Visual learning

O.k., on to videos. Despite the fact that my partner occasionally goes storming around declaring me a technophobe after I've admitted that I've ignored yet another one of his emails with a link to some fill-in-the-blank (witty, hysterical, horrible, informative...) YouTube video, I have seen a few. I liked this week's lesson because it puts sites like YouTube into a manageable and educational context for me. And, as a visual learner, I found some items that I really liked. I was excited to read the article about iCuek but then found the site to be in need of more development. Some of the sites also turned me off due to all of the advertising and due to the fact that a lot of them seem to count on viewers being ADHD, which I am not. This is to say that I do much better with fewer, more in-depth pieces than lots and lots of short, quick pieces.

Once again, I've learned a new term: Net Generation, presumably to discribe those younger than Generation Y.

What else? I checked out 100 YouTube videos for educators and plan to go back to explore further and use this list as a reference. I also checked out two of the videos. The first, "The Day the Music Died (American Pie)," was fun to watch. While watching, I was thinking about how the internet has created a new version of philanthropy, given how much time and effort people put into these pet projects that net no income (but perhaps feelings of fame?). At the end, however, the credits looked as though the piece had been produced professionally, which raised interesting issues of how much overlap the web allows between professionals and everyone else. The other video I watched was "How to Make a Mummy," which I cannot reccommend but which highlighted the fact that learning can be not just fun but funny.

How could PS use YouTube or other sites that have been showcased in these activities for 1) development purposes and 2) a course for teachers? I'm sure it's possible. Do any of the usual suspects- Jennifer H? Maggie? Julia?- have ideas for turning PS staff from technology learners to technology teachers/implementers?

There you have it. I'm ready for week 11. My own professional development has been a bit thin in recent years and I am finding 12 Things to be quite interesting.

Is it n-ing or nnning?

At some point I'll go back and catch up on the Google Docs exercise that I have been remiss about completing. Until then, I'm focused on keeping up! To that end, I've most recently studied Ning. I am a very low profile user of LinkedIn and Facebook, but will actually consider ramping up my involvement with them (probably LinkedIn more than Facebook, which creeps me out a bit) now that I have watched the Common Craft video and heard the narrator's explanation of the power of making invisible networks visible because, well, he's right. I checked out the Global Education Collaborative and signed up (because Maggie told me to!) but am not sure how much I'll use it. One truth that all of these activities have been clarifiying for me is that technology has the capacity to help me out a lot if I use it on my own terms but can otherwise start to bother me pretty quickly. As an example, I have very little interest in reading what other teachers are writing about at the GEC website but could certainly find it helpful if people that do enjoy that kind of reading ever wanted to comment on a question or dilemma that I had around teaching. I also learned the term "digital citizen," which I guessed would be very broadly defined, but which turns out to be used mostly around privacy and security and appropriateness on the internet. Interesting.

delicious wikis

I've now checked out delicious and wikis. I understand them better than I did before and think that they both make sense. I can hear all of the people who don't know about these tools (or everyone, before such tools existed) saying, "Wouldn't it be great if there were some way that...?" What I need to do now is to block out time to set up some of these applications in ways and for purposes that will be helpful for me. I am still somewhat ambivalent as to whether time saving organizational tools on the computer will in fact save me time and keep me more organized or will somehow cause me to feel more pressed for time and less on top of things. But these are two applications that I'm happy to check out.

PS- I just spell-checked my post and the computer flagged "wiki," which makes me think that it has yet to go completely mainstream. Then again, Word flagged "jello" earlier this week when I zipped off an email in response to Jennifer's email that she was working toward graduating from eating jello, so apparently computers are oblivious to can't-live-without items that are both new and old.

Rainy day catch up

Oy. I've gotten a bit behind. I just checked my RSS whatever it is and there are 668 something or others waiting for me, so that's officially a nightmare. I've also tried to tackle Week 5's play week. I scanned the list of Web 2.0 awards. I've heard of many of them including delicious, pbwiki, pandora and technocrati. I've used some, too, such as craigslist, monster, yelp and zillow. I checked out delicious, backpack and mango and see a bit of potential but mostly just got swamped again. I also came across parkingspaces and forwarded it to a friend who is trying to rent a parking space, so something good came of that. Now I will commit to going back to the award page and reading the descriptions of everything in case I need one of those products down the line. In the remaining few minutes that I have today, I am going to dive into week 6.

Wait, one more comment. What I was most struck by in looking over the awards list was that only the top three applications made the list and even out of those three, I bet most people only ever use the first one or two tools. This got me thinking about how much power teachers have in what they choose to teach in the limited time they have with their students. Last night I prepared my lesson plan for my English class and then today half of it went out the window to accommodate the pace of the students who made it to class this morning. Ever since then, I've been trying to decide it I kept in and cut out the right materials. It also got me thinking that when it comes to technology, or anything new, it's very important that people have positive initial experiences. Otherwise, they might be misled into thinking that learning more is not worthwhile. O.k., back to week 6.

RSS...putting things in perspective

Ha! I don't generally think of myself as someone who needs a lot of control over things. I tend to be deliberate in my words and actions but am also quite content to see how life plays out. Now RSS is making me make a slight adjustment to this perspective. I got a jumpstart on this week's activity so as not to be behind again. I have created a Google reader for the NY Times and the Globe, NPR and 12 Things. Now, I think I'm done. I had not been clear on the appeal of RSS before setting this account up and am still unclear as to the appeal. Blogs and Flickr, I can control. If I want to write or look for photos or upload photos, I can do so. If not, nothing happens. Here, RSS is feeding, feeding, feeding me information. I know that I neither need nor want all of this information. I can't figure out how to delete it, slow it down, or take a full blown break from it. Hmmm, no good. I'll give myself this week (and next?) to try it out. I'm guessing that by the end of this experiment, my head will be ready to explode and I'll unsubscribe to everything. Will I prove myself wrong? Will RSS win me over? Stay tuned.

Halfway there (links but no embedded photos)

My biggest challenge with Flickr (along with the rest of the web and all sorts of other things) is, as it seems to be with many people, finding ways to harness all-or maybe just some- that it offers without being sucked into an overwhelming quantity of options. In choosing a photo topic to link to, my initial curiosity led me to search for a few of the more off the beaten path places that I have been. In the end, I decided to select two links, http://www.flickr.com/photos/mollie/483933952/ and
http://www.flickr.com/photos/blackbird17/861283116/ that contain photos of my old neighborhood in Sunderland, MA. The first shows a view taken from Mt. Sugarloaf (in Deerfield), across the Connecticut river, across my former neighbors' backyards (I lived in a big old farmhouse a few houses to the right of the properties on the right side of the river) and out toward Mt. Toby, a popular running spot of mine. The second photo is of a cornfield that was about 1/3 of the mile down the street from my house. Every year, the farmers sculpt it into an amazing and very difficult corn maze. This photo showcases Julia Child, a Smith alum from nearby Northampton. If anyone is in need of an escape from the city, the Pioneer Valley foliage is probably at its peak for the next couple of weeks and I highly, highly recommend it.

If I dedicate a bit of time to thinking about how and when I would use it, maybe next week I'll actually open a Flickr account.

Testing, one, two, three

Ok, hopefully I'm catching up just in time for week 3. My son has now had a minor but miserable illness (3 separate ones, actually) for 30 of the past 31 days and my attention seems to be more focused on a cure for the common cold (and all of its variations) than on current technology. A cure has yet to be found. In the meantime, most of my waking hours are dedicated to tissue management. I'll spare you the details (there are actually a lot of details). I am familiar with blogging, familiar but inept at online social networking (why do I keep getting virtual plants?), and am long overdue to master just about everything else on our 12 week plan. Living with a computer guy who is sure that creating wikis to track household to-do lists is the only possible way that work on the house can move forward, I guess I'd have to list wikis as the item I am most in need of learning. Yes, the house has been vaccummed and dusted and mopped in the past few years (more than once, actually) despite my resistance to entering "vaccum, dust and mop" into a password protected site, but I am confident that through Maggie and Jennifer's leadership, greater household harmony will come to exist here in Somerville.

-afd