Instructional Technology changes so fast we constantly find ourselves back at the beginning asking questions such as. Where do we go from here? What technologies does a classroom need? What tools are we going to support? What tools can we support? What's our vision for the 21st century learner? We never actually arrive but instead are constantly evaluating and adjusting our goals and targets. So here I am Back Again to learn, explore and adjust some targets.
The first time I experienced the iTunes audio store it was liberating because I no longer had to stare at the CD's on the shelf wondering if I remembered the name of the artist and song title and no longer had to use community head phones to listen to snippets of songs to decide if that was what I was looking for.
LibraryThing has that same liberating feeling. It's now where I'll go to browse for books. Great resource I plan to share with my mom, wife, sisters, brothers -- you get the idea. Thanks for including this tool.
I created my delicious account several years ago but up until now have only had a couple of bookmarks posted to it. I understood what a fabulous tool delicious was but kept stopping because of the amount of effort it was going to take to transition the bookmarks I had into delicious. I was and am using a service that synchronizes my browser bookmarks between my computers so I haven't felt the frustration of not being able to access bookmarks when switching from one computer to another. About 6 months ago I began using another social bookmarking service called Diggo and although it has some unique features I enjoy I find I'm now committing myself to jumping into delicious. Delicious seems to have many more users and because of this has many more resources available for searching. As a bonus once I have delicious set up the way I want I'll be able to import all that information into Diigo and can use both tools. Sweet!
I've now uploaded almost 1000 bookmarks into delicious and am beginning the process of re-evaluating each link, tagging and sharing. It may take me months to complete but I believe it will be worth the effort. There are many situations where it will be advantageous to be able to share a set of tagged resources with a group of educators. I guess I just can't wait any longer.
Because of NCLB requirements every district is to now complete a report each November that as a part will identify the number of 8th grade students that met the TEKS for "Technology Applications" the previous school year. Since we didn't know of this requirement until this past May we "as well as many other districts" had to gathered this information by administering a assessment to our current 9th grade students. This assessment was completed a couple of weeks ago. We will soon begin the process of pre-assessing our current 8th grade students and then be ready in May to administer a final assessment that will go into next years report.
In Miguel Guhlin's "Around the Corner"-MGuhlin.net blog he's conducting a survey to gather informal information about this "Technology Assessment" report that districts are in the process of completing. This informatin will give us (coordinators, directors, anyone) a peek into how other districts are doing in meeting this goal and an informal way for us to measure how we're doing in our district. I encourage you to take a look at the results gathered so far. We obviously have some work to do.
I consider the information being gathered to be timely and invaluable. The best part is Miguel is doing it all brilliantly at no cost with free Google tools. Someting that anyone of us could have done - He just seems to be fearlessly a step ahead.
OK - I couldn't help myself - I looked at all of them and plan to return to several over time. A pretty cool assortment of tools with so many possibilities.
When I'm looking at these tools I'm usually looking from the perspective of how could a teacher use this in a classroom as a teaching tool or how could a teacher use this to interact with kids. As I'm testing these tools "from home" my enthusiasm for using them is being somewhat tempered with the knowledge that several of them will not function as described in this "The ABCs of It All" Blog post or will be blocked because of our filter. This begs the question - should we open the filter and make it considerably less restrictive knowing that with the good will also come some bad?
As an example lets take Google. Fantastic tool set that if unblocked would give kids access to not only its wonderful tools but would also allow them to search Google Images. Google Images search capabilities will find more images of every kind than any other Image browser I've found on the web. It's actually also a fantastic tool but if inappropriate searches are made will find images you don't want the kids finding. The way Google Images works is it caches thumbnails of images which may be blocked by our filter when the thumbnail is clicked on but does give you the small unfiltered thumbnail preview. There is technically no way for us to block these thumbnail images without blocking all of Google. If we unblock Google the end result would be access to wonderful tools but teachers would need to be that much more vigilant in monitoring what their kids were doing while on computers.
One of the tools I discovered that I plan to use is PollDaddy and thought I'd try it out for a spin with the above topic in mind. Which would you choose knowing the options we have? Give me your vote and feel free to have others read and vote as well.
Image generators are a fast and easy way to create graphics that can be used in a variety of projects. The only downsides for me is that I've seen so many of them that they are no longer looking fresh and new and the amount of commercial advertising on many of these sites is more than I would want to subject younger kids to. The two I spent most of my time with were spell with Flickr and Image Chef to create these two graphics. I may use the graphic above as a humorous way to alert users that a particular computer is out of commission.
I used slide.com to create this "books" topic slide show. I was specifically looking for pictures I might be able to incorporate into future presentations. I'm not sure it's the best use of the SlideShow tools but pretty cool just the same. Sandbox page
Flickr has so many possibilities and tools to explore it's hard to know where to begin. The time estimates however for each section are way off for someone with a tendency toward ADD. I would start off on a small task with an estimate of 15 minutes and an hour and a half later would find myself wondering what it was I was supposed to be looking for. So back to the 23 things to re-read the task description.
My search topic in Creative Commons - Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License was "books". Just wanted to see what fascinating images of books might be available. I explored several hundred of the 66,186 possibilities and downloaded several images that I'll save for future presentations and projects. Way cool!
I've been an Instructional Technology Coordinator for the past 7 years in a large urban school district. Fantastic job working with fantastic people. Downside - minimal impact on teaching and learning. Here's hoping Web 2.0 tools will finally break us out of the four walls.
