Get out of the boat

Aaaaah the journey is over.  Or, the journey has yet begun.  I hope the journey has just begun. There is a line in Apollo 13 where some senators are questioning Jim Lovell about why they should keep funding trips to the moon. The goal had been accomplished  so why keep going? Jim Lovell replies in essence…imagine if Christopher Columbus discovered the New World, but no one returned in his place.  I certainly hope that I keep returning to these wonderful discoveries and sailing off on new adventures of web 20 learning.

I am concerned that I will not remember half of what I have learned this summer, but I am hopeful that I will at least remember that “it” is out there; I just need to find it again and use it.  I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I am grateful for this blog.  Reading back over my posts brings to mind many tools and resources that I want to use in my classroom or investigate in more depth.

I have created two websites for my classroom. I am still tweaking them and trying to figure out which one I want to use and how exactly to use it.  I realize that if I just use it to disseminate information it is nothing more than an online newsletter. I want it to be a collaborative learning tool. I also realized that for it to be a collaborative learning tool I must release control.  This is a hard one for teachers or apparently at least for this one.

My 60 minute excursion into Classroom 2.0 turned into four and a half hours. I found and joined a group for beginners, seemed appropriate. I also joined a group for Elementary Reading Teachers with many good ideas and links. When searching in tags by subject, I investigated math and found Mr. Anthony‘s site with links to games and practice in math by math unit topics. It is well laid out; very easy to use.

Also, with a few more clicks of the mouse I landed on this site which is a compilation of useful sites.

100 Free Web tools for Elementary Teachers

My fear here is that with so many trails to travel down and so many destinations to explore, that I will forget that they’re there. I have tagged and tagged hoping to leave my trail of bread crumbs.

Twitter…aaaa…ok, I need to confess that I already had a Twitter account, not for twittering or tweeting, but to follow a son who is in the army. That said, I definitely had a condescending view of Twitter, probably due to the mainline news reporting more  issues than benefits. Obviously, I had no vision for the possibilities here, but now I do. I have even started following lottascales and coolcatteacher along with others.

I finally am able to get my mind around the fact that Twitter is micro-blogging…now I understand its place in the web 2.0 world. I noticed that many tweets include a link to what is being tweeted about. I like the idea that these entries are short and sweet.  I know I will be referring to the 30 Ways to use Twitter in the Classroom. For one, I like the idea of having students Tweet as if they are a character in a book.

If you didn’t feed your reader Cool Cat Teacher, you really need to. She posts often with a variety of information. She posts about ideas in education, blogs, websites, tools, and products. She even blogs about changes she has made to organize her web20 life more efficiently.

One recent entry was about Symbaloo. Symbaloo is a customizable visual start page. You can start with one of their prestarted webmixes, browse through other webmixes that might suit your needs or start from scratch. A webmix is a grid of tiles, you click on the tiles to navigate to that tile’s  location.  Even if you choose one of their webmixes you can easily tweak it to meet your needs by deleting  and adding tiles. The page is set up in rows and columns of colorful tiles perhaps slightly smaller than a scrabble piece. Let’s say one of your tiles is a link to the Bank of America website; the tile will have the Bank of America symbol on it. You can rearrange the tiles to group them in whatever fashion makes sense to you. You can also have tabs of different webmixes, let’s say for all your math sites or your RSS feeds. It’s really quite interesting and visual appealing. It is also quite social, as you can share your webmix with your friends…or the world.

www.symbaloo.com

Oh, if only I’d known about Google Docs this spring.  A colleague had created a document that we emailed back and forth many times in the editing process, even loosing track of where we were in the process. Google Docs would have made the process much quicker and simpler. I know in the future we will put Google Docs to good use, saving ourselves much time and aggravation.

Students and teachers could use this application to create a slide show presentation with each member contributing their slides.

Our small group at church is often having dinners together. We usually email back and forth about who is bringing what. Google Docs would eliminate that confusion as everyone edits one menu document.

I enjoyed looking through many of the documents that are posted for public use. There is quite a variety of documents for professional and personal use.

It was interesting to “play around” with the different application features like  drawing, spreadsheet, and presentation.

ROAD TRIP without even leaving my desk. I was able to glimpse into classrooms all of the country through YouTube and TeacherTube.  I find it inspiring and motivating to see other teachers teach. By observing, I can see what techniques they use that can be adapted to my classroom or perhaps even ways that I might do something a bit differently. I enjoy seeing the setup of their rooms, what’s on the walls, how does it feel, what can I learn from them?

I searched topics like differentiation, Understanding by Design, and math. The following is a video that popped up which I found intriguing. It was listed as Whole Brain teaching–4th grade Critical Thinking. I was attracted to the title and then the by the engagement, activity, and participation of the students during the lesson. The teacher is using the Power Teaching method.

How to _______, you can find it. One of our sons is a new homeowner with some plumbing problems. He had called a few days ago for advice on how to replace a toilet. My husband was not able to help with his specific question and suggested a plumber. I thought I would try a How to replace a toilet search, sure enough multiple videos.  I also searched how to tune a guitar and found a great basic video. And how to juggle and again found a great basic video.

Fun, more fun than you can handle. “Surprised Kitty” and “Dancing Cadet” are funny.

TeacherTube, of course, is more specific and requires less winnowing to find something useful. I tagged several math related videos. Some of the videos might be used to introduce a concept and some to have the students assess how they might have presented the concept differently.

Once again I have taken the circuitous route to completing the Thing. Finding the sound recorder, easy. Record the the podcast, not bad. But, I deleted it because I didn’t think I had recorded, but, but…don’t ask. I just recorded it again and we’re good to go.

Load it into iTunes, that looks good. Oh wait, where exactly is it in iTunes?? podcasts, no. music, no. recently added?? Yes.  I click to convert it to mp3 but there is nothing that says convert to mp3, it says convert to AAC version. I don’t know what that means, but I try it. I copy it and put it on the desktop.  Wait a minute… Shelley said something about iTunes and mp3 and what to do if it isn’t there. Back to the directions, switch to mp3, change the WAV to mp3, copy to desktop, we’re back in business.

I go to podbean, follow the instructions and publish my podcast. I notice that my podcast is not showing up in the same spots as everyone else’s so, I go back to look at mine and the little gray rectangular button that should say “audio mp3″ , doesn’t.  I must have uploaded the wrong one. I head back to iTunes after first stopping off on my desktop to delete the file I didn’t want, copy the correct one to the desktop then back to podbean. I uploaded the correct file, the correct little button appears. breathe.   I’ll just delete the incorrect podcast thinking it would be easy, but can’t find a delete button. Oh, there in a paragraph of information it says in teeny, tiny print “edit” –click–delete–are you sure??–yes–click–gone. breathe.

I did try and try and try…to embedded a link to the podcast. I never could get it to link to the podcast. It would link to some other area of podbean. At one point I even got a message that said, and I kid you not, “Hey, tiger, you’re in the wrong spot…” and listed choices of what to do.   If you got this to work, I would love to hear how.

I will admit it; I am one of the ones (hopefully not the only one) who thought podcasts were made for iPods.  pod, Pod..made sense to me. This explains why one of my sons would shake his head and laugh at me when I would say,”no, don’t send me the podcast; I don’t want to have to put it on my iPod.”  But, I’ll bet he doesn’t even know what pod stands for, and I can’t wait to tell him. Now knowing what pod stands for makes everything clearer. Before I was thinking pod, like a little protective encasement where you keep things you like or want to save. Kinda like the pod the president was suppose to be in when it left the plane in the movie Air Force One. Go ahead and laugh at me, but what a perspective this gives me into my students. When they don’t “get it”, what is it in their thinking that could be causing a misperception and thus blocking their learning? hmm?

I subscribed to Grammar Girl and Just Vocabulary through my RSS reader. I was surprised by the commercials in the middle of the podcasts. I had not experienced commercials with podcasts that I had listened to through ITunes.  I don’t know if that is a facet of the podcasts or the location from which I’m listening. Commercials aside these are short, useful podcasts.

I have enjoyed two additional subscriptions Mathgrad podcast, where in one short clip I learned what conjecture is as related to math and the difference between a theory in science as opposed to a theory in math; poddictionary are casts about the etymology of words, great fun.

I tried out Tech Teachers and although it was interesting, it was more about devices and their operation and less  about how I could use them in a classroom. If you are looking to purchase a tech device, this would be a good spot for a review.

I pictured the expansive building that would house such a collection. I opened the aged, but noble and immensely heavy front door and step into the cavernous foyer. The books and stacks and shelves and rows and floors and stairs stretch on beyond what I could see. There is the smell of leather and ink and old. There is the hushed whispers from libraries of old and the clicking of shoes on marble floors. Then I walk up to the terminal type in a book and bam, I’m connected to this world wide library without taking another step. I’ve stepped into the parallel universe of books. I love books.

I like the idea of being able to read reviews and recommendation on books for professional growth and for pleasure reading. I like when I added books to my collection that it showed how many others had that book in their collection as well. What I would have liked was to be able to click on that number to see what other books those people had on their shelf. I found it a bit creepy that after I created an account with user name and password only, no email address, it came back with local listing for my area.  Do I even want to know how that was possible?

Amazing, but true…I already had a delicious account!! AND I had already imported all my favorites from my home computer and my school computer….I know, I know…pick your jaw up off  the floor…it’s amazing, but true.

Delicious is the bomb! You know we have all found a site at home, then emailed it to ourselves at school to then post  in our favorites. Or found a site at school and send it home, etc.  I would often save the site in multiple folders if necessary, creating my own tagging system. It worked, but not too efficient and definitely not social or web 2.0ish.  And the worst of all possible things…occasionally out tech people at school would have to work on the computers over the summer and all of the favorites would be swept into oblivion…perish the thought…but true. Delicious solves that headache and heartache, cause you know we get attached to our favorites.

I love the tagging concept. At first I was trying to be judicious with my tagging, but then I scrapped that for the freedom of tagging mania.

http://delicious.com/katland73

Oh so much fun and so little time. Through my reader I discovered this helpful site with oodles of maps.  Having family members scattered about the world, I enjoy checking out where they are.

http://www.worldmapper.org/

This next  site may become a new favorite. I am notoriously poor at selecting the correct words when I want to search the web. This little gem offers alternative or additional words that could be used; all you need to do is drag them over into your word window and you have new way to search.

http://www.sortfix.com/

The next is a blog post addressing the changing educational climate which is proposed to be accelerating due to economic times.  This is creating quite an opportunity for innovative education.  It is a time for virtual schools, collaborative partnerships, face-to-face schools with flexible schedules, tandem learning partnerships, and progressive intellectual property organizations.

Coolcat Teacher shares that the educational organizations that will feel the most stress are barrier schools, barrier funding mechanisms, barrier intellectual property rights, and barrier thinking. Basically any organization that is boxing themselves in, in anyway. Groups who are afraid of the advancement, and instead of embracing  the newness they find themselves surrounded by they build walls to protect themselves from the onslaught.

The intellectual property rights barrier intrigues me. The idea that most schools own a teacher or students IP that is developed. But, they do nothing with it. If schools would embrace that fact that they have a product that could be marketed they may have an additional source of revenue. This would involve the need for creative new policies that would allow teacher to participate in the income from this arrangement. Schools that have the savvy to do this will not only be able to retain their most creative and productive teachers they will attract creative and productive teachers as well.

The Disappearing (and Thriving) Brands in Education

This is intriguing to me as juxtaposed with the whole Creative Commons movement. To create the best learning and teaching environments it is all about the economics. It’s about the production and distribution of wealth. In this case intellectual wealth. Those that creatively allow the production and distribution of education will be the ones who make the biggest impact, the ones whose voice will be heard.