Just Connect

Now I rest!

Our course on Web 2.0 tools has been nothing short of wonderful. It has made me busy this summer in a way that I haven’t been in a very long time.  My mind is filled with jumbled thoughts and ideas, and now I must go off and sift through them to see what rises.

I have LOVED keeping this blog, which came as a total surprise to me.  Originally it was the creativity involved (adding photos, coming up with catchy titles, etc.) that got me excited to produce.  Then it was the act of writing itself as a work of self-reflection.  I kept a journal for many years as a kid and as a young woman, but have long since stopped.  Blogging was simply a form of journaling, albeit publicly, but, thankfully, I doubt many eyes have been set on my words.  I may, though, take up some kind of practice of writing again, though, as a result of this enjoyment.  ’A blog?  I doubt it, but who knows?

It has been a fun roller coaster and I feel very accomplished.  The proof in the pudding will be to see what I gradually put to use.  And even if it’s only a few things, I am infinitely more comfortable on my computer now in many ways, and experiencing the process of being a learner again has been wonderful.  Now I will rest and see where I go.

I have been and remain reluctant to join in the social networking trend for personal purposes.  Professionally, though, I have been a member of the Independent School Educators Ning for a couple of years and take occasional advantage of it. In addition, as mentioned in my post on Thing 20, I’m serving on a committee to create and promote a social network for the New York State Association of Independent Schools.  Our goals are to increase chances that teachers will continue to pursue professional development after leaving a conference, and to provide teachers who cannot get to conferences with the ability to take advantage of notes and resources online that were available at sessions they missed. So I do believe in the concept, particularly with intentions of making my networks more “local”, and was further convinced by this excerpt from our lesson for Thing 22 from Shelley:

“A recent study by the National School Boards Association,  entitled “Creating & Connecting: Research and Guidelines on Online Social — and Educational — Networking” found that that 96% of kids ages 9-17 with Internet access have used social networking technologies, and that 50% have used those technologies to talk specifically about schoolwork. The final report (only nine pages with lots of graphics — not required, but definitely worth a read), in addition to presenting some really interesting findings, offers guidelines and recommendations for school boards regarding the uses of social networking in schools. It’s worth considering – if we don’t model productive, responsible uses of social networking tools for our students, how will they learn to be productive, responsible users of these tools?”

As for Twitter, I must say the whole concept makes me twitch. I attended a Think Tank this summer where members of this 25-person group were tweeting to each other about the content of the sessions contemporaneously.  At first, several attendees, including me, were offended that other attendees were essentially passing notes while the rest of us were contributing.  Then they shared their Twitter feed with the rest of us, and I must admit that a lot of productive and interesting work was being done in new and unorthodox ways.  For one thing, they were accessing the tweets of prominent educators on the very topics that we were discussing, and those far-flung educators ended up contributing to our small session in upstate New York.  ’Fascinating, to say the least.  I am also intrigued that you can search Twitter feeds without joining Twitter, and one good search term I got from Learning in Hand is #edapp which provides lots of interesting Iphone and Ipad applications for education.

I do not, however, envision myself tweeting (or joining Facebook, for that matter) since a) I’m fairly private (despite the impression these ramblings may give) and see no reason to broadcast my life experiences, and b)  I strongly subscribe to the life tenet of “be here now” which seems to me to be in utter contradiction with the attention distracting activity of Twitter.  I also, however, strongly subscribe to the tenet of “To each, her own”, so I will continue to keep my eyes and ears on what’s happening out there; I just hope I don’t miss something because someone ONLY put it on Twitter or Facebook!

The week that we were learning to podcast, we met Grammar Girl.  She has both written posts and podcasts, and I found her topics useful and interesting. I sent her feed to my Google Reader, and very shortly afterwards I saw this post on How to Get Started Blogging.  How timely!

An unrelated feed is Mike Allen’s Playbook on Politico.  Playbook is the ultimate inside-the-beltway look at 24 hours in our nation’s capital.  It’s a lot of fun to read, in addition to being very informative.  I try to take a look at it daily, and it can be quick to read once you get the hang of it. I wouldn’t be surprised if The New York Times was onto something when they named the article in its April 19, 2010 Magazine  “The Man the White House Wakes Up To”.

After being exposed to so many exciting web 2.o tools in our course this summer, I’ve been motivated to create and maintain a start page for faculty that includes RSS feeds and links to interesting and valuable educational sites. I’ve been thinking about it all summer and wondering which forum I would use, would it be some kind of reader, a wiki, simply a deli.ci.ous page, or, now – a start page from Pageflakes, Net Vibes, or some other software?

For personal use, I have an Igoogle Homepage with 4 additional tabs, and I would like to imitate its functionality.  My homepage includes the links and feeds I want to see most regularly (NY Times headlines, The Weather Channel, Politico, my google reader. calendar and gmail, etc.), and then I have a page each for feeds and links related to Educational Stuff, Cooking and Food, Travel, Wine, and Summer 2010 which has the feeds of all my colleagues’ blogs from this course.  I peruse these pages and their feeds from time to time, some more than others, and stay current to the topics that interest me most or whose headlines grab me.

I would like to create a similar venue for faculty to go to.  I envision a homepage with matters relevant to our school and students, along with general school information (i.e. calendar, upcoming events, etc.), and there could be a tabbed page each for professional development opportunities, both online and in person, for periodicals of general educational and pedagogical interest, for different subject areas, and for opportunities to incorporate and use technology in teaching.  I have certainly come across enough in this course to get those pages started and “fed” right away.

With my own Igoogle page in mind, I didn’t want to invest too much time into Pageflakes for this purpose until I am sure it is the source I will use. The functionality of Pageflakes resembles my Igoogle page quite closely, so I’m signed up to Pageflakes and am ready to go should we choose to go that route.  But since our school uses other Google Apps for Education, I’m wondering if we don’t simply have access to something that imitates Igoogle homepages or utilizes our already-formed start page, and I can go that route that I am so familiar with already.  I bet we could!  If not, and I go with another source, where should we put it?  Where do teachers go on their computers most regularly ?  ’Our Moodle site, our website, our email?  What’s the best portal?  Lots of questions, and with assistance from our technology director, I am hoping we will make the right decisions to get it going.

I have been experimenting with Google Docs for a few months now, and have found it quite useful.  As I get better at it, the uses seem more valuable to me.  Two recent projects were:

• A spreadsheet for our course registration for 2010-11.  The initial process for registration at our school is quite changeable, and I wanted to have easy access to information about which students had registered for which courses, numbers, etc., so I entered the data into a spreadsheet that I could share with teachers.  Specifically, once our foreign language teachers gave placement tests to new students, they could add the students’ names into the right course without having to send the information to me for entry.  They could see, too, the classes and how they were shaping up as they entered the names.

• I am working with a committee of the New York State Association of Independent Schools to develop a Professional Learning Network that will be accessible to teachers and administrators at all member schools. My committee mates and I started by writing a mission statement for our PLN, but we are spread across New York State.  I wrote the original draft on a google doc, it was revised by a colleague who is 90 miles away, and then I tightened it up a bit more.  It was shared with the remaining members of our committee online, and we met via video chat (through OoVoo) to discuss and confirm our work. I liked the process, and it made our collaboration across New York State quite easy and efficient since we were able to each work at our own time but see the new draft whenever it was ready and convenient to read.

I can see a great use for google docs among my school’s administrative team, both via spreadsheets and documents.  We are often reading and editing each other’s work, and this could be an efficient and nifty way to do it in the future.  There are “bells and whistles” to google docs that I am learning as I go, and I liken it a bit to when I first learned to do word processing, but easier because I already know the basics (it shares a tremendous amount in common with word processing, as word processing originally did with typing). My one caveat, though, is that printing via google docs is not a perfect system yet.  When you want to print, Google either converts your file into a PDF or imports it into another program (MS Word, Excel, etc.).  Neither of those methods seems great to me, as they seem like steps backwards.  I believe the goal is to only work in the “cloud” and eliminate printing, but I’m just not there yet!

Shooting the Tube

Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/thelastminute/1973927918/

So, what do the following things have in common:  Conjugation of Spanish verbs, Pedro Almodovar, Raquel Welch and Cher, President and Mrs. Obama, Beyonce, the Periodic Table of Elements, and big wave surfing?

That is the stream of consciousness  – or YouTube surfing — that brings me to my chosen YouTube video.  I am not an aficionado of YouTube but enjoy it from time to time.  I spent way too much time surfing YouTube by originally thinking I would look at instructional videos involving Spanish verbs, which took me to a video of the filmmaker, Pedro Almodovar, discussing his favorite YouTube videos, which directed me to a hilarious, campy video of young Raquel Welch and Cher singing “Woman”, which led me to wonder who are female role models of today which led me to search videos of Michelle Obama, and I found that exquisite rendition of “At Last” performed by Beyonce at the 2009 Inaugural Ball.  Phew!  I thought I was done, but when I recounted this thinking to a science teacher, he directed me to some YouTube videos of Tom Lehrer’s Elements Song that his students love.  So, after all that,  I have decided that that is more relevant to our purposes, and I offer it to you here.

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If you are still wondering what big wave surfing has to do with any of this, check out the title of my post.  ’Hoping that clarifies how I felt about all this and, if not, feel free to ask.

This “thing” came together in several stages.  The longest stage was deciding what to include in my podcast that could be brief, engaging, brief, informative, brief, and  just a little interesting.  Add to that the fact that I wanted to create something that would put practice to providing educational content, and the criteria for a good lesson suddenly had to be examined in a whole new way. Ultimately, what must be pondered much more extensively from this lesson is: what makes a good educational podcast?  What known pedagogical elements can be included, and what new and valuable ones can I learn to include?   As a teacher who has always structured lessons so that they are student-centered, I wonder how can a podcast possibly provide the benefits of that kind of classroom?  How can I engage students who are not in front of me or their classmates,  but are working independently and have to construct and shape meaning simply from a voice that is dominating the lesson? BIG questions! So here is my novice attempt at 2 minutes worth of teaching the Spanish vowel sound system:  Vocablos Podcast.

So that most important stage is ongoing.  Then there was the technology which actually came together in several stages.  The podcast evolved through a LOT of trial and error for me; it was not easy. Every time I thought I had created this thing, something proved me wrong.  And, actually, I am not entirely sure that what I presented above was an audio file or a podcast.  I will think about and explore this more and then try, try again.

I have subscribed to podcasts for awhile now, but have not been using them for educational purposes other than my own personal ones.  I studied Italian awhile back and, when anticipating a recent trip to Italy, I needed to brush up on my rusty speaking skills.  Itunes offered a whole bunch of podcasts for practicing and learning Italian, and I listened to the previews of several before choosing LearnItalianPod, downloading it to my Ipod, and then using/listening/practicing Italian at the gym, on the subway, on the airplane, etc., etc.  I found it very useful, and it was particularly handy to practice while huffing and puffing through my cardio work.  ’Made the time pass faster while I honed la mia lingua italiana.

Once I moved to an Iphone, I had heard of a television show on PBS called Keeping Score about classical music composers and the places that inspired some of their compositions.  It is a combination of travelogue and music appreciation course hosted by Michael Tilson Thomas.  I had missed a few seasons, so I downloaded the episodes that interested me most, and I have watched those while huffing and puffing through my cardio work, too.  It was a very pleasant way to endure that unrelenting chore.

The Itunes site has such an extensive choice of podcasts and videos that you can find just about anything you want.  I explored Itunes U today and it, too, has all sorts of fine offerings, many of which are free.  On principle, I have been against purchasing any media or apps (the “I lived without it before, I don’t need to pay for it now” theory) and have been managing just fine in finding free materials that are worthwhile.  That said, there are a few TV shows I’d like to watch at the gym that will require shelling out a few dollars so I wonder when this particular principle will get worn down.

For educational purposes, I am fascinated by Tony Vincent’s Learning in Hand site and will explore it extensively, among others.  As a language teacher, I can imagine all sorts of ways students could practice their language skills via podcast — the technology completely supplants the language labs of bygone eras (and I worry when it will supplant the teachers, too!).  In addition, we have students at our school who travel for periods of time requiring that they do their school work on Guided Study.  If their teachers were podcasting crucial lessons, it could make their education much richer, let alone easier, to accomplish from afar.  So I guess that’s our next “thing”: just how do we make these podcasts?  And how do I structure a lesson differently so that it is appropriate to the technology?  I guess I’m about to find out!

Last week I was having a discussion on a car ride with friends about what each of us were reading.  The titles were interesting, and I wanted to remember several of them so I put them in a note on my Iphone for future reference, along with all the books I gather from reading various book reviews.  That’s for my future reading enjoyment.

As for my past reading enjoyment, sometimes I remember books I’ve read by playing word association games, and I usually remember what I read when I was traveling in a certain place, but if someone asks me what I read before the last book I read (Zeitoun by Dave Eggers – FANTASTIC!), or before that, I usually cannot come up with it.  My mind rarely serves me that way anymore which is, of course, a disappointment (but a reality), and my friends in the car all agreed.

I am a very avid reader and used to keep book logs with titles and descriptions of the books I had read.  I have about 10 years worth of book logs on my laptop, but stopped doing it a few years back when something else in life took over that time spent writing.  Now I may have found a new venue and way to record what I’ve read and it looks like fun.  LibraryThing and Shelfari are very appealing to me since they provide a place for me to “socialize” around one of my favorite hobbies.  I’ve never been a big fan of joining reading groups since I’m quite selfish about what I read and make my choices very carefully.  When I have visited reading groups on occasion, I’m never too sure that I want to offer anything up since my reading experience tends to be very personal; I’m not prone to literary analysis, but enjoy my reading for the private journeys it takes me on.  These social networks for readers, though, seem like a happy compromise.  I can “hear” other people’s thoughts, decide if and how they inform my reading of a book, and move on.  I can also use them to research future reading choices, something I do extensively already but am always looking for new sources.

So now I have to decide which one to try out.  Can anyone comment on the relative merits?

Fun Overwhelming Information Resources – My Delicious Page

Exhausted!

Were I tagging my experience with Delicious, those would be my tags.  Even though I am exhausted and overwhelmed by it, I am cooking up a good idea for use at school.  I would like to provide our teachers with an active and dynamic clearinghouse of professional development opportunities, both virtual and real.   The websites I find and follow are a big part of that, and I hope to tailor my Delicious page to that project.  I have discussed other versions of the same project with some colleagues, i.e. making a wiki or a Google Reader page, but the current frontrunner is Delicious.

By the way, does anyone know why it is named that?