Thing #23

Thing #23 Summarize Your Thoughts about This Program

• What were your favorite discoveries or exercises on this learning journey?

I loved the idea of Google Docs; I hope to get my grade team to work using these instead of email clusters this year. I also am thinking about embedding all videos I show in-class from now on, perhaps in this blog, which I'll continue whenever I have something educational to note for posterity. I'm going to look into using Lulu, if only to bind my own self-made children's books. Oh, and I've got to use a couple of attention-catching custom images this year.

• How has this program assisted or affected your lifelong learning goals?

I thought of myself as fairly technologically savvy and competent at the beginning. I guess the program has helped remind me that we can always learn more. Vicki left a great quote on my open Google Word Doc along the lines of "daring to classify ourselves as developing." To the extent that one of my lifelong learning goals is to simply keep learning, this has been great.

• Were there any take-a-ways or unexpected outcomes from this program that surprised you?

I was surprised to find so many great things under the mash-up category.

• What could we do differently to improve upon this program’s format or concept?

The format is good. Loved the "in plain English" videos that accompanied many lessons. On the whole easy to follow and nicely telescoping - each lesson opens a door to the next. It would be nice if there were more networking opportunities. A 23 Things Ning? A Google Doc for participants to sandbox in? A 23 Things wiki?

• If we offered another discovery program like this in the future, would you choose to participate?

Sure.

• How would you describe your learning experience in ONE WORD or in ONE SENTENCE, so we could use your words to promote 23 Things learning activities?

I'd say 23 Things inspired me to gladly classify myself as developing.

• Now go and comment on some of the other Players' blogs?

Is this a question? I don't know the answer. Er, yes?

Thing #22

Thing #22: Nings

I knew nothing about Ning until this Thing. I was totally Ning-norant.

I joined the Ning Teacher Lingo. It appears to be a good resource for lesson ideas and interesting or amusing articles geared to the industry. For elementary education I think Ning is solely a teacher-specific tool, like an educator's magazine.

For middle school and later grades, I gather that Ning can also by students be used as an alternative to more anarchic social networking sites such as Facebook. While it's a commendable idea and it's always good to have a safe space for school networking (or global networking), it's pretty clear that nothing school-endorsed is going to take the place of sites like Facebook. Students will always want a refuge from school, just as adults want a refuge from work. Still, it's great for students to have an opportunity to create their own networks based on their own interests.

On the whole I find Ning somewhat off-putting. Unless you've created your own group, it gives off a vibe of being rather exclusionary to me.

Thing #21

Thing #21: Podcasts and Videocasts

I really do like those "In Plain English" explanation videos. So helpful!

Photostory, being a Microsoft product, only downloads to Windows, so isn't going to be very relevant to the MacBook Pro machines we all have at work. Which is a great shame, because it looks like a lot of fun. I looked at a few vidcasts made by the 23 Things community and they're very impressive! (Love this one!) I believe the same effect can be attained with iPhoto, but I'm not sure how. Help me, Steve Jobs!

However, I downloaded Audacity, which is a wonderful program! I have a microphone, and used Audacity to record this truly professional-grade podcast. I'm not so sure if podcasts have a practical purpose in elementary school education, but I'm glad this program showed me the tools to do one if I need to.

Thing #20

Thing #20: YouTube, TeacherTube and Zamzar

As I mentioned last time, I've used YouTube in the classroom before. This is the first time I've embedded a video. Turns out to be so easy, a child can do it.

Embedding video is a useful tool because it gives students access to the video that you want them to watch and no others. As I said about Google Search, sometimes just being on YouTube can lead to some quite inappropriate videos or even video titles. I saw that there was an option to not include "related videos" at the end (which I have enabled in the video below), which I'm highly thankful for. Again, sometimes the videos YouTube suggests are decidedly not what you want to see. I am very seriously considering embedding all videos I show in the classroom from now on.

In conclusion, I love They Might Be Giants.

Thing #19

Thing #19: Web 2.0 Awards List

I perused quite a few of the winners and runners-up on the list. I regularly use one or two of the more common ones, like YouTube, Last.fm and Google Maps, but my interaction with many of the others (Flickr, Del.icio.us) has been entirely though the 23 Things Project. For which I'm grateful! My horizons have expanded already!

Though YouTube has been a source of vaguely educational fun for my class every year, the winner that I'm most taken with is Lulu. I've never used it before, but have heard about it. Yes, it's vanity press made accessible and easy, but it seems to me that the classroom potential is great. Books can be customized for lessons, schools, even specific classes (repairing my shattered dreams of being a children's book author). And of course content created by the students themselves can be published, which gets kids involved in the entire creative process and boosts self-esteem.

I guess in the end I find Lulu to be the most inspiring Web 2.0 tool because like the others it demands a commitment to creativity but, unlike most of the others, promises to transform your work into a physical artifact. Perhaps I'm just stuck in the old Life 1.0 mode of thinking.

Thing #18

Thing #18: Online Productivity Tools

I downloaded and installed Open Office, and I think it's terrific that a full set of Microsoft-clone writing and spreadsheet programs are available for free. Schools and students without a surplus of resources can use these programs to do schoolwork and promote computer literacy and office skills. It really levels the playing field.

But - and I don't mean to keep harping on the same string here - Google Docs (which we explored in Thing #7) are also free, and better suited for collaborative research because they're accessible to any computer, at a school lab or the library. For the same reason, they're better suited for those without easy access to computers.

So, in short, Google Docs, the wave of the future.

Thing #17

Thing #17: Rollyo

Rollyover Google, and tell Ask Jeeves the news.

Ahem.

Rollyo is a site that allows you to customize a search filter by limiting the search to only the sites you select. This is a useful tool for the classroom, since despite Google's Safe Search setting and even with our school's sometimes over-zealous blocking software, it's still possible to get highly inappropriate results from Google image search. I enjoy modeling for kindergarten kids how I create PowerPoint presentations or Mimio games using Google, but I can't look for even the most innocuous pictures while they watch, on the slight chance that something unexpected will pop up.

So it's definitely a neat tool, but custom searches are probably of more use in older grade classrooms. Teachers can set search criteria and students can do their own research without being distracted by unwanted web sites, and staying away from legitimate sites that the teacher does not want them to use for research.

As I see it there are two negative aspects to consider Rollyo. One, it discourages browsing, as I discussed in the Thing #15 entry; it's often the case that we find what we were looking for when we stumble upon it, sometimes while looking for something else. Two, it requires that the teacher know what he's looking for in the first place; it presumes familiarity with a wide variety of sources, which may not be the case. It's a tool that requires advanced planning to use.

For my own use and just for this project, I created this linguistics search roll which covers six terrific sites about language and expression.

Thing #16

Thing #16: Wikis

I've used Wikipedia a lot and am familiar with the general wiki concept, but I thought the video did an excellent job of explaining it.

How might wikis be used in the classroom? Well, I don't want to rain on the wikiparade, here, but - from a purely practical standpoint - I don't see any difference between creating a wiki and creating a Google Document for collaborative research.

Of course I could be missing something. I'm not very bright.

Thing #15

Thing #15: Web 2.0, Library 2.0 and the Future of Libraries

I'm a teacher, not a librarian, so I'm more immediately interested in the implications of 2.0 learning in the classroom than in the library. I found the video to be revealing ("I will be hired for a job that doesn't exist yet") and quite sobering ("I will read 8 books this year"?! I read eight books this week! You consarn kids quite that Face-tweeting on my lawn! And so forth). The article at that link is also fascinating reading. Key lines, to me:

Last spring I asked my students how many of them did not like school. Over half of them rose their hands. When I asked how many of them did not like learning, no hands were raised. ... And there’s the rub. We love learning. We hate school. What’s worse is that many of us hate school because we love learning.

The articles on Library 2.0 made for some interesting food for thought, however, since I am after all a library aficionado (a.k.a. geek). One clearly controversial point from Rick Henderson's piece struck me:

But it no longer makes sense to collect information products as if they were hard to get. They aren’t.

Well, I'm not sure that public libraries have ever collected things because they were hard for the individual to get. It may have been true at one point, but that's not the reason for the collection. The collection, then and today, exists to draw the patron in, to provide more than one point of view, to lead her down previously unexplored paths, and to enable the fortuitous "stumbling-upon" of new ideas, media, and favorites.

I agree with his assertion that library patrons (like students) must and do educate themselves as to how to use the tools they use to learn. But left to their own devices (ha! devices! geddit?), will patrons expose themselves to a broad array of viewpoints as they would with the existing collection? Michael Stephens' article notes that Librarian 2.0 "gets content" for the patron to use, remix, and so forth - and what is that content if not the collection?

Most people who have actually browsed in a library can attest to the experience of finding something they did not come in to get. (Actually, this model works with shopping for pretty much anything, as well.) It's true that the library no longer has to have a monumental collection on site - the Patron 2.0 should know how to order various editions or missing pieces from the web or InterLibrary Loan - but there's still a place for the collection itself as starting point.

Thing #14

Thing #14: Technorati and How Tags Work

Well, while I was intrigued by the possibilities of del.icio.us, I found Technorati to be a bit chaotic. I'm sure it's very helpful for bloggers who want a wide audience, but I found all the ranking and tagging to be distracting. It's nice to have the tags in order to search for a specific subject on the blogosphere, but of course if you want to do that there's always Google Blog Search, which in some ways is far more thorough. (A search for "linguistics" gets 11 hits on Technorati, and 638,000 on Google Blog Search. "Newbery" has zero results on Technorati, but 148,000 on Google. "Three musketeers" gets 6 on Technorati, while GBS gives 243,000. Hey, apparently they're making a 2011 movie! Sweet.)

Technorati's main strength seems to be tracking which blogs are "hot" right now, based on who's linking to them, and which blogs are losing influence. A sort of Billboard for the blog business, I suppose, and indubitably of intense interest to industry insiders, but - in my opinion - not so necessary to those of us who look for specific content for one-time perusal.

Thing #13

Thing #13: Tagging and Discover Delicious

Well, I started a del.icio.us account. I've used this service before and, frankly, didn't see the benefit to it. It's very easy, after all, to use your web browser to sort bookmarks into folders as soon as you save them, so the whole thing seemed a bit redundant to me.

However, I was wrong. I overlooked two redeeming qualities. First, with del.icio.us you can access your bookmarks from any computer.

Second, and more importantly, I didn't see the social aspect of sites such as this. I like the way del.icio.us can be used as a community builder. It shows you the number of people who have tagged a particular website, and by clicking on that link you see the accounts of those who share your interests. For example, after tagging my school's website, I found the account of a parent from my class two years ago who also tagged the site.

It can be used with students as well. For example, parents from my classes are always asking me what websites I use with the kids. I could set up a classroom-friendly account and give them that URL, with all the sites listed and tagged for easy perusal.

Thing #12

Thing #12: Creating Community Through Commenting

1. One point made in this post that I think bears repeating is to write constructive agreement. Everyone talks about constructive criticism, but it's just as important to realize that just saying "Love your blog" or "I agree" is nearly meaningless. As a kindergarten teacher, I have encouraged kids to go beyond saying a book was "good" or that that they "like" a friend's show and tell item. So how much more should we as adults use our expansive vocabularies and say why something is good or what we like about an idea? This goes far beyond the blogosphere and into everyday conversation as well as work meetings.

I also enjoyed being told about the comment tracking service CoComment in the same post, because I had no idea such a thing existed.

2. I added to my Associated Blogroll a shedload of this year's Library2Players who have updated within a week or so. I will be reading and commenting in the coming few weeks.

3. Outside of the Library2Play community, I recently discovered two terrific blogs of interest to a language-loving geek like me: the academic but eminently readable Language Log and Ken Jennings' amusing blog.

Thing #11

Thing #11: LibraryThing

But what about Goodreads?

Ahem. So anyway I set up an account on LibraryThing, user name nleggatt. I added a smattering of loosely pertinent books that I've read because of the school.

I tried to search for relevant groups but although I found some for librarians, teachers, and pedagogical instruction, very few of them seemed to be currently active. (This one for librarians is up to date.) And while it doesn't pertain much to professional development, this group intrigues me and could be potentially handy (especially for librarians, who get asked that sort of thing all the time).

How could this be useful to me professionally? It's good for keeping online notes about work-related books I've read. Beyond that: obviously, as with most internet tools, it works best if everyone else were doing it too. If there were a school group on LibraryThing, where faculty and admin could discuss work-related books and ideas. It could be used to discuss the text of a recent literacy symposium, for example, to read similar ideas and suggestions from teachers around the country, and to see other similar books that are recommended based on that text.