Technology Miscellany

For my friends who are educators (and those who love to read--see #4 & #5), some Web 2.0 tools and online sites that you might enjoy:

1. http://www.polleverywhere.com/
You can create an online poll where respondents use either their cell phones or twitter.com to respond.

2. http://historicaltweets.com/
Fun, fun, fun! You can read interesting tweets from historical figures or get creative and come up with your own. There is a Photoshop template you can use or just send in your ideas to the historicaltweet crew. It would be really easy to come up with an interesting student activity that crosses content areas.

3. http://www.bookglutton.com/
Book Glutton is an interesting way to read online with others. Many books are free and can be inserted into blogs as a widget. You can see Alice in Wonderland on my blog on the left hand side at the top. I haven't read much lately but hope to finish it soon and put another on my blog before the end of July.

4. http://www.librarything.com/
I've been on Library Thing for a while and have posted some of my books. You can hook up with other book lovers who share similar tastes in reading. A lot of media specialists are on this site. They also have book reviews and give away hundreds of books each month. You can sign up to be an Early Reviewer and hope to receive one of the books. I try every month but haven't been lucky enough to snag one yet. But someone has to!

5. http://www.goodreads.com/
Good Reads is similar to Library Thing in that you can catalogue your own books online, but this website is more for avid readers than librarians, though usually they are one and the same. I just find this site much more user friendly than Library Thing, and it has a slicker look. It is a social networking site, and you can find friends on this site who also post info on what books they have read, are reading, and want to read. There are groups you can join, and some of these groups also have podcasts where they talk about authors.

6. http://www.diigo.com/
Ever wondered what to do with all of those really cool websites, online articles, videos, blogs, images you find online while you're away from your personal computer? Or maybe you want to access your personal bookmarks when you're away from home? Diigo is an option that I've just begun using. I am more familiar with #7.

7. http://delicious.com/smartmedia8
This should take you to my homepage on delicious. It is a social bookmarking site. My main problem with bookmarking is that I forget to do it and then regret not remembering the site I wanted to remember. Bottom line, use a bookmarking tool and you'll never forget where you saw something online again.

Seven seems like a good place to stop. After spending three and a half weeks writing and posting to a blog, I plan to stay in the habit. I'll post more about Web 2.0 online tools for learning, so check back.

Please share your own experiences with these tools that you use to improve your performance as a teacher, help your students, or to have fun.

If you'd like to look at some other Web 2.0 tools, here are some educational bloggers with some suggestions for you:

Larry Ferlazzo's Best Web 2.0 Applications for Education 2008

Jane Hart's E-Learning Pick of the Day--once you go to her blog, you will want to click on the Learning Tools link on the left of her page. She keeps a running list of online tools to use in the classroom.

For Every Season...Turn, Turn, Turn

While I haven't been in education very long (15 years), many changes have occurred at the school level. Whatever happened to these items that I remember having in my early years of teaching? Let's retrogress to the teaching technology of the 80s and 90s.

1. The machine that you placed a carbon on and cranked by hand to make copies for your students--you know, the one with the purple ink that you loved to smell--I can't remember it's name because it has been so long since I've seen one much less used one.

2. Risograph--I think this is how you spell it. It's a step up from machine #1 because it could make hundreds of copies quickly, and you weren't required to hand crank it.

3. Dot matrix printers--these were great! You always had to make sure the paper was on track, and when it printed, it made a grinding noise. Well, maybe grinding isn't the write descriptor. The noise, if you were printing a long document, would lull you into a relaxed state because it was so repetitive. And you could tell when the printer came to a shorter sentence or was printing a single word. The BRRRRRTTTT sound it made would be just a BRT with longer stretches of silence as the print cartridge glided across the paper.

4. Paper for a dot matrix printer--the sheets were always attached to each other, and you could make banners with it easily. I loved printing out these banners and then coloring them in with my Crayola markers.

5. Computers with DOS operating systems--I've forgotten every key stroke that I had to learn to run one of these babies. I actually resisted learning how to use a computer until my last quarter in college (Spring 1992). I took a fiction writing class that semester and just could not endure the multiple drafts on my Brother typewriter.

6. My Brother typewriter. Man, I loved this typewriter. I wish I still had it. It was an electric typewriter, and I got it one year from my parents for Christmas. Typing was the best class I took in high school. I use it daily. I used my typewriter all the time as well. I typed every paper in college as an undergrad on that Brother typewriter, and any time I ran out of correction tape, I would cry. Thank goodness I typed well and had few errors. I even used it to type worksheets for my students my first year teaching.

7. Chalk boards--Can I just say that I don't really miss these? Whenever my fingernails would hit the board as I erased something quickly, my face and body would contort and I would begin my chicken dance. The squeal of nails on a chalkboard is worse than water boarding in my opinion. Other interesting accessories that came with the chalkboard were long pieces of wood covered with athletic socks to use as erasers. For some reason, these long erasers were preferable to the short black ones I used to clean by beating them against the telephone pole for my teacher in elementary school. I suppose in another ten years I'll be able to add dry erase boards to this part of my list, but not quite yet.

8. Small tape recorders that have the buttons at the bottom you use to play/record/fast forward/rewind/pause--I actually had three of these in my closet that I donated to the school library this year. They were great when students had to record something for an oral history project, for instance, but they were bulky and took up too much room in my supply cabinet. Now I'm writing a grant for podcast recorders. If the grant goes through, we'll be able to record small group discussions and use the recorders for collaborative or individual student projects which we can then post to the school website.

When looking back over my list, I realize that all of these changes have occurred because in some ways, educators have decided to work smarter and not harder (one of my mottoes). Instead of resisting the computer age, I joined the 21st century and am especially interested in how I can help my students use these new tools that are displacing the old methods of communication in and out of school. Unfortunately, educators are too often Luddites who are either too scared or too set in their ways to change. Some technology tools I foresee working their ways into schools include social networking sites (Nings, Facebook, Twitter) in some form. The person who can figure out how to create a social network that schools will approve could earn millions. Many schools block these sites for student safety reasons, but students are still using them at home. The resistance will be there until the Digital Generation currently students in schools becomes the generation running the schools. By then, we'll be focusing on applications no one has invented yet, and today's arguments surrounding the use of technology in schools will be forgotten.

Does Twitter Change the Concept of Audience?

My students turned in reading journals today, some using twitter as their medium for the first time. I haven't had time to read through all of them but am excited about one in particular that I have seen. One young lady decided to twitter a conversation between herself and Walt Whitman. She read (and struggled to understand) "Song of Myself." I'm interested in reading her questions to Whitman and how she answered them through his persona.

While I was quickly scanning her twitter page, I was drawn into other twitters I have received over the past day or so. By the way, can I actually say I receive twitters? Do those tweeters actually intend to write only to me? I have no idea who will read my twitters at any given time, and I have no inkling of who will decide to follow me today or tomorrow; therefore, I am not writing to a particular audience. So is Twitter changing the concept of writing for a particular audience. How do you know who will read your tweets? Hmmmm.

I have some other twitter questions, but this one is at the forefront of my mind at the moment. What motivates us to choose the people we follow on twitter? For whom do we want to be an audience? I have chosen others in my profession, a couple of friends who are online and tweet, and some people I think have their fingers on a pulse point of our American society.

I ran across Bill Gates' Twitter today and decided to follow him to see what he talks about. (I do question whether or not Bill is actually Bill or if someone is writing as Bill.) Then I decided to see who he follows. He's influential; he's wealthy; for better or for worse, he is a notable American. He has 17,824 people following him on Twitter. So who does this American icon follow? He only follows 45 people/organizations/groups! They include many names I do not know or recognize, Macworld, Iphone Game Play, Scott Hanson (Sr. engineer at Dell), JeanPaulSatre, Darrell Jordan-Smith (VP with Sun Microsystems), and my personal favorite, Darth Vader. What does this say about Bill? What does this say about Twitter users' choice of audience? What does this tell me about how technology is changing the concept of audience for me as a writer?

Transcendentalism and Twitters

One class of college prep students is studying Transcendentalists this week. I've done some creative planning to get this study into my schedule before they take the Georgia High School Graduation Tests next week.

While reading postings on the EC Ning , I saw an idea from Jim Burke that I decided to adapt to my classroom. He highly recommended Stanford's Encyclopedia of Philosophy, so I divided the information between collaborative groups and had a conversational round table as an introduction to the Transcendentalists. Then I chose nine different reading selections from Transcendentalist writings (particular chapters of Walden, "Self-Reliance," portion of "Song of Myself," Prelude to Leaves of Grass, "Civil Disobedience") and had each group choose which section they would read for a short round of literature circles. (See initial assignment.)

As part of their individual reading, I asked them to do transactional reading journals and gave them 10-15 options for writing their journal entries. I also wanted to encourage students to incorporate technology into this study, so I gave them the option of creating a blog for the journal assignments or creating Twitter postings. I did adapt the writing options for the Twitter postings.

Yesterday when I gave students time in class to work on their journals, two students tried to access Twitter at school. I can access Twitter when I log in, but unfortunately, the powers that be that control our system's technology must have decided that Twitter is not acceptable for students to access and have thus blocked its use on campus. Thankfully these two students are quite savvy and are willing to do this from home, but I just hate that my students cannot use these technologies at school!