, but also to learn about other oral history / community history champions in Kansas. Personal networking is SO important for facilitating projects like this. If you know of others interested in Kansas history, Kansas oral history, community history, etc. please share Celebrate Kansas Voices with them and encourage them to also join our learning community. This project is open to anyone, not just Kansas teachers.

It’s going to be exciting to share and extend the successful COV model we’ve developed in Oklahoma over the past three years here in Kansas!

Cross-posted to Moving at the Speed of Creativity.

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Please visit our 2010 COV Workshop calendar to view dates and available “open slots” in our workshops through August. If you are interested in attending one of these workshops, complete our online “COV Workshop Registration Inquiry” form, and you will receive further instructions via email from Stephanie McCoy, our administrative assistant.

NOTE: Teachers in school districts hosting COV workshops, whose districts have been awarded TitleIID grants, should receive a COV workshop registration link directly from their school TitleIID grant coordinator.

Everyone is welcome to join our COV learning community, to rate and comment on videos as well as participate in our discussion forums. Membership in the COV learning community is free!

If you have questions regarding Celebrate Oklahoma Voices or Storychasers, do not hesitate to contact us!

Our Google Calendar for Celebrate Oklahoma Voices is available, which includes all our workshops scheduled through August 2010.

With the beginning of the New Year, the annual OSSBA/CCOSA Conference and Exposition will soon be here! This year’s conference will be August 27-29th at the Cox Convention Center in Oklahoma City.

Enclosed, please find the application for presentation for breakout sessions. Sessions can be 1 or 2 hours in length. New this year- we are also taking applications for pre-conference (3 hour) sessions on Friday morning. However, these sessions will be very limited in number.

We encourage anyone who has something valuable to share or showcase with school districts, board members or administrators to apply. A conference committee will review all applications and we will let you know if the application is accepted by May 1st.

We look forward to hearing your presentation proposal.

Thank you for your time.

Terri Silver
Director of Board Development
OSSBA
terris [at] ossba [dot] org

This information does not appear to be available yet on the OSSBA website. I’ve shared this as a read-only Google Doc, which you can (if desired) download locally to edit and submit via snail mail.

The deadline for proposal submissions is Monday, March 15, 2010. Note the following sentence at the end of the proposal form:

Each room will be set theater style with a head table and four chairs, screen, and podium microphone. OSSBA/CCOSA does NOT provide live Internet access in session rooms.

My work for CASTLE this week with K-12 principals in Minnesota has energized me to share more technology leadership workshops, presentations, and resources for our administrators in Oklahoma. I can think of multiple session possibilities for OSSBA, addressing things like our Storychasers Mobile Learning Collaborative, the Celebrate Oklahoma Voices digital storytelling project, the Unmasking the Digital Truth project to address misconceptions about content filtering in our schools, Social Media Guidelines for Educators, as well as other topics. (How about “Digital Magic Tricks for School Administrators?!”)

If you’re a member of our “Celebrate Oklahoma Voices” learning community, please consider sharing the digital stories you’ve created and your students have created with others at OSSBA. This is a great chance to open the eyes of school board members around our state to the constructive potentials of social media technologies.

Iowa K-12 students from Van Meter did a great job getting the attention of their legislators last week, and helping open their eyes to our need for legislative support of 1:1, project-based learning. We need to do the same thing in Oklahoma.

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A Global Initiative and Competition for the next generation of leaders and social entrepreneurs – Seeking global thinkers 14 to 24… For 2010, we are looking for 3-minute videos with Issue & Solution format. Express your issue and propose an innovative solution-project. Winners presented to Obama administration, on Best Buy screens across the planet, and at VIP reception and Awards Ceremony hosted by Sony Pictures in Los Angeles

This sixty second YouTube spot summarizes the project and contest. If you have any of the “digital natives” Marc Prensky talks about on the “digital_nation” website in your classroom or household, you might give them a heads-up on this contest.

Cross-posted to the Infinite Thinking Machine.

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1- Digital Curriculum
2- PD
3- Google Apps (Kern Kelly)
4- Q&A

See our wiki page for our Mobile Learning Collaborative for more information about recommended digital curriculum, PD topics and sequence, etc.

If you are interested in joining our collaborative in 2010, please join in our meeting and participate. This session will be recorded and made available as an archive following the meeting. If you have not already, please view archived videos of our December 15, 2009 presentation and discussion.

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Part 1 of 2 (47 min, 24 sec)

Part 2 of 2 (1 hour, 9 min, 9 sec)

Unfortunately we forgot to bring a firewire cable for the DV camera we were going to use for this Ustream, so we had to use a backup USB camera for this video which was not as high quality as we would have liked. Fortunately our lapel microphone worked great, so the audio (except for some of the questions from audience members) is very clear in both these recordings.

Presentation slides from this session are available as a Google Presentation.

Based on these guidelines and goals, if you are interested in participating in this Mobile Learning Collaborative in Oklahoma please contact Wesley Fryer ASAP. Interested parties will be meeting again via an online webinar, most likely on Tuesday, December 22nd at 10:00 am CST. The deadline for districts to submit their grant application for the ARRA 1:1 proposal is 15 January 2010.

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A virtual attendance option will be provided via Ustream.tv. If possible, please try to attend this event in person.

STORYCHASERS OKLAHOMA LAPTOP LEARNING COLLABORATIVE
This proposed collaborative will assist interested districts in successfully writing for the Oklahoma SDE 1:1 Laptop RFP, designing and delivering customized professional development for educators involved in 1:1 learning, building learning communities involving MULTIPLE districts and schools within our state, and working with district leaders on the multitude of issues which are vital for 1:1 project success. The specific details of this collaborative are still being worked out, and your input can help shape the direction and focus of this initiative. We will build specifically on the work of the Open1to1 Project in Maine and the Maine Netbook Consortium, utilizing the open source / free Ubuntu operating system for student laptops. The free Ubuntu image distributed by Open1to1 includes over 100 free productivity and educational applications. Collaborative partners will make commitments to several leadership, instructional, procedural, and policy changes which will directly contribute to 1:1 project success. These will most likely include the following:

1. Superintendent and principal must participate in top-level administrative consortium meetings as well as educator professional development
2. Content filtering: Schools must agree to adopt, implement and support reasonable and relatively open content filtering policies (To be defined elsewhere in greater detail. Access is open to Ning, blogs, wikis, Flickr, websites used for COV workshops,etc.)
3. Teacher laptops: Macbook laptops
4. Teacher software suite: Includes commercial screencasting software
5. Student laptops: Netbooks at a minimum and laptops at maximum (menu of options)
6. Netbook/Laptop OS: Ubuntu Linux using an image customized from the Open1to1.org project (>100 educational and productivity applications included)
7. Negotiated service level agreement: Negotiated with hardware resellers for all members of the consortium
8. Digital curriculum: A package of commercial digital curriculum sites and services, negotiated for consortium school use on a per-seat basis
9. Google Apps for Education: All districts adopt and implement Google Apps for Education (free)
10. Educator leadership training
11. COV Phase 1 Workshop Training (for all in participating districts)
12. Google Workshop for Educators: Selected / volunteer participants from member districts are able to participate in 1 or 2 day GWEs
13. Administrative leadership training
14. IT Support staff leadership training
15. Online and face-to-face (blended) professional development training
16. Learning Community Collaboration: Members of the consortium publish and share lesson plans on the “open web” using collaborative, web-based tools

The above list is not finalized and is subject to change. We are most likely looking to work / collaborate with two to five Oklahoma school districts in this collaborative in 2010 – 2011. We aspire to build a sustainable and exemplary model of 1:1 learning which ALL Oklahoma schools can follow, whether or not outside / supplementary grant funding is available. To do this, member districts will have to “be on the same page” with regard to computer hardware, digital curriculum, professional development, and other issues. All our districts can’t and won’t look exactly the same, but we will require standardization on several key aspects of the project to support high-quality and sustained professional development as well as (ultimately) positive impacts on student learning / achievement.

For assessment of our collaborative’s 1:1 learning projects, we will most likely partner with experienced 1:1 project evaluators at the University of North Texas, who have extensive 1:1 evaluation resources as well as expertise in successful 1:1 project design.

INTERESTED SCHOOL DISTRICT SUPERINTENDENTS ARE STRONGLY ENCOURAGED TO ATTEND THIS MEETING. If you are planning to attend without your superintendent, please encourage him/her to attend as well. What we are proposing and is proposed through this Oklahoma SDE initiative is NOT merely a “technology project,” this is a whole school / whole district transformational learning initiative. Our Storychasers team has superb expertise and connections to 1:1 educational leaders in the United States and around the world, organizations supporting 1:1 learning best practices, and blended learning models. We are focused on helping our partner districts be the most successful learning organizations in our state. We are serious about success, and top leadership in participating districts must be on board and be active participants throughout this process.

If you have questions about this event, please post them here on our blog. The Storychasers’ point-of-contact for this meeting and event is Wesley Fryer. Please register for this event as soon as possible via EventBrite. We look forward to collaborating with forward-looking and visionary Oklahoma leaders on this project. For more background and related links, refer to the 23 November 2009 podcast, “One to One Learning with Open Source Netbooks is Practical, Affordable and Powerful – Learn Why.”

WHO IS STORYCHASERS?
Storychasers is a respected and well-known provider of professional development workshops for educators in Oklahoma. For the past three years, the Celebrate Oklahoma Voices Project (organized and supported by Storychasers, as well as other partner organizations) has helped over 500 Oklahoma educators learn to create and safely publish with digital media. Over 700 people are now part of our open/free learning community for COV, and over 500 videos created by Oklahoma educators and students through the COV project are available on our learning community website.

Did you know Oklahoma is home to a growing black bear population and just had its first open hunting season for bears this year? Brad Hill used photos from his own game camera to create the 1 min, 17 second video, “Bears of Leflore County.”

Find more videos like this on Celebrate Oklahoma Voices!

When you think of tar pits, you might think of southern California and La Brea. You also should think of Lawton, Oklahoma! Alba Dissinger used her own photos to create and share the video “Fort Sill Tar Pit” to tell about this unique archeological site in Oklahoma.

Find more videos like this on Celebrate Oklahoma Voices!

Do you know the bison herd in Western Oklahoma in the Wichita Mountains was repopulated thanks to several bison sent from New York and the Bronx Zoo? These facts and many more are shared by Sydney Perry in her video, “Wichita Mountains Wildlife Refuge.” Sidney used the free website drop.io to have friend and refuge docent Katherine Hunt narrate this six minute video using her cell phone!

Find more videos like this on Celebrate Oklahoma Voices!

Kacey Kinsey leads a Girls’ Circle each week in the after-school program at her school, and it continues to make a HUGE difference in the lives of students who participate. Her video “Girls Circle” tells this story, including the voices of her students.

Find more videos like this on Celebrate Oklahoma Voices!

What’s the longest marriage you’ve heard of? Michelle LeAnn Slay’s grandparents have been married for 70 years! Michelle used iMovie along with Audacity to create the touching video, “70 Years of Love and Marriage” during our COV workshop this week.

Find more videos like this on Celebrate Oklahoma Voices!

Isn’t it amazing to see the creative and powerful media messages Oklahoma educators can craft in an intensive, 2.5 day workshop on digital storytelling?! All these videos and more (494 in all, as of this writing) are available for FREE and OPEN access in our Celebrate Oklahoma Voices online learning community. Our collaborative storytelling efforts continue! Great work, Oklahoma educators!

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“In Honor of My Grandfather” was created by Laney Miller, as a tribute to her great-grandfather who was born in 1929 in Shamrock, Oklahoma. He served in the Korean War, and wrote letters to his wife and family during his overseas military service to keep them updated about his life. Laney did a fantastic job writing and reading her script based on those letters, and synchronizing personal photos from her grandfather into her digital story.

Find more videos like this on Celebrate Oklahoma Voices!

Emily and Rheanna, 8th graders at Tenkiller Elementary School in Cherokee County, Oklahoma, created the video “Veterans Day 2009” to provide historical background about the celebration of Veteran’s Day in the United States, as well as a tribute to many the veterans who are family members of students in their school. This video was used as part of the school’s commemorative events to celebrate Veteran’s Day yesterday.

Find more videos like this on Celebrate Oklahoma Voices!

Haley Jones, a 7th grader at Tenkiller Elementary School in Cherokee County, Oklahoma, created the video “My Heroes” to pay tribute to both her grandfathers who served in the U.S. Armed Forces. She included interview audio for part of her video, which is 2 minutes long.

Find more videos like this on Celebrate Oklahoma Voices!

Kudos to Pam Henley and these students for FANTASTIC work helping recognize and thank some of our Oklahoma veterans, and contributing these videos to our growing video archive (now including over 470 videos) on our Celebrate Oklahoma Voices learning community.

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