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.