I've never been "tagged" by one of these, but this one looks too fun not to try. I'm a big fan of Wordle already and I've used it with students and their writing and with journal articles, but never with my own writing. So, here's the Wordle for my blog's RSS feed
The first thing I noticed is that I really need to stop saying "really" so often! The other is that students is my most used word, which makes me really happy (ha!). Since today was my last day at school until next year, that seems like a happy note to go out on!
Really, it isn't. So why do so many of us think that we are collaborating when we are engaged in nothing more than discussion of how to best accomplish some piece of "administrivia?"
I think that the main reason is our lack of understanding how to collaborate. If communicating and collaborating are essential 21st Century literacies, then our students are in trouble. Teaching can be one of the least collaborative endeavors ever. Teachers enter their classrooms everyday with the mindset that they stand alone in a sea of children (whatever their age).
It doesn't have to be that way. We can learn to collaborate, but we'll have to be teaching ourselves how. I don't think that many administrators know much more about working and teaming than anyone else in education.
Having made that optimistic statement, I need to admit that I'm not sure how I'm going to teach myself more collaborative skills, but I'm going to start by doing some reading and talking, my favorite methodologies for learning something new. Peter Gow has a great post on the lost potential of department heads and he's onto something there. I think the same could be said for middle school teaming structures.
Kim Cofino writes a lot about the work she's doing, and while I don't think she specifically talks about the structure of collaboration, its there. So, I'm going to catch up on what she's written as part of my research. It's as good a start as any, and better than many!
Literacy and technology have been intersecting in class this week in great ways!
I am a big fan of Harvey and Gouvis' work on the need to teach students reading strategies. Last year, students mentioned in their end of year surveys that we read too much non-fiction for our short texts and they missed reading short stories. Looking over the year, I realized they were right, we read very little short fiction although we still read novels.
In an effort to correct this, I decided to incorporate fairy and folk tales into our reading strategy instruction. I found two great resources for tales online. My teaching partner received a grant several years ago to explore the world of the Grimm Brothers. Usually, we like to use one or two of those tales in class. This year I found Professor D. L. Ashliman's collection of tales. These tales are, well, much "Grimmer" than the sanitized versions students are usually familiar with. Their background knowledge gives them the boost they need for comprehending these stories though, which have more complex vocabulary.
The other site is a more general collection of folk and fairy tales, from many cultures and time periods. It's part of the 4to40 website.
Here's the really cool part. The kids used the tools built in to Diigo to demonstrate their use of the reading strategies that we've been practicing with paper text. I used the Diigo for educators feature to set all the students up with an account that meets COPPA requirements. When it came time to assess the students' work I had such a great time. With all the stories to choose from, the students really felt that they genuine choices. Part of their grade was choosing a story that was appropriately challenging, but not too hard. (Differentiation, anyone?).
I try really hard not to give assignments that I'll dread grading. These were just plain fun to grade since I got to read a huge variety of stories through the students eyes. I hadn't read most of the stories in these versions before, so while it took a while to grade them, is was also truly pleasure reading for me. BTW, the students did beautifully and many mentioned that they really enjoyed the assignment. Wow--fun to complete and a pleasure to grade. In my world, that's about as good as it gets!
Now for the dragons. The students have been blogging about their independent reading. So many have become absorbed in the Inheritance series by Christopher Paolini that I felt I needed to check them out. WOW--I'm now almost finished with book two and I can't wait to get started on number three. I just love the feeling of being buried deep in another world!
I've given two talks recently about Web 2.0 features without Internet access in the venue. In other words, let's talk about the interactivity that is so powerful right now by using screen shots and downloaded videos. Weird.
What bothers me most though, is that the talks pretty much went fine. Of course, it was a pain to get all the videos downloaded (thank you DownloadHelper and Applian!). The thing is though, that the very nature of networking is participatory, not voyeuristic. So, watching a video about a flash mob, while entertaining, is not at all the same thing as participating in a flash mob (caveat--I haven't).
It's kind of like watching Paula Deen make Thanksgiving Dinner on Food TV--fun, but you don't get to eat anything!
So, I've decided that while I might still give a talk or two, I'm really going to focus on hands-on opportunities to draw folks in. I truly believe that parents and educators have to participate in virtual communities in some way (not all) in order to guide and help the children in our care. I'm a little astonished at the number of people who raised their hands during one talk when I asked how many people agreed with the statement "you should never use your real name on the Internet." As someone who blogs, tweets, comments, and Nings as "herself" I find this fear worrying. It's also a disconnect.
Maybe I am the one who is disconnected? Am I too open and optimistic? Should adults be obscuring their identities when communicating professionally with others in their field?
I do feel a little like I'm talking to myself here on this blog. Which is fine, because I started it as a place to be reflective about what I am doing with literacy and technology in my classroom.
However, on September 18, I got a message from screencast that I had exceeded my bandwidth for the month for my Jing files. On the 18th! Lots of month left after the 18th. This has never happened before and it worried me because I had just uploaded a video to show the new sixth graders. Ironically, the topic of my jing dealt with file compression. I wanted to show students how to compress their photographs before they inserted them into other documents. I wanted to make the video so that I can refer students to it repeatedly since reminders for 11 year olds are, well, essential!
At first, I thought that the new jing was the one that put me over the limit. I tweeted out an "oh no" just because I'm trying to remember to twitter my ed tech life a little more. Dave McCollom from Techsmith saw my tweet, contacted me, found my account before I had a chance to answer and upped my bandwidth allotment! Wow!
Now, I have no connection to Techsmith at all except as a customer (and I do have a paid for copy of Camtasia that I don't use), but now I am an even bigger fan than I was before. The whole scenario is a great example of 21st century marketing (which doesn't actually interest me that much as an educator, but does as a customer) which my classmate Jim Tobin would be interested in. Techsmith met my need as a customer without me having to ask for "technical support."
When I tweeted a little more with Dave, he sent me a message " If you want to dig a little deeper and see where your bandwidth is going check this out." He made me a jing showing me that it was actually my blog post on Jing vs Camtasia that was generating the traffic to my screencast account (which is where the Jingproject videos get posted). That made me feel good about my blog, maybe it is occasionally helpful for people. It made me feel even more positive about Dave and Techsmith that he would take the trouble to help me out so much with what is a free application and hosting service.
This video by David Truss does a nice job of communicating the power of networking for educators. Dave is much, much more connected than I am, and I'm not comparing myself to him by any means. His video inspired me to keep working on my PLN though!
PS While I'm writing this, I'm listening to EdTechTalk Weekly and have my Facebook and Twitter streams up. Did I mention looking for my attention span lately?
This week, I was traveling and had the opportunity to read the same book for 3 hours in a row with minimal interruption. It felt so good, and the experience made me realize that this kind of reading has been missing from my life for quite a while. In fact, I don't think I've done any one thing (except sleep and sit in faculty meetings) for 3 hours straight in a really, really long time.
Over the summer, the July issue of The Atlantic cover story was titled Is Google Making Us Stoopid? The article wasn't really about Google so much as the fact that reading is changing in ways that need to be examined. Being a huge fan of literacy, I've said often that the only part of the phrase "21st Century Literacy" that matters is, in fact, literacy. Reading this article helped me realize that I'm only partly right. The world is more text dependent than ever before and being illiterate is clearly a terrible handicap.
One of the less obvious risks of reading electronic text and watching electronically distributed video is the deterioration of attention. I know that I'm not reading nearly as many books as I used to, particularly non-fiction. I like to think that I'm learning what I need to know via the web, Nings, blogs, etc. But I suspect that is not entirely true. I've had trouble reading two non-fiction books this summer that really interest me: Working With Emotional Intelligence by Daniel Goldman and Crucial Conversations by Kerry Patterson et al. Neither is particularly difficult and I've enjoyed the 2/3rds of both that I've read so far. I suspect that so much work online has made it hard for me to engage in the deep reading of these that I would have done in years past. In the past, I also wouldn't have started one without finishing the other.
The attention issue translates to video as well. I don't even attempt to watch mini-series anymore. I heard great things about Planet Earth when it was on, but didn't even attempt it. I've watched the first half of Michael Wesch's An anthropological introduction to YouTube which is brilliant and fascinating. And, an hour long. I've got to get to the second half!
The 20 minute TED talks seem to be right at my maximum. I tried a new trick today though--they are downloadable, so I put 2 on my iPod and watched them at the gym on the elliptical. I have high hopes for taking myself through quite a few of the talks at the gym.
So, the ability to focus and learn new material in more than a 20 minute spurt is a problem for me. I hope that my recognition of the issue will, along with some thought, help me learn to manage myself and my attention a little better. What about students in school now though? How will they learn the satisfaction that is "flow?" They certainly will have difficulty learning about it in 45 minute class periods.
Bemoaning the issue or making silly stands like "you may not use Wikipedia as a resource for this project" isn't going to help students. I'm just not sure what will.
This time of year feels so much more like a new year than January 1! August has brought a flurry of workshops, shopping for fresh school supplies, a new corkboard (I realized the old one is more hole than cork), lists and more lists, ahh. As Mimi says "I heart me a good list!" There's something so optimistic about start of school lists. In contrast, the end of school lists that were dashed off just a couple of months ago were exercises in "please don't let me lose my mind or forget to pick up my kids at daycare by 6" panic.
I've led a couple of workshops this week for teachers. I tried to infuse them with some optimistic spirit. We did a cut/color/sort of web 2.0 logos in one workshop that led us into setting up RSS feeds (for real, not with crayons!) In a tablet workshop, we traced our hands to do a 5 finger writing activity. I have to remember that adults are as stimulated by hands on learning activities as are children. The teachers shared ideas about how to use similar strategies to teach the sophisticated elements of the AP/IB/Otherwise Impossibly Difficult courses they teach.
As for me, I'm looking forward to the arrival of my sixth graders next week. Happy New Year!
I serve as the Director of Technology at Saint Mary's School in Raleigh, NC . The views expressed on this blog are mine alone, not those of my employer.
Twitter ID: @sarahhanawald
