Yesterday, I was in Yoshiko Maruiwa's art classes to help 6th graders add three posts to their personal digital portfolio (created in Google Sites). Yoshiko takes photos of all their finished work and creates albums on The Gallery. (The Gallery is our internal photo server powered by Drupal.) Kids include an image of their work along with an artist statement that explains their process, idea, challenges, successes, curricular connections, and anything else they want to include to curate their work. For today's class, the students made a post for their Art Self Portrait, Art Tessellation, and Art Circle Design.

To organize all the posts from their 6th grade year, kids created an Announcements page named 2011-2012. As each post is written, it snaps into place in the sidebar index and is arranged alphabetically. Hence, I have them title their posts starting with the subject. I like this better than creating a new page/section for each subject. This way there are less clicks to get to examples of their work, and there is no danger of having pages without any projects on them.

During the course of our discussion, we talked about:

1. Their invisible audience - while access to the kids' digital portfolios is limited to users on our school's GoogleApps domain, everyone in the community has an account. At any moment, their work could be viewed by students, teachers, administrators, parents, and anyone with access to a username/password. This should influence what they write (informative without being super personal) and how they write (grammatically correct).
2. Appropriate commenting - write a comment that is specific and/or can initiate a discussion. Something like, "I liked your use of color" or "I see you painted a guitar. Do you play any other instruments?"
3. Inserting an image by linking to the URL of the image online rather than taking a screen snapshot or dragging a copy of the image to the desktop. By using the URL, students can simply point to something else online. The alternative is to copy/take/steal a version of it which is tantamount to theft (depending on how the work is licensed).

Nicole Haleen teaches Spanish to 3rd, 4th, and 5th grades at The School at Columbia University. She might be one of the most organized people I work with. For the 5th grade study of Day of the Dead, 5th graders made drawings, dioramas, paintings, and scultptures of calacas (skeletons) before creating a digital altar to represent a family member. They built their altar in Inspiration, as it allowed them to quickly create tiers in order to populate with images and text.

Nicole asked me to come in and remind the students how to properly search and cite online images. This is what we discussed:

1. They signed a Respectful Use Policy at the beginning of the year reinforcing that they'd be using technology academically, respectfully, and responsibly.
2. Try to choose "advanced image search" in Google and Flickr and other sites so that you locate only images labeled for reuse.
3. Use Wikimedia to search media. Wikimedia is a sister project of Wikipedia. I showed the 5th graders Wikimedia's Reuse guide where they specifically state, "almost all may be freely reused without individual permission according to the terms of the particular license under which it was contributed to the project, but some licenses may require that the original creator be attributed."
4. It is incredibly easy from any browser (Firefox, Chrome, less so in Safari) to copy the image and paste it into Inspiration. Control-click on the image and choose Copy image.
5. It is just as easy from any browser to copy the URL simply by holding down the Control key while clicking on the image with the mouse. Different browsers say different things: Copy image URL, Copy image address, Copy image location...
6. We talked about how if you don't cite/attribute a photo, it means you took it yourself, you forgot to cite it, or you stole it.
7. I reinforced that 5th grade is a great age to get into the habit of being responsible, respectful, ethical, moral, and purposeful with information. The expectation is they will continue to do this throughout 5th grade and beyond.

Nicole lists the following sites for locating images:

http://commons.wikimedia.org
http://compfight.com
http://www.photos8.com
http://pics4learning.com
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/images/?CTT=97

Daniel Scher is a principal investigator for The Dynamic Number Project. He works to create the iPad-compatible constructions for the Sketchpad Explorer app. Sketchpad Explorer is the iPad companion to Geometer's Sketchpad software program - both are published by Key Curriculum Press (@keypress on Twitter).

Daniel will be coming to The School at Columbia University to help me help the 5th grade teachers integrate Sketchpad Explorer into their math curriculum. He's psyched to watch/evalutate how kids learn with the app versus the software versus without either, and I'm excited to get a full grade of teachers to use a tool that I consider to be an industry standard for math educators. I love Geometer's Sketchpad, and I recently gushed about Sketchpad Explorer on Scholastic's Best in Tech Today.

Upon opening the Sketchpad Explorer app, there is an animated proof of the Pythagorian Theorem.

On the bottom right corner is a book icon. This takes you to many options, one of which is to visit the Sketch Exchange community site. From here, you can click Sketch Exchange sketches tagged with ipad, and then you can choose dynamic number in the tag cloud. These sketches open up with the full Geometer's Sketchpad software program as well.

There are four pages of sketches to choose from. I initially chose Balance Scale: Solving for Unknowns Part 1. When you choose a sketch, further down the page you'll find links to download activity notes, worksheets, and the actual sketch with the .gsp suffix. I was super excited to note the CreativeCommons license (!) of Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives which translates to: Give me credit, don't make money off it, and don't alter it. I love Creative Commons almost as much as Geometer's Sketchpad. :)

I had a bit of fun playing with this screen trying to figure out the value of the star and other shapes using the fulcrum, and yes, I think I'm smarter than a 5th grader.

Download the Sketchpad Explorer app here: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/sketchpad-explorer/id452811793?mt=8