The all-important three-letter word

I am surprised that "fun" didn't show up much on the Word-le because that, for me, was the operative word. Fun. Play. Experiment. I am taking a playful attitude from our class.
I want to keep working on my digital photography site as well as figure out ways to use this for English.
I am going to add a video, the opening bit from "Manhattan" by Woody Allen with the gorgeous score from "Rhaposody in Blue." I use it to give students a feel for New York City as they start Catcher in the Rye. The black and white photography and music...a nice three-minute interlude.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=uyaj2P-dSi8

Here's our new blogging rubric!

If you asked students a specific prompt, you might use this to assess them.

https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0AjXMlg6zemiYdGpBTTI1SWRyVGo5emVZdER4UGZRcnc&hl=en

My digital photography site has three lessons now.

If I really have my act together, I'm going to post a link to it right now! Here...

ITEC814spring2010PhotoProject

I've been going forms-crazy

The day after our last class, Yearbook launched its teacher survey and its senior polls. We set up forms that had required names and student ID numbers, and weeded out invalid votes before counting anything. We kept the polls open till the Tuesday after Presidents' Weekend, about one week. We opened the Media Lab that Tuesday lunch and snared some procrastinating seniors.

We had about the same number of voters return ballots as we had with paper ballots (about 160 for each--more than half the senior class for their polls but about 15 pct of the entire school for the teacher polls). The big difference was in the counting. We downloaded them onto Excel spreadsheets and sorted away! In many categories, you didn't even have to count. You just could see that "Suzy Sunshine" had a way bigger swath of votes than anyone else in "Best Smile." Counting the votes took less than one hour. Each counting computer had a rapt audience which meant there was no cheating. The cleanest elections ever.

I went and used forms for my classes, too...will share more on my website. Suffice it to say, "Never forget to ask the respondents their names."

Hippocampus Religion Class Seems Too Clunky but Thinkfinity's a Winner

We're reading The Kitchen God's Wife by Amy Tan in about six weeks. We usually look at Confuciansm how it is corrupted by Neo-Confucianism. We study Neo-Confucian sayings as a clue about the attitudes towards women that are embodied in those religions in Chinese Culture. "A woman king is like a hen crowing."

I gave the Hippocampus site a look, and noticed a religion site. Chinese religions. A lecture on "Confucius Say..."--maybe we could add this to the mix. When I tried it myselt, the quality seemed amaturish. The sound quality was low--you had to strain to pick up voices that went in and out. So, I decided, not for my kids.

Hippocampus doesn't have English lessons listed yet, nor did I see any history lessons that might help with Shakespeare or WWI or the Romantics in England. So, it seems that it's not a good fit for me.

A few weeks ago, I checked out Thinkfinity by trying out lessons for a book in the planning stages, All Quiet on the Western Front. I incorporated their lesson on irony at the end of the book into my plan. Students will use a modified version of it to write their own original ironic endings. More fun than an essay about irony.

RSS -something for English teachers and a nice blog from Ohio

Jim Burke is an English teacher, formerly of Burlingame, who likes to write about teaching English. He has a matrix of skills that English students should have mastered by the time they graduate, hands-on lessons on topics such as how he organizes his notebooks, and musings. Does anyone of our group know him personally? Here's his site.

http://jimburke.typepad.com/my_weblog/

The one blog I discovered randomly is called Erin O'Brien's Owner Manuel for Human Beings. She has 786 subscribers, one of them being me. She writes about her husband "the goat" and her child "the kid" and the new Mass. senator and what it's like to go to a transvestite bar in her sad little suburb of Cleveland. Sort of like Erma Bombeck, if you remember her. I don't think I would use it in the classroom, though.

http://erin-obrien.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default

Tech Challenges for Us

Bandwidth. That's the shortage at my school. We are asked to not use YouTube or other streaming because of a shortage of bandwidth. We are warned that our phones and attendance system will crash if we do it too much.

That said, I will tentatively try to use streaming and see if the sky falls down.

Anyone else?

Happy New Semester

Wow, January used to be a "mellow month." It's easier to get the classes going in the new semester, as there are fewer new names to learn, but there are other commitments--yearbook deadlines to meet, grant applications to write, and (ahem) this class.

Final thoughts on the class

I'm pleased that we can return because now we get to try things for the next month, then come back with our questions in January.

Next semester, I want to learn how to do slide shows. I want to keep working on navigation which is fundamental but tricky!! I want to wrap my mind around organizing a class of 35 teenagers and making it seem easy--group powerpoints using Google Docs??

I plan to do the yearbook senior survey using a form, and counting the 337 votes on a monster spreadsheet. It has to beat the old method.

Here's a Fun Survey!

Try this one.

spreadsheets.google.com/viewform?formkey=dFhJWFcySGJ1bGkwaFFrdHJhS3U1MEE6MA

Two Types of Wonder Wheels

In our ITEC class last time, I finally saw the Wonder Wheel that everyone said they liked. Before class, I had dutifully looked up Wonder Wheel and found on on Coney Island, pictured on the right. The Wonder Wheel of Google display is also pictured to the right. It can be a useful tool for students researching their persuasive essay topics. The limitation, of course, is it's the visible Google web database which leaves out a lot. After speaking with Dena at Aragon, I asked our new librarian whether we at San Mateo had access to academic data bases as do our Aragon colleagues. She is in the process of locating passwords, so soon, San Mateo HS students will have Wonder Wheel plus the vetted sources.

Maps at the Library of Congress

I enjoyed the interactive map reading exercise that showed a map, more like a detailed drawing, of Washington, D.C. I have pretty good background knowledge about women's fashions and when things were built, so I found it fun to guess when it might have been made. As the ladies did not have bustles, I assumed it was before 1880. If you gave students some fun facts for background info, such as the year the Washington Monument was built, and a fashion profile by decade of the 1880s, they might have more buy-in.

Now, at home, I have a map from 1664, a page from a Dutch atlas by a mapmaker named Hondius. I am going back online to see if I can find more maps by that particular mapmaker.

Update: I did find some maps by Hondius, but most of them were listed but not visible. I tried three times to upload one to this blog, each time getting a corruption message. It uploads in this weird jp2 format that does not work. I finally made a screen shot, a TIFF that I converted to a jpg.

Making Sense of Online Text

I bet I'm not the only one in the class who downloaded and printed this article before reading it. That said, it wasn't designed for internet reading...dense text demands to be scrutinized and highlighted with a yellow marker. Am I a dinosaur for thinking this?

Back to the article. My students would enjoy being fooled by a hoax, and it would make a valuable lesson, though I think the velcro hoax is too simplistic for high school. Figure 2 is fantastic and makes its points more clearly than the Google lessons. I got that one could research the sites from the Google lessons, but this chart shows how. Great. I'm starting a persuasive essay unit next week with a research component, and I plan to make Figure 3 into a word doc that they can use.

Does anyone know if there is an easy, free, way to list links in ALA-approved formats? I heard of a site that had a yearly subscription fee, but that was two librarians ago. Forgot the name of the service. Also, does anyone have experience with the Peninsula Library System portal, the one that links to public library cards?

Callling people from class

Have you seen the "Follow" feature of these blogs? I'm "following" some of you, and that means, when I visit MY blog, a button to connect to your blog appears. It makes it fast to check in on what you are saying. Now, if you would say something, we might get some energy going.

Google Research Thoughts

It took some time with the computer and the printer. I printed up most of the lessons and took notes on the paper in addition to reading it online. I learned a bit about how to do detective work on sites using good old Google researching authors of web sites. I want to learn more in class. Can we actually see what type links a web site attracts?
Though weather, movie times, trends in web presence, stock prices, and so much more is available, I wonder how much scholarly research is being indexed, or if that' s the inaccessible web.

Afghan Girl

Map of Afghanistan-click to see Kabul, Peshawar, and Islamabad.

What have I learned today?

I learned how to take a "special effects" picture with Photo Booth. Voila!

Also, I was exposed to a stimulating vision of the connected learner. A fine vision ... how to translate into a class size of 35 teens seems to require many computers and canny planning.