Watering, Weeding, Wisdom

I’ve finished with “23 Things” or more accurately, “23 Things” have finished with me! I know so much more and I know how much more there is to learn. (Do we ever learn to love that tension?) Web 2.0 is the language of my learners and the world. If I am to be an effective and relevant educator and citizen, then we must have a common language. I am a life long learner and this is one subject matter I’ve been ignorant of far too long.

I’m still overwhelmed at the volume and velocity of information at our disposal. Boundaries of content and chronology are crucial as technology is incorporated into my classroom. Now that I have glimpsed a vision of the collaborative, creative classroom and the personal, professional efficiency it provides, I am frustrated that my school isn’t allocating more resources to getting us 1:1. I’ll just have to be a cyber-crusader.

I wonder if this is the new path for my continuing education? I have a healthy fear of and an affinity for technology in the classroom. Can I be the poster child for the “Paperless Pentagenarian Pedagogues “?

Classroom 2.0 and Twitter bring the world (really just the parts you select) to your desk/palm. As access to people and ideas grow exponentially, the ability to sift and set boundaries becomes increasingly evident. In Mark Marshall’s blog, iclassroom, he give me the permission to opt out of Twitter, “If you’ aren’t a team player, Twitter might not be for you.” He states that  PLNs are cultures of reciprocity, you have to give and get, much like going to a conference only the information is dialogue not monologue. I get the concept and see its value, but in my world (which I know is not typical, real, actual or virtual) I do not have enough time to plan, teach, communicate with, assess, counsel, praise, vacuum, discipline, mediate with, listen to, supervise, and serve my current peers, parents and students, so what gives? How do educators who tweet, blog, wiki, flickr, onenote, moodle, voicethread, blabberize, bubblus, podcast, google, flake, bookmark, “tube”, and techno have time to teach six+ periods a day, five days a week? I’m not a team player, I’m a hermitess.

In the Twitter Experiment video, one student is quoted as saying “kids are able to get outside of their comfort zones. They’re not worried about having to speak in front of 200 people, 100 people, whoever many people are in the class.” How is posting a <141 character comment from behind a laptop, getting someone out of their comfort zone? Seems to me they’ve never left “the zone.” I’m a female English teacher-you can’t possible expect me to think and relate in such a restricted environment.

It’s a tough sell for these two apps, but today was the first day back to work after a long, summer break and I’m not in the mood to have more added to my plate (which everyone else thinks is a platter and is actually a saucer).

Much of blurbs that hit my reader are superfluous so I don’t mind marking them as read…too much. Still love the word of the day cuz words are the tools of my trade. Cool Cat Teacher lives in Camilla, GA so she’s got lots of credibility and her “it’s so hot in Camilla…how hot is it” post courtesy of Twitter cooled things down from me.

Since we’re winding down our web 2.0 class and gearing up for implementation of all this wisdom in the classroom, the DigiGogy post today encapsulates the issues we’re continuously evaluating:

• Upgrading your curriculum and finding alternative, 21st Century ways of providing evidence of student learning?
• Reaching out to other parts of the world and bringing Global opportunities into your program?
• Upgrading methodologies and teaching in a way that reflects a classroom in 2010, or one that reflects a classroom from 1975?
• Letting research based instructional strategies guide what you do?
• Creating communities for learning that include students?
• Letting students be stakeholders in the designing of curriculum and assessments?
• Integrating 21st Century skills beyond technology: critical thinking, collaboration, evaluation, etc?
• Replacing dated assessments with more modern evidence of learning?

When we’ve tackled the cerebral strands, take the less is more challenge and pare down your teaching technology to bare bones in the Blue Skunk’s blog post, If You Could Only have 6… His school district is Not like mine, we don’t have tools thrown at us, we still have to make our own arrowheads to hunt our lunch.

As soon as I read Shelley’s disclaimer, I knew this was one “Thing” I wasn’t going to run after as voraciously and vibrantly the other Web 2.o tasks. This is probably due to both the malaise that has set in now that we’re down to one week of summer vacation remaining and the nagging suspision that more is not always better. So many of the applications we’re discovering have overlapping functionality and being the efficiency Nazi that I am, I think I can collaborate and communicate effectively without a PageFlake portal. Doing everything short of copying the template and creating my own “avalanche” of widgets/flakes, I don’t think my students or their families will be deprived if I forgo this web interface. Thanks for the permission to do a few things well, one of which is to revel in the next 7 days of holiday. Pool anyone?

Our school is transitioning from FirstClass to Google Apps this year so I have been exploring Google Docs for about a month. I desperately wish Google would hire Shelly Paul to make tutorial jings for all its apps cuz they’re not as intuitive as pentagenarians would like. Here are my initial assessments:

Likes:

• ease of upload of current docs
• color coded folders because color and organization matters
• shared status and collaborators are clearly visible
• docs are automatically formatted to the Google format and ready to use
• most current docs are at the top
• you can hide docs that wont be accessed for a while
• there are tons of templates to choose from so no reinventing the wheel!

Dislikes:

• the help docs are insufficient in instruction and facilitating efficient acquisition of new skills
• I don’t have a method of knowing what new options are available without extensive time expenditure.

Three  probable applications:

1. PowerPoint collaborative DC project. Our 8th graders do a research project in preparation fro our trip to Washington DC. In the past, they have worked independently and created a slide to present. Now we can all access the slides and benefit from the unique skills and knowledge each child brings to the project.
2. Getting to Know You survey. I am the only returning teacher to our 8th grade team, so I generated a quick, hopefully fun, survey for my team to get to know one another in hopes of creating unity and avoiding division. Whether they’ll respond remains to be seen, maybe I should have added the question, “is this survey fun?”
3. Spreadsheet for tracking Quizlet practice. Similar to the manner in which we check off our ’23 Things’, I will attempt to replicate this process and permit my students to track their progress in practicing their learning their VCR (Vocabulary from Classical Roots). Then we can compare the results to see if there is a correlation between charting progress and increasing vocabulary scores.

A creatively clever collaborative crew constructed a cute cameo, canning and curtailing my curriculum night candor. (See Thing 19) Purloining aside, I think I like it…

I’m working on a spoof of this to welcome my students’ Moms & Dads to Parent Night entitled “Questions” …

We could borrow this idea from Who’s Line Is It Anyway? and even the most reluctant learner will know what an interrogative sentence is!

Want a great way to get to know your students at the start of the year (just 24 days from today-yikes!)? Ask them to beat Charlie McDonnell’s 100 questions and answers in less than 2:25 minutes…

One last question? Did you view Shelley’s recommendation, The Beckoning of Lovely? Did it captivate and compel you too?

Shelly made this process so easy, yet I managed to make a mess which I didn’t know how to clean up. Now every class member (except the one, exceptional, articulate, brilliant fellow who publish before me) will know I chose the wrong widget when publishing my podcast. Apparently, the iTunes version I have does not permit transposing a wave file to an MPEG3 but only AAC whatever that is. When I looked at the copy on my desktop it read MPEG4 Thing 18~Henri Nouwen, so not wanting to blunder I selected the MPEG4 option to publish in Podbean (is that an incongruous name, or what?). Alas, blunder I did; when going to visit the site and listen to my podcast, it said I made a video file. UGH *#)@%. Where is the undo/unsend button when you need it? On the up side, I couldn’t find my name situated anywhere near the file so unless you know my voice ( I should have raised the volume on my recording ) or read this blog, my ineptitude remains our dirty little secret…

Podcasts have enormous value in the English 8 classroom. I can leave sub plans, explicit instructions, lesson helps and lessons themselves for students, parents and peers. The students can produce and publish their own poetry and book reviews or recite excerpts from the selections we’re reading. My classroom blog (once I make one) will have a plethora of podcasts. I hope to one day branch out into video! I’d like to thank the Academy, Shelley Paul, my coach Kathy Miller…

Back in the day we knew where all the kids in the neighborhood were at 8:00 on Sunday; we were transported to the Wonderful World of Disney. There was some comfort in this shared though separate experience. Now that there are few offerings worth the 30-60 minutes, less commercials, we can become unfettered from the networks and choose what and when to watch. Personal and on demand, in its infancy to be sure, but definitely here to stay and destined to improve.

Being an English teacher, I’m ga-ga over Grammar Girl! I have my itunes pod catcher set to capture my favorite preachers since I don’t live in CA or FL. I was thrilled to find the ability to subscribe to the TED talks. At first I asked to subscribe to TED in HD, so I had to learn how to stop downloads and unsubscribe, but that was intuitively easy.

My husband is the sound geek for his church. He asked me to teach him how to podcast those sermons. WAIT! Who graduated with a degree in electrical engineering and who studied education? God’s on his throne but nothing is right with this picture. :-O I could suggest my students and their families subscribe to pertinent podcasts on my blog, but I’ll have to explore this application more extensively for its educational viability.

This week I get another year older and with each milestone (which increasingly and eerily look more like tombstones) the instances when the next generation says or does something unfamiliar to me are increasing exponentially. My cryptic retort is, “I don’t get out much.” After spending the better part of an hour in LibraryThing, I realize there are others like me-at least there must be, because those millions of people reading millions of books posting millions of contributions are spending millions of hours reading or data entering, so they don’t get out much either.

As a teacher of a Survey of Literature course, this site is the candy store. Choosing new books to read, sharing and unsuggesting will be much more personalized and purposeful. Our media center mavens who have heretofore tracked and rewarded our voracious readers can forgo the paper tracking and just start a group at LibraryThing or join a throng already in progress. I’m not sure about how I can incorporate the Library of Congress connection, but we take our 8th graders to Washington DC in November and visit the LOC, so there may be something brewing there.

As a member of the aforementioned previous generation and card carrying member of the IDGOMSMIAB  (I Don’t Get Out Much So My Ideas Are Bizarre) Club, I thought that if we could arrange a meeting (E Harmony or Match.com?) between the LibraryThingers, who don’t get their heads out of books/Kindles/computers and the culture of Pants-on-the-Gounders, who think book is an unspeakable four letter word and wouldn’t be caught dead in one…would it be a win-win or WWIII? Seemed like a plausible application for Shelley Paul’s admonition…

“If it’s not obvious yet, this SOCIAL thing is a Web 2.0 theme…”