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Last summer, (at the beginning of the current school year), I looked over my educational bookmarks that I had stored on my computer at home. Difficult to search and update, I began looking for a better way to store, organize, and share my bookmarks. Because of increased involvement on Twitter, I knew there were online resources that were far better ways to use bookmarks. I looked over several of the more popular social bookmarking sites: Diigo,  Delicious, etc. In the end, the school district’s filter settings decided the whole issue for me. At that time, Delicious was the only bookmarking site not blocked.

So, I exported my educational links to Delicious and then began looking at them. I was not really surprised to find some seriously outdated material, (some sites from the middle 90s), and many dead sites. A complete look at each link caused me to cut over 400 of them from my list. Now, my oldest link is from 1999, (yes, the information on it is still valid).

Of course, as I was cutting, more were added, many from Twitter, many from my own research and reading. As of today, I have over 2,000 links related to education and/or technology. As I maintain the school’s website/Moodle server, some of my links are related to building websites, etc.  and may be more technical than most educators are used to, but the vast majority are education related and can be searched at: Weemooseus

My only reservation is that Delicious now requires users to have  Yahoo IDs, something I do not advocate as a policy for my classroom, (we use Gaggle.net for email). However, our district’s filtering has been relaxed somewhat and Diigo has been unblocked, it doesn’t require an email address and may become my classroom focus next year.

Now I can bookmark a site anywhere I have Internet access and share with my PLN on Twitter and/or with my school’s staff. If you have not considered social bookmarking, try it. I know that I have used my Delicious account far more now than I ever used the bookmarks on my computer.

50+ Social Bookmarking sites from Mashable.

A part of being on Twitter is being able to be exposed to other people’s ideas when the 140 character limit doesn’t quite fit what one wishes to express. Recently, Michael Smith –  @principalspage, posted a list of items that we don’t need to waste time teaching any more. Among many things listed is keyboarding.

Unfortunately, IMHO, not learning keyboarding is a hindrance in school and in many job fields. In fact, I believe the very fact that not enough of the students know how to keyboard keeps teachers from using technology in my school. Complaints from teachers are generally focused around one thing, “It takes them so long to do anything”.

Cursive writing speed, copying from written material, is around 15 words per minute at its very fastest. Printing would be slower. Students in my class are surprised how much less time it takes them to key in a document once they get to 25 wpm. My students start out at 5-8 wpm, (what surprises me is that these same students have supposedly had keyboarding throughout elementary), and rapidly improve throughout the year. The highest keyboarding speed on my “Keyboarding Wall of Fame” is 7o wpm.  The vast majority of my students finish over 25 wpm. Quite a few beat my “old man” speed of 40-50 wpm.

Of course, many will say the keyboard is obsolete, either through input by voice, (right, I can imagine dictating this while my wife is trying to sleep one room over), or by the use of cell phones that are web enabled. However, I don’t see that happening soon, and I noticed that one of the major complaints from cell users are the keyboards. A recently featured ad on ZDNet featured an optional keyboard for a cell phone, much like the ones that were available from Palm for the Pilot.

I would be the first person to admit that I do not teach keyboarding, I have chosen software that has a good approach to keyboarding and starts with levels that are obtainable and enables self-teaching. From there, we move on to a more difficult program. My students spend less than 45 hours on keyboarding during the year. I do spend time on complimenting everything they do correctly and remind them how much education has changed, (my typing teacher used the ruler method — students cringe when I tell them). They have role models in school, one teacher types 100+ wpm, and when students ask our secretary where she learned to type, she tells them from me, (she was in my first class when our school opened — one of the job requirements was to keyboard at 25 wpm).

So all of this boils down to productivity, what do you as educators expect your students to be able to do in high school? College? Grad School? Isn’t automation of basic skills so that we as learners can go beyond the bare minimums? My only complaint is that I should not be teaching keyboarding, it should be done in 4th-5th grade.

So Michael, I disagree with you on this one. However, I am still trying to figure out why, with all that technology, everyone had to ask Scotty to “beam them up”. Shouldn’t that have been an app on the communicator?

Keyboarding: UltraKey

Note: I do not receive any money from Bytes of Learning nor discounts on their programs.

Knowing I was going to be absent, I put an activity in Moodle for them to do after they finished keyboarding, they were to take the following puzzle and write the directions to solve it step by step. We are studying algorithms and problem solving as a part of our unit on Scratch programming. They had already been exposed to writing simple instructions to a puzzle presented in class.

—————————————————————————————————————————————-

Puzzle:

“There was a farmer that had a problem, he wanted to take his goat, a lettuce, and his dog across the river. His boat was only large enough to carry one thing at a time.

On top of that, he had another problem, if he left his goat with the lettuce, the goat would eat it, if the goat was left with the dog, the dog would eat the goat.

So, how is he going to get everything across the river safely?

Down below is where you put the solution to the puzzle. You can use the numbered list feature, (or bullets), in the editor to order your list of instructions.

Just click on the add new topic button below and give the farmer those instructions!”

———————————————————————————————————————————-

Except for most of the 1st period, (hmm, wonder if sub helped them), only three students followed directions and solved the puzzle, most of the rest spent the first minute of the 15 minutes allowed to write IDK, (or the same thing in a few more words).

Of course, I was disappointed, I think they used the sub being there as an excuse to goof off. What do you think? Can you solve it? I would be interested in seeing responses from 12-14 year old students as well as teachers. Don’t add any thing to the story that isn’t there, and no, the river is too swift for the dog, goat, or the man to swim across.

Because of our student demographics, I never assign homework. Less than 40% have a computer and less than that have one that can go online. Yet during the two years we have used a Moodle server, I have observed something that is different, well, different from the previous 15 years of teaching in a computer lab.

I now have students, (that have online access), that deliberately do not do all of their daily work at school when the assignment involves Moodle, and/or email, (our email has a blog  and chat area).  I have, in the past, had students in rural areas take home work because there was no access to TV, etc. But, this is not the case with the students I have now.

Have I found a secret? If all the students had universal access to the Internet, would they be glad to do homework online? Would students attend tutoring online? Most of our students need help w/math and reading, but won’t stay after school for free tutoring.  I also wonder if this is part of being “cool”, if asked what they are doing, they just reply, “I am online working on my homework”.

So, what do you think?

Moodle

Gaggle Email

So, have there been any “Divisional Events” at school lately? What are “Divisional Events” anyway?

Simply put, they are events that divide staff, staff and administration, staff and support personnel, staff and students,  staff and parents, and etc. Who would do something like that? Well, in some ways, we all do — however, some do on purpose, others do it thinking it will have the opposite effect.

I have had administrators in the past that kept the staff in an uproar, purposely creating an environment where no one was to be trusted. It was their management style, if the enemy, (the teaching staff), was divided, they couldn’t unite against the administration. End result, the administration could do anything and no one complained.

Of course, not all administrators are like that, most fall into the category of being unwilling divisional experts. This all starts off with good intentions, but the effect can be chilling to staff morale. Administration, (and wrongly constructed teams of teachers), start things off simply by having a Teacher of the Month and/or Employee of the Month award that is chosen by a voting contest. So, how does one chose someone, hair style, a smile, something else? After all, most staff have not been able to observe them in the classroom, watch them sweep the halls/prepare food, etc. So, essentially, this becomes a popularity contest. Unfortunately, some really good staff members never win. I hate voting, chosing between teachers who I really admire and then realizing, it doesn’t matter.

So, have some ideas about what direction I am heading? Here is a short list of things that divide staff/employees without meaning to:

• Teacher of the Year
• Awards for doing what are standard duties
• Awards given to teachers when it was the students that did the work

Is there anything to be added to the list? How about merit pay? Isn’t that an award given for what the person should have been doing anyway. Who gets merit pay? Math and Science teachers? Talk about splittng the staff!

 What does this have to do with quality?

Getting Going With Scratch

Would anyone like to collaborate with me and develop a reusable 9 week programming unit for the Scratch programming language.

How can we make sure that students learn fundamentals of programming while having fun?

How about connecting with me, (I have 7th/8th graders), I would be glad to set up a Moodle classroom so that students can work with each other or we can run the whole thing on the Scratch website and document successes and failures.

Would also be open to having HS and Univ. instructors working with group.

Any takers out there.

Carl

After being interviewed by the school administration, the prospective teacher said:   “Let me see if I’ve got this right.

You want me to go into that room with all those kids, correct their disruptive behavior, breakup fights, observe them for signs of abuse, monitor their dress habits, censor their T-shirt messages, and instill in them a love for learning.

You want me to check their backpacks for weapons, wage war on drugs and sexually transmitted diseases, and raise their sense of self esteem and personal pride.

You want me to teach them patriotism and good citizenship, sportsmanship and fair play, and how to register to vote, balance a checkbook, and apply for a job.

You want me to check their heads for lice, recognize signs of antisocial behavior, monitor web surfing, and make sure that they all pass the NCLB testing.

You also want me to provide them with an equal education regardless of their handicaps, and communicate regularly with their parents in English, Spanish or any other language, by letter, telephone, newsletter, email, Twitter, blogs, personal websites, and report card.

You want me to do all this with a piece of chalk, a blackboard, a bulletin board, a few books, a computer that is three generations out of date, a big smile, and a starting salary that qualifies me for food stamps.

You want me to do all this and then you tell me. . . I CAN’T PRAY!!”

I can’t take credit for this, I have only modified it a little to update it for this time in history. I can only look at what is demanded of teachers and how we are all setup for failure in our society.

My title needs some clarification, I didn’t go to Canada yesterday. My wife and I took a day trip to one of our favorite haunts, the mountain community where I graduated from high school many moons ago.

We enjoyed the scenery of Ruidoso, NM and the surrounding area and included a drive to the ski run. Drive is beautiful, lots of scenic views, aspen trees, lakes, and a road with twists and turns, (one switch-back is named Axle Bend). The weather was spectacular, cool with numerous showers cascading the mountain ranges so it was a relief from the desert heat.

We spent time in town walking and  shopping. Went into an interesting book store that had an eclectic collection, ranging from cowboy poetry to alien lore, (Roswell is only 70 miles away).

As we exited the store, I noticed a fellow on a bench outside reading a book that had a faded blue cover, curiosity got the better of me and I took a closer look to see what he might be reading.  To my surprise, it wasn’t a book cover, it was a custom made cover for his Kindle.  This was my first view of one and now has me thinking more about textbooks and their future. Will there be a color Kindle?

In response to a question on Twitter, I decided to post the names/links to free and/or open source programs I use in my lab. I have not had a budget for programs in over 10 years, so I have to use what I can find. The programs listed below are what I have found to work for me.

My students use Paint.net to draw avatars and learn to edit pics. It is a program with a lot of features and is updated regularily. The only disavantages are its only for PC and .net has to be installed, (a download from Microsoft, easily done through the update process). I prefer it to GIMP as teaching students to use it seems to take less time.

When we work on personal web pages for our VPN, we use Kompozer. This is an WYSIWYG web page editor, the latest beta version just came out and is more stable than the last release. It is well featured, has CSS support, but has no spell checker, so I reminded students to open their word processor to check spelling. Kompozer is multi-platform and will run on a memory stick, (at least on a PC), so its easy to give students to take home.

My school also uses Moodle, an online classroom management system. We are starting to see an increase of classroom use of this tool, I use it to post instructions, links, and other resources when I teach a blended lesson. Install of Moodle is somewhat tricky, but there are lots of places to go for help, besides, if I can learn to install it at my age, you can too! In some ways I prefer Moodle to some of the Web 2.0 applications as its more secure for our students. We have 550+ students enrolled on Moodle.

We also use LunarPages for our Moodle and web host. They offer free space for public schools in the U.S.. I have found, especially considering its free, the support to be very good. If there is no response to email, the phone support is available 24/7.

StarLogo TNG is part of a PBL session to introduce programming to my students. 3D characters and a 3D environment make learning to use this a challenge. Our after school STEM program, Project GUTS uses TNG and NetLogo.  We also learn to use Scratch, which is similar in method of programming, but much easier as its 2D, it has an extensive online community and projects can be embedded in a web page.

Our final PBL is movie making, (vodcasting). Since we are a PC Lab, we use Windows Movie Maker. This is an easy tool to learn to use and is fairly flexible. Longer movies require more than 512KB of ram, however, if it crashes, it restores to the last point of edit. There is an updated version available for Vista and System 7. This year we will be posting these on our School Tube account, should be interesting.

Audacity is used to edit the sound tracks for the movies, making podcasts, and numerous other explorations of sound/music overlays. This is a well featured tool that is easy to teach, but will take a while to learn completely.

Pivot Stick Figure is a stick figure animation program that I only introduce to the students. They spend spare time playing with it and by the end of the year, some of them are pretty good. The animations can be exported as animated .gifs and can be imported into Movie Maker. Two years ago, I had three cheerleaders animate all of the cheers they had learned, they put it in Movie Maker to music, it was pretty cute.

My final tool is CCleaner, I use this to cleanup the browser history, cookies, and to correct registry errors. It works quickly and makes our computers run much more efficiently.  I defrag twice a year, usually use CCleaner first then defrag.

So, there you have it, a list of programs and tools that are free.

This post is a little delayed, I got caught up in the beginning of school with in-services, etc. So, I hope all following along will forgive me.

On Wednesday, campers gathered around our meeting table where they were led into discussing what questions they should ask during their interview. The campers were grouped according to their career choices determined by a survey done on Day 1 and they had decided roles for the filming. Each group had an interviewer, a camera person, and a director.  There were five college students, each from a specific college at NMSU, that had agreed to be filmed as part of our project.

Determining the questions to be asked, rephrasing and reordering them took the better part of an hour. By then, the interviewees had arrived and off they went with the campers and their Flip Cams. As part of the interview, each group was given a tour of the particular college by the interviewee.

When our campers came back, they began converting their video into a format usable by Windows Movie Maker. After a break for lunch, the rest of the day was spent editing video, adding sound for the title and to finish off the credits.

By the end of the following day, all had finished and the videos were given to one of the school district’s tech reps, (there were two who had come with students on the bus as chaperons all week). He burned all of the videos on DVD for school and student use.  Students that had finished early went to Blackboard and polished up their wiki/blog entries and commented on fellow campers entries. We ended w/gifts from the campus bookstore for all the campers.

Friday was a quite different. Campers went on a tour of NMSU’s Creative Media Institute. They were shown the script lab, animation lab, (they really liked that), and sound rooms that were used to develop tracks for animations and films. After that, it was upstairs to the theater. Animation projects, done by university students, were shown while we waited for parents who decided to join our presentation of the interviews. Eventually all arrived and all videos were shown on the big screen. Quite interesting, one of the campers had a knack for composing excellent questions on the fly, and one of the group’s videos was humorous, blooper section and all.

After a nice lunch, we went back to the lab. Campers had a few things to take care of.. some edited their blogs/wiki entries again and all had an end of camp survey to take. We gathered them together and discussed their roles as mentors at each school for the Flip Cams, blogs, wikis, and Blackboard. To close off the final day, each camper was given an iPod Nano for all the work they had done. We bid them goodbye, cleaned up our area and discussed what had worked and where we stumbled as camp counselors. We all agreed that the week had been lots of fun and that the campers had really learned a lot.

My closing thoughts:

1. Limit interview length to 5 minutes, they can shoot more, but have to edit and pick out best questions/answers.

2. Make sure all software for camp is loaded on all computers.

3. Try to make sure that a certain standard for posting on blogs and wikis are kept.

4. Make sure that all camp counselors follow the hands off rule. If helping a camper with the computer, hands off the mouse and keyboard.

So, want to watch some video? See Chaparral Middle School.

My thanks go to GISD Superintendent, Cynthia Nava and RETA’s Director, Susie Bussman for making this possible. Susie and camp counselors Sandy Johnson and Cynthia Mediana did the planning for the event. RETA’s employees were great at keeping the camp supplied w/snacks and drinks.

PS: This camp was a blast for me as a teacher!

Carl

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