Remote Access

Tools at Work

OK, it is 11:00 Saturday morning.

Granted I get up early, but this morning:

1.) I have listened to Will Richardson in Prince Edward Island speak live over streaming video about my classroom.

2.) I have been in on two different chat rooms about this same conference.

3.) I have had Skype chat sessions with three different people.

4.) I have had live Skype calls from two different people. One in Doha and one in Australia.

5.) I have done some planning for my classroom next week using Google docs.

6.) I have added a few notes in the Moodle that we are using for our Manitoba - California collaboration.

7.) I caught up with several people on Twitter and watched a conference back channel develop.

8.) I drank coffee, cleaned my kitchen and played some Wii with my kids at the same time.

This is what these tools are about.

 

technorati tags:twitter, skype, backchannel, learning

iGoogle Shared Tabs

After much debate (in my own head and in the comments and email I received about it), I decided to use iGoogle as the aggregator of choice in my classroom this year. Students usually have relatively few feeds to look after and I think the visual appeal, the ability to organize these how they wish, as well as pull things in like twitter feeds and additional pre- made widgets was the closing factor.

Several people questioned me on this as well as the inability to pagecast an entire piece out to my students as is allowed by Pageflakes. I also wondered about pagecasting. While I foresaw my students making their own pages instead of having to subscribe to a single pre- made page coming from me, I liked this idea, more for networks of learners that my students might find themselves involved in more then me pushing something onto them.

Which is why I was happy to see that iGoogle homepages now have the ability to share an entire tab with someone just by entering their email address. Similar to sharing a document using Google docs, you simply enter an email address and the invitation is sent off.

With this, I can see students who are working on projects with other kids across the globe constructing a tab and then sharing resources they have found with other network members in other places. An invitation could also be sent to the teacher to watch everything the kids are watching. Easy and valuable.

technorati tags:igoogle, pageflakes, RSS

PhDs Probably Shouldn't Read This

I had an interesting Skype chat last night with Konrad Glogowski. I had emailed him several weeks ago, asking if we could meet up. As we are both junior high teachers and I had questions that I felt I needed to pick Konrad's brains about. If you've spent some time with his blog, it will become immediately evident why I thought I needed to talk to him. He does amazing things in his classroom and thinks at levels several times deeper than many of us do.

We talked for over an hour about our classrooms, a wandering reflective chat, and made plans to meet again; but even from this conversation, I spent the rest of the evening mulling over one of the things we talked about: going against what we had been taught during our formal teacher training.

To say that teachers have an uncomfortable relationship with researchers is often an understatement. I know of no other profession who complains as voraciously about their formal training as teachers. This has always bothered me. The next time my doctor tells me he didn't learn anything during his time at university, I'm running for the door. I always think that there is plenty to learn and that the relationships between classroom practitioners and researchers needs to be cultivated and strengthened as we have so much to bring to the table.

But Konrad and I were talking about how much of what we need to do in classrooms to help develop a community of learners that is involved, caring, and thinking, is counter-intuitive to what we were taught in university. We were taught to be caring, but distant. We were taught to stand off and be objective. We were taught to be critical and constantly drive ahead, looking carefully for every moment to dive in with teacherly voice and advice.

Instead, with a blogging classroom, we often find ourselves deep into conversations and comments with kids about things that are nowhere near our required curricula. We find ourselves part of the community of learners, thinking through issues with kids, "doing" school together, not to them. Once the time has been spent first forming relationships, cultivating the community and building a trusted space, then the learning can take off. But how can we expect kids to post their deepest thoughts, and do their best thinking if we haven't spent time on the relationships?

We talked about how kids' blogs are like their bedrooms, a customized, safe space that is their carefully constructed digital identity; so much more than simply a space to write in. It IS them. As teachers we have an ultimate evaluative role, but getting there with our students together is how relationships to each other, to information, and to learning can dramatically change. Kids are much more apt to listen to us, to take our advice, to value what we have to say if we show ourselves to be human and wiling to listen and learn from them.

So to all of you teacher educators out there: don't forget the relationships and the potential that slowly surfaces, bubbles up to the top after the time has been spent allowing students to become someone in our classrooms.

technorati tags:relationship, konrad, glogowski, blogging, classroom

Power of the Network

Hugh MacLeod says it all (again) in only a few very valuable words.

Annotate a Text

Going back to my post from last week about Chris Bletcher's blog and all of the different pieces that go into building a text, I decided to check the understanding of my class on the structure of written texts. I photocopied a single two page spread from both a novel and a science textbook. Next, I had them annotate the text; basically I wanted to get to the idea that a text is filled with instructions for readers. While the main focus of the text is the words and the information, you need to be able to use all of the instructions that are built directly into the structure of the page to be able to fully understand what has been written for you.

It was interesting all of the "stuff" they found. Our written texts are filled with instructions that experienced readers cruise right on by with hardly a second thought.

Eventually, I am going to do this same thing with we b based text, but right now my kids need more experience online. If I give them screen shots of websites and blogs, with built in flickr feeds, del.icio.us, advertising, twitter badges, etc. many of them would not know what these things are. Hopefully next week we will be getting onto RSS and aggregators and they will gain some experience constructing a page of their own (I've finally decided that I'm going with iGoogle personalized homepages) and this will give them some insight into the possibilities for online texts.

I Want to Play

"(Writing) is like making spore marks from mushrooms on white paper and swiping them away, looking for patterns."

- William Gibson being interviewed by the CBC.

William Gibson is one of my favourite authors and I spent last weekend getting a good start on his new book, Spook Country. I also realized something else this weekend: I expect to be able to play with the texts I am spending time with.

Fro example, in the novel, Hubertus Bigend is one of the main characters. Wondering who he is, one of his new employees Googles him and finds a Wikipedia entry. The funny thing is, on a whim I tried to find Hubertus Bigend on Wikipedia too; and I found him. Since the book came out, someone has created this entry and has used Gibson's words from the book. The same is true for Node. This is a magazine that turns up in Spook Country. Scary thing is, someone took this magazine and turned it into a real website. Wondering what else I could find I searched around and found William Gibson discussion boards, his own official website, and an hour long interview with him done recently by the CBC. This is what I listened to on my walk in to work this morning.

These texts are all interactive, they are extensions, playing off of the original, an organic growth. This is what it means to be literate. This is what I am demanding from the texts that I spend time with. I want to be able to dig further, to go beyond what I can see and read at first glance. I want to be able to read news articles and blog posts. I want to listen to the podcasts and search out the Flickr photos of the places that are mentioned in the book. I want fan fiction and more.

This is something the kids in our classrooms are getting as well. They want a full multimedia experience growing out from a single piece of text. They listen to the music, read the blog posts, and want to post their own comments, their thoughts, their YouTube pieces. They want to be a part of the discussion, the growth that happens from any text. Rigged up with a webcam, a built in microphone and a keyboard, they move between video, audio and text.

They expect to be part of the discussion, part of the living thing that text itself is becoming.  This is how we get kids excited about language, about writing, about thinking: by giving them the power to be part of the conversation. When we lock our machines down, filter their internet service and not allow them to be contributors we take away the involvement, the intensity, the power. Remember doing grammar worksheets in school? I don't. But I do remember art class, the time I got to take part in making a radio play and another teacher that let us act in class. They involved me, they challenged me, they forced me to think, to play with language, to defend my opinions.

Language fairly pulses and thrives across cyberspace. Let kids in to the conversation.

Rant over.

technorati tags:spook, country, william, gibson, language, classrooms, change

Classroom Planning Using Google Docs

Classroom plans using Google docs, week three.

technorati tags:google, docs, classroom, plans

Blogs = Complex Spaces

Over the few years that I've been blogging, I've seen the sites themselves and the software take giant steps forward. Blogs are no longer just about text. As people have demanded more functionality, they have become complex spaces bringing together information from many different places and services.

This was brought home to me last week when I arrived in Shanghai along with a few others (virtually of course) to help out with one of Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach's presentations. Chris Betcher from Australia put up a slide (which I captured using Jing, one of my new favourite little applications) on Elluminate that deconstructed one of blog posts. As the pictures shows, his blog aggregates information from many different places into a single Chris Betcher portal.

 

A blog is a complex space. A piece of text in its own right that is as complicated as a textbook of any kind. In fact, I believe it is much more complex as one blog may differ from another much more than one textbook from another. Combine this with the addition of hyperlinks taking readers on to other spaces and the level of reading comprehension needed to navigate a text like this rises dramatically.

As I become more convinced of the legitimacy of blogs as information sources and the staying, revolutionary power of participatory media, I also become more convinced of the need to teach students comprehension and navigation techniques just as we would with any other piece of text.

Revising Voice Threads

Among the dozens of descriptors that need to be looked at and assessed on our report cards each term is:

"revises texts to enhance meaning."

The creators of this card were of course talking about written texts. But it has been interesting watching the students in my class as they create Voice Threads as a final introductory assignment for our connection with St. Elisabeths. As with any teens, these kids are struggling to find their niche and identity in the world and it has been an exercise in image creation for some kids as they choose the images and the words they want to represent themselves in a personal way to the students in a far off other school. And not just any school. But a school in the "cool" hub of the world, Los Angeles. Most of my students have mentioned several times, with concern, what the students in this far off, big city will think of them and their little town. I keep telling them that they will probably be pleasantly surprised by the connections and the similarities they will find between themselves, their lives and interests, and these urban students.

So they revise, they rework, they shoot multiple sets of photos searching for good ones to represent themselves with. They do the same thing with their recordings. Taking a few notes for themselves so they actually have something to say about each photo, they want to find a balance between being informative, and not being overly geeky and talking too much.

It almost feels like a first date.

The students struggle to find a balance, walking a line between meeting the criteria of the assignment to ensure they get a good grade and showing themselves off to these other students in a way that is favourable.

This is revision in the digital age. Revising images, revising their audio files, revising themselves.

It feels like watching danah boyd in action.

technorati tags:voice, thread, danah, boyd, text, literacy

SimCity and Google Earth

Teaching grade eight social studies in Manitoba means an intense look at ancient historical societies. I really enjoy history, but I also think that the students need time first examining current societies to gain a sense of context. For this reason, I like to have them spend a few classes playing SimCity. I've done this in the past and it has been a lot of fun and a great learning experience.

I usually put the students in pairs and have them try to design a successful city. We talk, write, and think about cities and how they work. This year I am adding an assignment using Google Earth to this as well. I really enjoy this tool and like to spend time with it myself. But besides showing a few things to students and using it as a kind of fun treasure hunt tool (find five cities with rivers running through them, etc.) I've never used it much in class so this is a first attempt.

Overall, I have two goals for this mini project:

1.) Understand and juggle the multiple factors that go into the creating, designing and governing of a city.

2.) Examine a few currently existing real cities in North America, Asia, and Africa and begin to understand the similarities and differences between these places.

While we are just beginning the assignment today, we have in past years also done some blogging about this and completed a debrief assignment as well. I have not yet decided if I am going to use this yet or not, but I thought it was worth sharing so I put it up n Google docs as well.

Use 'em if you want 'em!

SimCity debrief

Google Earth and Cities

technorati tags:simcity, google, earth, docs, classroom, assignment