The Village Green » Tools

Historic Humor, Web 2.0 Style

Matthew Woolums — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 17:34:45 +0000

You may have heard of Google Wave and wondered what it was. If so, take a little time to review this humorous reinterpretation of the creation of the Declaration of Independence using online collaboration tools, specifically Google Wave. A little history along with learning about a new online tool has to be a good thing!

We Hold These Truths To Be Awesome: The Founding Fathers Give Google Wave A Try

Because They Care

Matthew Woolums — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 17:01:52 +0000

Much of the criticism of Wikipedia, and wikis in general, stems from the open authoring design that lets anyone contribute content. There are limitations, but the idea that anyone can be an expert is more than a little unsettling to some. Still, that openness is also the whole point behind wikis. Authorship isn’t an accidental process. Motivation to contribute mostly happens when someone cares about the content. Take for example the linked Washington Post article below. Seems Adam Lewis, an ‘amateur’ historian cared enough about the Washington DC Wikipedia entry to fix it up. I think we should all care about something like Adam does.

How an amateur historian rescued D.C.’s Wikipedia page – washingtonpost.com

Wikipedia

Inventions for the Year 2020

Matthew Woolums — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 16:08:04 +0000

The BBC has a nice article on a project asking students to imagine helpful inventions for the year 2020. Among some of the 85,000 ideas submitted are magic pencils to automate their homework so they don’t have to do it, which sort of defeats the point of homework. Seems robots are going to be big in the future too. I’d like to see cars that drive themselves so we don’t have any more excuses for distracted or impaired driving accidents. In the classroom, I’d like to see a device that is a content delivery mechanism as well as a research tool and collaboration device, although I don’t think we’ll need to wait another 11 years to see that. What would you like to see? Besides magic pencils, what would your students like to see?

invention

BBC NEWS | Technology | Children draw own visions of 2020

Certifiable

Matthew Woolums — Sat, 26 Sep 2009 01:08:13 +0000

Spent the last two days in Boston attending mimio train the trainer training. And yes, I even rode a train to get around in Boston. Anyway, for those who don’t know, mimio is a less expensive interactive whiteboard solution, one that is simpler than the other, more familiar boards.

One of the reasons for the cost effectiveness is that mimio does not rely on providing a board. There is a bar that attaches to any existing white board, so no need to remove an existing board, or retrofit a complicated room. The capture bar can be attached with simple picture hanging tape strips, so there isn’t any cost for installation either.

The training I received makes me excited to bring what I’ve learned back to the teachers in my district. And now that I’m certified, I can!

One Word

Matthew Woolums — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 03:33:43 +0000

Of course, if 1400 words is intimidating, try your hand at a one minute write. You get a single word at the top of the page, a simple text box in which to write, and a timer to tell you when your time is up. Might be a nice warm-up for a writing class. From Langwitches Blog list of links for today.

one word. so little time.

Langwitches Blog » links for 2009-08-25

Twitter, Meet Woofer

Matthew Woolums — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 03:05:05 +0000

If you thought 140 characters of micro-blogging at Twitter was mostly pointless, try a site that requires a minimum of 1400 characters. Good thing so many people know about copy-paste. From a MacWorld UK article.

Woofer | Macroblogging

The opposite of Twitter: new site requires 1,400-character minimum – Digital Lifestyle – Macworld UK

Who Are You? Who? Who?

Matthew Woolums — Sat, 22 Aug 2009 02:17:03 +0000

With apologies to The Who, MIT produced a new way to search for yourself online. Called Personas, you type in your first and last name (I’m guessing the more common your name, the less personally relevant) and after data-mining information about your name, produces a graph of how your name is perceived on the Internet. I’m not sure what the ‘Illegal” section is all about, but here’s my personagraph. From an article by Techcrunch.

Seems to work with screen names too.

I wonder what it says about me that my screen name and real name show different results.

The Personas Project From MIT Is All Kinds Of Cool

Plan B and C and…

Matthew Woolums — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 17:58:17 +0000

I had the pleasure to present a few Web 2.0 tools to a group of Socials Studies teachers today, intending to use a ‘Jog the Web’ collection that a colleague of mine put together. Everything looked great. The accompanying wiki was set up, links to a PowerPoint they can download and use if they want, and links to two ‘Jog the Webs’. 5 minutes before the presentation everything was working just fine. 5 minutes into the presentation and Jog the Web stopped responding. Nothing. Checked the network, other pages were loading just fine. What to do? It is kind of hard to have people explore dozens of web 2.0 tools if the links to those tools are not available.

I started bringing up some of the tools I thought were in the collection. We looked at a couple of timeline tools, like xtimeline and Dipity. We talked about YouTube and how to request a teacher override. We checked Delicious, Animoto, and Blaberize. What tools would you show if you were under pressure to present and your original presentation was not going to work?

Maybe Jog the Web will be back up by the time you read this. If not, imagine a great collection of indispensable web 2.0 tools for the Social Studies classroom. So the simple solution would have been to list the links on the wiki as well to have a backup. It was a good reminder to myself to be prepared for problems. If you are committed to using technology, you always need a plan B and C, and…

http://www.jogtheweb.com/run/3wXQ2av1IcZl

Follow You Follow Me

Matthew Woolums — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 03:17:40 +0000

Maybe I missed this, but it looks like something new just showed up in Google Reader. When I last checked, I now have a tool that lets me search for people who are publicly sharing their feeds. Probably an idea worth exploring. I haven’t done much public sharing or following in Google Reader. Seems like sort of a Twitter twist on RSS feeds. Are you sharing or following others who share feeds in Google Reader?

TIE 2009 – Create, Communicate, Collaborate – Howie DiBlasi

Matthew Woolums — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 17:29:32 +0000

http://www.drhowie.com

Started with Green Eggs and Ham. More statistics about jobs moving from the US to overseas, from Friedman’s “The World is Flat”. Also mentioned Pink’s “A Whole New Mind” and Jim Collins “Good to Great” – get the right people on the bus, get them in the right seats, get the wrong people off the bus. Howie says we also need to get a driver. Short video about people who failed before achieving greatness (lincoln, etc). Can we still reward kids for doing anything rather than allowing them to fail? If you want change, be the change.

Will change happen if we don’t change our classrooms? Short video “Is this what the future in the US looks like” from ScreamingFrog. Skills for success:

creative problem solving
critical and analytical thinking
information gathering
team work and collaboration

These skills are all analytical. Video: “We are sinking”. Overview of outline in distributed documents. Interesting, Howie is talking about using Google Docs, but distributed files as an outline. We used a blog as a form of assessment – collecting comments as an assessment. http://mytooltest.blogspot.com/2009/06/how-do-you-assess-you-students-teachers.html

Web site evaluations - http://www.wiredsafety.org/wiredlearning/Evaluation/evalcriteria/index.htm#slide=1 It is important to foster critical thinking on the part of the web surfers in our classroom.

Web 2.0 100 tools for teachers – http://snurl.com/web2tools (slow loading). AltaVista use of host: (limit the results by domain) and link: (who links to that link) as tools to validate web sites.

Short demo of Jing – screencasting. Scratch – simple programming environment. Audacity – podcasting (This I believe example). What are my beliefs?

Everyone is not the same
Conflict isn’t always negative
Learning is individual to each person
Naps are important
We all deserve the opportunity to share our stories
Failure is a powerful teacher

Don’t be afraid of the technology, give it to the kids.

Podcasting in Plain English. Leads into a curriculum review with Bob Sprankle podcasts as an example. http://www.eduhound.com and http://www.curriki.org. Freeplay Music and others for sources of music to include in presentations. Curriculum links exploration. Google Docs presentation adding examples of ’six words that describe me’. My six words? “relax, reflect, don’t let other restrict you”. Other tools shown: Wordle, VoiceThread. Howie has an interesting style where he brings up a ‘newbie’ to demo the tool and the ‘experts’ in the audience provide support in using the tool. VoiceThread only lets you have 3 free threads. Brain is getting full.

Online tools, 280 Slides, PhotoShow, One True Media, Moblyng, Animoto, Rock You, My Jugaad, PhotoPeach. Look for the Educator (sometimes free) options in many of these tools! ePals. We would have to find a way for ePals and Gaggle.net to work with each other. Anyone using both? Contributions to your community. Johnny Lee, Wiimote interactive whiteboard, video from TED Conference. Ask high school electronics classes to make these for every classroom. Contribute back.

Stay connected (communicate) with Twitter (Texas teacher Twitter Experiment). Creates a back-channel. Increases number of participants in any conversation.

Dreaming. Building planes in the Air video from EDS.

Reflection: There was a lot to digest if you didn’t know about any of this. It would be nice to see the document posted in an online version instead of distributed as a file. Where would teachers start? Is there one best practice to implement?

TIE 2009 – Technical, Wikis, Blogs, and Podcasts – Mike Scott and Frank Vretos

Matthew Woolums — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 22:34:41 +0000

Started with introductions. Podcast Capture is the client utility (included with all 10.5 Macs) to create or upload media to the Podcast Producer on the Leopard OS X Server. Podcast Capture uses 6 built-in scripts or workflows. You can make your own workflows. Web interface for the client is also available. Podcast Producer is highly scalable. Probably a good idea to start with a small group of dedicated content producers before it is more widely distributed.

From the server side, starting with Wiki server. Wiki services enabled on the OS X server. Create a couple of users to see how they can work differently. Group is created and the wiki and blog option is selected. From the client side, open a browser and view the wiki server.

TIE 2009 – iPodTouch – Dan McCormack

Matthew Woolums — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 20:43:07 +0000

Most of this session is done on touches. Positioning the touches as a device that improves the ability to collaborate, create, distribute, and access. It is not a ‘netbook’ or laptop lite. Starts with a review of touch basics. Turn it on, home button, bring up controls, swipe to navigate.

Watched a 7 minute video on the touch which outlined challenges in education, and how the touch addresses those challenges. Talked about the student as the CEO of their own digital brand. Karl Fisch cals this their ‘digital footprint’. Looked at audio books in ‘music’ as a podcast, and videos like the physics of baseball. Research from Escondido Union School District on the iRead project where fluency was improved. Apple’s solution is the Bretford PowerSync Cart ($2300 without the iPods). Charges and synchs up to 40 dock connector iPods. Other solutions are on the way.

The App Store. We are exploring apps that were synched on the touches. There are a lot of options.

iTunes and the App Store. Think of iTunes as an architecture. iTunes U is free, hosted by Apple.

Reflection: I’d like to see this used in a school. I also think the price for the devices and carts has to come down a bit. The free offerings from the App Store are very nice.